A beautiful mind parallel

I wrote about dealing with insecurities by making a case for selfishness a week ago. There are were a couple of sentences in that post that I thought I’d revisit.

“I am of the view that you don’t ever get rid of your demons. But, you do learn to keep them at bay. So, I don’t think you ever truly get rid of insecurities. You just learn to accept their presence, work with them, and consistently let your best self shine through.”

This was the single hardest concept that I have grappled with over the years. I initially operated with the assumption that you build self-confidence brick by brick and reach a point when you don’t ever see your insecurities again. It turns out that that is not true.

A parallel that came to mind was John Nash’s experience as depicted in the Oscar winning movie ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ In the end, Nash is shown to come to terms with his schizophrenia, but the characters from his delusions don’t go away. They’re still there. He’s just learnt to ignore them and carry on with his own life.

That’s a great way to think about insecurities. The best outcome of dealing with them and building our self-confidence isn’t that they disappear. We just learn to develop the self-awareness necessary to overcome them. Courage isn’t the absence of fear and insecurities, it is the realization that there are things more important than fear.

And, from personal experience, it is definitely the happier path…

Maximizing learn-rate – Being kind to yourself

If your response when you taste failure is to beat yourself up, it is natural that you will eventually fear failing.

But, isn’t that what we all do?

Maximizing learn-rate is on top of my mind as I had 2 days of ski lessons this week. After an encouraging first day, I had a challenging second day. And, as we progressed to a slightly tougher slope, I found it much harder to execute what I thought I’d learnt. For a good few minutes, I began wondering why I wasn’t getting it and, soon, I felt paralyzed. Negative self talk is the first step of a cycle that takes us nowhere.

The next step was to reverse the self talk and just try again.

It went better. I need more of that as I practice today.

My understanding of the situation is that my skill level is just what it is. Self talk isn’t going to improve it. But, as I start learning a new skill, there are many insecurities that get in the way of performing at the skill level I am at. It takes a while to build the confidence required to shove the insecurities aside. And, negative self talk is as potent a confidence destroyer as they come.

This post in one line? To learn better, be kind to yourself.

Lessons on branding from Blackbeard the Pirate – MBA Learnings

A brand is simply a network of associations that exist in the minds of customers. Seeing the famous Nike swoosh or the Coca Cola logo triggers associations in our mind.

Brand associations are incredibly powerful because they stick. Malaysian Airlines, for example, is likely to face the consequences of its two tragedies for a very long time. These discussions naturally lead us to discussions around what companies do with these associations – rebranding, repositioning, etc. We’ll leave those topics for a later time and, instead, learn from one of the early exponents of the power of a brand – Blackbeard the Pirate.

Edward Teach or “Blackbeard” is one of the most famous pirates in history. And, after an apprenticeship with some famous pirates of the day, he went on to build an empire of sorts. While he wasn’t the most successful pirate in terms of loot, he definitely succeeded in leaving behind an unparalleled legacy. Here’s how –

1. The name – Blackbeard. It is unknown where he got his famous nickname. Given his mastery of the art of building a brand, we could suspect that it might be the work of the man himself. He was a shrewd and calculating businessman who knew that intimidation mattered greatly as a pirate. The more intimidated his opposing ships were, the less men he would lose since they would give up without a fight.

2. Devil’s image. Blackbeard knew the importance of image in his line of work. Before battle, he would dress all in black, strap several pistols to his chest and put on a large black captain’s hat. Then, he would put slow burning fuses in his hair and beard. The fuses constantly sputtered and gave off smoke, which wreathed him in a perpetual greasy fog. He looked like a devil who had stepped right out of hell and onto a pirate ship and most of his victims simply surrendered their cargo rather than fight him.

3. The first pirate flag. Blackbeard was a true innovator in using insignia. He realized that he would be able to intimidate ships best if they knew he was coming from afar. So, he created his flag – a skeleton spearing a heart while toasting a devil. Pirates later simplified it to the modern version which just depicts a skull and bones.

Blackbeard Flag

Blackbeard understood that he wanted one association when people thought of him – fear. And, he carefully crafted an image around fear that has lasted well past his time. His is a wonderful lesson in building powerful brands while also prompting the question – what is your personal brand? Is it what you would like it to be? What do you do to live up to the brand you aspire to be?

As you can tell with Blackbeard’s tale, these often become self-fulfilling prophecies…

Maximizing learn-rate – look for the counter intuitive

Learn-rate is simply the speed at which you learn. And, I have a simple tactic for maximizing your learn-rate. Just look for what’s counter intuitive.

Every skill you attempt to pick up has a few elements that are counter intuitive. I’d argue that the more counter intuitive elements there are, the harder it is to learn the skill. Here are a couple of examples –

– If you are trying to learn the guitar, you have to learn to gravitate towards pain. Our natural reaction is to stop doing something if it is painful. When learning the guitar, it works the other way around. If you feel your fingers hurting when you try playing the F-chord, that’s a sign that you need to do a lot more of it.

– If you are learning to serve in tennis, you should look at where you want the ball to go. This is completely against our instinct to look at the racket and the ball. Also, we have to toss the ball higher than our normal zone of comfort.

– If you are learning to ski, there are a collection of counter intuitive ideas. First, you should always lean forward to keep control. This goes against our instinct to pull back when we move fast. Second, to turn right, you must put your tilt your left ankle and put your weight on it. Thirdly, like in tennis, you must keep your eyes on the trail in front of you. Finally, you have to go slow to go fast. This means you spend a lot of time making S-shapes so you don’t just speed down the hill, lose control and fall.

So, when you’re picking up your next skill, keep an eye for what’s counter intuitive and spend all your energy learning it. It works like magic.

Customizable

We are all exposed to industrial systems sooner or later in our lives. An outcome of having 7 billion people on the planet is that we’ve had to build industrial systems – school, college, the factory, etc. One consequence of these systems is that we’re conditioned to think of life like an assembly line – go to school, then get into a great college, then get a prestigious first job, then an elite masters program, then work in an exploding start-up and then build our own company. Or, the other way to think about it would be – study hard till you’re in college, then work hard while finding a partner, marry the partner, have kids, send kids to school, and let the cycle go on. Not much seems customizable. If anything, it feels like a never-ending list of things that just “have to be done.”

We crave connection as human beings. And, a result of this craving combined with technological advances is a slew of services like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. However, if we’re not careful, these can soon lead us to believe that there is a certain socially acceptable way to have fun, to go on vacation, or to even relax. After all, can it be a great vacation if it doesn’t make for a great profile picture?

But, here’s where it all breaks down –
1. Every bit of life is customizable. While large groups of us exhibit similar kinds of behavior (=> industrial systems work on average), we all have unique quirks. And, our happiness is entirely dependent on our quirks.
2. As a result, happiness exists in the customization. The less we feel like we’re going through life working through a pre-designed checklist,  the more we’re likely to be happy. The less we care about what others think, the more likely we’ll find our custom approach.
3. The less stuff we “have to do,” the happier we will be.

Our life is entirely what we make of it. And, the first step to making it what works for us is to realize that everything we take for granted was invented by people like and you and me.. and, that it is all customizable.

Lead bullets – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea..

When Ben Horowitz was working for the web server team at Netscape, Microsoft created a rival web server product that was 5 times as fast as Netscape’s and gave it to customers for free. So, Ben began working hard on potential acquisition targets that could help Netscape overcome this problem.

When he shared the idea with his engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, Bill listened and said – “Ben, those silver bullets that you are looking for are all fine. But, our server is FIVE times slower. There is no silver bullet that is going to fix that. We’re going to have to use a lot of ‘lead bullets.'”
So, the engineering team focused hard on the performance issues. And, Netscape soon beat Microsoft’s performance and grew web servers to a 400 million dollar business.

Later, as CEO of Opsware, when he found competitor BladeLogic consistently beating them on big deals, Ben had colleagues who suggested silver bullets like other acquisitions and pivots. But, he had learnt his lesson – they had to build a better product. No silver bullets, only lead bullets. That’s how they built a 1.6 billion dollar company.
Source and thanks to: The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Lead Bullets

Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”‘ | Ben Horowitz

I will do nothing else..

..until I make progress on my number 1 priority.

To this day, I haven’t found a single app or hack that accomplishes important work better than when I make this commitment. I’m just learning to be disciplined at breaking lists down into groups, prioritizing them and then getting to work.

Like all good things, the commitment just sets the stage for great follow up. There’s no way of escaping that.

The half-life of a failure

I heard back on 2 project outcomes yesterday – one went really well and one didn’t go so well. Guess which one I woke up thinking about?

The half-life of a failure is much much longer than the half-life of a success. So, the question then becomes – is there a way around it? Here’s how I think about it –

In the short term, I’m not sure there is. Successes and failures are a part of life and we have to learn to accept that failures stay longer with us. We expect negative emotions very intensely. There is no getting around that and you aren’t going to change your response overnight.

In the medium term, there are a few ideas that can help. The first is to develop a coping mechanism. I have developed two coping mechanisms that tend to help me. First, I give myself a certain stretch of time (depending on the size of the failure) to play victim. And I allow myself to kick myself and curse things a bit. Once I’m done with playing victim, I think about I learnt from the process and write about it. This part enables me to look back at the process that led to the outcome, draw my own conclusions about what went wrong and look forward to things that I should do better. The beautiful part of writing a daily blog that talks about seeing failures as learnings is that failures help me keep a steady pipeline of content. That’s not a bad outcome.

And, finally, in the long term, I see it as a part of a quest to become more zen – to accept the things I cannot change and focus intensely on the things I can. Every minute spent on a past result is a minute taken away from a future process, after all. I know this but it doesn’t make executing on it any easier.

As you can tell, I am in the “medium term” bit. This process has taken me about 6 years to internalize. Let’s hope I’ll be writing about the long term part 6 years from now. :-)

Being entrepreneurial vs. being an entrepreneur

The media loves the entrepreneur’s story. Just search for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Page and you will find no shortage of press articles and books that detail their obsessive habits, their exercise routines and anecdotes from their childhood. Why blame the media? We love the entrepreneur story too – the story of the one person who came about and changed everything. Many dream to be that person. It is definitely a worthy dream if the goal is to make a positive difference during your time on the planet.  And, it is definitely one way to approach the many problems our planet and the human race faces.

The other way is to just be entrepreneurial – wherever you might be. The entrepreneurship concept is built around three phases – idea/problem -> initiative -> action. Those who go about registering a new company to solve the problem/execute the idea are called entrepreneurs. As you might have guessed, this post is about all those who don’t, all those we will call entrepreneurial.

Let us consider the story of Brent James at Intermountain Healthcare who has been at the forefront of a movement to make health care better by making it easier for doctors to access data and make better decisions. Or perhaps the many change-makers at hospital networks and medical device manufacturers around the world who have helped save an enormous number of lives through changes they lead. Perhaps we could think about those in companies that have led agricultural innovations or maybe the early team at Twitter including folks like Jason Goldman who have helped make Twitter an agent of change around the world. Brent James and folks like him may not have started companies but, as change agents in large organizations, have probably driven more tangible change than most could hope for.

The way I see it – there is a small group of people who will have the combination of smarts, resources, and luck that Musk, Bezos and Page have had in shaping the world tomorrow. And, while they will undoubtedly make huge dents to life on this planet, the change they will make will be dwarfed by the change made by the many entrepreneurial folk who are driving change in their neighborhoods, tribes, communities and companies. These people may not have articles dedicated to their childhood on Fortune magazine and may just be lauded in an internal company-wide memo. But, it would be foolish to underestimate the impact that they have on our lives. We’ve been innovating at an unprecedented rate of late. That’s not because we have more superstar entrepreneurs. In fact, the number of superstar entrepreneurs has stayed constant over time. For every Bill Gates, there always was a Rockfeller. However, with more availability of information and resources, we do have more people who’ve been taking initiative and attempting to make a difference wherever they are.

So, you might have many reasons to not be an entrepreneur. That’s completely okay. There is, however, no excuse to not be entrepreneurial. You have more access to tools that can drive change than ever before. You can also spot people who’re out there attempting to make the world a bit better. If you don’t feel strongly enough about pushing an idea forward, be good at spotting those who are and join them. Just ask Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive – that works too.

We make the world better.. together.

Being suspicious of synergy – MBA Learnings

If you ask for 5 words that form part of traditional business jargon that people hate, the word “synergy” would be right up there. Given its horrible reputation, I was curious to learn more and we discussed the idea at length at our intro strategy class. Here are a few notes –

1. The economic view on synergy is – (how big are the gains) x (how achievable are they) – (costs involved). So, in essence, synergy is just a calculation that multiplies potential gains by the probability of achieving them and subtracts the costs involved.

2. The core idea is that two organizations can combine to create more value as a group than they did individually. Value can be created by either increasing benefit to customers or reducing cost. But, this is where things get a bit nuanced and tricky.

3. Combining two organizations just because they have something in common does absolutely nothing. Good strategy is when the acquisition enables the acquirer to fundamentally change something about how they do what they do. This works well when they have strengths that complement each other. A great example of this is Disney acquiring Pixar. Pixar gave Disney strength in computer generated cartoons and a creative engine that churned out a great movie every 2 years. Disney, on the other hand, could use all of Pixar’s characters in its theme parks and merchandise. In order to avoid too many organizational costs like a clash of cultures, Disney allowed Pixar to operate separately and this acquisition has worked incredibly well for them.

4. It does gets tricky at this point, however, because acquisitions we read about in the press largely talk about potential gains and completely neglect the potential costs. That’s the part of the synergy equation that is normally forgotten or omitted. Researchers have dug into this question over many years – why are acquisitions regularly over valued when they fail so often? There have been many explanations with CEO hubris, poor decision making processes being suggested as possible explanations. But, the fact remains that the costs of a potential acquisition are generally glossed over. And, every time you see an acquisition announced, it is definitely worth looking for whether the acquirer discusses potential costs and challenges. It is quite amazing how regularly this isn’t discussed just given the base rate of failure.

5. Warren Buffet once said – “Synergy is a term widely used in business to explain an acquisition that otherwise makes no sense.” And he’s absolutely right. Synergy has been used to describe business decisions that can best be describes as illogical or fuzzy. And, the take-home message is definitely to continue to be wary when you hear “synergy” because very few actually understand it and use it consistent with its economic definition.

6. Finally, a quick personal application. Every gain we foresee comes at a cost. It is regularly tempting to only think about and discuss the gain. When we do that, it pays to remember that we’re guilty of the exact mistake that costs many companies billions of dollars and many smart executives their job. Make sure we look at both sides of the decisions make. As economists like to say, there is no “free” lunch.

So, yes, we are back a full circle to where we started in terms of our suspicion of the word. But, hopefully, the journey has been useful.