The Infinite Power of Finite Time!

Time is what we want most, but what we use worstWilliam Penn
We, as a culture, are yet to call time on the above reality.Though I have not read the book yet, I came across this Oliver Burkeman title ” Four Thousand Weeks “. That’s the number of weeks in the average lifespan. Some years ago, Dr Robert Cialdini wrote his seminal classic ‘ Principles of Persuasion ‘ in which he argued about The Scarcity Principle– Simply put, people want more of those things they can have less of.
Without meaning to read out the morbid act, let’s remind ourselves that we all have a finite amount of time- no matter whatever situation or stage of life we are in. If we are ready to wake up to this smell of the coffee, the temptation would be very high to extract the maximum, do more, zero in on efficiency hacks to up the ante and all and more of that. That said, if we aim to do that, we might be on the wrong track.
Most of us live with the stubborn idea that we’ll always have tomorrow. But sooner or later all of our tomorrows will run out. It is finite.
Let the above not become a debilitating thought. Rather, use that as an invigorating tool to design the life that you want to liveTo distill the trivial many to focus on the vital fewTo amp up courage to take the outrageous moonshots that you were afraid to take. To give you the spunk that can go down to your every bone.

Probably, the route to take would be the  ‘ disciplined pursuit of less but better‘. What author Greg McKeown calls ‘ Essentialism ‘.

 

We have: One life to live. One life to die. One life to learn and practice what you have learnt. One life to learn multiple skills, arts, hobbies, sports…multiple professions. One life to experience joy in what you perform. One life to share, give, pass on, teach and donate so that you die empty but Rich every which way.

 

“ The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.”- so said Les Brown. And what a telling commentary that is on the ‘ ground reality ‘ .

 

Contemplating your own mortality can help you prioritize what’s truly important and live with greater purpose and meaning. Time to move the needle from living a life of endless efficiency and start living a life that really matters.

 

I had the good fortune to interview Todd Henry, author of the book ‘ Die Empty ‘  for BrandKnew and if you are interested you can watch the interview here .

 

ENDS

 

 

 

WANTED: Editor-in-Chief: For LIFE!

 

I was never even mediocre at either math or arithmetic. Hence, if this fails to add up, I am completely at home with it.

 

So the writer who breeds more words than she needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads ” – so said Dr. Seuss.

 

Every year at the Oscars, the award for Best Picture gets all the fanfare( a couple of year ago, of course Will Smith had other ideas). That may be stating the obvious. What might be not so obvious is in contrast, the award for film editing flies under the radar. But you may be surprised by the correlation between these two awards.

 

Since 1981, only three films have won “Best Picture” without also being nominated for “Best Film Editing”.

 

Why is editing so crucial in filmmaking?

 

A good film editor removes distractions by eliminating trivial or irrelevant things. She uses deliberate subtraction to add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

 

The best films are exceptional not because of what we see but because of what we don’t see.

We can draw parallels here. And use the same principles to edit our own lives. We might be from Mars or Venus but on Mother Earth our never ending to-do list need not be a perennial match for our Herculean, Machiavellian competence and calibre that we seem to have been willy nilly blessed(cursed?) with. Probably there is a space to begin by ‘ separating the vital few from the trivial many ‘. The over ignored practice of essentialism.
Mind you, this is no easy task. To distill and rein in our incorrigibly elastic task list. How will we answer our ego? Or camouflage our insecurities? We find comfort in “keeping our options open”. But having too many options leaves us without direction. Having a few focused options gives our life a clear direction and makes decision-making easier.
Eventually, every cut ​we​ make brings joy. Maybe not in the moment, but soon ​we​ will realize the time ​we have​ gained can now be spent on something better.
​We, as people, ​systematically overlook subtractive changes, instead following ​our​ instincts to add. There is nothing inherently wrong with adding. But if it becomes a default path to improvement, that may be failing to consider a whole class of other opportunities​.
The paltry rate of subtraction in our ​life or ​organizational-improvement​ journey is appalling.​ To improve a redundant piece of writing, few produce an edit with fewer words. To improve a jam-packed travel itinerary, ​we hardly remove events or places to​ allow ​us​ to savor the ones that remained. To improve a Lego structure, ​we hardly take​ pieces away. Whether ​we​ ​a​re changing ideas, situations, or objects, the dominant tendency ​i​​s to do so by adding.
​In an increasingly attention starved​, attention craving economy, subtraction ​h​as a ​noticeability ​​​p​roblem​. When we add things, apparently it gets noticed. But when we subtract..we seem to miss the point.
Life has a way of taking over. We start running on auto-pilot especially when we are overwhelmed, in over our heads, or simply worn out from all that life is throwing our way. And this year, life is throwing more than ever our way.
After a while of trying to keep all the balls in the air, we stop paying attention and simply start reacting. Amidst all the chaos, we know something has to change, but we don’t know what or how.
When was the last time ‘ nurturing our heart and soul ‘ was part of our to-do list? It hardly make​s​ the list of things to take care of during the day. If ​we​ prioritize the nurturing of our heart and soul, by taking time to listen to what they want, by engaging in soul-soothing activities and by using them to guide our actions, ​we​ ​can​ get our life back. ​We​’ll remember who ​we​ are​(otherwise in the stage called life​,​ we are all practicing ‘ selective amnesia ‘)​ and begin to attract people and projects that are a perfect fit for the real ​us​.
S​o what is the take away? ​Yes, you guessed it, take away, to make way!
BEGINS

RIP Productivity? Productivity Is Not Working!

ESSENTIALism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Sounds blasphemous in this day and age. The art of separating the trivial many from the vital few. A few years ago, I came across this fascinating book and after a gentle outreach and gracious response from Greg McKeown, the author, had me falling for the content Book, Line and Sinker.

Turn the caption statement around: Working is Not Productivity. The message once(and even now) was loud and clear. Relentless self-optimisation was a way to cope, but is it really? Humans are NOT search engines !

There has been always something obscene about the cult of the hustle, the treadmill of alienated insecurity that tells you that the moment you stop running for even an instant, you will be flung flat on your face.

Productivity is not a synonym for health or safety or sanity. I will go onto add that frantic productivity is actually a fear response. It’s a fear response for 21st-century humans in general and millennial humans in particular.

Productivity, or the lack of it, has become the individual metric of choice for coping with the international econo-pathological clusterfuck of the Corona Crisis. Talk about self optimisation: how do we do that and meet deadlines amidst settling our fighting kids, demanding colleagues and handling our screaming inner critics in the name of introspection? You are fortunate to have a roof over your head and you are also expected to use  ‘ this time ‘ to write blogs, launch your podcast and personal kept in the back burner projects and life-hack our way to some cargo-cult pastiche of normality, and if not, are we somehow letting the side down?

Arbeit Macht Frei. Meaning work sets you free. These words first appeared in an 1873 German novel. And later got adopted by Nazis as a slogan. The mantra of work as freedom or a magical route to happiness has proved incredibly resilient. But, as the corona virus crisis is exposing all over again: for billions of people work is none of these things.The reality is that for billions of people around the world , work is a tightrope walk oscillating between indignity and survival. Happiness as the byproduct of the work you do will come across a masterful con job for many.The task on hand now and onerous at that, is to push for a new narrative for work based not on happiness but humanity.

Questions have an in built audacity to be more interesting than answers. And in the febrile weeks and months that have followed the advent of the Covid-19 lockdowns, the one question that went unabashedly viral was: how do we stay productive when the entire world is going to hell? The virus has upset the human micro biome in an epochal act of strategic surprise.

A whole generation leaned on the fragile learning that relentless work was the way to cope with a rolling crisis with the mood of imminent collapse and economic insecurity that was the piped elevator music of the youth- the relentless tug of war between trying to save yourself and trying to save the world, between desperate aspiration and actual hope.

There could be multiple reasons that we are panicking about work: about to be furloughed or sidelined; or already lost a job. And you are playing catch up(sounds familiar?). Or if you have managed to retain one, you are apprehensive about the long term. And if everything is hunky dory, you are battling at the coat tails of ‘ survivor’s guilt ‘.

We now have a packed schedule: washing up, cooking, cleaning, being a sounding board, lending a helping hand, community work, countless video conference calls with people you have ever and never met and at the end of it hiding in bed hoping that history can’t hear you breathing.

People are working harder than ever but a lot of the work does not fall under the traditional sense of the term ‘ productive ‘. They just don’t count on the ledger of human worth because the economy refuses to value them in its reckoning of what does, because most of it has been done in private, by women, for ages, for free. Making breakfast, making the beds, making sure your friends and family aren’t losing their absolute minds is work that matters more than ever and will continue to matter in the coming decades as crisis follows crisis. It is not “productive,” in the way that most of us have learned to understand what that word means, but it is work, and it is really really worthwhile.

WFH(Work From Home) has seamlessly and unapologetically moved onto W(Work). Geography has become history!

For all those who flaunt their workaholic badges of honor and condescendingly accept the various neurotic flavors that comes with it, let’s come to terms with the fact that we have been conditioned to think that work in the laissez faire zeitgeist is about hyper vigilance. It’s about what happens to people when they are trapped in abusive circumstances and cannot escape. Psychologist Judith Herman observed that “the ultimate effect of [psychological domination] is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance.” We haven’t been able to shrug off the mega legacy of the Industrial Age: Compliance. Phew!

The idea that hustling can save you from calamity is an article of faith, not fact—and the Covid-19 pandemic is starting to shake the collective faith in individual striving. The doctrine of “workism” places the blame for global catastrophe squarely on the individual: If you can’t get a job because jobs aren’t there, you must be lazy, or not hustling hard enough. That’s the story that young and young-ish people tell themselves, even as they have spent the whole of their brief, broke working lives paying for the mistakes of the old, rich, and stupid. They internalized the collective failures of the ruling class as personal failings that could be fixed by working smarter, or harder, or both—because that, at least, meant that they might be able to fix them themselves. Completely Unfair!

After the quarantine, after we count the lives lost or ruined, recession is coming. A big one. For many, especially millennials, it’s the second devastating economic calamity in their short working lives( the first being the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-9), and they are still carrying the trauma of the first. This time, though, they know it’s not their fault. This time it’s abundantly clear that they don’t deserve it. And this is exactly the sort of crisis that gives people ideas about overturning the social order.

The cult of productivity doesn’t have an answer for this crisis. Self-optimizing will not save us this time, although saying so feels surprisingly blasphemous. There is nothing counterrevolutionary about keeping busy. But right now, we have a finite opportunity to rethink how we value ourselves, to re-examine our metric for measuring the worth of human lives.

Time for ESSENTIALism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.

ENDS

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Decibel V/S Gospel

We have all done our bit of time management drills. Segregate the routine from the urgent from the important. What is urgent need not be important and even the other way around.

Distill the wheat from the chaff. The signal from the noise. Indulge in ‘ Essentialism ‘- separate the trivial many from the vital few.

Hearing and listening are not synonymous.

Given the surfeit of digital and social media options today, the noises that you hear can be overwhelming. It’s easy for anyone to be loud and consistently at that. The Big Bold all uppercase attention seeking subject line for example. Falling innocent prey to these high decibel badgering is a strong possibility.

What would be vital to understand is who are these loudest noise makers to whom you are lending your ears to ? And are you overlooking the more important constituents in your customer universe as you do that? Well worth an introspection.

The once in a blue moon random customer with Cartier expectations and Naif Road budgets might be the noisiest for sure but do not confuse them with the silent, committed, long term customer who delivers you over 90% of your business.

It’s not about the Paleto Principle. Neither is it about profitability and revenues but identifying, respecting and understanding whom we have set out to serve. And serving them the way they ought to be.

A loud noise will not be important and an important voice need not be loud. If they are well heard, they can be well healed. And leave you well heeled! And then it’s business as usual.

Distinguish the decibel from the gospel. Then all would be well.

ENDS

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