Say you have an atypical medical condition the root cause of which is unknown. Depending on the specialist you go to, they are likely to diagnose a plausible cause in the corresponding body part. When you pick a specialist, you may be indirectly picking the disease as well.

Sometimes we do the same in our day-to-day lives. We make assumptions that lead us to convenient solutions. We don’t question the basis of the premise or even recognise that there is one. If you lose your keys, you have to search wherever it is that you lost them, not where it is easy to search.

Always ask the question. What assumptions am I making here and are they validated?

I had gotten into this mindframe of relegating all things non work-related to the weekend. Because I convinced myself that I could do justice to those tasks only when I had the entire day free. But it doesn’t actually work like that. We don’t become more productive because we have more time.

The pragmatic way to achieve our goals is to treat every day like it has the same potential for us to do better. It is a mindset I hope to cultivate and sustain for the long term.

This speech from President Obama moved and impressed me in several ways. This was an issue he had been passionately fighting for. By his own admission, the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting was one of his worst days as President.

There are good lessons here in how to advocate for a cause in the right way.

• He thanks the two senators who went against the grain and supported the bill.
• He doesn’t pull any punches in holding congress accountable for their actions. And he does it gracefully never once making personal or crass insults. He acknowledges that they are good people but they caved in to pressure.
• He explains to the people how gun lobbyists managed to block a common sense law that 90% Americans support, warns against the danger this trend presents and what they need to learn from the other side about achieving their goals.
• He speaks to the voice of moral conscience inside both senators and the American voters. Who are we here to serve? Have we forgotten so easily and moved on? By doing so, he appeals to the best in people, inspiring them to live up to higher standards.
• He finally ends with a promise of commitment to the issue and a call to action.

Throughout the speech, we can hear the thread of disappointment and frustration. But he (and his speech writers) didn’t let those emotions get in the way of what needed to be conveyed.

The cause is bigger than personal emotions. And we can’t afford to give up. Two important lessons to remember.

.

Exams, interviews, evaluations of any kind induce stress and anxiety in a lot of us. It happens due to two sets of reasons – circumstantial like getting laid-off and psychological like imposter syndrome. While we may not have much influence over the first, we can work on the second. We can learn to control the anxiety.

What I have found to work personally is reframing the process as an opportunity to learn. Like most good things, this mindset doesn’t manifest on demand. But, studying my own behavior over time, I have identified specific processes that have helped in this conditioning so far. These are subject to my personal characteristics, so as with most experiments, it will require trial-and-error to figure out what works for you. That is part of the fun 🙂

• Paying attention to interactions within my team and recognizing the areas / skills where my contributions prove valuable. Take special note of the soft skills because those are the harder ones to replace.
• Taking up courses which emphasise more on learning and less on grading. Doing them at my own pace in my free time.
• Thinking about the value of the assessment to me. By doing this exercise, I spend lesser time worrying about the areas that may be tested but don’t matter to me. (This is more specific to interviews)
• Focusing on what I can say and do instead of how I might be perceived.
• If I find out what I don’t know, that is just another learning. I am better off than before when I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Every week, a father asked his kids a question at the dinner table.

What did you fail at this week?

And he expressed disappointment when they had nothing to tell him. The result of this exercise was that it reshaped the idea of failure in his kids’ minds.

The question is a counter-intuitive motivation mechanism. But it does an incredible thing. It reframes the concept of failure as not trying something that you want to do instead of the inability to achieve the right outcome.

Read that again. If you don’t fail, it means you are not trying.

What would happen if we asked this at the family table? What would our lives look like if we didn’t fear failure?

Found the following gems in my notes from Kelly McGonigal’s amazing must-read book, The Willpower Instinct.

• Three biggest enemies of willpower 
  • Temptation 
  • Self criticism 
  • Stress 
• Three most useful skills for self control 
  • Self awareness 
  • Self care 
  • Remembering what matters most – main goal or commitment

The correlation between self-care/self-criticism and self-control/willpower is a good lesson to remember.

Tomorrow is the start of a long weekend. The night before such a break, I always feel great. In hindsight, it would have been the best part of the entire weekend. It is curious that the peak moments of happiness don’t happen during the weekend that we have been so looking forward to but rather the night before it has even started.

Why is that? It is just another night in the endless cycle of dawn and dusk.

It is because at this point, the entire weekend lies before me brimming with unfulfilled potential. But when it dawns tomorrow, the potential will have already reduced. And it keeps shrinking as the seconds tick by. Another reason is that no moment during the next three days, no matter how amazing, can live up to this present moment in the depth of hope I feel about the limitless possibilities lying before me.

Maybe there is a life lesson here. I haven’t discovered it yet. But I did find it an interesting exercise in self-awareness.

PS: Learnt an interesting new word in the course of writing this post. Nychthemeron, which translates to a period of 24 hours. It is sometimes used to avoid the inherent ambiguity in the term ‘day’.

This is a tech video I came across today. And it inspired me. Ya, I was surprised too.

So what was it about the video that had this noticeable impact on me (and judging by the comments, everyone who has seen it)?

• First of all, the speaker is explaining a pretty complicated concept that has multiple sources of documentation online, all of them incomprehensible. The talk truly lives up to its boast of being in plain English.
• One of the ways he has done this is by analysing and acknowledging upfront, the reasons why the explanations presently available are confusing. For example, the fact that they use jargon which pre-supposes, incorrectly, that the reader understands all the terminology. He then proceeds to address these issues by clarifying the terms in the simplest language possible.
• He provides context by giving examples of software we consume which works on this concept under the hood.
• A very well-thought out flow diagram is used that explains the order and interaction between components clearly.
• The fact that every question from the audience corresponds with the subsequent part of the presentation is testament to how smoothly the talk flows.
• He demonstrates further using apps that reveal the details of each transaction step. I found this to be better than a real-world fully-formed app demo.
• Finally, his articulation and diction are spot on. I didn’t hear one instance of fillers like ‘Uh…’ and ‘Hmm…’. His free body language displays confidence and engages the audience.

The talk showed me the power of a well crafted presentation that is delivered skillfully. It has motivated me to try out what I learnt, just for fun. Above all, it reminded me of why I fell in love with this field in the first place.

We can’t control a lot of things in our lives – who our parents are, where or when we were born, war, economic depression, accidents, natural disasters, the current pandemic and a lot more. While we may not have the power to influence these events, we do have the ability to choose how we respond and what we learn from them. That is the ultimate power to have. It is the foundation of Victor Frankl’s research documented in his book, Man’s Search For Meaning.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

I have found internalizing this idea to give a lasting sense of control and peace in the most chaotic circumstances.

Our circumstances do not define our identity. We do, with the way we choose to respond.

There are all kinds of courage. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends – Albus Dumbledore (J.K. Rowling)

I would go one step further and say that it takes a great deal more fortitude to stand up to people we love. Because we are fighting for what we believe in despite the risk of losing their acceptance and love. That is a much harder path to walk.

Why do it? Because doing the right thing trumps everything else.

How to do it? By trusting that true bonds don’t break because of a disagreement. It might create temporary cracks but it can’t destroy them. And more often than not, the people we love will eventually come to accept and respect us for leading our lives by the principles we value.