Author: Suresh Dinakaran

Prepared to look foolish is NOT being foolish!

 

In our quest to be the perfect version of ourselves, we over index on the idea of ‘ appearance ‘. To present & look good in front of others. And that default becomes a drag and devil as time wears on. The race for mastery in this ” Republic of Not Enough ” seems perennial.

 

 

Borrowing from George Leonard‘s masterpiece of a book ‘Mastery‘, imagine doing a very elemental task such as touching your forehead with your hand. Have you lost it? You may ask because it is so simple. Now, go back in time when you were a mere toddler and you tried doing the same simple act of touching your forehead with your hand and you had to indulge in all sorts of calisthenics to do that successfully. While coming to terms with different parts of your body and their points of reference which was a mere illusion in the tiny toddler head. At that time, it seems like a total non pianist trying to play a Beethoven sonata.

 

Back in the day, amongst the multiple aspirations I held, one was to become a musician. And I took the plunge to learn to play the Congo (image attached above for those might not have heard about it before, pardon the pun). The first few days I was a disaster and my prolific master was making it look like a walk in the park. Not just out of sync, I felt very out of place as well. Foolish is a better coinage for that. But I hung in there( lot of credit to my coach and my friends who were there too learning the guitar and the harmonium) till such time it began to strike a chord. As both hands and fingers began to rally around intent and tune.

 

 

To learn something new of any significance, you have to be willing to look foolish.

 

 

Imagine the best fielder on the national cricket team dropping a catch in front of thousands at the stadium and with millions watching! The willingness to go there and do it(or undo it) in front of your most precious audiences be it teacher, coach, teammates etc is an absolute must. If you’re always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that’s necessary for effective learning and top performance.

 

 

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. So stay hungry, foolish, stupid. Learning about learning begins there.

 

 

ENDS

 

 

In a Professional defense of the Amateur!

 

Some dictionary meanings first:-

Amateur: a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity.

 

 

Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.

 

 

To go with the above, there is a supporting cast of synonyms, antonyms, and words related to amateur, such as: abecedarian, apprentice, aspirant, beginner, dabbler, and dilettante.

 

 

It is obvious that there is no quest anywhere to crown the word amateur in glory. The world needs perfectionists and professionals, the ones who have been there done that.

 

 

The word amateur doesn’t get a lot of love these days. When we hear “amateur,” we think of a dabbler—someone unskilled and undisciplined who flutters from one hobby to another.

 

 

Now, let us take a look t the origin of the word amateur: it came from the Latin word ‘amare‘, which means to love. To do things for the love of it. And, there is(gratefully) an audience that is coaxing and encouraging us to love what you do, and do what you love. Follow your heart, without wanting to hang onto the coattails of outcomes. Small, consistent progress is what takes the amateur to professional status(if she so chooses to).

 

 

So, amateur is NOT a dirty word.

It comes with almost unabashed freedom. The best time in your life to create, take the plunge, begin a new chapter, following your heart without the rabid pressure of expectation. Don’t overlook or undervalue the gift of this time. And still we use amateur as if it’s a dirty word.

 

 

Being an amateur goes hand in hand with having a beginner’s mindset, when you are fanning your childlike curiosity, exploring, discovering and taking those small or big leaps of faith. Once we are established, we are governed more and more by outcomes and that comes with rigidity, close mindedness, the enemies of creation. So, hang onto that phase of your life where you edify your amateur self. Create, ship out. Rinse, repeat!

 

 

Never be afraid to try something new.“Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic”— Dave Barry

 

 

Considered “a man of colossal genius” by George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton was a prolific writer— publishing 80 books, 200 short stories, and over 4,000 essays in his lifetime. And in those prolific writings, Chesterton gave special meaning to the amateur over the professional, to the generalist over the specialist.

 

 

In his Autobiography, Chesterton writes of his father:

 

 

” To us (children) he appeared to be indeed The Man with the Golden Key, the magician opening the gates of goblin castles . . . but all this time he was known to the world, and even to the next door neighbors, as a very reliable and capable, though rather unambitious businessman. It was a very good lesson in what is also the last lesson in life: that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole, I am glad that he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career—his private career.

 

 

Take the tech industry, for example. Google, Microsoft, Facebook—all of these big companies were started by amateurs. And then there’s Wikipedia, which, despite being run (almost) entirely by amateurs, has replaced the eminent and professional Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

 

 

The internet has shown us there are people willing to make things with no immediate benefit at all. And they do pretty damn good job of it.

 

 

The amateur is back.

 

ENDS

Have you enrolled into the University of Curiosity?

 

CURIOSITY SKILLED THE CAT 

Curiosity is that strange human trait that got us out of the cave, across the globe, and onto the moon. A trait that has led to communication and collaboration.“Why” has the X factor!

 

Albert Einstein quoted that a mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.
All research come to think of it is ‘ formalised curiosity ‘.
Doubt and inquiry are the two pillars of progress.. So, it makes sense to ‘ Start with Why? ‘
Scott Shigeoka is an advocate for the power of curiosity. Scott delves into the ABCs of our habitual thoughts – Assumptions, Biases, and Certainty – and how they shape our world views. In the age of digital information overload, he emphasizes the need to make room for new insights about ourselves and others.
If you are like me, we are all a failed by-product of our education system that does not encourage, respect or recognise individual curiosity. It is mostly about what there is and what has to be conformed to.
An interesting aside can be extracted from the movie ‘ Accepted ‘. After receiving his latest college rejection letter, senior Bartleby Gaines ( played by Justin Long) devises a novel way to fool everyone into thinking he is college-bound: Open his own university. Bartleby and his similarly stymied friends take over an abandoned building, create a fake Web site, hire a friend’s uncle to pose as the dean, and — presto — a school is born. However, they do their jobs too well, and soon many other rejects try to gain admittance to the nonexistent South Harmon Institute of Technology.
So these 1000 ‘ admitted students ‘ turn up at the supposedly non existent university on day one and there is Lewis Black, the Dean. And he asks, ‘ so, well , what should we teach them? Because he said he didn’t know but offers a solution- lets ask the students what they want to learn. The student reactions are truly telling because nobody has ever bothered to ask them what they are interested in. So, the Dean says, let’s take this students’ tuition and appropriate it towards something that she’s truly curious about. Could be a not so real and immediate possibility but can you imagine the first university that actually creates a pilot program to test this approach driven totally by curiosity? They will have students going to them in droves, needless to say.
Real curiosity is just truly open-hearted, open-mindedness. Like I’m here to just understand you and where you come from and to understand your experiences, to understand the person you are. We live in a society where people are flattened to their identities. You are Japanese or Indian. You are brown or white. You voted for the Democrats. But there’s so much more nuance and beauty and messiness and complication and contradiction. And the only way we can learn about those things is if we ask these really powerful questions and, you know, engage in a deeper form of curiosity.
If our cup of ABC( assumptions, biases & certainty) is full to the brim, often without us even noticing, leaving little room to absorb new information about ourselves and each other and the world around us. This gets in the way of deep curiosity. We live in a world which reinforces the biases that we have. And social media and the echo chambers that it wields the megaphone on, are not helping.
We need to enter this age where we reclaim our curiosity and really practice it every day, inspire others to do it knowing that it’s contagious.
ENDS

Dear reader: How big is your anti-library?

 

An anti-library is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by seminal writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

 

 

Unlike the plague of ‘stuffocation‘ that has us owning far more shoes, clothes, watches or food than we need, and a lot of times unused, this is a happy problem to have. Having a pile of unread books in your book shelf or library. Without getting into the spiel of ‘curse of knowledge‘, it is a not so subtle realisation that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. Sledgehammer blow and much needed when we try to defy gravity and get too floaty for our own wings!

 

 

You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku.

 

Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders from Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.

It is said that nothing is more important than an unread library. These might include what are politely called ‘classics‘- classics are those books which people praise but don’t read.

 

 

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”.

 

 

But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable? That is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable  — an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.

 

 

There are some other compelling works that will beautifully complement The Black Swan and they include astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in a culture obsessed with certitude, philosopher Hannah Arendt on how unanswerable questions give shape to the human experience, and novelist Marilynne Robinson on the beauty of the unknown.

 

Welcome and embrace the unread so that we don’t dread the unknown!

 

ENDS

NOT In Awe of….Optimising!

 

Contemporary life and ‘ modern management ‘ have been fixated on the optimise everything on the horizon for quite some time now. The jury is still out on what the compelling reasons are for such kind of a shiny object chase, but then, that’s the reality.

 

 

Good enough is never good enough and only the best would do. It’s like the millennial sporting the T Shirt captioned boldly in front saying “BROWN” and in very small font below it mentions ” Though my heart is in Yale “.

 

 

In the quest for maximising, ironically what ends up happening is you trade off on happiness, which was the original intent when you wanted to optimise. The dark side of wanting to optimise everything.

 

 

Human beings are not search engines. SEO Strategy conventionally would have had us going for keywords that the search has the best potential to throw up high in the pecking order. But, that strategy is passe. You are not going to win that search. You are not even going to figure in page 30 of the search results. It seems as if most of us have lost the key to the keywords in the battle of the search. 

 

 

Probably an ideal situation to pivot to doing something remarkable. How do we own our word? Do things that make people search for us by our name, our work, our projects. Showing up with the right work, at the right time, in the right places. Do the hard yards, the slow deliberate work hard of earning permission, building a tiny circle, the smallest viable audience. Over time, the tribe embraces you, the word (your word) becomes the shortcut to get more of what you offer.

 

 

How about substituting SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) with another acronym? FEO- Find Engine Optimisation. Because it’s more reliable to seek to be found by people who were looking for you all along.

 

 

The chasm will get bridged at its own pace. That’s fine. Let’s take our word | commitment | generosity for it!

 

 

A couple of years ago, a trio of Stanford University professors-philosopher Rob Reich, computer scientist Mehran Sahami, and political scientist Jeremy Weinstein released a new book titled “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.” 

 

 

The book argues that it’s the programmers themselves — and their focus on optimization — who inevitably combine with society’s larger “aspiration to maximize profit and scale” (and the accompanying tech monopolies) that ultimately are creating a slew of unintended problems.

 

 

It is true to say that efficiency has run amok. Where shaping our future begins by directing our attention to “the distinctive mindset” (and growing power) of technologists —and specifically, the mindset of optimisation. The book has a quote from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave New World”: “In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

 

 

As a valuable contributor seeking to build a career, a business, or a body of work that matters, you benefit when you develop a unique asset, because that asset gives you the leverage to choose a niche in a system that respects optimization instead.

 

 

There are so many things that you can optimise- recalibrating your work out and diet to lose more weight, your presentations so that you can close more sales, optimise your website for better and more website traffic, your ads for better impact, your sleeping patterns to get more rest in less time, Cosmo(and so do a lot of other magazines) even says you can optimise your sex life…

 

 

Sooner or later you realise that you are spending your best energy and time on optimisation NOT creation!

 

 

This perennial cycle of optimisation is the impediment for new exploration and discovering, going into the unknown which is where your best solace and happiness resides.

 

 

So where do we go from here? The rabbit hole of optimisation? Or creating things better? Give me the latter any day!

 

ENDS

Resume…With An Anti-Resume!

 

Contrarian /noun/. : A person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position opposed to the majority view, regardless of how unpopular it may be.

 

 

We’re genetically programmed to follow the herd. Thousands of years ago, conformity to our tribe was essential to our survival. If you didn’t conform, you’d be ostracized, rejected, or worse, left for dead.

 

 

Continued success in the modern world requires continued innovation. The ability to disrupt established methods and find new ways of looking at old ideas is one of the most sought-after qualifications in all fields. It’s a super power that allows you to be right when others are wrong.

 

 

The Anti-Resume is an idea floated by seminal writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan. Here’s how Nicholas puts it ” “People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced…but it would be nice if they did.”

 

 

This borrowed thought from Hareb’s book was one of the things that I shared with a batch of over 150 students recently when I had an opportunity to pick up a conversation with them. Being in final year, and all set to embark on a career path of their choosing(though not always), the purposeful provocation was to be a contrarian to stand out and get noticed.

 

It’s such an interesting idea as Kent Blumberg puts it: imagine the hiring manager reviewing resumes and then going ” we have reviewed your resumes and see how your education, skills, achievements and experience could be relevant to the role that is on offer. That is the reason we are keen to meet you. Now, we would like to now know from you your approach to life and work. So, before we meet, could you submit a one page anti-resume from you that will articulate the relevant education and skills that you are yet to have, the relevant experiences that you are yet to gain and the accomplishments that you are yet to achieve. 

 

Now let’s look at the prognosis of such an experiment. The scenarios could turn out in multi faceted manner viz:-

 

– candidates who might not be able to fill up a one pager show either of the two- a lack of self awareness or they feel they are over-qualified

– the perception of interpreting their future roles kicks in. For eg, some candidates might talk about their lack of sales experience as the role demands it. While some may ignore mentioning that bit

– you get to discern the wheat from the chaff- candidates who believe their development is in their own hands while some others see it as an entitlement and a gift to be had from others- you get to see who plays victim and who plays victor

– you get to see the candidates who are intrinsically motivated to bridge the delta in education, skills or experience and others who are not

 

And why wait until you are looking for a job. Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask yourself every few months, “What haven’t I learned yet? What haven’t I experienced yet? What haven’t I accomplished yet? And what am I going to do about it today?”

 

 

Quoting from a feedback letter by Steve Roesler:

At the risk of getting a bit “jargon-y”, this goes to the point of Conscious Incompetence.

On the great learning curve of life, we revel in reaching a place of Unconscious Competence in things that we do. Auto-pilot, if you will.

Yet to excel, we need to pull back and take conscious look at what we do, how we do it, and the results that we’re getting.

I like it. Now I’m thinking “Anti-Auto Pilot.”

 

 

So, shall we resume..sorry anti-resume?

 

ENDS

What Do You Own? Sailing The Ownership Ocean!

 

More and more of us irrespective of demographic are veering towards usership or experience as against the conventional grain of ownership. A shift governed by wanting to avoid the baggage that tags alongwith ownership. As most of us chart our paths and accompanying struggles in this vast ” Republic of Not Enough ” !

 

That said, this rant is about actually taking the initiative and the effort to actually own something. Rather than be the freelancer in the bottomless, infinite Red Ocean territory called freelancing, or the 9 to 5 job hater going through the motions inspite of hating what she does, day in and day out.

 

That ownership might be the idea that is yours and you are doing your best to bring it to fruition into the world. The ownership could your goodwill or reputation that you have painstakingly acquired over the years by painstakingly and generously showing up and shipping out your best craft or work, consistently. The ownership could be the precious permission that your MVA(Minimum Viable Audience) has gracefully offered you to share your thoughts with them without coming across as spam or intrusion. The ownership can be also be the Intellectual Property Rights that you have established for your next game changing idea. You cultivate leverage that way.

The shift in thinking can be to move beyond the 8 hour shift that you put in, without owning anything (other than the 8 hours of your time)- that is hardly an inventory that will get the best suitors or bidders to make a special trip and reach out to you. The assured way to be a casualty is to be a commodity aka ‘ another ‘.

 

Being yet another is a trap and a race to the bottom and you hardly get any leverage or negotiating power. And therefore, at most times, you don’t get paid what you are worth.

 

So, if you are the retailer of your life, ensure that you own your inventory and that is desirable. The onus of ownership is on us and thereby the potential outcomes.

 

ENDS

Don’t Doubt The Benefit You Get!

 

It’s a beautiful place to begin with. Where you are being generously offered the ‘ benefit of the doubt ‘. The signal being sent out is that you deserve the chance or the opportunity and you will use your best bonafide intent to maximise the opportunity. It embarks on a place of belief and trust and there is no better arsenal at your disposal than these two if the idea is to make things better.

 

 

There are times when we feel that we deserve the benefit of the doubt but do not end up getting it. Sometimes it comes your away, when you least expect it. Its great when you earn it.

 

 

The rant here is to understand if we are working overtime when you are graciously offered the benefit of the doubt. Because it is cyclical. You can pay it forward. And then that goes to establish a ferris wheel of a culture echoing what goes around comes around. It is as Kevin Spacey said, “If you’re lucky enough to do well, it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down “.

It is about choosing to believe the best about people. No better example than love which walks the walk on this. No filling in the blanks with negative assumptions and conveniently calibrated bias or prejudice. We will stand in good stead if we un-install the app called ‘ self doubt ‘ from our mind. Like charity begins at home, giving the benefit of the doubt can start with oneself.

 

 

There is a genuis and power within all of us. Don’t short change it by using the currency of doubt. You don’t have to assume the worst about everyone, either. The world isn’t always out to get you. And offering the benefit of doubt hardly costs us anything. Doubt and enquiry are proven pillars of progress.

 

“Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.” Khalil Gibran

 

ENDS

What do you when asked ” What Do You Do?”

 

Ever been in situations at an event or a conference wherein you are struggling to get your business card out from your inner sleeve in the jacket or your visiting card holder decides to rebel and refuses to open? The struggle gets amplified  not because the mechanics of taking a card out is more complex than quantum computing but we are(at least most of us) so busy getting ahead of ourselves preparing in our mind what to say after the card is handed out and the introduction perfunctory is dealt with. The flavour of the season of course is getting your contact details QR coded from the phone onto the other welcoming device ( sometimes non welcoming I dare add) and vice versa. It also helps you make a statement that you are take sorry…tech savvy. And you can keep up with the Janes and Jones’s.

 

 

The innocuous( or is it?) question that follows once the pleasantries are exchanged is what we are ranting about here. ” What Do You Do? ” and, in our quest to seek validation and create a lasting first impression go to town articulating the best of what you do, portray the best version of yourself and comply with the ‘ been there, done that narrative drill ‘ that we are expected to go shrill on. At the end of the 90 second spiel, you are either Elon Musk or Halloween‘s worst nightmare in disguise. Take your pick.

 

 

Compliance and complications overlap to a great degree, no pun intended here. As you echo your well practiced 60dB decibel of responding to ” What Do You Do? “, default memory and wanting to be alpha, dictates your conversation. And because it is so often used, heard, and in Red Ocean territory, you are on a platter offering an opportunity to the other person to ignore you or frame you as ‘un remarkable ‘, all of your own doing mind you. So stop wallowing in self pity!

 

 

” What Do You Do? ” question is a trap that we fall into more often than not. The response is by rote, unimaginative, me too and also ran, all at the same time. The well rehearsed linear journey monologue which by now should have ideally met its obituary. Release yourself from the imprisonment of the default, the established, expected, elevator pitch.

 

 

The brain remembers what it least expects, so deliver the unexpected! We don’t have to be Alan Sorkin to rewrite our script to answer the ” What Do You Do ? ” question. How about trying something like this. ” I am on a journey of continuous unlearning and learning, trying to satiate (without much success) my perennial curiosity, always in an explore and discover mode with an open mind to create work or art that matters to me and hopefully which should matter to an MVA(Minimum Viable Audience) as well. Showing up and generously shipping out, day after day “.  At the end of it, you might get a few frowns but I bet you would leave the other side with a hard to ignore or forget narrative.

 

 

Ever been to a jazz concert- you would witness practiced, well rehearsed pieces combining beautifully with improvised, on the feet dynamism. Improv classes anyone? ” Whose Line Is It Anyway? “, the cult Reality TV show can teach us a few things.

 

 

Where are we headed? An objective for a pre-determined end or to remain open to limitless possibilities?

 

 

Let me know “What Do You Do“..sorry “What Will You Do? ”

 

 

ENDS

Can We Take A New Staircase To The Elevator Pitch ?

 

A couple of weeks back, I was fortunate to be invited by a well respected University in the UAE to do a guest talk ( if it came across as ‘ guess talk ‘, my apologies) with their final year graduating students and some faculty members. Future engineers, management graduates, psychologists, economists, accountants, technologists etc constituted the diverse audience set. It was very gracious of them to invite me and I am grateful for the learning opportunity it provided.

 

 

Since a majority of the audience viz the students were on the cusp of going into industry after their graduation, one touchpoint of the engagement centered around what is conventionally called ‘ the elevator pitch ‘.

 

 

What is an elevator pitch?

 

 

Not that it maybe needed but outlining here what an elevator pitch is : An elevator pitch is a brief (think 30 seconds!) way of introducing yourself, getting across a key point or two, and making a connection with someone. It’s called an elevator pitch because it takes roughly the amount of time you’d spend riding an elevator with someone.

 

 

Psychology 101 would argue that the brain remembers what it least expects, so deliver the unexpected. So, the typical elevator pitch would be mostly about ‘ I, me, myself..blah blah blah…and more blah blah blah’. Hence, often times failing to get the acknowledgment, respect and setting the foundation for keeping the conversation going well after the elevator doors have closed, metaphorically speaking.

 

 

So, how do we disembark on the correct floor of onwards, upwards and progress? How about a dose of ‘ pattern interrupt‘ ?

 

 

What is a ‘ pattern interrupt? ‘

 

 

A pattern interrupt, put simply, is anything that surprises the person you’re talking to. Prospects expect certain things from salespeople. By breaking the mold, you’ll alter their apprehensive state and make them much more receptive to you.

 

 

Which is exactly what you are seeking to do in an elevator pitch. Except what you do here is focus on the person on the person that you are talking to and make it about her occupation, interests etc etc rather than be about you being the best, the tallest, the fattest…

 

 

Originating from neuro-linguistic programming, pattern interrupt involves recognizing an unwanted pattern, disrupting it, and leading someone to the desired behavior.

 

 

A study conducted at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology by Dr Ellen Langer is worth looking into. The study exposed a senior male group of participants to be away from routines at home and nursing facilities, to live for a week in an environment that was physically similar to where they had lived when they were younger. They discussed historical events as if they were current news( the power of active communication), took care of their own ADLs( Activities of Daily Living) and personal needs, and shared photos of their younger selves. A week later, they showed improvement in physical strength, manual dexterity, posture, perception, memory, cognition, taste sensitivity, hearing, and vision. They even showed improved scores on IQ testing. Visual cues within our environment serve as reminders of memories and functioning.

 

 

It is good to perennially question convention to make things better. Probably mandatory. Because the world is desperate for new thinking and therefore new possibilities.

 

 

Ready for some OTISm? And students, as you get ready to step into the real world, how about creating your anti-resume? And borrow richly from the idea of pattern interrupt in so doing!

 

 

ENDS