Tag Archives: MondayMorningWakeUpCall

I Don’t Know

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“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is I know nothing” – Plato #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Ignorance is bliss

Ignorance is bliss

“I don’t know.” It’s one of the most under-rated and under-used sentences in our lives. More so I suspect, in our corporate/professional lives. Quite likely because we are ashamed and afraid (sometimes rightly so) of being judged as ignoramuses, by bosses, colleagues and team-mates, who know no better; who expect you to know all the answers.

But we need to realize it’s impossible to know all the answers. Cos learning is an endless process. (Oops! Didn’t mean to break the news to you this way!)

And the moment we know (or pretend to know) all the answers, we are setting ourselves up for ignorance.

Hint: Chances are though that if you are good at your vocation and confident about your expertise, you will also be confident about confessing lack of knowledge on what you don’t know.

Same is true for questions and answers about life.

Let’s Be Firemen

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Where there is a fire, there is an opportunity to rise higher #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Fire Fighting In The Corporate World

Staying Calm: The Solution To Saving Unnecessary Harm

Pop Quiz: If you saw a fire burst out in your house would your first reaction be to put it out or would it be to argue and investigate what caused the fire while it hungrily swallows everything in its path?

I’m hoping you would choose the former option.

In our daily corporate lives (and dare I say personal lives), we encounter situations which require fixing fires, the ones that haven’t been lit to keep us warm. And while the obvious action is to put the fire out immediately, before it paints scars that create Two-Face monsters, the reality is far from what is obvious.

In the throes of the heat we do everything but solve the problem. We panic, we play ‘passing the blame’, we cry and we waste precious time demanding (and God forbid, arguing) over reasons for the cause, all while the damage doubles by the minute.

Panicking, getting angry, crying, passing the blame or screaming your lungs out on an incompetent call centre agent to find reasons just adds fuel to the fire. As clear as this seems, in actuality, the smoke clouds our ability in taking the obvious action.

It is in these situations when you can take a leaf out of the book of firemen. Pretend you can be a hero just like them too, by emulating how they calmly control the chaos, fix the fire/problem first and then go about investigating the cause.

Easier said than done. While it’s an under-rated skill, it’s an essential one to develop I would say.

 A related aside:

(I’ve written this post fresh from one such experience – we just spent a harrowing 48 hours fixing a problem caused by our hosting service providers, Hostgator. Due to some technical problems at their end, our portal faced a downtime of close to 48 hours. I’m also using this as an opportunity to warn anybody thinking of taking their services. Please think several 100 times before signing up with them.

  1. They were incompetent –
    1. Didn’t know what the problem was (after 4 days we still don’t know what went wrong)
    2. Couldn’t give us an estimate of how long it would take to solve the problem
  2. They didn’t care that our portal was facing unknown hours of downtime, that our business and brand image could be suffering –
    1. Offered no alternate solution (they could have easily given us an alternate VPS server, especially since they had no clue how long it would take to solve the problem and added to this,
    2. they had the audacity to say that they were looking into our case on priority cos we had escalated the issue, as opposed to customer who hadn’t escalated it).
    3. And of course there has been no apology, no intent of any compensation
  3. They couldn’t be trusted – there was zero transparency.
    1. Despite our repeated requests, not once could we speak to any of the tech guys who were actually working on the problem, assuming someone was (as their policy doesn’t allow it)
    2. When they said they were ‘done’, they restored the site to a 2 week old snapshot, losing all our data of the past 2 weeks. Thankfully, we had a more current backup and were able to retrieve it and get back in business

The ‘Not-So-Sweet’ Reason For Obesity

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There would be fewer obese people if we didn’t sugar coat everything we said #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

The not-so-sweet reason for obesity

May not be so sweet in the long run

I suspect that in the quest of sugar coating bitter truths 2 things happen –

  • First, sometimes the potency of the message gets lost, especially for delusional people like me who think they can do no wrong
  • Second, again for people like me who are incapable of reading between lines, the entire message might get lost (and you’ll find us repeating the same ‘mistake’)

Even for the person delivering the sugar-coated dessert, it’s just sometimes plain easier, simpler and less stressful to concoct sentences that will not hurt others.

So why take so much effort in sugar-coating? I guess the answer is a combination of not wanting to hurt another human and to not come across as a bad person.

But you are being a bad person if you are choosing to be liked rather than to be completely honest. And you are hurting another human if you are picking your short-term benefit over someone else’s long term betterment.

Which doesn’t mean that you have to be mean or malicious. That’s just plain cruel. It just means be straight with the other person and back it up with reasons for your actions/decisions/statements. A simple explanation can sometimes be the difference between helping the person move forward or leaving the person to a lifetime of trauma and turmoil, battling demons in the head.

Warning: This also means that we all have to gear up to happily face the truth rather than be unhappily oblivious of it.

This becomes easier if you remind yourself “Satyameva Jayate” or “Truth Alone Triumphs”

Let’s Score Some Goals

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“A goal without a plan is just a wish” – Antoine de Saint Exupery #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Goals

It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s not as difficult as you think.

The best way to score some goals is to put together a plan for it. The best way to go after a plan is to put some deadlines to it. One of the tricky parts is setting deadlines.

Set a deadline that’s too difficult and you just might drop dead. Set an artificial (read impossible) deadline and you won’t even care when it whooshes past you. Set a deadline that doesn’t challenge you and Parkinson’s Law (“work expands to fill in time”) will take over, you won’t ever learn your potential.

The best way I’ve found to set real deadlines is to break up the plan into small chunks and create estimates of how long I think they’ll take. It fundamentally requires just some thinking through. In instances when I’m doing something for the 1st time then I either google it to get a sense of what the task involves or figure how long others would probably take for it by googling or even asking around.

Like any skill, the more you practice, the better you become. I’ve found this a very handy skill cos I’d rather set my own deadlines than allow anyone else to put a gun on my head and shoot me dead. It also gives me the confidence to push back on unreal deadlines if I’ve thought a plan through.

You of course could also argue why do you need to set any goals. I guess that’s fine as long as you don’t have any wishes. But if you are like most people, wishing upon every star that falls, then the wish will go into motion only when YOU go into motion.

Cos like Scott Adams puts it, “Wishing starts in the mind and stays there.”

That’s just a waste of a wish, isn’t it?

Metrics That Matter

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Building a company without looking at any metrics is like sailing the stormy seas without a GPS, you might burn all your fuel and realize that you’re still in the same spot #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

And it’s equally important to measure metrics that matter, not metrics that are easy to drive or the ones that look good. There’s no point getting thrilled by looking at your odometer touch 100 knots/hr when your fuel tank reads a big red ‘E’.

So a million page views and thousands of FB likes may mean nought if your visitors aren’t becoming family.

Wise Advice

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Wisdom is following your own advice #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Wisdom

I came across this line somewhere. It stayed with me. We are so often so quick to tell others what to do or not do but how often do we really practice what we preach?

It’s also not always easy to stay true to our lofty principles when we are faced with moments of truth. Plus we are also very good at conning ourselves, justifying our actions.

Which is why, every time you can follow the advice you give others, which in fact is your own advice to yourself in a similar experience, true learning and wisdom will more likely follow.

After all, experience helps you look at life through an unfiltered lens.

Fight Song

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Fight Song by Rachel Platten

“There’s still a lot of fight left in me”

#MondayMorningWakeUpCall I might have only one match but I can make an explosion – Fight Song by Rachel Platten

Find me a person who hasn’t had to fight through life before (and very often after) fame and fortune kissed her and I shall find you a magic lamp that exists outside our imagination.

Rachel Platten is on her way to fame and fortune’s exclusive party. She got invited only after she wrote a song to remind her that no matter how little her music got celebrated or how much she got punched, she believed in herself and she would continue to make music even if it was just for her ears only.

Rachel Platten released her first independent album in 2003 and since then has spent the last 12 years scrapping for gigs, grinding out small tours and trying to figure out how to make a dent in the music industry.

In an interview she mentioned “I wrote ‘Fight Song’ at a real low moment of feeling like, ‘Should I quit? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was deluding myself.’ There weren’t a lot of signs to keep going. But something in me — this tiny little crazy voice — would not let me quit. That song was the apex of that moment where it was like, ‘You are not quitting. If nobody else believes in you, you have to believe in yourself.'”

So if the song’s helped her get out of bed even on dark and depressing days with gusto, then I’m guessing, for a manic or no-manic Monday, what better #MondayMorningWakeUpCall could there be to punch through the week with a Fight Song playing in our head.

Hint: The trick however methinks is to not fight. More musings on this puzzling paradox another Monday morning. Till then, thank you Rachel Platten for your Fight Song.

Destiny is not the enemy

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Destiny is a myth. Write your own story. #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Destiny

Destiny is not the enemy!

How do you know your life is pre-destined? Or it’s not for that matter? In fact how does it even matter?

So why make destiny   
Your ‘blame it on her’ enemy,
For any of your tragedy?
Rather create your own symphony,
And live life in harmony.   

Wouldn’t you say?

Cry Knowledge, Cry Wolf

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Knowledge is wolf in wisdom’s clothing #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

MondayMorningWakeUpcall

Beware the wolf who cries knowledge

Charles Spurgeon, an 18th century British Baptist Preacher explains my MondayMorningWakeUpCall beautifully. He says, “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great than a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom”

We laud people who can quote facts, figures and aphorisms. We applaud people who seem to know the GDP, foreign policy, capital and currency of countries we never knew existed. We glorify people whose vast knowledge lives can pledge.

Knowledge has become (probably has always been) a measure of a person’s intelligence. But if you truly deeply madly ponder over how knowledge about the world at large really helps you as an individual, you might not come up with a better answer than “to avoid being perceived as a dumb bimbette if I cannot converse on a topic.” At least I couldn’t come up with a better answer.

How else does it matter if you don’t know what the Vyapam scam is about, who won the IPL or woe betide, who’s the President of India other than being judged as the uncoolest of dinosaurs, the ignoramasaurus.

Case to point – before judging Alia Bhatt as an ignoramasaurus on her infamous response on Koffee with Karan (President of India is Prithviraj Chavan), it might be helpful to remind yourself that she probably earns more than you do, is more famous than you might ever be, and is making a living doing what she loves.

Even Sherlock Holmes, or at least Arthur C. Doyle shares the same view point (I would presume from a dialogue exchange between Holmes and Watson)

Sherlock Holmes: Look, it doesn’t matter to me who’s prime minister, or who’s sleeping with who…

Dr. Watson: [quietly] Or whether the Earth goes round the Sun.

Sherlock Holmes: Oh God that again. It’s not important.

Dr. Watson: Not important? It’s primary school stuff. How can you not know that?

I am not advocating ignorance. If any topic/subject impacts you directly in your personal or professional life, then yes it is worthwhile delving deeper in the subject to appear erudite. After all, if you’re working as a Digital marketing professional and you are clueless about ‘periscope’, then you know why you didn’t ace that job interview.

Nor am I discouraging satiating your curiosity across any inane minutiae even if it may kill you.

But I am advocating questioning the precious time you spend on filling your mind with worthless junk (news in my mind is the unhealthiest of them all). After all, if you see time like I do, as a diminishing commodity, then I would rather spend it on improving my ‘knowledge’ on my vocation and nonsense that may help lead a more productive and fulfilling life, rather than on life, the universe and everything (cos the answer anyway is 42)

In fact, long before Google was a verb, Einstein figured “I don’t need to know everything, I just need to know where to find it.”

The potty of gold

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Why chase a phantasmal pot when you can be a zot #MondayMorningWakeUpCall

Sing even if you can’t sell your songs

Paint even if there’s no one to purchase your paintings

Love even if it is a love that is lost

Write even if no one reads your rhymes

Race even if you reap no rewards

Once you experience the joy of singing, painting, loving, writing, racing, doing just about anything simply for the love of it, you lose yourself in your labour. It is when you become one with your vocation and time ceases to exist.

And when you experience the magic of oneness, it’s unlikely that you will crave the phantasmal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Which sometimes even turns out to be more like a potty of gold.

The rainbow itself becomes the reward.