A Learning a Day

Happiness = Set point (50%) + Living conditions (10%) + Voluntary choices and actions (40%)

Our set point is our balance point where we return to on most days. This means we all have a happiness range and our set point is somewhere in the middle of the range. This determines 50% of our happiness.

Living conditions involve better clothes, houses, cars, etc. All of this accounts for (only) 10% of our happiness.

Our voluntary choices and actions constitute a whopping 40% of our happiness and this post recommends the “most-of-it” rule to earn your stars on this.

On most days, 70% of what happens to us is good. On good days, this goes up to 80%, then up to 90% on amazing days, and a whopping 95% on extraordinary days. Finally, to present the other end, I’d wager that we have 40%-50% good stuff happen to us on a bad day.

There are 3 things to note here –
1. We vastly exaggerate negative events in our mind. Try journaling all the good and bad things that happen to you in a day and you’ll know what I mean.

2. Even on extraordinary days, we have an idiot or two who, knowingly or unknowingly, threatens to muck things up. That’s just life. There may be the occasional day in your life when everything goes perfect but on most days, your victory lap always finds a critic.

3. Our happiness largely depends on what we choose to focus on. I’m learning to focus on “most-of-it.” On 90% of the days in our life, most of what happens to us is good/works out just fine. It’s a worthwhile check if you are feeling unhappy – is “most of it” working?

If the answer is yes (and it generally is), you have no excuses. No moaning allowed. There will always be dampeners and problems. Expect them.. and eat them for breakfast.

For most social interaction, “why” isn’t a necessity. It’s a great-to-have and makes a huge difference. For example, if you meet a customer service person whose life mission is to serve or to excel in service, you feel the difference. The “why” naturally translates to the “how.” The “why” is an intrinsic choice, however. It can’t be easily trained.

Training employees to embody a “how” is easier. If done well, it can mask the lack of “why” because employees have been trained to behave in a certain way and do so in a way that feels genuine. Most air hostesses at Singapore Airlines are trained to exude a certain positivity – whether it is their life mission to serve, the act of putting on a Singapore Airlines uniform seems to bring out the best in them.

Instead of focusing on the “how,” too many training programs focus on the “what.” They train their employees to say please, sorry,  and thank you a lot with other phrases that sound nice on paper. All of these miss the point – it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes an impact on a person.

People don’t remember what you say or do, they remember how you made them feel.

A friend’s mom explained that her wonderful singing abilities were thanks to power cuts. As soon as their house had a power cut, dad would begin to sing and daughter would promptly join. As a family, they were actually very underwhelmed by the coming of the inverter as the lack of power cuts robbed the family of some precious bonding time.

I have a lovely power cut experience too. As a kid growing up, we used to have power cuts in the middle of the night. As it got too hot to sleep, we would all troop outside for some fresh air and we would be greeted by cheers and calls from all over the street as our neighbors would do the same. We met a couple of these neighbors last year and we went back to discussing some fond memories standing outside our homes during power cuts.

It’s a nice reminder that technology cuts both ways. On the one hand, we are able to stay in touch with more friends and family than ever before and yet, on the other, it also means we can build virtual islands around us and avoid the kind of stuff that actually builds great relationships.

“If the whole world was blue, there would be no blue. We need something that is not blue to understand blue.” | Eckhart Tolle (paraphrased)

The more the pain and chaos, the more we learn to appreciate those moments of joy and calm. Joy, however, is different from happiness. Joy is a feeling while happiness is an ability.

Pain and chaos are just feelings. They are a part of this marvellous piece of engineering we call life. Like all feelings, they can be understood, accepted, and embraced. Understanding comes with self awareness, accepting comes with proactivity, and the embracing comes with wisdom. Rafael Nadal plays through pain every single time he steps into a tennis court. He’s a great athlete but an even greater role model simply because he’s learnt to embrace the pain.

The pain and the chaos are just part of the infinite game. We just have to learn to play it, to celebrate the wins, to learn from the defeats, and move the hell on. Can’t change the waves but can learn how to surf.

Let me say that again – pain and chaos are just feelings that can be accepted and embraced. Happiness is a skill we develop that we can apply even during the worst of times. The moment we learn to make that distinction, life will never be the same again..

I am a huge fan of the hug. I’ve been a huge fan for a long while.

The hand shake is a nice way of greeting people – especially ones you’ve never met. Bill Clinton innovated by making sure he used his other hand to touch people on the elbow making it a touch more personal. The hand shake is safe and that’s its greatest strength.

The hug, on the other hand, is unsafe. It’s the sort of betrayals that came with the hug that gave birth to the phrase “being stabbed in the back.” The hug is a wonderful show of love and trust in any relationship simply because it requires us to be vulnerable for those few seconds as we give ourselves completely to them.

The hug will never be the norm in politics or business – both low trust environments. But, in our personal lives, let’s remember to hug away!

And when we hug, let’s make sure we give what I call a “full on” hug i.e. a tight frontal embrace – anything less than this doesn’t qualify.

And guys, just hug already. Macho doesn’t build great relationships.. affection sure does.

Better pictures to follow soon (hopefully). I just had to get a quick snap at home to share with all of you.

A new life begins.. :)

During his days as a Professor, a student ran up to Albert Einstein after an exam and said -“Professor, I’m not sure if you realized that the questions you asked were exactly the same as the ones you asked last year.”

Einstein famously replied – “Yes, but the answers have changed.”

Safety is self delusional. We need a healthy amount of self delusion to be happy. But, too much stifles us. It’s tempting to always look at what’s been tried and tested.

The trouble with tried and tested is that it neglects context. What worked yesterday is unlikely to work today. The knock-on-door-and-push-the-sale car sales men of yesteryear are all but gone. Selling today works with different rules – trust and permission being the foremost among them.

Standing still isn’t different from moving backwards. In some ways, it’s worse.. it’s often easier to change the direction of a moving object than to make it move in the first place.

..will always have a critic. You will always be too young, old, early, late, fast, or slow.

We tend to be very autobiographical and self righteous in our opinions about decisions. We love our own paths, our own stories, and wouldn’t do it any different for the most part.

2 rules for all decisions –
1. You will never please everyone you care about. So, just make decisions you can live with and hope for the best.
2. Keep making decisions. The proportion of bad ones will decrease with time and with decision making, it is more about avoiding disastrous decisions than about getting it perfectly right.

Refresher: We’ve set up a basic spreadsheet (available for download here) in part 1 where we covered setting up a spreadsheet for analysis.

For the next 2 editions, we will put the spreadsheet down for a bit before picking them up as I find more time and bandwidth (I’m getting married in 3 days). As a result, today’s post will be about excel shortcuts.

There are an important principles that I use when working with Excel and PowerPoint -With Excel, you want to minimize use of the mouse and become a keyboard ninja and with PowerPoint, you want to do the opposite. We will cover mouse related to dos in a post on recommended quick access bars for Excel and PowerPoint. Today’s post is about keyboard shortcuts.

The following 11 shortcuts are those I’ve used the most and those I’ll recommend you learn. I’m assuming you are well versed with the basic ones like ctrl+s/c/v, etc., to save, copy, and paste.

1. Ctrl+Up/Down/Left/Right: Move to the end of a row, column.

2. Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down/Left/Right: Select till the end of a row, column.

3. Shift+Space/Ctrl+Space: Select a row/column

4. Shift+”-“/Ctrl+”-“: Delete row/column

5. Ctrl+Shift+”+”: Shift rows/columns up, down, left, right

6. Ctrl+Shift+$/%: Format numbers in $, %

7. Alt+E+S and “down” twice: Paste as values – invaluable when working with multiple pivots (Alt+E+S brings forth the paste menu)

8. F4: Absolute and relative referencing – as critical as they get

9. F2: Toggle in and out of formulas from text editing to moving the selected box

10. Ctrl+Shift+>/<: Increase or decrease font – more relevant for PowerPoint than Excel

11. Ctrl+D: Populate i.e. use it to populate an entire column based on the first value

The point to remember here is that it’s impossible to be efficient with your time on Excel without working with shortcuts. So, if you’re planning on significant work on excel – crunching data, building models, analysing surveys, etc.,  I would highly recommend you spend some time getting fully on board with shortcuts. As an added resource, do check out Chandoo’s post on 10 must-have shortcuts.

As these are off the top of my head now, I might come back and add a few. If you have any shortcuts that you use a lot and feel I’m missing, I look forward to those in the comments.

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Series introduction, Part 1

Some things are not meant to be.

I was supposed to get on a flight last night and wasn’t notified that it was cancelled (Pro tip: Never ever ever ever fly Air India). As I was stuck in a really bad and unusual traffic jam that added an extra hour to the usual 20 minute journey to the airport, I was unable to buy a replacement ticket since all flights heading home take off around the same time.

I just had to laugh. It just wasn’t meant to be. In hindsight, while the experience wasn’t great, it wasn’t all that bad. Spent time with friends, submitted a request for a refund with proof of no information about the cancellation(the first request was denied by Air India!), submitted a claim on my travel insurance for the first time, etc. Yes, I’ve lost some sleep and I’m missing an event I was supposed to attend but this just seemed to be the work of forces beyond my control.

I don’t know if I have always been a huge control freak but I probably did have delusions about the kind of control I had over my life. But, over the past few months, I have repeatedly come up against situations, big and small, that have ripped this illusion to shreds. I haven’t been able to out-work or out-hustle myself out of them and I’ve found myself going back to a maxim of a wiser friend – “Perhaps life is trying to teach me something here..”

And it has. I’m glad I wasted no energy on anger (moaning is not allowed anyway – I have the privilege to FLY for god’s sake! How ridiculously fortunate..). I laughed, shrugged, and moved on.

I’ve learnt these past few months that you can push things, but only so much. Knowing when to push and when to quit is an art that we hone over the course of the lifetime. I’ve always tended to push too much rather than too little. I guess I’ve been more impatient and less wise as a consequence. But, my quote for the day says “wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.” Perhaps life is just teaching me to be wise?

Either way, the ability to just shrug at an annoyance, laugh, and move on has not come easy for me (sounds like such a small and easy thing, I know!). And I’ll take that learning.. and some wisdom if you will. 

Life is always teaching us something. We just have to be open to the lesson..