Month: February 2019

Wednesday, 9.12pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. – William Shakespeare

I’m on a bit of a hunt for blogs that justify my point of view.

Or, better still, blogs that have a point of view I can adopt.

Because the fact is most of us don’t really know what the right thing is to do.

We look to others – searching for clues to the ways in which they approach the world – to see if there are any lessons for us.

And this is an increasingly less diverse process as we are pulled inexorably to the few opinions that surface on Google.

For example, if you’re interested in people who write about technology and marketing in a relatively understandable way you’re pulled pretty quickly in the direction of 37 Signals / Basecamp and Seth Godin.

But then again, you find stuff like the picture above which I’ve adapted from one on Seth’s blog.

Today’s search actually started from a fairly innocuous point – I was wondering about how technology was being used for good.

Unsurprisingly others have thought about that as well – so you get Apps for Good and a grant funding programme called Tech for Good.

Which is perhaps a little too literal interpretation of what I was looking for.

Here’s the thing.

As techies, we get interested in the nuts and bolts of a thing.

Whether it’s useful or not is a side effect of curiosity.

But most people aren’t techies – but they like tasteful things.

For them, what’s important is the Art, with a capital A.

You find Art in good books, fine wines, elegant furniture and inspirational design.

Of course, there is technology in the background, behind the font engines and steam pressed wood, but no one sees it because they are too busy looking at the surface.

But if it isn’t Art – then it’s tacky and that’s junk.

It’s the difference between Lego and something that’s not Lego. It just doesn’t fit.

And of course, a lot of people make a profit by making tech tacky as well.

Think spam and cyber-crime and a bunch of other things the Internet has made it easier to find.

The question we need to ask ourselves, if we sell ourselves on being a business that uses tech, is which side of the tasteful / tacky line we’re on.

You’ve got to think about whether your business model is based on long-term value or short term opportunism.

Because that’s going to drive the way you pitch and present yourself.

You’ll experience this if you have a conversation with a really pushy salesperson who has been taught that the way to win is to keep you on the phone and sell you again and again on what they want regardless of what you say.

If it’s something you really want or need you don’t need the sales call.

You want to buy – and you’ll do it the easiest way you can.

If you don’t then you’re in for a draining conversation.

As someone said, in any sales call, someone ends up selling something.

Either the caller sells you that you need what they want or you sell the caller that you don’t.

In today’s world a pushy sales call is the audio equivalent of spam.

And it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing that because all the models we see of how sales is done emphasise the hard sell.

But the businesses that go the distance are the ones that can do the tasteful sell.

The ones where referrals bring in most of the business because you’ve done the hard work over the years of doing good for your customers.

Because when it comes down to it, we all know what good is.

As Robert M. Pirsig wrote in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions. – Bremer Acosta, Stoic Practice

Some people are very sure of their place in the world and what they are here to do.

Some of us are less certain.

Certainty is a form of faith – a belief that needs no proof and is just accepted as true.

Which makes it hard to tell whether that faith really is true or if it’s misplaced.

And that makes it uncertain.

You may experience a similar problem when you try and think about how to describe yourself.

Are you where you are right now?

Or are you where you are going?

For example, if you work in an office doing analytical work but you really want to be a musician and spend all your evenings and weekends working on that, are you an analyst or a musician?

The Uncertainty Principle talks about two things – where you are and where you’re going.

And the more you know about one the less you can be certain of the other.

In a quantum world anyway – in a physical sense.

In the real world, the physics stops being an issue but that doesn’t stop us moving the principle into our mental worlds.

I copied the picture above from a cartoon because it expresses the uncertainty in life pretty well.

We spend most of our days being uncertain.

Uncertain of what customers want, what our partners want and what our pets want.

In business, especially, a lot of work goes into trying to remove uncertainty by making work transactional.

Something transactional can be reduced to the simple act of exchanging something well defined for money – a commodity trade.

And there are good arguments for going that way.

Many markets are opaque, hard to understand and don’t have good information – making it possible for people to take fees for helping you out.

Any market like that is an opportunity for someone who has the ability to open things up by using information.

Of course, that doesn’t remove uncertainty – it just reduces it or, more importantly, reduces the impact it has on you.

Take shopping on Amazon or Ebay for example.

Do you expect to get the best price always?

Or do you stop looking when it appears that what you have is cheap looking at the other options on the screen in front of you?

So what does this mean for you and me – how can you use uncertainty strategically?

First, here’s the bad way.

Many people believe that the way to get ahead is to project an aura of certainty.

That’s a salesperson’s training.

Believe in the product, believe in yourself and the self-talk will make the world bend to your will.

If you’re pitching and someone finds a flaw in your argument plough on regardless – your certainty and determination will get people to buy into you.

The second approach, and perhaps the more strategic one, is to look at the future as a distribution of possibilities.

You are – you have to be uncertain of the outcome.

There’s no other way to exist and be honest about the way things are.

But what you can do is reduce uncertainty – and you do that by combining distributions.

If you’re not into the math that probably doesn’t make any sense but remember what Scott Adams said about why Dilbert, his cartoon series, took off.

He was an average writer, an average artist and knew an average amount about engineering.

A career in each of those fields has a fairly wide probability distribution and his chances of wild success would have been low.

But, when you combined the three, you ended up with a much narrower distribution – how many people write and draw a cartoon strip about engineers?

What he didn’t do was create a niche in writing – for example focusing on science fiction.

He created a category all to himself by combining three normally unrelated things.

And the mathematical term for what this results in is confidence – something that in the real world also works very well.

In a nutshell, making your pitch on your certainty is asking people to believe in you.

Making your pitch on confidence is showing people how you have narrowed the range of possible outcomes.

Which do you think has a better chance of succeeding?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.09pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. – Rumi

Management has to be one of the most pointless activities out there.

Who would willingly become a manager?

Become someone who has to watch others doing work and try and get the best out of them?

After all, managing oneself is hard enough without being responsible for other people.

One of the worst ideas in management is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Think of something – anything that is good in the world.

How many of them were “managed” into existence?

Trees? Animals? Your family? Art? Books? Jeans?

A seed doesn’t need to be managed into existence.

You don’t need to measure and report key performance indicators.

Given the right conditions it just grows.

Wouldn’t you rather find the right person that wants to do work you need to get done and let them get on with doing a good job?

Wouldn’t that be preferable to managing them?

Thinking of life or business like gardening rather than managing may be a good idea.

Your job becomes one of planting seeds and nurturing them, protecting them and letting them grow.

Or, if you’re trying to change, your job is to find the right seed – the right behaviour, approach or strategy that will make a difference.

Then you need to make it ridiculously easy to do – you need to think small.

Big things are too big to keep in your head – too big to fight.

It’s too easy to give up when you have a big challenge.

Like running a marathon when you haven’t jogged in twenty years.

You need to start with something smaller – like walking every day.

And when you change you’re going to fail or not see results as fast as you want.

You could say, “I’ve been training for two weeks but I’m not getting any faster.”

Using the word but stops you in your tracks.

There’s nowhere to go from there.

Or you could say, “I’ve been training for two weeks and I’m not getting any faster.”

Using the word “and” seems unfinished. It feels like the word “yet” is missing from the end of that sentence.

You aren’t faster yet.

But you will be.

As long as you keep showing up.

Thinking is hard work – if you want to change something you have to make it automatic, something you do without thinking.

And the easiest way to do that is put it on a schedule.

If you want to get fit, get your exercise times in the diary.

If you want to create art or write – set time aside every day to do it whether you feel like it or not.

Deadlines are just pressure – they don’t help.

Showing up is what matters.

And then, if you’re trying to change something there is always the risk of sliding back to your old ways.

And it’s easy to do this when you come across an old trigger – something that prompts you to do what you used to do.

For example, if you go shopping hungry you know you’re going to buy some chocolate.

So, watch out – and avoid being in that situation.

Then there are bright line rules – things that are very clear, where there is a yes or no answer.

These are good.

The classic here is dry January – where people decide not to drink all month after the merriment of the month before.

It might not last – but it’s a pretty clear rule.

The thing with change is it’s hard – really hard.

And there isn’t a way to do it without some pain and effort.

But there are ways to make it easier to change something – whether it’s a habit or a process.

But to make it last you need to do it in a way so it doesn’t need ongoing management – so it manages itself.

Because anything that needs to be managed will stop working as soon as that manager stops paying attention.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes. – Richard Bach

You should never ask someone what they want.

It’s a question you shouldn’t even ask yourself.

Why, you ask?

There are three reasons, wrote Watts S. Humphrey in one of his essays:

First, people find it hard to visualise a solution to their problems, especially if they aren’t professionals in building those kinds of solutions.

Second, they often know how to do their job but not why. So, all they can show you are their existing, often manual, ways of working.

And third, if you do have a solution it could change everything about how they work and mean thinking again about what problem they have.

That’s why most approaches that focus on problem solving end up solving the wrong problem.

It takes multiple attempts to get to something that actually works for you.

As a professional, you come at things from a different point of view.

You’ve seen people experience problems that you’ve solved before, so you know what they need – a very different thing from trying to make what they want.

But that only works when you’ve been there and done it before.

When its something new you’re at the same place as everyone else.

And that’s a place filled with insecurity and angst.

Angst because, if you’re like most people, you worry that this time you won’t succeed – you won’t get it right.

And that’s ok – it’s just something that you have to get past.

But you can only do that if you have a way – a strategy ready for when that happens.

One approach that has had almost no traction is called Literate Programming.

It’s not the easiest thing to explain – but in essence its inventor, the legendary Donald Knuth, said you should first think about what you’re trying to do in plain language and then express it in code.

From that point the whole concept starts going downhill rapidly.

In an attempt to avoid that particular section of slippery slope we should talk about bread.

How would you make a mechanical breadmaker?

You might start by learning how to make bread.

The first time I tried doing that, we were in Italy and I was bored, and making bread seemed like a good idea.

So, I had a go.

It was a fairly angst inducing experience, given that I was guessing that flour and water was involved and had no books or Internet.

I’d forgotten about yeast and a few other ingredients, and the resulting block in the oven felt and tasted like a house brick.

So, I did some research, got a little focused and ended up with an edible loaf.

And it seems to me that any creative endeavour and, let’s face it, everything we do can be creative, needs an approach that lets us explore problems rather than trying to solve them.

If you’re writing a book or a program it makes sense to start by thinking and writing about your hopes and fears and expectations of what the thing will do.

Then you can come back and refine your thoughts, focus your attention and come up with a plan.

The book or program should then almost write itself – the result emerging from the cocoon of thought you’ve built up around it.

It feels sometimes that people are too eager to get to the end – without checking if the end they get to is the one they need to reach.

A little thinking might help – but it’s hard work.

Mainly because we need to admit that we’re unsure and need to look around, ask questions and experience things before coming up with a solution.

But if we do that maybe the result we get will be the one we need.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh