I just finished reading ‘The Geography of Bliss’ by Eric Weiner. I am in an understanding happiness phase at the moment and this book was a treat in every sense of the word. The book is a story about a grumpy journalist i.e. Eric Weiner who travels the world searching for the happiest places in a quest to understand happiness. The book is fun, happy, deep, humorous, relatable and insightful all at once.
There are many many great quotes, lessons and insights in the book. And I thought I’d pull one up about attention that stuck with me.
“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.”
I’ve been thinking about that story since and reflecting about it. I’ve read over a 100 books in the past 4 years or so and it’s gotten to a point where I feel like hardly anything I read is new. The concepts are all similar, the underlying principles are the same.. yet, each book brings with it a different level of insight and understanding. It’s the power of words, really. String them together right and they work like magic. Stories have that magical power and perhaps that’s why this book was magical. It was one large story at the end of the day made up of many small ones, some of which really struck a chord.
In this case, the story didn’t just strike a chord. As a friend once joked, it was more of a gong. It instantly reminded me of the quote about zen – ‘The essence of zen is to do one thing at a time.’
If I have to brutally honest with myself, I have constantly hidden behind my natural ADD to justify my bad behaviour. On calls with family, I am almost always doing something else on the side that distracts me – checking email or browsing for example. Of late, I’ve been seriously considering getting an iPad since it is blindingly obvious when you are ‘multi tasking’ on an iPad. Your video doesn’t show! And I’ve also tried discipline myself to do more conversations on my phone, walk, run an errand if necessary so I’m not near the computer.
In short, I feel like I struggle with giving the ones I love the most the attention they deserve. They deserve much better and I could do much better.
Hence, this story came at a wonderful time. I am big on the importance of quality time vs quantity time. I just don’t walk the talk as often as I should. And that’s why I’m broadcasting it to the world. I only write stuff here that I do or intend/promise to do. And like all the other little personal betterment initiatives, I’ll keep you all posted.
And to Eric, thank you. This is likely to be the first of many quotes from your book that I will think about and talk about. You should know that you’ve made a difference and inspired me. And as one commenter here said, ‘You should know that inspiration is one of the most powerful things we do.’
As a kid, the mental equivalent of something wonderful was that it was ‘just like magic’.
Of course, as a kid, I met with wonder pretty often. There were so many ‘new’ things that kept popping up in life, so many things I did not understand or know much about and very often, this meant experiencing or witnessing something completely unexpected.
As I have grown older, my encounters with wonder have reduced significantly. While I could conclude that this is thanks to my vast knowledge and deep understanding of the universe, I know enough to know otherwise. I just pay less attention. I am somehow wrapped in my own world of thoughts, ideas, issues and, I should add, push notifications. Too wrapped.
So, these days, I am beginning to actively take time out in the day to stare into nothingness, ignore all technology and see what the world throws at me. I’m much happier for it. (I don’t schedule it. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if I did?) And I think I notice and experience life a little more.
And, yesterday evening, while I was speaking with a colleague at the train station, we suddenly spotted a rainbow. This time, I didn’t just ignore it and continue the conversation. Aside from it being terribly rude, I would have just missed my ‘moment of the day’.
I turned and saw a gorgeous array of colours in the sky (yes, also known as a rainbow…). All conversation stopped for a moment as I looked. I even pulled out my phone to take a picture so I could share it with you. This is a big deal as I don’t like taking photos or videos of things I see (yes, not an instagram user). I prefer just to experience things.
But, you simply had to see this picture..
..because the moment I turned to look at this wonderful sight that popped out of nowhere when my mind said ‘Wow. Just like Magic.’
After last week’s very practical and easy to apply work hack, this week’s hack will be less of a hack and more of a learning.
There is a lot of great literature out there that talk about the importance of saying ‘Yes’. The usual story here is that there are way too many naysayers and you automatically differentiate yourself when you say ‘Yes’ to things.
There’s equally compelling literature out there that talks of the importance of saying ‘No’. The logic here is that top performers are always saying ‘No’ to things that are lower in priority.
That’s the theory and as is always the case, it is very situational and contextual.
The real life application of this Yes-No Paradox for me has been to be (roughly) 60% yes, 40% no. My reasons are simple – there needs to be a balance between the two. Well, balance only happens in theory of course. We are constantly going to be straying to one side or the other. And, as a general rule, I’ve learnt that it’s better to stray towards the side of attempting too much than attempting too little.
The important caveat here is that these ratios change as you take on more important roles. When you start on a new challenge in a new work environment, it helps to be 90% Yes and grab all opportunities that come your way. Over time, you hopefully build a reputation of excellence and this allows you to pick and choose what you want to work on.
Of course, the only way to sustain the ability to choose is to continue delivering great work. The moment that stops happening, the choice magically disappears too.
The Hack: Be excellent and consistently push to deliver top class work. This naturally means that more opportunities will come your way. When they do, remember to exercise the option of saying ‘No’ and continue to keep focus on high priority stuff/things you enjoy. And of course, remember to make sure you don’t exercise it too much so as to become a naysayer.
Not much of a hack in the traditional sense of the word. But not much of work or life is hackable especially the ‘Be excellent’ part.
As Peter Drucker learnt in the first few weeks of his first job, you either ‘get good or get out.’
The moment misfortune strikes, we end up asking the ‘why me’ question.
Why do I have to be subject to bad luck, trials (that seem unnecessary), tests, failures, disappointments? Why now? and why ME?
The next time that happens – my suggestion would be to flip the question.
Why NOT me?
We have very limited control on the events that shape our lives. We have a lot of control over our responses.
If we are repeatedly responding badly (badly = with anger, jealousy, sadness, depression), there’s something fundamentally wrong with our approach to trials. And, if there’s something wrong with our approach, it’s time to flip the question.
PS: It works similarly for envy where we typically ask the ‘Why not me?’ question when someone else gets what we desire. Same concept applies. Flip the question..
I thought I’d stray from the usual long form post today and share a song that truly is the song of the moment.
The song is a Hindi song and I hope all those in this community enjoy the song as much I do.
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This song is from a movie I first watched in December – Zindagi na milegi dobara -which is roughly translated to ‘You don’t live twice’. The movie is about 3 school friends who take a 3 week road trip in Spain that changes their lives. I really liked the movie.
I watched the movie again last week and this song has been playing in my head since.
The funny thing here is that I have no idea what the song means. My now-broken Hindi means I understand some parts but I haven’t once listened to it to find out what it means. I simply couldn’t care less.
I debated for a long while as to whether I should go ahead and post this or post a traditional week-day long form post. The song of the moment won. Call it Easter break hangover if you will..
Dhanya met Carlos at a talk about Social Entrepreneurship last year. He spoke about a lot of his initiatives and ideas on the matter. One that struck a chord with her was about a bunch of school kids. He mentioned how they all wanted to be computer engineers. Not because they are truly wanted that. Somehow, they had been brought up to think the only way out of their current life and towards a better future was to become a computer engineer.
Dhanya spoke to Carlos for a Real Leaders Interview and enjoyed his take on doing good in business. Hope you find his story interesting too!
About Carlos Miranda Levy
Carlos Miranda Levy knows disasters-and how to help people transcend their devastation with dignity, inclusion, and an equitable distribution of wealth. Following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, he collaborated with Stanford’s Peace Innovation Lab to create Relief 2.0: a disaster response model that uses independent units of local stakeholders and foreign volunteers with mobile technologies and social networks to fill the gaps bureaucracy and top-down hierarchies leave. With the National University of Singapore Entrepreneurship Centre he developed Relief Enterprise, a disaster recovery strategy based on social entrepreneurship. He now leads Relief B2B, a business collaboration initiative for disaster recovery in Japan.
CNN named Carlos one of Latin America’s twenty most influential people on the Internet. No wonder: his education, literature and local portals engage four million people worldwide. Governments and international organizations such as United Nations consult him on public technology policies and strategies.
Dhanya: How did your interest in Social Entrepreneurship stem up?
Carlos: That is an interesting story. My generation of social entrepreneurs and technology developers never thought of us in those roles. It was a natural state. That’s why it’s fascinating when we see social entrepreneurship being taught at schools. Only in the last ten years it has made into mainstream academia.
I always tell a story. I was invited to Stanford University to be a fellow for a digital vision programme. Google sponsored us. There were 16 of us and we were a team of people from all around the world. They had a guy who came to talk to us about social entrepreneurship. There was this other guy from Latin America. He looked at me and he said ‘Ah, so that’s who we are!’. That’s how we learnt that we were social entrepreneurs. Until that time were struggling with the fact that we were making money but we wanted to do good. We felt we were less than the NGOs because we were in business. We thought of our friends in the non-profit world as the real heroes. They were the ones devoted to social good. However, we were the ones who were on a path to find out how to do good with efficiency and innovation!
We never set out to be social entrepreneurs. We did not feel comfortable asking for people’s money. We did not feel comfortable with doing inefficient things. Basically, it started with a drive in you. I think it’s a similar story for many people in business. You create your own business, but then you don’t just want to run a business. You also want to do good.
You are not easily content with the things around you. Not just the society. So you say we can turn this into a business. You see a problem, or an issue or a challenge and then say we can do this. Maybe we will succeed, maybe we wont. Lets still go ahead and do it.
Carlos: It’s amazing because they are stories of failures and mistakes. Educar.org and BibliotecasVirtuales.com are two of my largest websites. Each of them has one million active users. Funnily, I never wanted to do either of them. I created CIVILA.com in May 16, 1996. It became too big too complex and too fast. It is a virtual community and the users always wanted more. They were using the resources we gave them and uploading more content. And we were struggling with it. At the same time it was also the biggest lesson we learnt. Although we were a community network, what set us apart was that our content.
One of our co-founders of Educar.org wrote to me in 1997, telling me that she wanted to do something for students. I however, only received the message 9 months later. She was so enthusiastic that I wrote back to her and promised all my support. She wanted to do something for the community. I was not very keen then and she kept persisting.
In a while, we said there you go and set up Educar.org. I still told her that I did not have any time to spare for that. She took up the challenge. She set out to working on it everyday. And in less than a year it became the most popular website. It had good content and it was built on a very natural and sincere way. Till this day it is our site with the most traffic!
Another teacher who joined our team came up with the idea for BibliotecasVirtuales.com. ‘What do you think about giving people access to books?’ she asked. She is a teacher from a small rural town in Argentina. She said her students didn’t have access to books. I said ‘I don’t see any value in it’. She kept insisting saying there was a need for it. Actually, if you are looking for a particular book in Spanish its not easily available online. That is something I learnt later. There was indeed value there!
Then we did build a website for the books. We would work everyday on it. I set up the website and servers. We even registered the website on her birthday. Me and her went 11 years without meeting face to face.
Both of our ideas have become the most successful ones. There is something different about the website, BibliotecasVirtuales.com. Most websites have the books and make them available for download as pdf. We did not do that. We actually turned them into html. I did not initially believe in this. Who would sit and read the text on a computer. Surprisingly, people are willing to read online!
We did try to set up a download once or twice. It does not give me anything back as an entrepreneur. It uses up bandwidth and slows down the system. When people go through a book page by page, I can have ads and sponsors on these pages. I can also try to make them read something else. It was creating the online experience.
Another advantage we have is that, when someone searches for an excerpt from a book, our pages show up as one of the first searches. This is because our files are in html. However, a book available as a download would not show up. And that’s our competitive advantage.
Dhanya: What is the inspiration in your life? What are some defining moments in the story so far?
Carlos: I remember going to this conference in Mexico city. In the first hour, I made two friends. We started with ‘Where are you from?’ and we were together for the rest of the conference. There was something about the fact that we were Latin Americans that allowed us to connect.
My mother got cancer and she had to go to the US for treatment. I was alone for an entire summer. During this time I made a friend from Brazil. There was no messenger those times. I found her on a mailing list. And guess what, three months later I was visiting her in Rio de Janeiro! I stayed with her family. It was a nice time.
These two experiences taught me that people could actually connect. It’s never been about technology for me. It’s about people. Long distance friendships that were glorious taught me so much. We were talking everyday and we decided to meet during the Easter week. There I was in Brazil. I did not speak her language. But it did not matter. Her friend met me at the airport. They took me to this sailing club and we had fun. I was in a Caribbean island with 10 million people and boom; all of a sudden I was in Brazil. I was one of them. I had friends, I went to their parties and I stayed at their house. It really touched me how. No one had to explain globalisation to me. It was real and I knew what it means. In 1996 I created a Latin cities social community website. Meeting people face to face touched me and changed my life. It really altered boundaries and the goal was always to share.
At that time I was part of a failed initiative in the US. For one thousand dollars you would get a server. I had to pay 1000 dollars to go online. It was just the initial cost – a big sum of money in those days. Also, I wanted to share it with everybody. I gave my username and password to people I did not know. In the first days of CIVILA.com the content that was generated was using just one username and password. These were people I never knew. I just trusted them and no one abused the power. There was no security what so ever.
Those were the real milestones for me. The fact that I was able to meet people and connect with them reminded me of humanity. People are people.
Dhanya: Can you give some advice for the leaders of the future?
Carlos:Follow your dreams. Allow yourself to dream. Listen to others but always do what you think is right. If you do something wrong, it’s okay. Make it a mistake you will learn form and grow from.
If you don’t have a dream follow your heart.Be authentic. Don’t try to be the next Apple. Don’t try to be the next Creative Labs. You cant. Don’t try to replicate Silicon Valley. Just be authentic.
Listen to others but don’t renounce your beliefs. That’s the most important character. In a global competitive market, there is huge global knowledge; the only competitive advantage we have is the local knowledge. It’s the added value of local perspective. You cant do anything better than the people in Silicon Valley, unless you bring Singapore in perspective to it. Because that’s your edge!
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Thank you, Carlos for some enriching words. It was a pleasure having you here at Real Leader Interviews!
This week’s book learning is from ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath.
Peter Bregman was hired by a consulting firm that needed to needed to move their timesheet system (i.e. where consultants indicated where their time needed to be billed) online, from paper.
There had been a lot of resistance to this move! So, following traditional carrots-stick thinking, management had issued a memo saying paychecks wouldn’t be issued to those who filled their timesheets on paper.
There was no change to the resistance. Exasperated, management had hired Bregman.
Bregman spoke to a couple of consultants and asked them to take him through the process. Peter soon noticed that that the problem was with the mandatory help wizard that annoyed the hell out of their people. Ironically, while it was created to make it easier, it just created a barrier.
The moment the help wizard was knocked off, all resistance was removed and everyone moved to the new system!
What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. It is very easy for us to point to people as being the problem with the assumption that only carrots and sticks would make us move.
However, as Bregman found, all we often need to do is to make the path of change easier.
Here’s to inspiring change by making the path easier!
We all experience ups and downs. Whether we’re talking about jobs, relationships, energy, motivation, happiness – life is often about moving from ups to downs and so on without losing faith.
If you’re experiencing an up, I hope you are enjoying the moment. It must feel special. It must feel great. Enjoy it. Do more. Make the most of it. Spread joy, love and happiness. Be careful about over promising in a good mood while you’re at it. Laugh!
If you’re on a down, I hope you are keeping the faith. As dreary as things seem when we go through downs, they don’t last. And the best things about these downs is that they keep us humble and grounded. Of course, we don’t like or want them.. but what would life be if we ever given everything we liked and wanted? Look around. You probably have everything you need.
And if you’re in the between, that’s a great place to be too. The next up or down will arrive soon enough. And when that happens, do remember to come back and read this post. :)
A friend of mine sent me this passage. As regulars know, I love sharing a passage like this every once a while – a passage that makes us stop and think.
Tucked away in our subconscious is an idyllic vision. We see ourselves on a long trip that spans the continent. We are travelling by train. Out of the windows, we drink in the passing scene of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at a crossing, of cattle grazing on a distant hillside, of smoke pouring from a power plant, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of city skylines and villages halls. But uppermost in our minds is the final destination.
On a certain day, at a certain hour we will pull into the station. Once we get there, so many wonderful dreams will come true. How restlessly we pace the aisles waiting and waiting for the station. “When I’m 18”, “When I put the kids through college”, “When I get a promotion”, “When I retire”..I will live happily ever after.
Sooner or later, we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It constantly out-distances us. So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, climb more mountains, eat more ice cream, laugh more, cry less. Life must be lived as we go along. The station will come soon enough.
‘The station will come soon enough.’
Word.
Happy Easter long weekend for all those celebrating it! :)
I remembered ‘The Man in the Glass’ yesterday thanks to an email exchange where a friend and I were exchanging views on self awareness, self appreciation and self love.
We often go through life seeking acceptance from those around us and forget the greatest victory of them all.
The Man in the Glass By Peter Dale Winbrow Sr.
When you get what you want in your struggle for self, And the world makes you king for a day, Just go to the mirror and look at yourself, And see what THAT man has to say.
For it is not your father or mother or wife Whose judgment upon you must pass. The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life Is the one staring back in the glass.
Some people might think you are a straight shootin’ chum and call you a wonderful guy, But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum, If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
He’s the fellow to please, never mind all the rest, For he’s with you dear up to the end. And you have passed your most dangerous, difficult test If the guy in the glass is your friend
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years, and get pats on the back as you pass. But your final reward will be heartaches and tears If you have cheated the man in the glass.
A Learning a Day 