Random Musings – Narayan Kamath

100 Ideas I Wish to Write About

James Altucher, an internet celebrity and writer, advocates writing a list of 10 ideas every day. The hope is, by generating 3650 ideas, you will have a few winners: ideas that make a big impact.

I followed Altucher's suggestions a few times without much success. I just don't seem to have it in me to become an idea machine.

When a writing challenge I'm part of, sent a prompt for "100 ideas you wish to write about", my first reaction was to give it a miss. I almost quit just a couple of days after the challenge started.

Then I decided to give it a shot. I listed the broad topics I wished to write about - which was only 3 ideas.

I then used a couple of frameworks I had created to break these topics down into component ideas. This gave me just under 20 ideas.

Then I used my favourite framework for developing ideas: Why-What-How-Now. That helped me get to 72 ideas.

I took a break, went for a walk, and thought of a few more adjacent themes that I could write about. Then applying the frameworks, I came up with more ideas that allowed me to cross the 100 mark.

My takeaway from this exercise: don't just rely on your brain/memory to come up with ideas. Use frameworks that increase the number of ideas, even if mechanically.

See: 100 Ideas I Wish To Write About (List)

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Why I Write and Publish

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. Even as a boy growing up in the suburbs of Bombay, I used to maintain a notebook where I would write poems and essays - outside of assigned homework.

In fact I used to consider myself a good writer. In school my essays were graded well and I received a lot of encouragement from my teachers. At the time, I would tell anyone who asked that my goal was to be a journalist and writer.

This bubble burst when I started junior college - my very first essay assignment came back with lots of red ink. Thinking back, I might have honed my writing skills and become a real writer with the thoughtful feedback provided by teachers who cared. I took it to mean I wasn’t very good and put my focus on doing well in the sciences. After all, like most of my peers, I had already decided I was going to be an engineer.

I did not do any writing during my years in engineering school - except occasionally contributing a piece, mostly angry satire, to a campus publication. I did contribute to the scripting of plays and sketches - but they were few and far between.

The professional years - 25 years of working in the oil and gas industry - were dry creatively. I did a lot of business writing, and a lot of papers and assignments while pursuing my MBA, but I don’t recall writing anything for fun, or for expressing myself. I did read a lot though.

I launched my coaching practice in 2015, and started a journaling habit shortly thereafter. My primary reason for writing is to process and clarify my own thinking.

The human mind is a funny thing. If your only means of clarifying your thoughts is within your own head, your mind is good at making you think you have it all figured out - that your ideas are coherent, complete, and connected.It only when you attempt to put your thoughts on paper and string them together that you see they don’t make as much sense as you were convinced they did. So writing is a key part of how I make sense.

However writing for yourself, as in journaling, is still a conversation with yourself. The process of writing makes your thinking more legible, but your mind with all its tricks, still lets you get away with gaps and fallacies you don’t even notice.

That’s where publishing comes in. When you publish, even if no one reads it, you are more critical and are likely to find more opportunities to refine your thinking. And if you’re lucky to find an audience, even an audience of one, and they are kind enough to give you feedback, your thinking and learning improves by leaps and bounds.

It took a couple of years for writing to become a habit, and I have been writing everyday (almost) for over 3 years now. What’s been missing has been consistency in publishing. I’ve done it in fits and starts, but never long enough to get the benefits of building an audience and receiving feedback.

That’s what I seek to change in 2021.

After a slow start, I started publishing one essay every day and have been doing so without a break since January 25 this year. It’s by no means a unique or extraordinary feat - I know several people who have been doing this consistently for years. However, for me it feels special. It’s the longest streak of publishing I’ve done - ever.

I know however that these habits are fragile. And I understand the value that accountability and community support brings. So I am now a member of two communities where I and other aspiring writers share, discuss, provide feedback, and celebrate each others’ wins.

That’s why I write and publish.

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How To Make Weaknesses Irrelevant

"Maximize your strengths" has become a cliche.

Yet, being a cliche does not make it untrue or irrelevant. People excel when they are playing to their strengths. Also, developing existing strengths provides greater leverage than improving a weakness - unless the weakness is a derailer.

Leaders get this, but consider it impractical. Clients sometimes say: "How can I serve my customers, if I encourage my people to only do what they are good at?”

Making people play to their strengths does not mean compromising business results. Here are 5 ways to make your people's weaknesses irrelevant:

Hire people with strong and complementary skills.

When hiring, pay attention to an individual's strengths, as well as how they enhance the overall capability of the team. Not everyone needs to be good at everything, as long as the team can collectively excel.

Be strategic in allocating or delegating tasks and outcomes

When you have a team of people with distinct strengths, you get the best results by structuring processes and projects to make the most of individual members' strengths.

Aim for effectiveness, not perfection

Even with the best planning and optimisation, you are likely find capability gaps. In closing gaps, aim for effectiveness, not perfection. Address less important gaps by training, and more strategic ones through hiring.

Reward collaboration

When success depends on effective collaboration, you cannot reward people solely or mainly on the basis of individual outcomes - put your money where your mouth is.

Celebrate those who show mastery AND those who make others shine

Recognise outstanding individual achievement, but. do not overlook the contribution of those who work behind the scenes to keep the machine running.

If you can "make your people's strengths effective, and their weaknesses irrelevant", you are someone Peter F. Drucker would consider to be a true leader.

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How To Deal With Toxic People

Toxic people are everywhere.

At work. In your neighbourhood. Even online.

There is no way to avoid toxic people altogether, so you have to learn how to prevent them from getting under your skin.

Here are 5 ways you may find useful

Take a deep breath and count to 10

My grandma was no neuroscientist - but she knew that taking a deep breath and counting silently to 10 almost always worked to calm things down. You were right grandma! Studies show that a deep breath can alter neurochemistry sufficiently to prevent emotional hijack.

Don't React, Respond.

We are wired to react to each other's emotions, and this is the basis of emotional contagion. However, it is possible to train yourself to stop reacting mindlessly, and to respond thoughtfully - even in the face of grave provocation.

Take a View from the Balcony

Sometimes it is useful to zoom out from the immediate situation and look at the larger context of the individual or the issue, and known behaviour patterns. This can provide clues to what triggered them, as well as potential solutions.

Look Within

There is no question that some people are innately toxic. However, it is useful to look within yourself and see if you somehow enable and encourage their toxicity. You didn't start the fire, but is there some way you are fuelling the flames?

Be Curious

If you can avoid reacting, and instead use your curiosity to ask questions, even something as simple as "Could you please tell me what happened?", you might be able to shift the focus away from the emotion to the issue underlying it.

You may not always be able to avoid interacting with toxic people, but there are ways in which you can reduce the impact of their toxicity on yourself.

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Slow Down to Move Faster

Running faster looks like a good idea - until you realise you are getting faster to where you don't really want to go.

It is important therefore to slow down occasionally - to take time to look around and see if you are on the right track - if you are headed in the direction you desire. Sometimes, you have to slow down to move faster.

The year end is a good time to do this. The prevailing holiday mood, few or no meetings, fewer emails - this is a good time to stop relentlessly forging ahead, and to slow down to an amble and take perspective.

Use the last few days of the year to figure out where you really want to go - in your career, in your relationships, with your health, and every other area in life that is important to you.

In this post, I share 3 simple ways in which you can do this effectively without spending an unreasonable amount of time.

The Wheel of LIfe

A tool like The Wheel of Life can help do this in a more structured and simple way. It is a simple diagram of a wheel with multiple spokes - each spoke representing an important area of life, or a life role (father, partner, friend) - if you prefer.

You start by asking yourself, on a given scale (say 1 to 10), how satisfied you are with where you are in that domain or role of your life. Once you have completed this evaluation, the next question is where do you wish to be in each of those areas. So, for example, if you scored yourself a 8 (out of 10) on Health, are you content with how you are doing, or do you wish to get even better. There are no right answers, and your self-evaluation, and your judgment on where you wish to be, are all that matter.

This exercise reveals gaps and imbalances in your life:

In any given area, where are you today compared to where you wish to be? The difference is a gap
Comparing across areas, are there some areas you are neglecting relative to others? This gives you an indication of imbalance

The mere presence of gaps and imbalances does not mean you must act on them. Use your judgment - and determine which gaps you wish to close, and which imbalances you wish to address at this point in time. These set your priorities for the year ahead.

Freeform Writing

Freeform writing can be an effective way to conduct this reflection.

In freeform writing, you allow your thoughts to be captured on paper without any judgment. Like other stream-of-consciousness exercises, it is important not to restrict, edit, or influence your chain of thoughts in the moment.

However, it can be useful to have a list of prompts or questions to jumpstart your thinking. For example, here's a list of questions that I have found useful:

What areas of life are important to me at this point in time?
What areas of my life am I paying less attention to today?
What would paying adequate attention to the important areas of my life look like?
Is addressing any of the gaps or imbalances particularly important at this time?
What should I do next?

The trick is to ask yourself the question, and then let your thoughts go wherever they wish - even if it looks like a digression. Eventually, when it feels like your stream of thoughts has dried up, get it flowing again by asking the next question.

Thinking Partners

Thinking aloud, in the presence of a good listener can also be powerful.

In this case, you reflect with some assistance from your thinking partner - who might acknowledge what you say, ask questions (which are often selected and agreed to in advance), or even give feedback (this can be tricky - more about this in a bit).

Sometimes people choose this option because they find talking easier than writing. If you fall in this category, you might wish to consider speech to text apps - which are getting better every day.

Some people find doing this in the presence of another human being easier, while others find it more inhibiting. It also depends on the level of trust and familiarity - though sometimes doing this with a complete stranger can also be quite liberating.

Coming back to the question of feedback - it can be tricky because when you are reflecting on your own life priorities, you might not want others' judgment to cloud your own thinking. So most people who practice this avoid asking or giving feedback in the process.

The best thinking partners ask questions that allow you to reach deeper inside of yourself and uncover motivations and beliefs, which can also be useful when evaluating your priorities. So work with someone who is familiar with the process or willing to learn.

Often, people combine this approach with some other approach - such as Wheel of LIfe or Freeform Writing. . This ensures you have done some of the messy work upfront, and what you bring into the discussion with your thinking partner is good raw material for the process.

When picking a thinking partner to work with, you must consider a few things:

Pick someone you are comfortable opening up to
Ensure they can be trusted to maintain confidentiality
Clarify their expectations, and ensure that you can be a good thinking partner for them if this is a reciprocal arrangement
Ensure you are both familiar with the process and know, maintain and respect boundaries

You can of course choose to work with a professional - like a coach or a paid mentor or advisor - which largely addresses most of the above issues. And they will often guide or facilitate you through the other two approaches (Wheel of Life or Freeform Writing) as well.

Any of these three approaches can be effective - by itself or combined with one of the others. Pick one, any one, and spend time clarifying what you really want. This will help you be better prepared to face the opportunities and challenges the new year brings.

Sometimes, you have to slow down to move faster.

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The 3 Levels of Communication That Will Increase Your Impact

Effective communicators help their audience understand their message better by communicating the idea in more than one way.

They share the idea succinctly and elegantly to capture attention and create awareness. They provide examples to make the idea more practical. And, they also help people see how the idea is related to other ideas they already know.

Communicating effectively requires you to take responsibility for being understood. I have previously written about how effective communicators collaborate with their audience to ensure their message is better understood.

In this post, I'd like to focus on how to craft your message in a way that increases the likelihood of people understanding it. This is based on a framework developed by Matt Church, a charismatic speaker, best-selling author, mentor, and one of the most impactful communicators I've ever met.

Any idea can be communicated at 3 levels. You can simply share the idea - stating it as simply and elegantly as you can and hope people get the meaning you intended. In Matt's framework, this is communicating at the level of Concept.

Ideas can be communicated at 3 levels - directly, in a more concrete way, and in a more abstract manner.

However, this is not the only level at which the idea can (or should) be communicated. You can help people understand your message better by making it more concrete as well as by making it more abstract! Matt Church calls these Content and Context.

Content is about expressing the idea in more practical or concrete terms. You can make your idea more concrete by offering examples, evidence, implementation steps (how-to's) and other ways that make the idea more tangible for the audience.

For example, if your Concept is: "Make it easier to build a habit by setting up reminders", examples of Content that supports this idea might include:

Set up a daily alarm at a fixed time to go for a walk (Example)
Steps to set-up automated email reminders to ensure you pay credit card dues on time (How-to)
Example of how someone built a reading habit by scheduling a reading hour on their calendar (Case Study)

On the other hand, you could also express the idea in more abstract terms - linking it to other ideas or concepts or beliefs that people have. The advantage of doing this is people find it easier to make sense of new ideas, if they can connect it to something they already know.

One way of doing this is to share a model - which shows the relationship between your concept and other ideas that people are already aware of. Continuing with the example of using reminders to build a habit, you could use the habit loop - which shows the linkage between cues, behaviours and consequences, as a model to help people understand the concept. In this case, the reminder is the cue that triggers the desired behaviour.

Effective communicators don't stop at communicating their idea directly (Concept). They know when and how to zoom in and share details (Content), and when to zoom out and help the audience see the big-picture (Context). In doing this, they help more people understand their ideas more deeply.

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Communication is Incomplete Until People Understand You

Communication is hard.

Despite our best efforts, people sometimes just don’t get what we are trying to say. This can be frustrating. You sometimes end up feeling “I’ve said what I wanted to say - whether they understand or not is up to them. It’s not my problem.”

Well, it kind of is!

If the objective of communication is to transmit an idea from your brain into other peoples’ brains, communication isn’t complete until people understand you.

A popular game in communication training is some version of Chinese Whispers. What the game illustrates is the extent to which a message can change when it is sequentially communicated across a chain of people.

While that is fascinating (or shocking) the root cause is the inherent imperfection in the human communication process.

This can be best understood by looking at this simple model.

Ideally, we want communication to work this way :

what I wish to convey = what you understand

In reality, there is a significant gap, which can be understood as follows:

what I wish to convey <gap> what i put in words <gap> what i actually say <gap> what the other person hears <gap> what they understand

Without going into the details, the gaps at each of the stages might arise from a combination of personal factors (such as quality of thinking, language skills, clarity of speech, listening skills, quality of attention etc) as well as environmental factors (distractions, noise, activity etc)

What this means is, for communication to be effective, you have to focus not just on the message you intend to convey, but also on how you convey it effectively, so people understand it as you intended.

Part of addressing these gaps is purely internal - how you think, how you structure your thoughts into words, how you speak. This is where your thinking, communication and planning skills can be used effectively to reduce the gap to the extent possible.

Other parts are internal to the receiver of the communication (paying attention, listening skills, making sense). It might appear that you have no influence on any of these. However, there is a shared platform for addressing these gaps - the interaction.

Effective communicators collaboratively increase the likelihood of the right message being received.

The key things you can do in the interaction to increase the effectiveness of communication are

Infer - sometimes the other person will respond - by asking questions or by verbalising their understanding. This can give you clues as to whether the message is landing as you intended.
Observe - look for non-verbal signals that indicate attention, understanding and also the meaning they make. For example if you see an indication of anger, and you do not expect that from the content of your message, it is likely that they are making sense of it in a different way than you intended or anticipated.
Ask - ask questions to check they have heard what you said and also to test their understanding.

Effective communicators also make the invisible visible. They make their thinking transparent, and encourage and support others to share their thought process as well. They do this by balancing advocacy and inquiry, while also using frameworks like the ladder of inference to make explicit the data, assumptions, evaluations, and beliefs that both parties are using to make sense of the message.

A significant part of communicating effectively is ensuring your message is understood by others as you intended. While there are a number of factors that influence this, and not all are within your control, effective communicators maximize the likelihood of their message being understood by planning ahead, by paying attention to others as they listen, and by collaborating to create shared understanding.

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Abundance Mindset and Career Success

To perform effectively at work, you need not just skills, but also the capacity to take action effectively, and the ability to mange your mindsets. Previously, we have seen how an Ownership mindset is important for career success. Another mindset that is critical for career success is the Abundance Mindset.

What exactly is the Abundance Mindset and how does it help you perform better and enjoy greater career success?

The Abundance mindset, simply put, is the ability to think beyond constraints.

We often fall into the trap of considering everything a zero-sum game.

If a colleague gets promoted, I won’t, because there is only one role that I can get promoted to
If I accept greater responsibility, it will mean more work, because I’m already quite busy
If I spend my money on acquiring new skills, I will have less money for the family vacation I have planned later this year

When we reframe the same situations with an Abundance or non-zero-sum mindset, we challenge the implicit assumptions in an existing belief and open up more possibilities.

Situation 1: If a colleague gets promoted, I won’t, because there is only one role that I can get promoted to.

Reframe: If my colleague gets a promotion, it means I can too. My company is growing. There will be other opportunities. In any case, I can also look for other opportunities outside.

Situation 2: If I accept greater responsibility, it will mean more work, because I’m already quite busy.

Reframe: If I accept greater responsibility, I can delegate some of the work I’m currently doing. If you don’t have anyone to delegate to, it might be: I’ll ask my manager to help me offload some of the things I’m currently doing

Situation 3: If I spend my money on acquiring new skills, I will have less money for the family vacation I have planned later this year.

Reframe: The new skill will help me deliver even greater performance, which will lead to a bigger bonus that I can spend on a really memorable vacation.

The essential point to remember here is not whether the constraints we implicitly assume are real or not. They might be real constraints. However, merely accepting them as real stops us from taking any action. When we reframe, we open up more options for taking action, which increases the probability of success.

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Cultivate Clarity to Eliminate Confusion

The best way to eliminate confusion is to cultivate clarity.

Clients often reach out to me when they are stuck in the process of deciding on something that feels very important, and they are unable to clearly see what is right for them.

I am always wary of giving advice, but I often share guiding principles that I have found useful in my own life and in working with several clients over the years. When it comes to gaining clarity for making important decisions, there are 3 Key Principles, which you can use as successive filters to help arrive at a decision.

Principle 1: Start with Why

Any time you feel stuck and unable to decide, you should go back and look at your Why. Depending on the situation, this Why might be the objectives for something you are working on, goals you are trying to achieve, your strategic imperatives, or even your purpose and vision. The more important a decision, and the greater the impact, the higher the level of Why from which to assess it.

For example, recently, I was considering the idea of buying a new desktop to replace my old machine. This is not really a critical decision (I have two laptops that meet all my requirements) and all I need for deciding is to look at my cash-flow targets for this quarter. And that settles the matter for me.

A more significant decision was deciding whether to work with a mentor whose fees would have cost more than half my projected income this year. The fact that I did not reject the idea outright meant there were a lot of considerations to unpack. He is a role model for me professionally, he is extremely selective about who he works with, working with him would earn me significant bragging rights, and due to the brand association, I might even be able to charge higher fees myself (I’d HAVE to!)...

All these factors appear relevant, but so does the large impact on my income. That prompted me to look at this decision from a higher level of WHY - my professional purpose and vision. When I use that lens, I see that working with this mentor would not really move the needle much. There are a number of other things I have to work on to fulfil my purpose, which this mentorship would not help me with. So it was a difficult decision - but one I can live with.

Principle 2: Never Split The Difference

If your decision passes the filter of Principle 1, the next step is to look at your non-negotiables. These might be personal values, commitments (stated or unstated) to important people in your life, and anything else that is important for you to honour.

As an example, imagine you are deciding on taking up a new role. Further imagine that this is aligned with your Why (career goals or any other appropriate Why from Principle 1), but requires you to back out of an important commitment to your loved ones - spending more time together as a family. This is where Principle 2 - Never Split The Difference kicks in. Essentially, this principle asks that you not compromise on your non-negotiables, just because the stakes appear high.

A pitfall many of us are vulnerable to is that when a significant decision fails this 2nd Screen, we tend to reassess priorities, renegotiate commitments, or reexamine values. There is nothing wrong with revisiting priorities, reviewing commitments, or looking at your values again; but if you do it in the face of a significant conflicting decision, chances are you will do it for the wrong reasons. And given how good we are at rationalising our decisions, it may be months or even years before we realise and acknowledge that we might have made the wrong choice.

Principle 3: Action Brings Clarity.

Sometimes, having passed the filters of the first two principles, we are still unable to decide. We wait for more information or over analyse the information we have, or even pray for divine inspiration. Sleeping over a decision in hope of some clarifying insight or inspiration is a good idea - within limits. However, if you find yourself in a state of analysis paralysis, waiting for even greater clarity, it is useful to invoke Principle 3: Action brings Clarity.

Sometimes, the only way to get clarity is by taking some action. Often, you learn more from taking a small step in the direction you are considering, than you would from analysing heaps of data, considering a range of scenarios, or simulating a number of options.

There is value in analysis, and simulation, and thinking in scenarios - however we often forget that what we learn from these analyses depends on what we start with - data and assumptions. Since data is usually limited, and assumptions can be wrong, you cannot over rely on these. In such situations, taking action provides additional information, and confirms or invalidates assumptions. So taking action is often the best, and sometimes the only way of getting the clarity required to take a decision.

To summarise, when you are confused and unable to decide, it is time to invoke the 3 Principles:

Start with Why
Never Split the Difference
Action brings clarity

In all cases, we are eliminating confusion by intentionally cultivating clarity. The word cultivating is important, because it reminds us that clarity grows in stages and takes time. The process of gaining clarity is less like switching on a bulb and more like clearing successive layers of grime on your windows - gradually allowing more light in and illuminating the room of your mind.

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Why building trust is important for your career

Your career success is limited by your ability to build trust.

The pursuit of career success is not an individual game. At every stage, you are dependent on a host of people for help with performing what you are hired to do, and growing in your career.

Of course, it is not all one way - you contribute to the success of others as well. It would therefore not be wrong to say winning at your career is a team sport.

This interdependence with others is captured in the second of the 3 Drivers of Career Success - Partnerships (the other two are Performance and Perception). Your partnerships encompass a wide variety of people - beginning with those who are closest to you and directly involved in the work you do (Core Relationships), your Networks - comprising of people you personally know who are not involved or less directly involved in your day to day work, and your Communities : people you have some shared affiliation with, but may or may not know personally. Relationships, networks, and communities - all have a significant role to play in your career success.

When people and relationships are involved, trust automatically enters the picture. You cannot influence, collaborate with, or get support from people unless they trust you. You cannot work effectively or productively with a team when there is no trust. And if you are a leader, trust is one of the basic needs your followers expect.

Which makes building trust, fast and effectively, an important skill you need to develop, if you wish to get ahead in your career.

So how do you build trust?

One approach is to look at the values that people associate with being trustworthy. These include - honesty, integrity, and authenticity. And the way to show people that you are honest, authentic and a person of integrity - is to demonstrate these values in all your interactions. Needless to say, you cannot consistently display these values unless you truly embrace them - faking honesty, integrity, and authenticity won’t get you far - and will erode any trust you have already built.

Another way of looking at what constitutes trust was neatly captured by David Maister in his Trust Equation. According to this equation:

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) divided by (Self Orientation)

Credibility is about credentials, experience, competence and other qualities that make you someone people can believe.

Reliability is about whether you can be counted upon to do what you say or commit

Intimacy is about shared emotional experiences that help you connect with people more deeply

Self Orientation is the extent to which you are perceived to be acting in your own interest ) as against being concerned about the other person or acting for shared benefit). Note that self-orientation is in the denominator, which means the less self-oriented you come across, the higher the level of trust.

While the Trust Equation appears to tie it all up neatly, and suggests that trust is built through favourable assessments of others across a number of interactions, adopting a transactional approach to building trust is ineffective.

To effectively and rapidly build trust, you have to internalise the values, and make trust producing behaviours a habit - so that the conditions are right for trust to emerge naturally.

In other words, to build trust with people, you have to make yourself trustworthy.

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When Should You Quit Your Job?

As a coach and career success strategist, I am sometimes asked whether I have any guidelines around the right time to quit or change jobs.

As a prudent coach and advisor, I am always worried about giving advice without context. For one, it tends to be very generic - and therefore not very useful. Secondly, there is genuine risk of someone taking it seriously and acting upon it without giving due consideration to whether it applies to their situation.

On other hand, any advice that transcends personal context might be considered a principle. So what I would like to offer below are best taken as general principles. However, like all principles, application needs to be determined after applying the filters of relevance and practicality.

With that preamble, here are my principles for determining when you should consider changing or quitting your job:

When you are not learning anything new. When the job is not challenging you any more, and you feel you are not growing your skills and capability.

When your job does not align with your values or beliefs. If, for example, the products you are selling or the process you are applying has personal, social or ecological impact that you do not wish to support.

When the organisation no longer feels right for you. This could be because the organization’s strategy or business model constrain your ability to create the impact you wish to create. Alternately, it might be the culture or climate within the organization - which has gradually changed (or your perspective has), and you find it too political or even toxic, which suffocates you.

When you sense there is no future for you within the organization. This might be because there is no headroom for someone with your credentials, skills, and experience, and the only way to grow is to leave. Sometimes, the business or industry is at the sunset stage, and quitting is better than waiting for the inevitable.

When you feel discriminated against or disadvantaged, and there is no recourse. This might take the shape of favouritism, nepotism, regionalism, racism - and a number of other discriminatory practices. Or it might simply be that the pay and benefits are significantly lower than you would expect elsewhere, and there are no mitigating considerations like learning opportunities or a sense of purpose to hold you back.

When your work and/or your colleagues sap your energy and cause undue stress. You spend a significant part of your day at work, and your workplace environment and relationships have a significant impact on your physical and emotional well-being.

When you find yourself hating the prospect of going to work. When disengagement creeps in, and when everyday feels like Monday, it is time to consider a change.

These briefly, are my guidelines on when you should consider quitting or changing jobs. However, as I have previously stated, you need to use the filters of relevance and practicality, and assess how these principles apply in your specific situation.

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Learning from Mentors

When it comes to learning new skills, having easy access to mentors can sometimes work against you.

On the one hand, there are definite advantages to having access to people who can show you how to do something the right way. In fact, what we call "tacit" skills, those that cannot be documented into neat processes, are often learnt by working under the guidance of someone who is more skilled.You learn things faster, you identify problems early, you make fewer mistakes, and perhaps from the standpoint of your career - you don't make any costly or fatal mistakes.

On the other hand, there is evidence that learning is more effective when it is not very easy - when there is some struggle involved. This is linked to the principle of desirable difficulty - learning is deeper and more sticky when you have to put in more effort, and make mistakes along the way. Of course you need to ensure that the effort involved is interesting, and the difficulty is at a level that makes you stretch but is essentially achievable. Also you must ensure that the mistakes are reversible, not fatal or career limiting, and that you actually learn from your mistakes.

Another important consideration when building skills is to ensure that you don’t focus exclusively on the “how” - the steps or process that allows you to accomplish something, but also pay attention to the “why”. Unless you understand the underlying principles, the reasons why certain steps are necessary and how they work, you will not be able to adapt to less than ideal or novel situations (which are a given in the real world of work). This can be a serious limitation in working independently - the very definition of being skilled.

This has important implications for how you should approach learning from a mentor:

Do not expect (or accept) spoon feeding.
When the skills involved are tacit skills, look for opportunities to see them work. Pay less attention to what they say, and more to what they do.
Ask them about what can go wrong - the risks involved, mistakes they have made, and expensive/fatal mistakes that you should avoid.
Use your conversations with mentors to reflect on what did not go as planned - to ensure that you are drawing the right lessons from your mistakes.
Test your understanding of underlying principles by engaging your mentors in deeper conversations.

Of course, these same principles apply when you mentor others. Help your mentees acquire critical skills and become truly independent.

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Changing Your Life Story

Stories play an important part in our life. We make sense through stories. When we say we get someone, it means we know their life story - the underlying narrative that gives meaning, unity, and purpose to their life.

It is the same when it comes to knowing ourselves. We make sense of our lives by constructing and reconstructing narratives that link our past to our present, and to the future we envision. And if we change our vision for the future, we inevitably have to retell the story of our past, so that it still makes sense.

This explains why we find change so difficult. We've bought into our own life story and are not quite willing to change it - it seems dishonest, and makes us feel inauthentic. And yet, change cannot happen unless we are able to integrate it with what we believe to be unquestionably true about ourselves. So how do we give ourselves permission to change our narrative, so that we can choose a different path than the one we were originally on?

For many, the turning point is an event. We have all experienced, or know someone who has experienced, a life-changing event or episode in their life. However, according to Herminia Ibarra [1], it is not really the event that triggers change - it is just a pattern interrupt that brings into focus changes in our thinking that have been happening silently, often unawares, in our minds for a long time. The event effectively provokes an insight, and perhaps more importantly, provides an opportunity to recraft our life narrative. This latter aspect of life changing events is important because insight alone does not motivate us to change - we need a reinvention story - a retelling of our past that convincingly flows into the future we have imagined for ourselves.

Notes

1. Herminia Ibarra, Working Identities: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 2003)

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Motivating Yourself for the Long Haul

Ali Abdaal is a Junior Doctor at Cambridge, and is a well known and successful YouTuber. I came across his work a couple of year sago, when I was interested in learning about learning. Among Ali's many achievements is the fact that he was a topper at Cambridge, and he has a lot of content on his YouTube Channel on prepping for medical entrance exams, but also for learning in general.

A video of his that I recently watched talks about 15 Lessons that improved his life. Among the lessons he mentioned were 3 that resonated with me, and I think are important for anyone embarking on a project or endeavour that has a long runway - that is, it is something that takes lots of time to show results. This spoke to me because I am currently finding it a bit difficult to give my all to starting a new YouTube Channel where I am essentially starting with zero content, zero views and zero subscribers. I can see that it will be a very long and testing period before I get to see any traction here, so these ideas give me some succour.

The first idea that really resonated to me was concept of The Flywheel. This is from Jim Collin's book Good to Great, which I first read when I was studying for my MBA at NUS (~2003/4). The idea here is that getting anything important started is difficult - there is a lot of friction (or more accurately inertia) to overcome. However, once the flywheel is in motion, the same inertia actually makes it easy to keep going. In practical, or business terms, which was Collin's intent, it is easy for organisations that are doing all the right things and getting the results to keep getting good results - so good companies will find it easier to get better. However to get to that point, one has to invest significant effort and exercise discipline and patience.

The second idea is the idea of mastering the boring fundamentals. This idea comes from James Stuber, whose work I am only slightly familiar with. What this says is that the most important principles that are essential for success in life and in any professional domain are difficult to follow - not because they are conceptually difficult to grasp, but because they are fairly straight forward and obvious and repetitive and hence boring! People know what needs to be done, but fail to do it because it is not glamorous or exciting enough.

The third idea, also from Stuber is of the two types of fun - Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 fun is pure fun, almost hedonistic pleasure, providing instant gratification. Type 2 fun on the other hand is anything but fun in the short term, and only provides a sense of satisfaction looking back. Given this choice, it is natural for us as pleasure seeking animals, to value Type 1 fun, more than Type 2 fun. However, the pleasure from Type 1 fun is mostly fleeting, while the satisfaction we get from Type 2 fun is more sustained.

In my context this means, I should proceed with the mindset that while success will eventually come, I should not expect anything for a really long time. I should be prepared to invest significant time in mastering the fundamentals, knowing well that I will have to fight my fascination for shiny new objects. And I should not let the absence of immediate feedback (and validation) prevent me from persisting with something that I know will give me great satisfaction, probably after several months or even years, of having created an asset that I am really proud of.

How do you manage your motivation when embarking on a long term project?

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6 Common Networking Mistakes

As a career strategist, I help my clients figure out what career success means to them, and how they can pursue it while staying true to their most important values. There are a number of career success factors that we work on, one that people have strong feelings about is networking. While some people hate networking, others treat it as a necessary evil - something that they HAVE to do, and therefore something they don't want to waste any more time than the absolute minimum they can get away with. Strangely, this is not restricted to extroverts - I have seen extraverts, and also people whose jobs involve meeting a lot of new people and developing critical relations, treat networking with disdain.

Even those who are neutral or like the idea of networking, are not quite clear about how they should go about it. Needless to say, when it comes to networking, there are a number of mistakes that people commonly make. Here are six examples of networking mistakes that people make that I came across in my reading. Where relevant, I have provided links to the source, so that you may go deeper if you wish.

Treating Networking as a necessary evil

When people have misgivings about networking or think of it as a distasteful task they are forced to undertake, their negative attitudes show up in their approach to networking and affect the quality of relationships and engagement. This not only makes networking ineffective, but it also causes them a lot of stress. In Learn to Love Networking, Tiziana Casciaro and her co-authors suggest that adopting a promotional mindset, that is seeing networking as an opportunity for discovery and learning would make it feel less inauthentic and more fulfilling

Promotion-focused people networked because they wanted to and approached the activity with excitement, curiosity, and an open mind about all the possibilities that might unfold. Prevention-focused people saw networking as a necessary evil and felt inauthentic while engaged in it, so they did it less often and, as a result, underperformed in aspects of their jobs

Not treating networking strategically

Another common mistake that people make is to take a very tactical or transactional approach to networking. Fundamentally, networking is about close and mutually beneficial relationships. Therefore, it needs long-term thinking, a strategic approach and constant engagement. Allison Jones shares a number of good tips in 5 Common Misconceptions That Make You Bad at Networking.

Focusing on things that don't really matter

As in most areas of life, when it comes to networking, people tend to focus on what marketers call "vanity metrics". Examples of vanity metrics in networking are the size of your network, the number of high-profile or powerful people you can claim as part of your network, the number of people who follow you on social media etc. However, the value of a network is not only a function of its size. A large network in which there is little or no engagement is inferior to a smaller network where there is a high degree of engagement. Similarly, a large network that consists mainly of other people like you is of limited value. It is much better to go for a network that scores high on BCD - breadth, connectivity and dynamism. In How to Revive a Tired Network, Herminia Ibarra explains how lack of breadth, connectivity and dynamism leads to inbred and ineffective networks, and how you can go about improving these in your network.

Letting Nature take its course

Networking is work. It takes a certain amount of effort to build, grow and sustain your network. And this goes beyond merely being intentional and proactive about building your network. How you go about building your network matters as well. According to Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap, if you have initiated relationships by approaching prospective network members directly, you are likely to end up choosing people you spend a lot of time with (proximity principle) and who are just like you (self-similarity principle). This seriously reduces the diversity and impact of your network.

The authors provide a number of useful tips, such as using netwrok brokers, focusing on shared interests and other ways of overcoming these limitations in their article How to Build Your Network

Not keeping your network balanced

Your network supports you in your career in multiple ways. For instance, you might rely on your network for information, political support, personal growth, motivation and morale, meaning, as well as inspiration. All these are essential functions of your network, and unless you have been careful and deliberate when building your network, you might find your network is skewed - offering lots of one kind of support, and severely deficient in others. In Managing Yourself: A Smarter Way to Network, authors Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas outline a four-step process to restore the balance: analyze, de-layer, diversify, and capitalize. This balance is the key to better performance, as well as greater job satisfaction.

Not Refreshing your Network Periodically

An important part of managing your network is refreshing it periodically, so that it stays relevant (for you and other members) as your work context changes - as you change jobs, geographies, get promoted, or even undertake a career shift. Your network must grow with you, and it must stay relevant to your current as well as future needs. Herminia Ibarra in the article referenced earlier has this to say: Network should grow with you.

We change jobs, firms, and even countries, but our networks lag behind our new responsibilities and aspirations and therefore pigeonhole us just when we need a fresh perspective or seek to move into something different.

Conclusion

As we have seen in this post, even if you are able to overcome your reservations and aversion to networking, it can be very tricky to network effectively. Even if you like networking, you are likely to commit any of several common mistakes that people make when it comes to networking. Besides being intentional and proactive, you are likely to need advice and guidance on navigating the path to networking success. The links suggested in this article should be a useful place to start learning more in this area.

If you looked at your networking approach and outcomes over the years, which of these (or other) mistakes are you making when it comes to building, growing and sustaining your network?

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Ownership Mindset and Career Success

You may have all the skills required and may put in all the hard work you can muster, but you will fail to translate that into great performance and career success unless you pay attention to mindsets.

There are a number of mindsets that are relevant to Career Success, and one of the moe important ones is the Ownership Mindset.

What exactly is the Ownership Mindset and how does it help you perform better and enjoy greater career success?

The Ownership Mindset, as the name suggests, is about taking ownership for your work - and for your outcomes. It is about asserting that you are in charge of your own life, your own results, your career decisions and the success you enjoy.

To better understand this, it is useful to contrast it with its opposite - the Victim Mindset. In a Victim mindset, people do not take responsibility for their lives and for their results - for them everything, especially something that doesn't go well, is on account of somebody else. They blame other people, circumstances, fate - anything but themselves.

For instance, let's say you did not as well as you expected on a significant project, and it turns out that the reason you were not successful was that the market conditions, or economic situation changed. If you adopt a victim mindset, it is fairly easy to explain away your failure - the economy did us in, or the market let us down. In other words, you are blameless, and the fault lies elsewhere.

If on the other hand, you adopted the ownership mindset, you would say something like - "I did not expect the market conditions to change significantly, and therefore the project was vulnerable. If I had anticipated these economic shifts, I would have done things differently."

At first glance, it seems you are saying the same thing in both instances.

However, there is a big difference.

When you are in the Victim Mindset, your priority is to shift the blame - to prove that you did not make any mistakes. This might seem like the smart thing to do, except that people don't quite buy your logic. Employers expect you to deliver even when things don't go quite as you expected. And secondly, perhaps more importantly, you don't learn anything - since you don't see any shortcomings in yourself, you don't think you need to do anything differently in future.

When you are in the Ownership Mindset, your priority is to learn from any shortcomings - and see how you can do better next time. While the results may not please your stakeholders, they know you have done your best, and that you wont repeat the same mistake again.

So the Ownership Mindset helps you learn new things - grow your skills. It helps you Perform better.
Also, when you take responsibility and ownership for outcomes, you build trust with and confidence in your stakeholders. This strengthens your relationships and also the impression that others hold about you.

Thus, the Ownership Mindset positively impacts all the three drivers of career success - Performance, Partnerships and Perception.

One important point to note - it would be wrong to label someone as being an "Owner" or of being a "Victim". Both are within us, and it is really a question of what mindset we adopt in a given situation, or even most of the time.

What this means is that if you are someone that frequently finds yourself playing the victim, you can change - you need to be intentional about adopting the Ownership Mindset as much as you can.

And if you are someone that displays the Ownership Mindset predominantly, Congratulations! Great things will happen. However don't let your guard down. remember the Victim is pretty much alive inside you as well - and you need to make sure you don't fall prey to his tricks.

What mindset do you find yourself adopting in most situations?

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When You Outgrow Your Network

We all pursue networking in the belief that it will help us move forward - that it will provide us ideas, information, access, referrals, support and accountability that will make us pursue and achieve challenging goals that we would have found difficult to pursue on our own.

That, in general, is how networks work - or are meant to. However, if you have been around long enough, you are sure to have experienced instances where your network holds you back - stops you from doing something you were keen on doing.

Now, that is not necessarily bad - it might just be your network helping you stay out of trouble. There are certainly cases where my network has helped me avoid serious consequences by warning or dissuading me from doing something rash or positively dangerous to my career. This is a valid and useful role that your network plays - provided their warning comes from real experience and is applicable to your situation.

But sometimes, people who are close to us can stop us from trying or doing something that is in our best interest. Now, just to be clear, they are not doing thsi to hold us back. They are doing it out of true concern - they genuinely believe it will not work, or it might even hurt us. That sounds like right thing except that their concern is based on belief - not on personal experience.

When this happens more than once in a while, it is a sign that you hav eoutgrown your network, and you should consider making some changes.

As we grow, personally and professionally, it is important that our network keeps pace. In fact, our network should always have a few people who are ahead of us in whatever journey we are in at the moment. Not just that, we should also have people in our network, who are on a journey that is of interest to us, but we are yet to embark on.

This is critical because, without real experience, any advice that we receive from people in our network can be a case of the blind leading the blind.

I can personally attest to this. I launched my practice as a full time coach, mentor and facilitator in 2015, a full 10 years after I started my coaching journey. When I started coaching, I did not have any intention of making it a full time profession - I felt my day job interesting and satisfying. However, a few years later, around 2010, I started feeling I should seriously consider switching to coaching full time.

When I sounded out my personal network - my sponsor, my mentors, and other key people in my network, the unanimous response was - "It's a bad idea!". I knew they had my best interests in mind - but their advice was based on belief, not experience. Almost everyone in my network was part of the same industry, or in a related industry. None of them had any experience of a career transition of kind I was contemplating.

From their perspective, I was walking away from a field I had extensively trained in, and had accumulated over 20 years of experience in. My career was progressing well, and they all expected significant growth for me. Also, I was working for a company that I openly admitted was my dream company. Leaving all this for something that I was interested in, but did not have a clear track record of seemed to them a risk not worth taking. Almost to a person, their advice was - continue coaching on the side if you wish, don't quit your day job.

This unanimous advice from my network made me reconsider - but not totally give up on my dream of making the transition to full time coaching. I realised that my network was incapable of providing me any real information or advice in this matter. So, I resolved to find some new people - those who had made this transition in their own careers, and make them part of my network.

Over the next few years, I cultivated new relationships with people who had undertaken the journey, and what I found gave me new information and perspectives that I could trust - because they were based on experience. This did not mean I could make switch immediately.On contrary, my discussions with these new mentors and network members convinced me that I had some work to do - in terms of additional skills, new relationships, and in terms of being financially and mentally prepared for transition.

It took me a further 5 years to get to the point where I felt I was ready,, and this time, I had advantage of having people in my network who could guide me, and help me make the transition, and provide support if the need arose.

Career transitions are always complex. Therefore it would be wrong to lay the entire blame on or give credit to networks. However, the influence of networks is undeniable, as are the limitations, and the need for your network to keep pace with your own aspirations and growth.

What is your current situation in this regard? Has your network kept pace with you, or have you outgrown your network?

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Your Network Should Help You Evolve

Your network must help you anticipate and keep pace with changes in your business, industry and domain. In fact, it should help you evolve as the world evolves around you.

This is only possible when your network is strategic, and when you are actively engaged.

Many of us have networks - but they are neither strategic nor engaged. The hallmark of a strategic network is that it helps you see farther and scan wider. It helps you see the future and prepare for it. This may be developments in your industry, cutting edge knowledge, emerging requirements and anything else that might take you by surprise in the future - if you hadn't been actively looking ahead.

Having a network is only as valuable as far as you and other members are engaged. I have previously written about how to keep your network engaged, so I won't repeat it here. However, when it comes to strategic networks, to get maximum value, you need to go beyond simply staying in touch, or forwarding articles, or introducing people to each other.

The key idea here is that you need to be actively collaborating and creating - not passively consuming information. Three ideas to help you get started:

Create a LinkedIn group around the niche that is of interest to you. Invite existing network members (where appropriate) to join, and also invite people from your professional communities. Curate and share information, and at the same time be actively engaged in conversations with other members.

Be a connector of people who are interested in this area - matching people according to their interests and needs. Help people find collaborators, match people to jobs, introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other but wouldn't ordinarily make connection themselves.

Get involved with a start-up in your domain, or a domain you are interested in. Depending on your experience, finances, and the time you can spare, your involvement could be as a curious and sympathetic supporter, as an intern learning the ropes, as an advisor or mentor, as a co-founder, or as an investor. Your existing network might be able to help you get connected with founders, venture capitalists or other people in the start-up ecosystem

There are any number of other ways in which you can engage actively, and be involved as a creator, rather than as a passive consumer. Pick what works for you, and you will find that your strategic network is yielding dividends beyond your expectations.

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Thinking Things Through

Have you ever put something off because you haven't quite thought it through?

That happens to me a lot.

For instance, I wanted to invest in a camera - somewhat expensive but not prohibitively so. I did a lot of research and almost made up my mind on which brand and model to buy, and then... nothing.

Why? Because I had not quite figured out why I needed the camera in the first place. And this prevented me from going ahead and clicking BUY, even when juicy festive offers on all the major online stores were tempting me. I even successfully resisted a flash offer that offered an even more substantial saving!

So my reluctance to go ahead, and take action without thinking it through, stopped me from buying a camera that I was fairly sure I wanted. To be honest, I'm not a photography enthusiast. I've dabbled a bit when I was younger, and then, like many other interests, have largely ignored it.

You might say, I love the idea of being a photographer, but don't quite enjoy the doing part.

So, all things considered, failing to act on a decision I made after quite some research, might not be a bad thing. It saved me some money and also the hassle of creating space in a closet that is spilling over with stuff that I no longer use, but can't decide to give away - because I haven't thought things through.

You may consider this a form of procrastination, and I wouldn't really disagree. While I can always (mostly?) justify my inaction in hindsight, I'm not really sure it's a good thing. It is often seen as resistance to change.

Change, especially the more complex sort (and most meaningful change IS complex) can't always be thought through - not in its entirety. There are too many variables at play. Multiple dependencies and contingent factors. There is not much information available, and very little visibility beyond the first step or two. And the only way you can get more information - so that you can think, evaluate and decide how to move forward - is by moving forward.

And that makes me uncomfortable. My desire to think things through makes me want to see the entire path before I take my first step. The only way I can get over this paralysis is by coming up with a plan - even if I know it is very unlikely to play out even remotely as I envisioned it.

That makes me envy friends and colleagues who are not similarly constrained. They have far greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. They are able to decide and move ahead with very little information.

My mentor says I should stop craving certainty. His mantra is "Action Before Clarity".

He should know. He has faced far greater uncertainty, and made a number of successful pivots, including one very recently - when the COVID19 pandemic substantially disrupted his main source of revenue.

He says I should stop overthinking and just take the first step - things will only become clearer as I move forward.

I don't disagree.

I want to follow his advice.

But I can't - because, you see, I haven't thought things through.

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A Dangerous Belief

"I used to think that to write a book one only need to sit down and write a book. This is a dangerous false belief that I think people share" - David Kadavy, How to Write a Book

When I first read this, I was amused -"dangerous"? Mistaken - certainly. Counterproductive - sure. But dangerous? Why should a wrong belief about writing a book be dangerous.

This is not to say that beliefs cannot be dangerous - for instance if I believe someone is evil and take it upon myself to rid the world of this evil, I would agree that it is a dangerous belief.

But why would the belief that writing a book is a linear process - something you hunker down and white knuckle out from start to finish - is "dangerous"?

Kadavy does go on to clarify, but let me summarise it in my own words.

If you believe that writing a book is something you need to do linearly in one very intensive campaign, excluding everything else from your life, you would be perfectly justified in putting it off. It would be more prudent to wait and plan for it - because doing otherwise would be disruptive to yourself and probably to others who live or work with you.

So this belief makes people put writing the book off. And for most people, it means putting it off forever - because it is not possible for most people to free themselves up for an extended period of time and devote it completely to the task of writing.

Ok. So that means a book does not get written. Why is that dangerous? What harm has that caused?

The harm, in the main, is to yourself - or rather to your future self. By putting off working on something that offers significant personal growth, you deprive yourself from growing into a better thinker and writer. You get in the way of your potential being materialised.

One could also argue that you deprive others of the opportunity to engage with your ideas - with the unique perspectives that you would bring to their attention. And even if that it isn't dangerous, it is selfish and shunning your responsibility.

Now, normally, the realisation that you are harming yourself (and potentially others) is enough to get you to take action. However, in this case, since you believe that taking action requires more effort than you can muster, and causes more disruption in the short term, you feel justified in putting it off until the time is right.

That is what makes this belief dangerous - it allows you to justify delaying, often endlessly, something that is essential to your personal growth, and results in limiting the person you could potentially be.