Winning back my life by reading two great books

After I decided to quit my job just over a year ago, I struggled for some time with regaining control over my life. For most of my work life, I have been dragged about by the whirlwind of the corporate work-style. Everything is urgent, and that pretty much leaves no time for the important. The urgency gave me the warm and fuzzy feeling of being busy. Yet, at the end of every day, I really hadn’t worked on the important, because the important requires time to think and the urgent takes away all of that time.

This was really about being in control of what I was doing with my time. And being in control is about saying what you will do, and doing what you have said. So I turned to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don’t need to say much about the book except if you have read it, apply the learning, and if you haven’t read it, then get a copy or attend a 7 Habits program in the neighborhood.

The models in the book helped me with practical structures to sift out the important from the urgent, and all that was neither. It brought focus and discipline, and soon, at the end of a day, I felt fulfilled if I had done what I set out to do. The real challenge was in differentiating the urgent from the important.

That’s when I read another fab book titled Quiet Leadership. It’s by David Rock who founded and still runs a company called Results Coaching Systems. The best results would have been if I had someone to take me through the processes in the book, but I managed quite well just by myself.

Done well, the models seriously challenge your thinking. You brainstorm and whiteboard whatever is top of mind for you. Then you force yourself to pick 3 of the dozens of things that are absolutely killing you. Usually it’s hard to do that. But it works if you club common things or sub-points, and simply eliminate some stuff. But don’t pick even one more than 3. Make sure these are things you will be proud of if you achieve them, as in stuff you will talk about and people will go WOW! It works if you create statements with a clear, measurable outcome at the end of a defined period. For example, I want to move X to Y by the end of March. You got your causes! Do a check again. If any of the statements you created results in a Ho Hum response, redo them!

The next step is to identify the 2-3 things you need to do to make each of those causes happen. You could look at these as lead indicators. For example, if your smashing goal is to run a 5 minute mile 1 year from now, your lead indicators could be getting into 3 days of weight training a week, running 3 miles a day and appointing a running coach. Then your everyday goal would have the daily breakdown of these things in the 7 Habits framework.

At the end of the exercise, you will get over the dilemma of differentiating between the urgent and the important. And as you practice this day after day, for goal after goal, watch the control you get over yourself. Watch the most difficult thing in life happen – a change in your habits to achieve what you really want to do. The stress caused by the whirlwind will go out of the window, and you will work only on things that are important. And at the end of each day, you will be satisfied about saying what you will do, and doing what you have said.

India’s “Qualified Uneducated”

The Wanton Waste of Human Potential

Today’s news articles on DU’s first cut-off list got me off my seat, if only because something I had felt strongly about for a long time landed a swift one on the seat of my pants, and the sting was hard to ignore. SRCC asked for a 100% score on the Class XII exam for an admission to their B.Com Honors course. Not to be outdone, Hindu asked for 99%. Till this morning, I held these institutions in awe. At this time, I am questioning my sense of judgment in this matter, and, indeed, my intelligence.

These two colleges, and indeed many others around them, are supposed to be places we send our kids to get educated. I felt too lazy to look up the dictionary, so I just used the right mouse button on Microsoft Word for “educated” and looked up the synonyms. Here’s what I got

1.       Cultured

2.       Knowledgeable

3.       Well-informed

4.       Well-read

5.       Sophisticated

6.       Skilled

7.       Learned

8.       Erudite

I just found it interesting enough to ponder how many of these 8 qualities our education system imbibes in our students, and by consequence, to the people of this country.

The Race for the Degree

We believe, at least we’re told, that India has a good education system. It creates more engineering and management graduates than most other countries in the world. Our kids are good at Math, and its got Barack Obama all worried about the future of America, because Indian kids consistently beat their American brethren at Math and spelling. We read this stuff in the news ever so often.

Seeing the way Indian universities, in particular the ones in our metros, work their trade,  I don’t think Barack Obama should be worried. Kapil Sibal should. Here’s why.

Our education system doesn’t educate people. Our educators only teach subject matter. Our students don’t learn, they only accumulate degrees. We have incredibly successful training academies that prepare students not for engineering, but for how to crack the IIT-JEE; not for management, but for how to crack the CAT. Consequently, the ones who are successful are mostly those who crack the examination code and not necessarily the ones who really do learn, or have the potential to. Science students accumulate Commerce and Management degrees. No one says they shouldn’t, but something is wrong when a number of students pick science subjects so they can score high marks, and then do an Economics or B.Com course. Some do get engineering degrees; later they go and get management degrees. So what engineers and mathematicians is Barack Obama sweating over? All our chaps will do is out-calculate and out-spell Barack’s chaps, then go and get a management degree and work for a bank run by one of Barack’s chaps. We need an education system to educate our kids, not a factory that churns out degree holders. We need an education system that encourages learning, not one that rewards kings of the multiple-choice question format.

Waste of Potential

Another reason for Kapil Sibal to worry a lot is the wanton waste of potential we indulge in year on year. After all, human potential is supposed to be our differentiator in the 21^st century. We already have a problem with the low numbers of well educated people in the country. Our economy is booming and it requires more and more qualified workers. We missed the manufacturing bus, so we need to have people who can fill service industry jobs. Yet the attempt to create capacity is pathetic, instead, we are creating more and more elitism with respect to colleges. So those amongst the work force who are best poised to fulfil the needs of the job market will either leave the country, or get pushed out of the opportunity to get a good education, and employers won't find the right people. That potential is squandered by the nation year after year. Look at where the United States is with 265 million people. And look where we are with 4 times that many people. The United States has spent energy and money on developing its human capital, and then enabled them to innovate. We are telling the young generation that they’re not good enough because they didn’t crack the code of scoring marks in an exam, not because they can’t innovate or be successful at something real.

I’ve heard a counter view. The counter view is that kids should learn to compete in the environment they live in. In my view, this is an anachronism. It may have been relevant 15-20 years ago when the country did not show the potential to flourish. Today it does, and our education system is choking that potential by not being inclusive and by being incapable or unwilling, or both, of developing the country's human capital. As a mute spectator, our government is an even bigger culprit, because human development is its job. If you do have the old “compete in the given environment” view, you may want to think about it. In our environment, wasting even one student with potential is a crime, and so we have to change the environment to one of inclusion where each student gets an opportunity to learn in a great institution, and not one where institutions do their utmost to keep people out. I believe going private is the way to create the scale to support this. Elimination of the elitist and exclusionary attitude of the best known DU institutions and colleges by creating more high quality capacity will force a rethink on their part.

Employers, too, contribute handsomely to the problem. As a hiring manager first, and as a member of a head hunting team, I have learnt a lot about the way employers think. The common refrain is if a potential employee is from a great school or company, chances are he will do a better job than someone who isn’t from a great school or company. At least the hiring manager won’t get into trouble for hiring great pedigree, whatever the performance of the candidate. In fact, in many cases, employers will look for a cultural fit, which basically means they want somebody like themselves. So, in effect, they place a premium on candidates from great schools or institutions and the what skills they have often become a secondary factor in decision making. In other words, employers often don’t believe in meritocracy. They believe in the process of elimination at best and downright elitism at worst. In many cases, employers, especially body-shoppers and even offshore development houses turn qualifications into a commodity and regularly sell a higher qualification at a lower price to their customers. A classic example is when an engineering graduate from India works on an IT helpdesk in a company based in the US.

I shudder to think what educators asking for 100% marks for admission will teach our next generation. They seem to have used their intelligence very sparingly in the first place. It’s no use for them to blame the system. They are the system. How many people get 100% marks? And if they do, how do they get those marks? I would put people with 90% marks or higher through some very stringent tests to understand whether they are really knowledgeable in their subjects, or did they train to score marks. If they did get those marks based on knowledge, I would spend a lot of time researching what makes them tick and create educational methods imbibing those learnings so that more kids could become real super stars. I really do fail to understand how someone can be equally adept at English, Math, Economics and Commerce to the extent of getting 100% in each subject. So what really is the game? Are they just creating a process of elimination because they don’t have enough seats? What about thier duty as educators? Do they not look beyond their noses, or in this specific instance, beyond the gates of SRCC? Why have they slept individually and collectively till this day? Why have they not created capacity till now? Or are they just plain arrogant? I suspect its more about posturing, elitism and exclusion to enhance the reputation of their institutions. If you’ve been to DU during admissions (25 years ago or now, it’s no different), they still don’t think it’s necessary to install a shamiana under which you can stand while waiting 2-3 hours to submit your form in 40+ degrees heat. You can forget about things like fans, water coolers or even utilizing large indoor facilities like auditoriums to sell and collect forms. These are the people who truly epitomize what I mean by the qualified uneducated.

So will we continue to create the “qualified uneducated”? Will we continue to create qualified engineers who sell soap or mutual funds? Will we continue to create degree holders who seldom if ever demonstrate any quality in their thought, word and action? The jury is out. I hope we can find a solution to this, otherwise we will have to find a differentiator for the 21^st century other than human capital. And suffer this arrogance and ineptitude every summer.

Cheers

Sanjiv

Are you struggling with the meaning of success? - Answers to some questions

Last week, I was blitzkrieged by the number of responses to the post sharing my experiences on the meaning of success. Thanks everybody who took the time to read and comment (24), “liked” (18) and forwarded (3) it. I tried to respond to each one individually, but then thought it is better to just go and write a sequel. I’m hoping this will be the only one J

I realize every individual has to deal with a unique situation, and therefore the uniqueness of the questions. Each one is important. For brevity, I’m highlighting two that came in early, and encapsulate quite a few things.

Renu Dhar “Great Sanjiv. You have put your thoughts nicely together. One thought i have do we have to wait till we are in 40's can't we balance it or do we have to leave one part of life to achieve the other part I am sure you must have gone through this phase do share your experiences.”

Ashish Uchil “Awesome Sir, my view goes a step further to your last line and a bit contrary " good idea to create your own definition of success and then achieve it "....by doing this, you would love the path to success, and if you love what you do. higher chances of achieving success, The moment you hit high strike rates, you are perceived to be successful, however – whoever looks at it! Makes sense?”

Before I write any more, I do want to clarify that I have permission from both Ashish and Renu to reproduce their comments in this post. I’m footnoting this because of my experience with Microsoft and exposure to its Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) team which has instilled this discipline. If you’re reading this and you’re from LCA, you’re winning! Naru hinted this should be titled “getting away from the rat race”, but I’m just keeping the title because it’s a sequel.

So Renu’s ponderings (not verbatim) are...

·         Is there a time or age when you start building the balance and defining success for yourself?

·         Is it necessary to sacrifice some part of what we do to be able to achieve the other part?

...and Ashish believes this needs a strong closure, namely

·         ...by doing this, you would love the path to success, and if you love what you do, there are higher chances of achieving success any which way you look at it.

Honestly, I never thought about whether there’s a good time/age to start. Let me tell you when I started. It may give you some idea. There were two distinct periods. I wasn’t very strong academically, and I have wondered since my school days whether I’m being successful or not. It continued well into my professional life. In the early part, I became really good at what I did. That built up a lot of self-belief. The obvious success meant I put everything into my job since I believed it was helping me out of the insecurity. But that may have been when things started working against me, without my realizing it.

I know that’s a contradiction, but it was the point where I created the one and only dimension of success in my mind – my job – and that stayed with me till several years later. As I dropped much of what I enjoyed and directed my energies in the sole pursuit of professional success, I laid the foundation for a mind that was kidnapped by its alter-ego, my other self. I believe my alter-ego had been fed on the uni-dimensional mantra of success – that which is achieved professionally and is represented by wealth, power, fame etc.  Essentially, that’s when I lost the balance. Two things I want to make clear here – first, I’m not looking for the enemy without; and second that there’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of wealth, power and fame. My alter-ego is mine to use the way I choose. It was being consumed by the “sole” pursuit and that’s what corrupted it.

Not all of us have that problem. The ones who do should reflect where they are if their issues are similar. That could be a great time and place to start working on rebuilding the balance.

On the point of having to sacrifice one for the other, I’ll go back to my heyday in professional life. I never felt the need for the balance. Everything was great. There was recognition, growth, wealth, some fame and power in a limited context. It’s just that at some point I realized that I had already sacrificed my balance. I needed to bring it back. My reason for making the change was that I was up to my ears with the way I was feeling about myself, and I wanted to do something about it urgently. That thought, or event, didn’t give me the freedom to leave what I was doing. Most of the time, old and painful things don’t go away. But to not let them consume us by creating new things that matter is important to keep the older things in their place and not let them consume us. I don’t view that as a sacrifice, but as an investment, and I don’t believe it’s one over the other.

 Has it had a positive impact – well, yes because I feel much better about myself. For example, I’ve relegated the “mine is bigger than yours” syndrome – I’m referring to house, car, bank balance, designation, team, company, alumnus, salary etc. – to one of the things I care about, not the only thing. That’s a big one. As a result of doing this, I have gotten rid of a property investment which I had made because it had the right social profile; I already have lesser debt; the worry of a Grade B house coming up opposite my balcony doesn’t trouble me as much, and so on. Instead, I’m making decisions better suited to my profile, and am less influenced by anybody else’s view. We all KNOW this, but it is different to ACT on it. So many people I know kid themselves about what importance the symbols of success have for them. For most of them, these symbols mean EVERYTHING, whatever be their public position. Let me reiterate, there’s nothing wrong to desire for symbols of success. It doesn’t even matter what they are. But making these the sole pursuit of our lives, or not understanding when that happens, can spell trouble. You can avoid this by adding things that really matter to you amongst your list of high priorities, and you could keep your successes in much better perspective more easily.

There are some things I’m not so sure about yet, because regaining the balance did mean doing some fundamental things very differently; it’s too early for me to say what the impact will be. It’s also evident that I will have to keep finding the balance, so there’s more work to do. But at least I realize that what was incredibly important to me 10 years ago is less important than some other things now, and I must tilt the balance if I want to have a free spirit, and not a mind abducted by my alter-ego.

Which brings me to Ashish’s comment.  

It’s a very simple and powerful point. I can say without a doubt that everything I have been successful at has been something I enjoyed doing. I read more, I worked longer, I learnt more, I fought harder, I believed in myself, and it just mattered so much more. I can still tell detailed stories from 10-15 years ago about things I enjoyed doing because the memories are so good, and because, surprisingly, so many of them ended in success. I’m glad I took the initiative to try and create more such stories for myself. My environment was no longer giving me those opportunities, so I decided to create my own. In business literature, authors extol the virtues of being passionate about what you do. Much of the literature has a use by date from the time of unpacking. I wish there was more about how to re-ignite that passion. I am on the lookout for creative new things to be passionate about, and to push use by dates into the future.

There’s some good reading on related subjects from an author called Marcus Buckingham. I’ve heard him once, and read some stuff he’s written. It’s inspiring. And if you haven’t already read it, try The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Renu presented me a copy; I still read it off and on.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. See you again.

Sanjiv.

Are you struggling with the meaning of success?

I originally wrote this more than a year ago on Rajiv Srivastava's blog. This is a word for word reproduction.

If this question isn’t haunting you, then you don’t want to read beyond this sentence. This will be more interesting to people like me who aren’t that sure.

For the first several years of my professional life, being successful was never a problem. I did well at almost everything, every employer I left wanted to retain me and I never had to look for a job because head hunters or old contacts came calling.

Then something changed. I didn’t try to switch my job so there’s no question of my employer trying to retain me, and head hunters did call, and for all purposes, though not as fast as before, my career did move forward. But I just didn’t feel great any more. And then the doubting started…

At first, I refused to believe something was changing. I had an inkling that the change was that I wasn’t enjoying what I did as much as I did earlier. But I was in my early 40s with another 20 years or more of productive life before me. How could I accept that I was bored of what I had done till now? And I had no answer to what I would do over the next 20 years. No, this wasn’t acceptable. I would get over this tomorrow…but tomorrow never comes.

Several months later, I did accept that I wasn’t enjoying myself. No, I didn’t do a Harsha Bhogle. My experience is not the story you would publish in a magazine, but it did help me put a better perspective on what I meant by success. And after all that I have done, I feel a lot happier, and a lot more successful. I thought I’d share it with people who may be going through the same challenge.

The first thing I said to myself is that I would be brutally honest with myself. Many of the things I didn’t accept about myself in the past were because they were not hip and happening, and they were designed for acceptability in circles that mattered to the world I had submitted myself to. The only circle that should have mattered, and that didn’t, was me. The first of these was the narrow definition I had given to success. All it meant to me was which company I worked for, what my designation and level were and whether I was getting ahead in my career or not. Just how much of my success I had placed in the hands of people and dynamics that were driven by organizational politics, flavors of the day, and other such things that had little to do with how well I did and more to do with how the coin dropped at the toss.

I decided to change all that. But I couldn’t get around to relegating my career to the back burner. It still matters a lot to me, probably as much as it ever did. So I decided to keep it as a very high priority. But not the only one. I asked myself hard questions about what really mattered to me. Like all good, educated middle-class men, family came first. It’s a different story just how true it turned out to be but that’s another discussion and I will come to it at the right time. I did, by the way, include family. I eventually identified 7-8 aspects of my life which I had never bothered about earlier. There was my profession, my finances, my spiritual self, my physical self, how I wanted to be perceived by the world,  my emotional self and what challenges I wanted to throw at myself. Then I started putting down things that fit into these categories. I struggled quite a bit because there were overlaps. But eventually I worked out where I wanted to go with each of these aspects. So I set specific tasks – nothing very complex – but realistic tasks that I could achieve in 6 months and 12 months time. For example, in the physical self section, I set myself a goal of achieving a golf handicap of 14 (down from 18) in 6 months time. And I did.

So was I successful or not? Sure. And my handicap had everything to do with me, and nothing to do with anyone else. I felt in control, and I felt a sense of achievement and satisfaction. I’m your average corporate party animal. It seemed a bit incongruous for someone like me to have a spiritual goal. No, I don’t intend going into the Himalayas and meditating till there’s an anthill growing all over me. But nothing stopped me from setting a goal of reciting a specific mantra 1,00,000 times. I did. Not one, but two of them. Now I’m not sure it sounds like an achievement to you, but it did to me, and that’s the other big change that came over the way I was looking at success. Yes, what you think no longer matters, mate. Because in areas other than my profession, it is I who will judge achievement, not anyone else.

So is this the approach of a loser? I thought about that too, because I’m essentially competitive, and my last 20 years in a professional career in IT, mostly in American MNC’s, has ensured that line of thinking. Anyway, I tried to fight the thought away. But every day, I would think about my new “successes” and the way I was measuring them, and wondered if I was fooling myself into believing that I was achieving something meaningful. So I set about another exercise. I created a Word document titled “Me”, and I wrote down everything I have done that I’m proud of since I can remember, things that meant a lot to me when I did them. Some of those things are completing the Raid-de-Himalaya motor rally in 2007, took a hat-trick in a cricket match (all bowled) when in school, made a blemishless 10 minute speech on Clive Lloyd at age 8 before 200 people and so on. Can’t think of too many people who can say all of those things. And they were successes in things that had meaning for me. So that helped me understand that if I consider myself the center of the universe, then things that matter to me are more important than things that matter to others. And if I’m being successful at achieving those things, then where’s the question of whether those things are meaningful or not; of course they are!

 There’s actually 20 odd things I wrote down. I already know the 21st. I’m going to make a list of 100 things I want to do before I die; if I do 50, I’ll die a happy man, more importantly, a successful man!

Go take your success into your own hands. I’m not advocating you give up or slow down on what you do. But try not to make only what the world sees as success as your benchmark. Its a good idea to create your own definition of success and then achieve it. This is not a new idea. It’s just my experience of living through it.

Golden question. Do I consider myself a success now? Not completely, but I have many more open roads to success now than the solitary one I saw a year ago, and that one had a menacing roadblock along the way.
I am sure this will help some people form their own thoughts and routes to how they want to view success.

Here’s wishing them success!
best wishes
sanjiv