A Learning a Day

I used to play in an amateur football league in London two years ago with a few weekend football friends. Our understanding of amateur was clearly different from our opponents but we didn’t know this when we showed up for our first game. 11-0. Every subsequent game became a gradual struggle – very few wanted to wake up at 8am on a Saturday morning and journey across town to be thrashed by an average of 11 goals at 0 degree temperatures and rainfall.

For the few of us who were regular, it was a real test of willpower. We kept it going for a few months and ended up quitting in the new year. Getting thrashed every week wasn’t our idea of fun.

I learnt a lot from that experience. I learnt that victories keep a team together. A team is just equivalent to a mood and you get into a good mood when you win.

I also learnt that losing badly was good for me. I am generally very competitive and losing a goal or two pushes me to work harder for a team. But, this was a situation where effort didn’t matter. We were outclassed. It was a good lesson to learn – put your effort in areas where your effort will actually make a difference.

And, finally, it has put all my subsequent losses in perspective. I was part of a team that lost a game 4-1 this weekend. There were a few teammates who were disappointed.. I was smiling. It could have been worse, after all, and thank god we are healthy enough to play..

This week’s book learning is part 9 of a 12 part series on The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

University of Chicago professor and Nobel prize winning Economist Milton Friedman set out to solve the welfare state problem. Milton Friedman was called to consult the Chilean government as their social system had gone bankrupt.

(Interestingly, the Chile connection was thanks to the fact that one of Chile’s leading universities had an exchange program with the University of Chicago. Thus, many of the leading finance and economic ministers in Chile were Prof Friedman’s students)

Friedman and team worked with Jose Pinera, a Chilean student at Harvard, to work with Pinera’s view that the welfare state had replaced thrift with entitlement. So, they did the following –

– They offered workers in Chile an opt out of the state welfare system and had employers contribute payroll tax to a personal retirement fund managed privately
– By 1990, more than 70% of the population were on the private system – a huge success as the government deficit reduced massively leading to a stable democracy!
– The new savings were invested back into the economy developed at impressive rates. The poverty rate decreased to 15% versus 40% in the rest of Latin America
– The downside has been that the unemployed don’t have any pension. The government, however, uses it’s surplus to take care of the unemployed

This was an example of a huge gamble that did pay off and many nations have attempted to copy the Chilean example with varying results depending on the government’s corruption levels and resolve.

Sketch by EB

The implications for a country like the US is that reform will come (whether liked or not) as only 1 out of 6 Americans can afford health insurance. This is made worse when you add an ageing population with higher life expectancy to the mix. No country, however, is worse off than Japan – 75% of its tax earnings goes into funding welfare. A long life, after all, is good for an individual but a curse for a welfare system. Welfare systems are near impossible to sustain but unfortunately, are great vote-getters…

Wish you a happy weekend and happy week!

A love anecdote from “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield –

Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

I may not have bought this idea 6 years ago but boy, is he on the button. Inspiration does strike when I open up my Windows Live Writer and stare at an empty headline. On most days, I have a 10 or 15 minute window for inspiration to strike so I can get ready to get to work on time. On days when I know I may not have the time in the morning, I open up Windows Live Writer the previous night and inspiration doesn’t disappoint. I have also trained myself to type out an idea onto my phone every time inspiration strikes during the day. These days, I find it strikes multiple times in a day and the morning involves picking the best one/the one I feel most strongly about.

It’s amazing how ideas work – you learn how to treat one well and very soon, you have a dozen. These ideas lead to inspiration – give it some space in your day and it’ll amaze you. Try it. Do it.

Once we secured admission into university in Singapore, the final step involved receiving the IPA letter – a temporary stand in from the immigration authority for a student visa. This was July 2006 and I was impatiently waiting for the IPA letter to show up in time for the scheduled departure. It didn’t.

I was upset. I kicked up a fuss. I was going a couple of days later and missing out. It was the high and low that accompanied excitement. The high of traveling to a new place for a new life with friends had just crashed. I did get there a couple of days later and of course, I didn’t miss anything of consequence. In every way, the two day delay didn’t make a difference. It had just messed with the plans in my mind.

Such delays are just part and parcel of life. We make many plans. Some just don’t work. Some work with delays. Some work on time and some happen sooner than expected. We’d like them to happen exactly as per our plan, of course, but then life happens.

My learning is that these delays and advancements don’t matter in the big scheme of things. I described the effects of a mere 2 day delay but have since faced many others. Of late, I’ve been dealing with plans delayed or advanced by up to a year! And you know what? Things work out just fine.

Don’t take the script in your head too seriously. Plan and prepare but also be ready to improvize. The only certainty is that things will change; your happiness with the change is never guaranteed. But then again, you don’t know when a good day is a good day..

My inbox had an email I didn’t really want from Goodreads. Cue: Ignore.

A few seconds later, I noticed that my inbox had an email I didn’t really want from StumbleUpon. Cue: Unsubscribe and see if I wanted to deactivate the account. I didn’t deactivate it. I figured I’d never really given StumbleUpon a shot and I might change my mind. As long as I didn’t get any emails from them, I was okay.

I hate Windows updates. I don’t mind Apple updates. Why?

In two words, love and trust.

I like Goodreads (love is too strong a word for our relationship for now). I don’t know or trust StumbleUpon. While I like Windows (yes yes, I know..), I do not trust their updates as they’ve messed my computer up multiple times. Apple, on the other hand, has proved itself trustworthy with app updates.

The problem here isn’t the individual update or email of course. It’s all about the trust and love these brands have built.

This gets interesting when we apply it to ourselves. What sort of brands have we built? How do people react when they see emails and messages from us? Food for thought.

The challenge – finding the balance between being hard enough on yourself so you take constructive action and not being so hard that you just feel paralyzed and thus do nothing. Awareness helps. So, check in on yourself when you find yourself beating yourself up. We respond okay to a harsh word but not to a verbal volley of abuses.

It is one of the toughest tight rope walks in that most amazing of balancing acts we call life.

If it is of any consolation, life is all about the balancing.. not about being balanced.

Out of every 20 experiences in our life, it is likely that there are 19 process experiences and 1 result experience.

Remember that year you spent trying to get into that university or to make that big project work? I’m sure you remember that moment of glory. But the amount of time you spent savouring the win barely compares the amount of time you spent to make it happen. Besides, if you tasted that one win, your mind probably began thinking about the next.

Results – big and small – matter. They give us confidence if we win, encourage us to reflect if we lose, and keep us focused either way. They’re only a miniscule part of the life experience though. If it weren’t for the fact that result experiences leave strong memories, they’d not even be in consideration. We might look back at our lives and tend to only see the highs and lows that these results have brought us… but our life experience is a different matter.

How we live our life every day, whether we wait for happiness to come to us or whether we hone our happiness skill, how we react to life’s small frustrations and annoyances, how do we treat people, and if we express our love, care, and gratitude, i.e., the small stuff. It’s the small stuff that moves the happiness needle. Sweat the small stuff.

It’s the journey that makes the destination worthwhile.

PS: The best results rarely follow a bad process anyway.

The best relationships work when you bring together people who are comfortable by themselves. If they don’t work well by themselves, the chances that the overall result of the team is better than the individual parts is low.

If your relationship isn’t a win-win, someone is losing energy and positive vibes. If that is you, this can work out okay for a short time but eventually, you’re better off moving on.

Look at your key relationships – both professional and personal – and ask yourself if the products are better than the sum of the parts. If they aren’t, spend time fixing them.

And if they are, treasure them.

This week’s book learning is part 8 of a 12 part series on The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

The concept of the welfare state was pioneered in Germany by Otto van Bismarck thanks to 2 beliefs-
1) A man with a pension is easier to deal with
2) A person embracing the welfare state idea is the one that would come to power (more people are poor than rich and thus, there would be more votes for socialist moves)

Following World War 1, more and more states began nationalizing industry et al to cushion effects for people but none took it as far as Japan.

Japan initial went the way of the warfare state. But, after World War II, it set upon being the welfare state where every citizen was taken care of by all sorts of coverage thanks to the government nationalizing insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. Until 1970, this worked really well as the economy was predicted to overtake the US by 2000 and other countries like Britain decided to follow suit. But, things began to fall apart since..

Sketch by EB

Interestingly, what worked well in Japan in the 30 years post World War II didn’t work anywhere as well in Britain. Unlike Japan, the society wasn’t built on norms of social conformity leading to more people gaming the system and viewing welfare as social hand-outs.

So, what was the issue with the welfare state concept? How do you structure a welfare system? Coming up next week..