Kumar's Blog

Renowned Harvard Business School professor, Clay Christensesn shared a story (hat tip to Prakhar) while addressing the 2010 graduating class of HBS. Here's an excerpt:

We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tourna- ment—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?” I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game. 

Ludicrous as this story may seem, I can somewhat relate to what he is saying. I have a similar commitment, to myself. That I will watch every single competitive game the Chelsea Football Club plays. And I have kept this up for a good eight or nine years now.

About 6 months ago, I made another commitment to myself. That I will write a blog post every single day of the year. I kept it up for about 6 weeks. Then I missed one day, thinking 'just this once' and I can continue from the next day. But I only managed about 30 posts in the next 4 months. Nowhere near what my commitment demanded. I just didn't build that into my culture by allowing 'just this once' lapses now and then.

You can make any kind of commitment. In fact, millions of people across the world do it at the start of every new year in terms of resolutions. But, few are disciplined enough to see it through. And as Clay Christensen says, you will only imbibe it into your culture if you're disciplined enough to avoid the 'just this once' lapses. 

Looks like there is now research indicating the benefits of living multiple lives. Putting yourself in the shoes of a character you admire for as little as the duration of a movie or the reading of a novel can change the way you think and act.

Whether you use a Micromax Canvas Turbo to juggle your many lives or not is immaterial (sorry Micromax). But the act of juggling many lives is a good thing to do.

In football, having the most talented players in your squad is not enough. When the competition lasts a good nine months, having eleven good players is nowhere near enough. Players will face injuries, fatigue, drop in performance. Sometimes, different tactics need to be employed for taking on different opponents, which might call for players with different qualities.

While it is important to keep the eleven first choice players fit and sharp and high on morale, it is equally important to do the same for the reserves. Of course, the reserves will get to play much less than the first choice players, but they need to be able to play their part when called upon. The best teams that win competitions at the highest level do a good job of keeping their entire squad of players fit and sharp and high on morale.

The same can be said about individuals as well. While we use a certain set of skills most of the time in doing our jobs, and working on improving them, it is just as important to manage and improve our reserve set of skills that can be put to use when needed.

What are you doing to manage your reserves?

Use it.

You blame the government for poor infrastructure in the country. You blame the officials for indulging in corruption. You blame taxi drivers for charging more than what is fair. You blame real estate agents for inflating house and land prices. You blame your organization for not following best practices. You blame marketers for lying to you about what products can do.

You blame them because you feel they have the power. The power to run things the way you'd like them to. But you're blaming all the wrong people. You are the one with the power.

Sports channels prioritise matches involving Manchester United over others because that is what majority of the people want to watch. It is shown because a lot of people want to watch it. Not the other way around. It is the same with radio stations, newspapers, and everything else you consume. You are shown what a lot of people want to see. Not the other way around.

If you want to a match involving Arsenal to be prioritised over the others, you should only watch when an Arsenal match is on. And there should be enough of you doing that. You shouldn't watch the Manchester United game just because it is on and the Arsenal game isn't. Because when you do, you are one of the many people making up the majority who define what is shown.

The logic is the same with all the issues mentioned above. You can complain all you want, blame people all you want, but unless you stop doing the things you don't want to, you will be one of the many people contributing to the majority that define how things should be done.

Towards the end of The Dark Knight, the Joker says to Batman 'You just couldn't let me die, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.'

You have the power. Use it. Like Batman did in not killing the Joker. 

When that is the case, having just one key will not get you through the door. You need the other one as well. But before you start thinking about the keys, you need to know where the door is.

Some people like nearly every movie they watch and every book they read. While some others find ways to criticize every movie they watch and every book they read. And neither kind is wrong. They just see what they are looking for.

Unless you are looking for the right things, you are not going to find them even if they are starring you in the face. That is why you are advised to meditate before performing a session of Yoga. That is why you are asked to remove your footwear and wash your feet before you enter a temple. That is why food tends to taste good in restaurants with good ambience. You need to get yourself in the right frame of mind. You need to be looking for the right thing in order to find the right thing.

If you're looking at the right thing without an idea as to what you need it for, you will find it, and when you do, you will not have a clue as to what to do with it. Having found the right thing will still keep you in good spirits for a while. Then it wears off.

If you know what to do with the thing you are looking for, you will get to work as soon as you find it.

You need to know where the door is. You need to know your goal. You should succeed in finding both keys. You should succeed in understanding what you're looking for and also in finding it. When you have found the former, the latter is staring you in the face everywhere you look. Then all that is left is to open the door. To make art. To ship it.

You can spend another couple of hours in the office touching up the slides to be used in the presentation tomorrow, perfecting the words in your blog post, revising for an exam believing that what you have done so far is not good enough.

Good enough for what?

Before planning to do anything, it is essential to know what is expected, what is good enough and what will exceed expectations. And it is time to ship when you have made your art good enough to exceed expectations. If you continue honing it and making it better, you will succeed in doing so, but you will have missed the boat to ship it.

If you aim for perfection, you will achieve it. But you will have missed several opportunities along the way. To ship. To take up another exciting challenge. To broaden your skill set. To grow.

The only skill you need to know is to understand what is good enough to exceed expectations. Everything else you need to get there are things you can learn.

When this skill is lacking, there will be fear. Fear of not having done enough, fear of consequences, fear of rejection, fear of failure.

Do you want to overcome that fear by striving for perfection or do you want to not let fear get into the picture by understanding what is good enough to exceed expectations?

Done is better than perfect.

The biggest fear that anybody has is the fear of failure. A lot of opportunities are not taken, by individuals to change their lives, by businesses to change their products, by governments to change laws, simply because they are afraid of the consequences of failure.

Everybody seeks perfect candidates. Consumers respect brands that do not have a history of any blemishes. People vote in governments that they feel will best suit their interests. Companies look for people with a stellar record in academics and previous roles. This leaves no room for failure.

The best way to not fail is to not try.

Even though the popular saying goes 'To not try is to fail', that is not the perspective that people have today. The best route to success is seen as one where there is no disagreement with anybody else, one where the only important thing that needs to be done is fit-in.

This is sounding a death knell to innovation.

There is either nobody questioning the status quo or everybody questioning it. It is as though the individual view point has given way to a collective mind in the race to fit-in.

If you want to learn, you have to fail. If you have to fail, you must be willing to try. If you want to try, you should forget about fitting in.

Be different. Fail fast. Fail Often. Make a difference.

We are often told to be original and be ourselves in our interviews, in our work. This is not a very sound piece of advice to receive when the person giving it doesn't know much about the original us. The original us simply may not be good enough. In this case, we have to look outside for inspiration and to understand what we ought to do to improve our chances of succeeding in whatever it is that we are pursuing.

The alternate path that many choose is to try and reach out to people who have successfully trudged down the path to the finish line before us and to learn the steps they took in their journey and aim to replicate those steps in our own journey.

Here's a line from The Truth about Marissa Mayer: An unauthorised Biography, that appeared in Business Insider a few days ago, that inspired this post.

“You know, you have it all wrong,” the counselor said to Mayer and the campers. “It’s not what Zune knows, it’s how Zune thinks.”

The counselor said that what made Nguyen so amazing wasn’t the facts that he knew, but rather how he approached the world and how he thought about problems. The counselor said the most remarkable thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an entirely new environment or present him with an entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes he would be asking the right questions and making the right observations.

We focus on the path taken by those before us, without understanding that it is not the path that matters. It is the reasoning behind choosing that path. After all, each person will have to take her own path that will resonate with her life so far. This is what is actually meant when we get advice asking us to be ourselves.

We learn a lot from failures. Only if we go down our own path with full understanding of why we're choosing it. If we go down a path defined by someone who reached success through it, without understanding if that is the best path for us, we will not even learn from the failure as we will attribute it to either not doing it right or to the person who defined the path.