A Learning a Day

it’s unlikely you will be happy tomorrow.

The promotion, the new car, the vacation, and the exam result aren’t going to change much. Sure, they’ll give you that momentary burst of joy but not much more. If you’re waiting for happiness to “happen,” good luck.

Happiness isn’t too different from the exercise habit. It takes a bit of work, is a bit painful (imagine that), and requires you to make a commitment to being thankful for what you have. If you find yourself having difficulties with being thankful, spend a day at a home for the underprivileged and your issues will sort themselves out.

If you’re complaining about happiness sitting in your comfortable chair, staring into a computer screen, and scrolling down a facebook news feed – shame on you.

Go out there. Do something. Help someone. Play. Read. Run. Laugh. Love. And then repeat everyday.

There’s a reason they say “be” happy. “Be” is a verb.

We will encounter two forces today – the force and the resistance.

The force will support us every time we set about doing things that improve us – getting difficult work done, learning a new skill, improving ourselves, or just becoming better. The resistance, on the other hand, will only support activities that take us to a lower plane. The resistance hates getting work done, learning, and attempting to get better. It would rather have you procrastinate or just watch TV.

The resistance acts just before you get started. That’s when it is at it’s strongest. If you are planning on reading a self-help book, the resistance would say “But YOU don’t need this. this is for those other dorks. You are brilliant the way you are. You don’t need to change… change is bad.”

And then it will use it’s most powerful weapon – rationalization. “It’s good you don’t read this. You are tired today and need to relax a bit. Maybe you’ll get to this tomorrow.”

And of course, tomorrow never arrives as the resistance wards it away till you decide it’s hopeless.

The moment you get into action, however, everything changes. The force begins to take over. You begin to build action-momentum and suddenly you are deep in a state of flow. When you finish your first attempt at creating an exercise routine, you feel good.. really good. When you start your second attempt, the resistance still tries to thwart you but the force is stronger now. Act again and the resistance grows feebler.

Every day, we face a choice. Do we embrace the resistance and stay stagnant and happy in the short term or do we embrace the force and thus embrace painful growth and work for happiness in the long run?

It’s our choice.

PS: May the force be with you! :-)

You know the feeling when you’re having a great day. Everything feels within your grasp. The train shows up when you set foot into the train station. You are working on your strengths. The universe seems to conspire to make things work. You are in control and happy.

The crap day is a different experience. The train is late. You try working on a project using your strengths but you have to do something you don’t want on a day you don’t feel like doing much. A whole bunch of administrative tasks backfire and you are left calling your bank to follow up with this and calling up your travel agent to follow up with that. You’re not on your ‘A’ game and get told off a bit. By the end of the day, you are kicking yourself hard for not doing something well and you feel like the universe is conspiring against making things work. Cue feelings of stupidity and helplessness.

“How was your day?” – someone asked. “Crap” – I said.

I was wrong. It’s actually so very important that we feel stupid and helpless often. Strengths and happiness give us a feeling of invincibility which are great in short bursts. But, stupidity and helplessness are equally important (if not more..) because they make us stop, take stock, reflect, and learn. Crap days are not just crap days. They are days of great learning. And history has repeatedly shown that human beings only exercise ingenuity when we are feeling lazy, helpless, and fearful.

So, if you’re having a really bad day, remind yourself that this is the best thing that’s happened to you in a while because today will be a day of great learning. Go back home and write those learnings down! Use the strong emotions to make commitments to get better. It’s because of days like today that you will appreciate good things tomorrow and who knows – you might even exercise ingenuity and shape history.

Bad days.. greater purpose.. who knew?

One school of researchers studying the evolution of our brains attribute our large brain size to our tendency to gossip. Human relationships are complicated and the fact that we can hold 150 relationships at one time is testament to our brain power.

Gossip, however, is inherently judgmental. Most gossip is negative and involves us taking the moral high ground. “How could he do that? I would never dream of it.”

Before I go ahead, allow me to digress here. There is a big difference between exercising good judgment and being judgmental. We are all called upon to exercise good people judgment when we hire teammates, colleagues, new employees in our departments. We need good people judgment to pick the right friends, right spouse, etc. However, we become judgmental when we attempt to apply quick judgment to every possible situation or person. Being judgmental involves constantly making assumptions and rarely involves giving the other person the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve struggled with being judgmental. I still struggle with it. I think I’ve slowly learnt to draw the line between exercising judgment and being judgmental in the past few years. And I’ve observed this happen thanks to two changes.

– Less gossip. This has been a consequence of living far away from most people I know for the past 3 years. Unintended but appreciated.

– Less insecurity. I think insecurity is what drives us to gossip. This is not a quick fix though. And suggestions to solve this deserve another post.

I appreciate that both these solutions are not easy ones. The first will probably be impractical and the second sounds vague. But I felt it was important to help explain the rationale for my suggested solution – focus really hard on your own problems.

I’m not advocating being selfish or self centred but I am suggesting we think of our own problems every time we are faced with an opportunity to gossip. This is a guaranteed solution because our problems ALWAYS loom larger than those of others. Focusing on solving the problems in our life keeps the demons of insecurity away as an added bonus.

I had a choice today to mentally pass judgment on hearing a story. Just as I caught myself doing that, I quickly thought about 3 pressing issues in my head. The old judgment thought vanished.

So, when you have an opportunity to gossip or pass judgment about someone else in the next couple of days, think about where your life/career/health/relationships are heading. Then repeat again at the next opportunity.

This works.

PS: Tuning out a gossip habit like the the Facebook news feeds helps too.

Many great friendships share their origins in “what” or shared experiences like same school, same neighborhood, etc. Friendships are purely optional in a sense. If both of you want to play, you have a great game. And if you don’t, too bad. You’ll find another partner.

Friendships are inherently flexible. You can have great friends united in the “how” i.e. friends who follow the same thinking/decision making process or in the “why” i.e. similar purposes, dreams, and goals.

We often think the rules that apply to friendship should work just well at work. They don’t. A shared experience rarely makes a great team member. They can help strengthen bonds between team members (remembering that experience in the trenches) but they don’t make working with each other any better. Great companies build cultures that bring together people with similar “why’s”. So, that’s often take care of as well.

The difficulty lies in aligning the “how.” If how you approach tasks and projects, how you make decisions, how you communicate is incompatible, it’s not going to work. There may have been many who shared Steve Jobs’ vision of changing the world but aligning the “how” to actually make a working relationship successful was not for everyone.

If we want to be able to pick great bosses to work with, great teammates, we need to be as self aware as possible – to understand our “how” and look for others who align with it. The rest follows.

This week’s book learning is part 1 from a 3 part from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

When Michael Phelps’s alarm clock went off at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of August 13, 2008, he crawled out of bed in the Olympic Village in Beijing and fell right into his routine.

– 3h to go: He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and walked to breakfast. He had already won three gold medals earlier that week and had two races that day. Phelps’s first race—the 200-meter butterfly, his strongest event—was scheduled for ten o’clock.

– 2h 30m to go: He began his usual stretching regime, starting with his arms, then his back, then working down to his ankles, which were so flexible they could extend more than ninety degrees, farther than a ballerina’s en pointe.

– 1h 30m to go: He slipped into the pool and began his first warm-up lap. The workout took precisely forty-five minutes.

– 45 min to go: He exited the pool and started squeezing into his LZR Racer, a bodysuit so tight it required twenty minutes of tugging to put it on. Then he clamped headphones over his ears, cranked up the hip-hop mix he played before every race, and waited.

Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman focused his early training on habits that would make him the strongest mental swimmer in the pool and he did it with “the science of small wins.”

Small wins are exactly what they sound like. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Michael Phelps cranking up his pre-race hip-hop mix (Img source)

When the race arrives, Phelps is more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.

Small wins are part 1 of the Phelps formula. Part 2 coming up next week..

Wish you a happy weekend and happy week!

I started blogging 5 years ago on May 12, 2008. My first post was had longer post scripts than content.

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A learning a day..

The name says it all – Its just what the blog is intended to be. To help me re live some of those meaningful learnings. Hopefully, I will be able to keep up writing one a day.

(PS: I tend to have weirdly long days sometimes resulting in the next day being understandable short(36 hrs and then sleep through the next for example). So, the definition of day can be a bit..well.. shaky..

(PPS: That’s just me making excuses! Hoping to make it happen..)

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I love how I make an excuse to start with (the joys of being 19, eh?). If integrity is the ability to make and keep commitment, I had pretty low integrity in those days as I didn’t have the willpower to follow up on my commitments – I did marginally better on commitments to others thanks in part to an inflated ego.

Five years and 2766 posts later, I can say with confidence that this blogging thing has changed my life. In committing the “A Learning a Day” ideal, I committed to learning more, learning better, treating failure as learning, and showing up every day. I’ve tried hard to live up to all of that.

And I’ve been fortunate to have a small readership that’s been steady, encouraging, and supporting all at once. There was a time I knew the numbers at the back of my hand but then I realized that this readership thing can really get into your head. A year or so ago, I used to check Google Analytics and Feedburner stats every couple of days to see what my page view count was. Now I do so every few months. I realized somewhere along the way that I don’t this to be the most popular blog in the world. it was a great opportunity to revisit the “why” behind this.

I blog primarily because it makes me better. This journey of learning inspires me and I share it in the hope that it will inspire others too. And I am blessed to have a small blog community of folks who subscribe to this blog via their feed readers, emails, and the like and thus take part in this journey. I treasure hearing from all of you – thank you for sharing your stories every once in a while via email and the comments on this blog.

I really am honoured for the time and attention you give my writing. I hope to continue to be worthy of it.

Best wishes and wish you a nice week ahead,
Rohan

I blogged about attention a year ago. This paragraph from Eric Weiner’s great book sums it up well..

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“Attention’ is an underrated word. It doesn’t get the… well, the attention it deserves. We pay homage to love, and happiness, and, God knows, productivity, but rarely do we have anything good to say about attention. We’re too busy, I suspect. Yet our lives are empty and meaningless without attention.

My two-year-old daughter fusses at my feet as I type these words. What does she want? My love? Yes, in a way, but what she really wants is my attention. Pure, undiluted attention. Children are expert at recognizing counterfeit attention. Perhaps love and attention are really the same thing. One can’t exist without the other.”

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I’ve always struggled with attention. I tend to be attention deficit by nature and smartphones, social media, and notifications haven’t exactly made it easy (excuses.. yes, I know).

13 months down the line, I don’t think I’m too much better at this. I still struggle with attention.. but I’m hoping to improve by focusing on mindfulness first. Mindfulness is just the ability to “be” in the moment. The essence of zen, as described by a teacher, is the ability to focus on one thing at a time. That requires radical self awareness and mindfulness or conscious action is the first step.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly changing habits that increase distraction and thus reduce mindfulness. For example..

– On my phone. All sorts of push notifications are switched off. I switched off email notifications more than a year ago and it’s now moved to applications like whatsapp. This helps a lot.. because I now only get messages when I want to see them or when I want to engage.

– On my computer. I switched off Outlook’s new email alert more than a year ago. That helps a lot. Additionally, I’ve switched off from all sorts of messengers and communicators except when I really need to use them.

– On social media. 5 weeks ago, I decided to experiment with never checking my Facebook news feed. The experiment has worked well and I only get on Facebook to share blog posts, quotes, and the like. It’s one way and I’m loving that.

– On email. I’d tested a project to only check my personal email and social media in 3 hour intervals. That’s been fantastic and has been working for a few months now.

– On meditation. Thanks Headspace – nothing like a daily morning reminder to be more mindful.

I’ve paid lip service to mindfulness and attention for too long. I’m hopeful I will report some improvement in a year from now.

Happy mindful weekend!