A Learning a Day

Note 1: These books were not necessarily published in 2012. These were chosen from the books I read this year.

Note 2: I only count “geeky” books/books that make me better here i.e. books related to history, psychology, self-help, business et al.

I thought I’d continue the tradition of publishing a top 5 list of the best books I’ve read this year. This year has not been too different from last year in terms of books. The count is at 23 (vs 24 last year). For all practical purposes, it’s been a busy year with a lot of truly fantastic books read. There were 2 big themes this year – happiness and human behaviour. And, thanks to Audible and my R15 system, I’ve been able to keep up 30 minutes of book reading or more pretty much every working day.

Over to the awards, then.

Winner – Book of the Year: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

Why? This was simply the best book of the year. As a mark of it’s brilliance, I have already gifted around 10 copies to various friends and family. The book beautifully tied together a whole bunch of concepts that I have come to understand over the year – the importance of deliberate practice, the importance of excellence in finding purpose and the importance of taking lots of “little bets.”

For all those who would like to make more of their life and careers, this is a book that comes highly recommended. I have attempted to summarize the key principles of the book in a recently concluded book learning series (here).

Impact? In my case, aside from solidifying my understanding of many of the basic principles of excellence, it has taught me to focus hard and “be so good they can’t ignore you.”

Additionally, I have now been inspired to ensure I apply the principles of deliberate practice in every aspect of my life.

Great job putting this together, Cal. Thanks a lot!

1st Runner Up – Book of the Year: Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin

Why? Because it’s awesome.

This is not a new book by any stretch of the imagination. Somehow, it slipped under my radar for a while. And boy, it did absolutely blow me away when I did get to it.

Talent is overrated examines performance in great detail. It beautifully deconstructs the myth of talent and, instead, focuses our attention on a concept called deliberate practice that has gone on to shape our understanding on performance.

Impact? It took me months to truly understand the kind of impact deliberate practice could have on one’s life.

I began applying it fervently to my guitar practice (as it’s a concept easily applicable to sport and musical instrument learning) and I’ve seen the difference. Now, I’m working to make this a habit and apply it to everything I do. More to follow on this initiative..

2nd Runner Up – Book of the Year: Start with Why by Simon Sinek

Why? It teaches you to ask “why?”. The book is an expansion of Sinek’s famous TED talk and is meaningful, engaging and fun – all at once.

Impact? The book has begun to change the way I communicate. I find it’s effect nearly every time I begin to launch into an introduction or explain something – I ask myself to “start with why.”

It has also solidified some of my own beliefs and biases on leadership. Very inspiring book.

Fourth Place – Book of the Year: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Why? Like all books written by journalists, the Power of Habit has a compelling narrative. But, books don’t make it to this list for their compelling narratives – this book is incredibly powerful in that it underlines how important a role habits play in our lives.

It goes deep into the science behind habits and helps us understand the nature of our behaviour.

Impact? The Power of Habit helped me understand the real difference between the most productive people on earth and the rest – habits. They had habits of deliberate practice, winning etc ingrained in their daily schedules.

This book has inspired me to re-examine my own life during this break and commit/re-commit to creating and strengthening some important habits. In my case, I have 2 habits I would like to build – 30 min of exercise 5 days a week and deliberate practice in everything I do. This is going to take work but I’m looking forward to building systems to make this happen in the new year.

Fifth Place – Book of the Year: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Why? Jonathan Haidt is the man behind the very powerful “elephant and rider’” analogy for our minds. He also has a very clear and thought through theory on happiness, which he examines in detail in this book. I loved this book.

Impact? Understanding the fact that our mind consists of 2 very distinct beings – the elephant (i.e. the strong emotional part. In scientific terms, our lymbic system or old brain) and the rider (i.e. the weak logical part. In scientific terms, the pre frontal cortex) has helped me understand how I can work with my mind to get things done.

Understanding the elephant and the rider is critical to help us understand ourselves.

And Jonathan Haidt’s studies on happiness also helped me re-commit to little habits like counting 5 blessings every day.

Special Mention – Book of the Year: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Why? Simply one of the most sincere books I’ve ever read. Brought tears to my eyes. And, if you need any convincing, just read this passage..

“Again and again, I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

And it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run, in the long-run, I say(!), success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

Impact? This passage alone has inspired me to no end. It reinforces the principles from the books above – focus on being excellent and giving what you do everything, and success and happiness will follow.

I am working on making sure I have reminders of this passage all around me.

There were a few other books that deserved to make it on this list, and almost did. These were –

The Honest Truth about Dishonesty by Dan Ariely
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Quiet by Susan Cain
The Big Short by Michael Lewis

And thus, another year has passed. There have been so many learnings and changes in my life thanks to some of these books. If you haven’t gotten to them, I hope you will find time during the holidays..

And, if you need any help with getting together a system to help you stick with reading, do let me know and I’ll be happy to help.. (And on that note, if you do have a system that enables you to exercise 5 times a week, I’d love to hear from you as well!)

Here’s to many great books in 2013!

It’s time for the holidays, for rest, reflection and relaxation.

The new year will be upon us soon, and will usher in new hopes, dreams and promises.

That’s still a few days away though. For now, let’s enjoy the good food, the rest and celebrate a year that’s gone by. For those still working, I hope you don’t work yourself too hard..

Happy holidays!

You just finished a presentation and are sitting down for a debrief with your team. What do you focus your energy on? The “hits”? or the “misses”?

If you are following normal habits, you will likely gloss over the hits and go really deep into the misses. That’s the norm – don’t focus on the strengths or what you did well. Focus hard on your improvement points.

Now, let’s imagine you are a football player. You took 2 shots during the game. The first shot was hit with the wrong part of the foot and fizzed wide. The second shot, however, hit just the right spot and you scored?

What do you do now? Spend all your time figuring out why the bad shot was hit that way? Or do you spend time practicing so all your shots hit the right spot, like the second one?

We tend to be critical by nature and finding flaws in a process or person comes more naturally than finding strengths. Finding flaws and criticisms is the easy thing to do.

The hard thing to do is to figure out all the things that went well so success can be understood, and replicated.

(PS: Things will go wrong anyway, no matter what you do and learnings from those misses will always follow if you take some time to reflect..)

This week’s book learning is the traditional final book learning of the year.

The year end review form has become tradition by now. This year, however, the sheet has undergone a bit of an overhaul to include questions regarding deliberate practice (for example).

Here are links to the DOC and PDF versions to ensure you have a version easy to print/type. As always, I look forward to any feedback you might have on how this form can be improved for next year.

Sketch by EB

I sincerely hope you find time with yourself to go through your annual review this holiday season. And I hope this sheet helps!

Here’s to reflection and review this week!

There are 2 ways to approach anything in life – By process or by results. We can choose to measure our success and happiness by the results we have generated or by the process/method we apply to life.

The catch, of course, is that the external world judges us by our results. As a result, we are trained through life to look at outcomes and results. We grow up, as a result, worrying more (on average) about our grades vs understanding, our medal vs our running style, our presentation vs our preparation.

The flaw in this approach is obvious. More often than not, we don’t control the result.

So, what then? Ignore the process approach and only worry about the result.

My take is to shun the outcome. Never mind what the result is. Focus intensely and deliberately on the process. Become the master of approach and the master of an awe inspiring process. Hone your skills, and approach your work like it’s a craft.

It’s only a matter of time before you churn out craftsman-like results. Success and happiness will ensue.

The class of a place is directly linked to the class of the bathroom. You’ll never find a 5 star hotel with pathetic bathrooms.

So, the next time, you are at a nice looking store/house/office with pathetic bathrooms, the “nice looks” are likely to be just a front. It’s just like the fact that your behaviour matters most when the going gets tough.

That’s why McDonald’s systems ensure that bathrooms are cleaned every 15 minutes (I’ve done the cleaning…). Bathrooms matter. A lot.

So, how much attention do you pay to the bathrooms where you live and work?

I am in India as of todays and am catching up with the state of affairs here thanks to the best new source of them all – my mom.

One of the points of discussion was the 10-12 hour daily power shortage in an important city in the state. Yes, that’s 10-12 hours. And yes, that’s every single day. Can you imagine how that must affect productivity? There’s a reason developed nations are more productive – their citizens do not have to fight the most “basic” fights.

The better the infrastructure, the higher the productivity.

Then, it follows that the million dollar question for us would be – have we taken time to build infrastructure in our lives so we don’t waste our bandwidth on “basic” fights? Do we have systems in place that help us deal with the pressures of daily life?

Forget the macro systems and the state of the world. Let’s look within and ask ourselves – is our personal infrastructure as sophisticated as that as a developed nation? Or are we stumbling through life fighting the “basic” fights every day?

Absence of critical colleagues (vital team member, boss, client etc) can cause a few problems. Chief among these problems is miscommunication. Thanks to the “cc” feature on emails, they will likely be cc’d to more emails than they can handle on their week back.

So, how do we make it easy for them to catch up? Send them a structure daily update email with the progress made in the day. Depending on the importance of such communications, you can decide whether to run a daily, bi-weekly or weekly update. This solves a number of problems all at once –

– Update on progress. At the most basic level, this serves as an update on progress made on current projects/priorities

– Effort and process on show. Some projects require a lot of effort with no concrete outcome, at least immediately. This is a way to ensure everyone understands the effort taken, and the process of approaching the task. If there are any issues with the outcome, it’s easy to go back to the process and see what you could have done better.

– Managing your client/boss. Update emails are a great way of keeping your client/boss updated. If your client is headed for a 2 week break, it helps to make a commitment that you will send him an email at 5pm every day with the critical updates. That way, even if  he does check his email, his will check it after 5pm and make sure he reads your email and actions any critical items.

Great communication is a vital part of avoiding “surprises”, especially when dealing with clients and bosses. And avoiding “surprises” comes from discipline and predictability. Predictability is an incredible asset. As for discipline – I’ve said this many times – the world belongs to the disciplined.

I noticed an extra $150 on my credit card bill and called up my company.

“What are these charges for?”

“Annual credit card fees, sir.”

“Why am I being charged these fees this year when I wasn’t charged anything last year?”

“Sir, I cannot answer that. I can only deal with requests for a waiver.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing – requesting for a waiver.”

“Oh. Sir, I am pleased to inform you that you are eligible for a waiver. I will take these fees off right away.”

This is the kind of money I could so easily have thrown away. I’m sure I have done so before and I’m sure many have. It’s shocking that some policies exist. I’m sure the company justifies it thanks to some fine print on a contract.

For us, the lesson is clear. Check your bills. Call companies. Get unnecessary fees waived.