I came across this quote – “Confidence is silent, insecurities are loud.”
The ego that arises out of insecurities makes a lot of noise attempting to announce, explain, and justify.
Confidence doesn’t need all that. You know you know.
I’ve found that to be very true. But, I’d never thought of it in this way. And, I’m looking forward to observing my silence and loudness and understanding where they come from in the coming days..
Take it with a healthy pinch of salt.
Nobody (not even your mom, dad or spouse) has the context you have.
Nobody is free of biases. We all love our own thought processes and generally believe we are right.
Nobody has to live with a decision you make in the same way you have to.
Nobody cares as much as you do.
So, listen to people who matter and then forge your own path.
And, if it helps, there is no right answer. There may be a “general” right way. But, there’s no guarantee that it is the right way for you.
PS: If you find yourself sharing your perspective or giving advice, state your biases. It helps the person on the other end.
An idea I’ve increasingly appreciated over the past few years is “equanimity.” Equanimity is defined as a state of mental calmness or composure in difficult situations.
I struggled with something approaching even a semblance of equanimity until a few years back. Highs and lows were the norm. Over time, however, thanks to all the self reflection that writing here required of me, I’ve learnt to keep perspective. And, in addition, I’ve realized that what matters most is to keep focus on the process / things you control.
An example of applying this was when my laptop stopped booting up last night. I had been having intermittent problems over the past couple of days. I hadn’t gotten around to figuring out the issues since I was busy wrapping up a project and switching locations. But, last night, just as I boarded my flight, it gave up on me. So, I reached home this morning and gave it a fresh shot.
Again, no luck. Damn. Can’t blog in the morning. Can’t do some work I wanted to get done. Can’t get through emails that required certain actions for a current project. Not good in my world.
But, I chose instead to spend my time unpacking. I’d been having a good couple of days and just viewed this as the inevitable “down” and moved on. After unpacking, I took it to our IT support folk at school. Within 3 hours, they’d identified that the problem was the result of a hardware loose contact and had fixed it (thanks guys!).
The best part about this was not the fix but the fact that I didn’t experience the slightest amount of stress or anxiety. While this is a classic first world problem, this would have caused hours of irritation and anxiety in the past. But, thanks to focusing on things that I could control, I dealt with it far better than I ever would have.
Truly a transformative experience.
(PS: A big part of this evolution has also been the absence of the manic high. More on that another day.)
It was only this morning that I realized that reviews at work are called “performance” reviews.
Performance has 2 meanings – an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment and the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function.
While the second definition is what we think of when we think of work, I am sure you and I know of people who come into work and act as if the only performance they know is the first kind. They prepare incredibly hard for their meetings, show up on time (you can’t be late on stage), bring their whole beings to their work, care for the experience of the people around them and try to make the world better with their work.
Sometimes, I think every word works a bit like the word ‘performance’ – there are always two meanings. You can work or you can “work.” You can be a friend or you can be a “friend.” I realize these differences don’t have as much effect in writing as they do in my head. But, there are those who approach work or friendship as everyone else does. And, then, there are those who just do it differently. Suddenly, work or friendship isn’t what you are used to.
That’s magic.
The magic of a Steve Jobs product launch was that he didn’t treat it as a product launch.
We have data and statistics thrown at us everywhere we go. And, if it is anything you do on a computer, it is likely that data has been analyzed in many ways.
It is tempting to just do things that make the numbers work. Write posts that generate more hits, make management decisions that improve your approval rating, and so on.
But, numbers lie. They might seem fool-proof and indisputable. But, the fact remains that they only show you the state of things at any given time. And, we all know that projections need to be taken with a healthy dollop of salt.
The solution is to learn to use numbers to inform your decisions, but not to let them decide everything for you.
Painting by numbers does make painting easy. But, it is also for amateurs.
US President Dwight Eisenhower used to have fits of anger as a child. Over time, he learnt that anger and hate clouded his judgment. And, in positions of leadership, he couldn’t afford to let that happen. So, he strived to make it a practice to avoid getting angry and hating anyone.
His technique for doing so was to write the person’s name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of his desk, and say to himself – “That finishes the incident, and so far as I’m concerned, that fellow.” Over the years, the drawer became a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities. During his time as Supreme Commander and President, he was frequently made a scapegoat by journalists for all sort of troubles. His anger drawer saved him from any negative reactions.
The learning that emerged for me – the anger drawer was Eisenhower’s method to pause and respond to adversity rather than react to it. And, he designed a system that worked really well for him. Here’s to doing that for ourselves..
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot piece of coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one that gets burnt. | The Buddha
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Source and thanks to: Lifehacker.com
I didn’t do my product review post this week. That’s because I’m struggling with 2 questions.
But, before I get to the questions, I had an interesting experience after downloading the excellent Economist Espresso app. This was thanks to a reader who insisted I try out the Economist Digital subscription (thanks friend!). It has been a fantastic experience using the app. I’m sure I’ll review it shortly. But, the big break through was when I scrolled down to the bottom of the article by swiping up. I instinctively tried to swipe up to move to the next article. But, it turns out you have to swipe right. That works for photographs and makes sense. But, does it make sense when you are reading text? I am not sure. But, it feels great to find myself asking such questions and not taking design for granted.
Onto my questions –
In short, more to follow. Fascinating process so far. And, looking forward to lots more learning and thinking about how technology products are built in the weeks and months ahead.
As a consultant, I worked on a fascinating project back in 2012 to prepare a client for a potential Greek exit from the Eurozone. This was July 2012 and things looked bleak.
Fast forward 3 years later and we’re still in the same situation. There have been a couple of false dawns along the way but, largely, the problem hasn’t gone away. Every time I see a headline in the news about the situation (i.e. every day), I am reminded of sunk costs and bitter pills.
The sunk cost fallacy is when we weigh up all our past investment to make an investment in the future. The phrase “throwing good money after bad” sums it up. Billions of Euros have been sunk into this “relationship.” And, it feels like both sides are consistently looking back at all past investment instead of making decisions based on what lies ahead.
When you fall sick, the recovery path is rarely sweet. Yet, leaders on both sides are refusing to swallow bitter pills. Greek President Tsipras won the previous election by declaring he would be anti-austerity. There was no shred of sense in that campaign. He resigned yesterday. Glad that worked out. There’s a nice saying that says something like – “When 50,000 people believe in something wrong, they are still wrong.” The trouble with politics is that it often involves hundreds of thousands of people screaming populist bullsh*t. Someone is going to have to take the bitter pill in this situation.
Time doesn’t make difficult problems go away. The last 3 years in the Eurozone saga have demonstrated that.
Some of my highest impact learnings as a graduate student have been around productivity. One of my professors in the first couple of weeks described it as a 2 year course in decision making and trade-offs. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve written about what my process has looked like. And, today, I thought I’d attempt to pull out 3 productivity principles that have become apparent to me in the past year.
1. There is no productivity without a goal. We are either active or productive. The difference is whether we’re making progress towards a goal. This goal has to be necessarily overarching. For example, if your goal is to become CEO and CEO alone, talking to family becomes unimportant activity.
So, the first principle of productivity is to decide what matters.
2. Strategic decisions cannot be taken in isolation / You can’t optimize sub systems. If you’re trying to figure out how to live a good life, you can’t work toward optimizing a “sub system” or part of your life. This means you can’t make a good decision on your career if you don’t consider the impact on the other parts of your life. For example, what is the impact of you accepting a new role? Does that compromise on your desire to be healthy?
The latin root of decision comes from ‘cis’ or ‘cid’ which literally means “to kill.” Good strategy involves good decisions which, in turn, involve killing options. And, such decisions need to be taken with a view of the whole picture.
A quick additional plug – making decisions keeping the whole picture in mind helps us be consistent and “walk our talk.” The one word that describes that well is integrity. Integrity is derived from integer which, as you probably know from 3rd grade math, means whole. It all ties together.
3. The key goal – to keep the main thing the main thing. There’s a story that a productivity coach in the 1920s once gave millionaire Charles Schwab a simple piece of advice – write down the 3 most important things at the start of the day and don’t move to item 2 till you finish item 1. He received a check for $25,000 (a big amount in those days) a few weeks later.
Once you understand what you are optimizing for and make decisions that ensure you’re optimizing for the right thing, the next step is getting things done. And, the first step to getting things done is to constantly keep the main thing the main thing. This isn’t easy to do. But, I’ve found that the Charles Schwab technique of being consistently mindful is one of those that works very well. To each their own though.
I find it unfortunate that discussions around productivity often revolve around tactics – how to keep inbox zero, write things down as you think of them, etc. There is a lot of merit to tactics and maybe I’ll attempt to pull together what I’ve learnt on them, someday. But, they are secondary to strategy.
It is also telling that 2 out of the 3 principles I’ve pulled out were thanks to that fantastic book on Operations Strategy – The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt. As we learnt on day 1 of our course on Operations, good operations supports strategy. After all, if it isn’t contributing towards the goal, it is just activity, not productivity.
I’ve been following football (/soccer) for 13 years now. Many of the young stars I started out admiring have now retired. Football has taught me a lot about life and careers. I’ve seen careers torn apart due to bad life decisions, personal lives messed up due to hubris and seen innumerable cases of “the next big thing” never turning out to be the next big thing.
There are, however, a handful of legends who did manage to stay true to their status as the “next big thing,” And, every single time, they did so not just because of their incredible technical abilities but because they were willing to adapt and reinvent themselves. They understood their physical make up and changed their game to suit them as they grew older. Many changed positions and styles. And, what is telling is that they found new strengths as they grew older. If they were pacy in their youth, they impressed with their reading of the game a decade later.
Careers in sport at the highest level are rarely longer than 15 years and, yet, top players probably reinvent themselves 2-3 times in that period.
Careers in the professional world are 30-40 years long generally. How many people reinvent themselves by adding new skills and abilities 6-8 times in that period?
A Learning a Day 