A Learning a Day

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do a lot of public speaking growing up. I am pretty comfortable on stage now. While it is easy to attribute this to natural talent, I was horrible when I started. My school believed in giving kids plenty of opportunities to participate in inter school competitions. And, I had been chosen to try my hand at public speaking. After a poor showing in my first 3 competitions, I was told that they’d begin to give other students an opportunity if I didn’t do well in my next one. I did, and didn’t look back.

This is the process I followed –

1. Write/type what you want to say. As a kid starting out, my mom used to write all my speeches. (Thanks mom!) It took me a while to find my own voice and write my own.

2. Practice. When I got started, I rehearsed every talk at least 20-30 times in front of the mirror. The “practice in front of the mirror” tip ranks among the best pieces of public speaking advice I’ve received as it contributed most toward a better end product.

3. Find your authentic style. I am not funny. So, I’ve learnt that it is pointless to try to be funny. I’ve also learnt that it becomes very annoying when someone is trying hard to speak like someone they’re not. Just be you. In my case, I tend to gravitate towards content that is focused on learning (surprise, surprise) in my own style. My public speaking voice and persona isn’t very different from my conversational voice and persona. I’ve found that alignment to be very helpful.

4. Talk about stuff that matters to you. This ensures that the passion comes through. If I had to go one step further, I would even say – say something that you think might make a difference in the lives of the folks listening. Too often, public speaking becomes a race to make people laugh.

As you can tell, the process is not rocket science. I still follow it to this day for most important talks. However, the benefit of having done it so many times is that I am comfortable with minimal practice. That helps a lot – especially when it comes to delivering presentations at work.

Many people fear public speaking. I think that fear is natural. I do not know anyone who jumped off the cradle ready to speak. In every speech during my first 10 years or so, my legs and hands used to shiver like nobody’s business on stage. You learn very quickly that the fear is just part of the process. You learn to embrace it and trust in your preparation. And, when you do, you’ll have people come up and tell you have “the gift of the gab.” :)

Whenever I think of great public speaking, I am reminded of the Sir Winston Churchill quote (paraphrased) – “There’s three weeks of preparation before a great impromptu speech.”

So true. Success lies in the hours.

I’ve veered off a bit from “normal programming” over the past 4 weeks – there haven’t been weekly MBA learning or product review posts. The reason for that is that I’ve dealing with a few extenuating circumstances. A mix of a massive project’s peak, illness, start of a new project, and a couple of setbacks meant that I kept focused on just making sure I wrote once a day.

However, as I was reflecting on the past ~30 weeks this morning, I realized that there was some disruptive force or another in at least 15 of the 30 weeks.

Thanks to Clayton Christensen’s warning in “How Will You Measure Your Life,” I had learnt that life is just a series of extenuating circumstances. But, I guess it is one thing to understand an idea and quite another to experience it. Looking back the past 30 odd weeks and seeing the regularity of these extenuating events has resulted in a lot of appreciation for the idea.

Perhaps I should just stop making these excuses and get on with it. There is no such thing as a “normal” week.

The obstacles never stop. I just need to learn to expect them and view them as part of my definition of normal.

There are times when circumstances force you to make difficult decisions. I’ve noticed that most of these decisions are personal. There isn’t a clear path forward and it is hard to really weigh all options. While I’m a huge fan of the WRAP framework for most decision, these are times when I feel the need for a gut-based personal decision.

And, in such times, I have found 3 things to be very helpful –

1. Create space from the noise. Shift to a different location and spend some time alone. Or, spend time with people with whom you’re very comfortable in silence. It is only in space can we really listen to ourselves.
2. Get some sleep. This sounds like an extremely counter intuitive thing to do when you have to make a difficult decision. My guess is that the scientific reasons for this approach is that sleep refuels our willpower. And, our willpower helps us make better decisions. There is also some scientific merit to the idea of subconscious information processing. Go to sleep with a complicated problem and sleep can, every once in a while, clear our heads. However, the reason I recommend it is that it has simply worked incredibly well for me. I’ve also a few life experiences that have taught me never to trust my judgment (or others’ for that matter) when sleep deprived.
3. Share your decision with a few people who understand you. This is just to watch out for any red flags. The folks who really understand will warn you if the decision makes no sense. And, that check point is very helpful.

Peeple, an app that allows you to rate other people (“Yelp for Humans”), received a lot of press attention yesterday. As the app hasn’t launched yet, it is unclear if the app will take off. If the attention it has received is anything to go by, it is sure to see some initial demand.

It shouldn’t be surprising to see an app of this nature. After all, nearly every organization or system we interact with is rated on the Tripadvisors and Yelps of the world. The risk is that this could end up being an app that facilitates a lot of abuse. So, I’m curious to see how the founders build this product.

That said, the more pertinent point is that apps like this will only further increase the “chatter.” Thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, we’re all, every once a while, both media outlets and news-worthy personalities. Things we do can receive a lot of attention. So much so that we can spend more time surveying the attention we (and others) get than actually building something worthwhile.

The chatter is unquestionably distracting and counter productive. It is impossible to focus on creation if all we do is listen for feedback. So, repeatedly asking ourselves the questions – “what are you working to build?” and “what is the next step to make progress?” – has become more important than ever before.

The 2 most common questions asked by the business press –

1. What works?
2. And, what doesn’t?

The press then picks out practices from successful/unsuccessful companies from time-to-time and attempts to answer these questions. We then get a list of practices that we place into one of the two categories. These lists are akin to fashion trends – depending on the time of year, it is either cool to do open offices or not, cool to work remotely or not, etc.

They are, however, the wrong questions. The next time you find yourself asking these questions, it is worth swapping them with 2 others –
1. What worked or didn’t work in this situation or context?
2. Can we abstract from the specific situation to general principles that could be applicable to the general population or, at least, to a significant subset of the population?

These questions are much harder to answer. They might also not take us anywhere. But, that’s the point.

It is hard to get to real insight.

The best parallel for learning I’ve found is the human digestive system. So, I’ll use that analogy to illustrate how learning works.

Ingestion (you + someone else who shares the idea) – This is when an idea is thrown at you. This could be in a class, in a book or in a casual conversation. The first step, if we’re listening, is to take the idea in.

Digestion (you + others) – This is why every teacher who knows what he/she is doing encourages class discussion. Ingestion only makes sure you’ve taken the idea in. Digestion makes sure you “get” the concept and the context.

Absorption (just you) – Once you have digested the idea, you need time by yourself to revisit and absorb it. This is why research suggest you pay attention in classes and meetings and jot down summaries at the end of classes/meetings. Writing summaries is a way of making sure you absorb what you’ve digested.

Assimilation (you + someone you teach/share) – Once you absorb an idea, you are ready for the next step – you now need to synthesize it and share it with others. Assimilation is why it is said that teaching or sharing ideas is the only sure shot way of learning. That is true. It also matters because this is when you open up your thinking to others for their thoughts and critiques. Inevitably, the sharing process crystallizes the key concepts.

Excretion (you) – In this final step, you revisit your teach/share discussions, reflect on your own mental models and throw out pieces that don’t make sense. This matters because learning involves a constant refinement and simplification of concepts and ideas. Excretion is how you boil things down to first principles and create original ideas and mental models.

A lot of what we’re taught about learning focuses on ingestion, digestion and, to a much lesser extent, assimilation. That’s also because a lot of what we’re taught about learning is taught in groups. And, these steps involve groups (surprise, surprise).

However, as this framework hopefully illustrates, there is no learning without reflection. So, if we ever find ourselves running from one activity to another without time to reflect, it is worth reminding ourselves that we’re cheating ourselves of the learning.

We must take the time. We’re worth it.

And, once we do take the time, we must share. With great learning comes great responsibility.

The first secret to staying in good spirits consistently is to embrace the fact that we’re never really done.

Sure, you can be done with cleaning your home, doing the dishes, or clearing out the task list for the day. But, you’ll only be done with those for the day. Cleaning, staying organized and getting things done are never really done.

The beauty about embracing this is that it reminds us that going on a crazy triage of our “to do” list isn’t what we need. What we need is deliberate planning about how we intend to spend our day, re-prioritization when things inevitably don’t go as per plan, and focus when we get to doing the things we need to do.

The question isn’t – “When will I get done?”. It is – “Have I made progress today versus where I was yesterday on the key priorities?”

The game is infinite. The important thing isn’t the final whistle. It is, simply, to play.

Harry Chapin was a singer-songwriter and he had this to say about his grandfather.

My grandfather was a painter. He died at age eighty-eight, he illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry, and he was looking at me and he said, “Harry, there’s two kinds of tired. There’s good tired and there’s bad tired.” He said, “Ironically enough, bad tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people’s battles; you lived other people’s days, other people’s agendas, other people’s dreams. And when it’s all over, there was very little you in there. And when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn; you don’t settle easy.

It’s that good tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost, but you don’t even have to tell yourself because you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days and when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy, you sleep the sleep of the just and you say ‘take me away’”. He said, “Harry, all my life I wanted to be a painter and I painted; God, I would have loved to have been more successful, but I painted and I painted and I’m good tired and they can take me away.”

This note manages to be beautiful, poignant and inspirational all at once. To me, it speaks to the power of the struggle for a cause that we feel strongly about. The wins and other such results hardly every matter. It is all about the process. It is all about giving it our best shot every day. As Anton Chekov said – “Any idiot can face a crisis – it is day to day living that wears you out.”

Here’s to being good tired this week.

HT – The Steger family – thank you for sharing.