A Learning a Day

High investment returns come from believing things others don’t believe in.

While it is tempting to believe that only financial investors and venture capitals should care, in reality, we are all investors. We all invest in people and ideas every single day. And, the bets that result in massive return (financial or otherwise) are those where we saw potential quicker than most other people.

So, it is worth asking ourselves – how do we see the world?

If all we see are what “common knowledge” dictates, it is unlikely we’ll experience anything uncommon.

Every age has had a collection of flawed beliefs that have driven behavior that made little sense in retrospect. In the early 1900s, thanks to the psychologists of the day, kids in England were separated from parents and sent to boarding schools at an early age. And, until a decade ago, we had a couple of decades where the press and flawed research would have us believe that boosting self esteem was more important than anything else.

An item on the current list of head-fakes, in my opinion, is giving and receiving feedback. Managers are asked to take it seriously, leadership coaches are studying it and business schools are talking about it.

Before I explain why, I’d like to highlight a quick terminology quirk. I refer to professional feedback as feedback around hard skills – e.g. creating better PowerPoint, doing better analysis, giving better presentations, etc. And, personal feedback refers to everything else. This deals with all the hard, personal stuff – “you come across as too mellow” or “you’re going to have to learn to tone it down.” The lines between these can often be blurred. But, it is important we start with these definitions and work our way through the problem.

There are 3 reasons for most feedback being useless –

1. Most feedback just attacks the flip side of a strength. Telling a warm person they are often too warm or telling an analytical data geek that they need to be less analytical isn’t very helpful. Yet, this is pretty much the default state of most feedback conversations. This happens simply because these “issues” are easiest to observe. Learning to work with (and not over do) our strengths is a skill we all develop through our lifetimes. Presenting just the flip side of these regularly does more harm than good.

2. Most feedback tells more about the giver than the receiver. If I am a loud and talkative person (I am :-)), the chances that I’ll give you feedback for being the same are near zero. In any case, it would take a huge lack of self awareness for me to do so. However, if someone I find annoying exhibits a trait similar to one you exhibit, you will definitely hear about it.

3. Context matters a lot. Our behaviors often change with context. And, as a giver of feedback, it is hard to really understand if we’ve gotten context right. Is this how the person always behaves? Would it change with different circumstances? As any person who works with data knows, it is dangerous to read too much into small sample sizes.

And, if all this wasn’t bad enough, just take a moment to consider the impact. As we know from experience, people remember one negative comment over twenty positive ones. So, even if you did have something incredibly insightful thing to say but, somehow, phrased it wrong – you can be sure that it is all the other person would remember.

Feedback done well assumes a very high level of wisdom, self awareness, tact and perspective on the part of both the giver and receiver.

I’m not sure I would put money on those odds.

So, what do we do about it? Coming up in parts 2, 3, 4. The key words are self-awareness, experimentation, and trust.

Seth Godin had a wonderful post on his excellent blog this week.

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The two-review technique

As you work on your project (your presentation, your plan, your speech, your recipe, your…) imagine that it’s the sort of thing that could be reviewed on Amazon.

Now, write (actually write down) two different reviews:

First, a 5 star review, a review by someone who gets it, who is moved, who is eager to applaud your guts and vision.

And then, a 1 star review, an angry screed, not from the usual flyby troll, but from someone who actually experienced your work and hated it.

Okay, you’ve got two reviews, here’s the question:

Are you working to make it more likely that the 5 star reviews are more intense, more numerous and more truthful than ever, or…

Are you working to minimize the number of 1 star reviews?

Very hard to obsess about both, since they tend to happen together.

The thing is, if you work to minimize criticism, you have surrendered the beauty and greatness of what you’ve set out to build.

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I shared this post with a group of friends who I’ve been working with over the past months. We’ve had many a discussion about this and Seth put it beautifully.

There were two learnings that jumped out to me as I read it  –
1. A big part of aiming to do 5 star work is accepting that there will be those who will give you 1 star. It isn’t an easy thing to do accept by any means and requires you to be able to give yourself entirely to your art… and then completely let go.

2. And, perhaps, more interestingly, I think a big part of being a 5 star person by your own values/measures of success requires you to accept that there will be 1 star reviewers. So, we ought to consider spending less time rounding ourselves out to reduce the 1 star reviews. Perfection isn’t the point. Being human and authentic is.

Thanks as always, Seth.

While it might be tempting to treat your to do list like a dump throw all tasks down its throat (it is just a list, after all), I think it is important to give your to do list a fair bit of attention.

Here’s why –
1. The way you structure and maintain your list has a direct impact on how much you get done.
2. Wording matters a lot – specific to do items always see more action.
3. If your to do list is messy, you have lost your way. After all, didn’t we make a list so we could get things organized?
4. Batching small tasks can go a long way in helping you get blocks of time to do meaningful work.
5. We always have surprises and unexpected interruptions. The biggest benefit of organization is that we can now embrace these interruptions without worrying about whether we’ve got the rest of our life under control.

There’s a lot of psychology around getting things done and there’s good reason many books have been written around the topic. As small and trivial as it is, we spend most of our lives taking directions from a to do list that we create (either in our minds or written/typed somewhere). Let’s make sure we give it the attention it deserves and build lists that work for us.

I was reminded of my preparation in the months leading into my high school final exams this morning. I was keen to do my undergraduate studies in the National University of Singapore and the criteria for admission was a good score on these exams. With exams coming up in March, the key preparation months were between September and December. So, in those months, I went to bed around 630pm in the evening and woke up by 230am. This way, I got a good 3-4 hours of uninterrupted time every week day. It was a very consistent routine. I used to microwave some food, grab a quick meal and get to work. During this time, I played the exact same collection of songs on CD (we had just moved from cassettes to CDs) – so much so that I can still remember the rough order of those songs 10 years later.

Those months of effort definitely paid off. While they helped ensure I did do my undergraduate studies where I wanted (which, in turn, created a significant ripple effect), their long run effects, however, were that they taught me how work gets done.

I needed to get a chunk of work this morning before my classes started. And, as I needed uninterrupted time, I went to bed at 8 and woke up at 3 to get to work. Learning from that experience, I had my email and messengers switched off and, just for old times’ sake, played songs from my list from 10 years ago.

I’ve rinsed and repeated this process many many times over the years. And, this is a big reason why I do my best to wake up at 5am on most weekdays.

Growing up, I heard, and believed, various kinds of myths about top performance. I heard about people who could ace their exams without effort and solve problems in their sleep. Over time, I’ve learnt to consign those myths to the rubbish bin. The top performers I know combine focus, intensity and hard work incredibly well. If, over time, they need to work less to get a particular kind of task done, it is because they’ve worked so hard on it previously that they just know smarter ways to get it done in less time. We’ve all experienced that type of mastery.

It was in those preparation months that I learnt how to combine intensity and hard work. Focus (and, here, I refer to focus as a verb) took a lot longer to understand because I initially thought of intensity as the only kind of focus. However, the focus I’m referring to is that dynamic process that constantly evaluates what you should be focusing your intensity on.

The beauty about these three factors – focus (deciding what to focus on), intensity (focusing on it) and hard work (putting in the time) – is they are all learned. All we need to do is to learn how to work them in tandem and work hard to keep honing them over the course of our life.

The result is magic.

My wife and I watched a nice Anglo-French movie called “Chocolat” this weekend. The setting was a conservative village in France ruled by a Mayor who used religion to maintain strict norms and alienate outsiders. The village community are forced to question their beliefs when an outsider who doesn’t adhere to their strict norms opens up a Chocolate shop near the square. Over time, the village, and, in particular, the Mayor, learn to appreciate and, eventually, accept her.

There was a lovely line in the movie that summed up the challenge the villagers faced. The village priest summed it up thus –

I think that we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do – by what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.

The village, to me, was a nice analogy of the human condition. Every time we find a system that works, we are tempted to hold on to it by resisting any new force that threatens it. It is tempting, as a result, to exclude anyone who thinks differently. But, a life lived well embraces what’s new, strives to create and be inclusive.

This isn’t a “good-to-have.” It is a necessity.

After all, what got us here won’t get us there.

I asked myself a question – what do I focus on when there’s downtime these days, i.e., what sort of problems does my mind wander to?

The list was fascinating as it consisted of a list of problems that weren’t really problems in the big scheme of things.

One of the biggest benefits of being human is this ability to see ourselves and our thoughts from a different perspective. The reason this is hard to do is because we don’t often like what we see.

I certainly didn’t.

But, a problem we’re aware of is a problem that stands the chance to be solved. So, here’s to awareness… and an eventual solution.