Month: January 2020

Thursday, 9.23pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course. – Michelangelo

When you know how to do something you start to forget that it was once difficult.

Take reading, for example.

How often do you stop and take a minute to think about what you’re actually doing right now?

How your brain is taking shapes made from light, descended from charcoal on stone walls?

How it turns them into meaning – putting together squiggles in combinations that spell out words and sentences and phrases and help you read someone else’s mind.

If you have children you can see their attempts to get to grips with this astoundingly complex activity.

If you’re unsympathetic or have forgotten what it’s like to start something right from the beginning – you might wonder why they have a problem at all.

But if you’re wise you’ll watch them closely, picking up clues about how you can plan your next learning experiment.

Reading and writing seem easy in comparison to other tasks – but that’s just because we’ve been doing them for a long time.

When we set out to learn something new we start by examining the components of that thing.

Take baking a cake, for example.

I’m not a good baker – I don’t have the patience to follow recipes.

I find that if I throw a bunch of ingredients into a mixer and blend until the resulting mix seems about the right consistency – then something edible sometimes emerges.

Two out of three times, perhaps.

I’m thinking particularly of a banana cake experiment and a spinach based chocolate cake.

My last attempt at creating a flapjack resulted in what tasted like soggy bricks of cold porridge.

And the point I am making, I suppose, is that gaining mastery over the components of a thing matters if you want to do it as a job or profession or business.

I used to think that the thing that differentiates a professional from an amatuer was money – the act of being paid.

But I think actually the thing that makes the difference is the mindset of the person – are they trying to do this once or twice – or just when they need to?

Or are they trying to do it again and again – getting better each time and trying to learn everything they can about wha they do?

You might think of the professions – doctors and lawyers and so on.

But the best doctors and lawyers will spend their time reading and learning about their field.

Others will spend their lives prescribing based on what they have learned so far.

While both are called professionals – only some of them act like professionals.

I was in London the other day and had some time to kill so I wandered over to the treasures room in the British Museum.

There you are confronted with the messy reality of how people once worked.

The piece of paper where Wordsworth wrote out the lines to “I wandered lonely as a cloud” next to the Beatles collection – who appeared to write their lyrics with crayons on brown paper.

If you look at the physical artifact it looks like something anyone could do – something you and I could do.

But we don’t.

And we would be wise to see those marks – marks that we could make – and see how they emerge from a lifetime of work and practice hidden from view.

The point I’m trying to make is this.

A lot of people can read and write – they’ve mastered the components and put them together and can create useful things – emails and documents.

But if you want to be exceptional you have to learn and put together components in a way that other people don’t.

Cartoonists, for example, combine skills with page layout, script writing, fine art and colour to create something that many people would see as simple, maybe even childish.

But could you create one?

Could you bake a multi-layer cake with a topping and frosting?

I can’t even draw one properly…

But if you knew how to create the components of a normal cake and then you were able to add your spin and twist and design ideas – you might create something that stands out – something that has value for others.

A lot of people think that value is something you have or that you give in exchange for money.

Perhaps we should think of value as something that emerges from how you put together the underlying components.

My one layer banana cake has value – my children will eat it to get sugar fix.

But given a choice they’ll pick the one made by a baker who knows what he or she is doing.

So perhaps if you want to get into the business of creating value – you first need to understand what you need to do to be a professional.

And then get busy working.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.00pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue. – Napoleon Bonaparte

What do you do after a tiring day at work, or a few exhausting days out on the road, or at the end of a long shift?

Do you come home and flop on the sofa and get a glass of wine – have you given everything you have and now is it time for a rest?

We all probably feel that way sometimes – feel that we’re running out of energy, out of fuel – and the needle is hovering close to empty.

Some people power on, pushing through the tiredness – willing themselves to keep going.

Others stop and rest, perhaps they give up and look for something easier to do.

Others are used to the ride – the roller-coaster of idleness followed by explosive, exhausting action.

Special forces soldiers, for example, eat when they can and take a nap whenever they can – because they know that it might be a long time before they can do those things again when on a mission.

Napoleon’s quote is interesting in that context – if you could choose someone on your team would you pick the most brilliant person – or the one who you knew could go the distance with you?

We all know people who are clever and capable but that are unable to shift their views when needed – they follow a set path and any variation unsettles them.

And then you have those who talk a lot and promise much but usually fail to deliver.

The people who make the cut in elite armed forces are often not the best or sharpest or quickest – but the ones who can plod away, taking step after step until they reach the end.

Being good at plodding matters.

It matters because if you’re the kind of person who needs to be fully rested, fully fed, with all the gear and tools and resources to get things done – then you probably won’t.

That’s often the problem with large organisations – they have the resources but not the people with the will to keep going.

A startup, on the other hand, has few resources and depends on the energy of the team – and not on mercurial, unpredictable energy but the focused, concentrated and undivided attention that comes with working on something you’re really interested in.

If you have tried to cultivate a daily habit – daily exercise, daily writing, daily meditation – you know how there are always forces that are trying to pull you off track.

Not intentionally – but there are fun things to do, people do see, things to watch – and surely you can just put it off for one day and take a break?

And that’s the problem with relying on willpower to get anything done.

Will power needs energy and if you’re tired and have had a long day your willpower is drained and you’re more likely to take the easy choice – order takeout and sprawl on the sofa.

When you’re tired what comes to your aid is not willpower but habit.

If you have created a habit then you’ll be able to get started even when the needle is pointing at zero.

You might have to take a nap but then you can get started.

The ability to endure comes from habit, not from will.

We are weak creatures, we humans – we get excited when things go well and we get down when we don’t.

And we can easily be let astray by the basic forces – just like you see with children all the time.

Tired, hungry, ill or bored – those are the things that get you every time.

If you’re tired, you’ll reach for the chocolate.

If you make a habit of not buying any – then you won’t have it.

Because what you need to get where you want is to know how you’re going to keep moving when you’re completely shattered and on the verge of being wiped out.

Because most of your competition will stop at that point.

You just need to take a few more steps – and you’ll be out there, in front, on your own.

Winning.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 7.58pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Haters never win. I just think that’s true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end. – Tom Hiddleston

Many years ago I spoke with a girl who seemed to see things other people didn’t.

Like energy – she said some people sucked energy from you, while other people didn’t.

I didn’t quite know what to make of this at the time and, to some extent, I still don’t.

Do people who need to talk things through with you – the ones who spend hours going through their experiences fall into this category of energy vampires?

Or is it a more insidious thing – are there people who are relentlessly negative? The ones who see the dark side everywhere, the possibilities for failure and who seem to take a perverse delight in seeing others stumble and fall?

There is a line, somewhere between normal conversation and the need to unload one’s feelings, and this other place.

At the extreme is the feeling you might get if you were one of the victims in the picture above – a loose adaptation of a scene from a well-known film still in cinemas at the moment.

I remember being relieved that the girl said I wasn’t in the energy vampire camp – but then I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

For example, I think that my writing is relatively balanced, relatively thoughtful.

It lacks the passion and angst, however, of a more driven person – it lacks the anger and drive of someone who wants to take radical action to change the world around them.

You will know people personally or have watched them – these larger than life people who fill rooms and screens, simply bursting with energy.

They can be glorified or vilified.

The press, in particular, loves the story of a person rising up and then take equal delight in pulling them down – it’s the action and angst that matters not the person.

But there’s a dark side to dynamism, isn’t there?

The same energy that one person harnesses to create a movement and positive change is used by others to create a cult and harmful change.

An uncompromising quest for the good can result in something like the inquisition – where you deal harshly with people who don’t meet your standards of what good looks like.

And negativity is not always bad, is it?

I’m often see conversations where people talk about what to do – what strategy to take.

And one school of thought is to say that no idea is bad – and you can’t win if you aren’t in the game.

But sometimes you know why a particular idea won’t work – should you stay quiet?

Or perhaps you should just say no to everything unless it’s in your sweet spot – you only swing for those shots that you have a good chance of hitting.

Is that being negative or just pragmatic?

And if the game is baseball, something you’ve never played – surely you’d be better off not trying to play and work on a sport you do know instead?

What all this teaches us, I think, is that people lie on a spectrum – from frenzied optimism to relentless pessimism.

One might say that the first thing to achieve is balance – a dynamic equilibrium between the negative and positive – so that you are unaffected by the forces on either side.

That means you don’t rush to criticise but that you also don’t rush in without questioning.

You might also want to spend less time with negative people who do suck the job from your life – but also be wary of charismatic types that draw you into their web of magic and euphoria.

Because when you’re balanced you can choose what to say and when to say it and how to act – you can make choices about how you want to be.

And surely when you have that ability – that energy – you’re going to choose to be positive and optimistic.

Aren’t you?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.38pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When you listen to the way in which people go about their business it’s remarkably similar whatever business they’re in.

Take the business of comedy, for example.

Comedy is a business – we spend a lot of our time being entertained – and there are people working very hard to come up with the jokes and gags and plot lines that keep us amused.

A good joke is like a magic trick – it’s best when you don’t know how it’s done – when you experience that sense of surprise when it’s executed perfectly and cannot help but laugh.

So, I was listening to Jerry Corley talk about the comedy writing process and he said a couple of things that made sense in several ways.

One of those things was about how you don’t try and write funny stuff.

Instead, you just write, starting with whatever you have and then you make it funny.

Now, that’s really insightful – and obvious – but mostly insightful.

It got me thinking about arrowheads.

Let’s say you find a rock – perhaps its obsidian or flint – what do you do with it?

You might be tempted to carve a statue, perhaps one of a god, or the successor to Michelangelo’s David.

Except David is over five metres tall and your rock is around three inches across.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone in a pub who’s had a brilliant idea for a “platform”, something that rivals YouTube and Facebook, and they’ve planned out exactly how they’re going to do it?

The only problem is that they aren’t techie and so will need to hire others to do the entire thing on their behalf.

This kind of thing is like sculpting a five metre David from a three-inch piece of rock.

Maybe it’s possible if you have access to a few extra dimensions but your chances aren’t good.

But, on the other hand, if you decide to make an arrowhead, you have a pretty good chance of being successful.

Which is actually the second point I wanted to make.

You have to match your ambitions to your resources – to what you have.

Yes, by all means have dreams, believe that your reach should exceed your grasp, but recognise that you will eventually have to either give up on grabbing a star or find a practical way of making a rocket.

The first, and more important point, is starting with what you have.

Too many people look around at what the market is buying, or what others are doing and think they’ll do that as well.

But that way you’re always chasing the market – and by the time you get to where the market was it’s moved on.

You’re better off starting exactly where you are and then adjusting, chipping away, to fit the needs of the market.

Let’s take that stone again.

Inside that stone lives something like an arrowhead, not a David.

You can chip away at that stone to reveal the shape underneath and if you chip away enough you will get an arrowhead – one that is useful and that will get you dinner.

And the same approach applies to your career, your business or your startup.

Begin with the skills you have, build on what you’ve already done and then tweak, adjust, chip away – until what you have fits what the market needs.

A startup based on something you need and want is going to have a better chance of succeeding than one where you believe that if you build it others will buy.

Belief is a dangerous thing – a double edged sword that cuts both ways.

Knowledge, on the other hand, of yourself, what you do, what your skills are – is something you can use without fear.

Because if you start with what you have you can make a joke – or make a career – or make your business.

And it will be solid.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.36pm

Sheffield, U.K.

But in order to survive in this foreign world, I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy. The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas, and the rest our relationship – the laughter and the memories – were the brushstroke applied over time. – Alyson Richman

I’ve been thinking more about drawing the last few weeks – and the way in which drawings can help us see the world around us.

And it’s funny how they can help us see in the way that we want to see – they follow our approach rather than the other way around.

Let me explain.

Most people will appreciate the fact that when they see reality what they see is not reality at all – it’s instead a construction, a hugely effective virtual reality system, that creates a world in our brains using electrical signals generated by our sensory systems.

In reality, this brain of ours, which hides in a cave with no windows fools us into thinking that the movie it’s showing us is the same thing as reality.

The world is an illusion – Maya, as the Indians would say.

And because there is so much data the brain ends up using some data that is real time and a lot of data that is stored and reused.

And that’s why when we look at a house we don’t really see a house – we replace it with a mental model of a house.

Unless there is a reason for us to look more closely – we’re in the market for a house – and then we start to notice many more things about the houses around us.

We look at size, age, driveways or lack thereof, the people, schools feeling.

We’re always positively looking for things – and our brains focus on bringing those to our attention, filling in everything else with stored data.

And this makes sense because if it insisted on processing exabytes of real-time information every time we stepped out of our front doors – it might just burn up – but instead it just uses a quarter of the energy we put into our bodies and does all the work for us.

But the shortcuts it sets up create a problem – we can start thinking of these shortcuts as the same as reality.

For example, if you once dealt with a situation in a particular way it’s hard to stop yourself telling others that the same way will work for them as well.

Or, you might even start telling people how to do things because you think that approach will work – without even really testing it first – the approach taken by many how-to books over there.

Which is why reading Betty Edwards Drawing on the right side of the brain again reminded me of some very important points.

One of which is the idea of negative space.

Let’s say you’re asked to draw a chair.

If you’re like most people your mental model of a chair will intrude forecefully to influence the image you create on paper.

You know how a chair looks, how its legs are connected at right angles, how there is a seat – and this will affect the lines you put down as your mental model of a chair clashes with the particular scene in front of you.

One way of getting around this is to stop looking at what you know and start looking for what is not there.

In the image above I’ve traced the negative spaces that you find looking at a wicker chair.

Look at those weird shapes, the odd angles, the spine and fishlike backbone.

Yes, you could see a picture of the chair, but you would not see what is not there, the thing that is in between what you see.

And that’s important because as long as we look for what we expect our solutions will fall short.

In business the thing that takes you down is rarely the thing you’re looking out for.

Retailers were busy watching footfall – they never thought the Internet would be a thing.

Armies are always training to fight the last war.

The books we read, the subjects we study, the strategies we adopt – these are all things that help us deal with what we see, what’s in front of us, what we expect to find coming down the line.

But it’s the unexpected that gets us every time – governments, companies, empires are overthrown from within again and again – not from without.

And so, it is only by training yourself to look for what is not there will you come up with strategies that have the potential to save you.

What will you do when your job disappears – if you lose it tomorrow.

What will you do if you make a living with your writing and your hands stop working?

Where is the space where there is no one else – the niche that you can fill with your new product?

Space matters – because everything else is already filled with something else.

Learn to see what is not there and you will always have a place to go.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 8.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called yoga – Bhagavad Gita

I felt like there’s been something missing the last few days of writing – a feeling of being tapped out, exhausted, running out of energy and content.

Maybe that because the big ideas seem to run into each other – the differences seem less relevant and the insights questionable.

For example, take the value of mathematical modelling.

That’s something I would have been quite interested in once upon a time for decision making.

But now I’m not so sure.

If you want to design a new bridge or a heart valve then modelling is crucial – you’re building something real and if it doesn’t work people could die.

But when you’re trying to choose between options the value of maths seems to fall – and what seems to matter more is maximising the opportunity to gain power and avoid blame.

It starts to be about people and people are hard to model mathematically.

It can also seem a hopeless task to try and understand anything new well.

After all, the 10,000 hour rule says that you must spend that much time over around ten years to get any good.

I’ve always had that rule in mind which is why I’ve given myself ten years and a million words to get better at writing.

And it appears that I’m wrong.

I watched a talk by Josh Kaufman, the author of The first 20 hours where he explained why what I thought was wrong.

The 10,000 hour rule, it turns out, comes from research into how much time you need to spend to become one of the best in the world at something that can be easily tested and ranked.

If you want to become one of the best violinists, for example, you’ve got to put in your time and then some.

But you don’t need to spend anything like that amount of time to get merely good.

Kaufman argues you can get to good in as little as 20 hours – 40 minutes of practice a day for a month – if you’re strategic about it.

Kaufman has a model and lists for how to go about acquiring a new skill – but the main takeaways for me are about two things.

First, sort out the environmental issues.

Decide what you’re going to do and block out time every day – preferably at the same time – to practise doing it. And get rid of distractions – notifications, children, your spouse.

And get the tools and space you need and keep them to hand – basically make it really easy to do what you want to do when you’re ready to do it.

And second, be structured about how you learn.

Focus on the things that come up often – the high frequency components.

Create a way to check you’re doing it right.

And practise, practise, practise – repeat, repeat, repeat.

Now, to give you an example of how this might be done – I’ve created the picture at the top of this blog.

I’ve been drawing images for my posts (badly) for a couple of years – nearly 700 of them so far.

I’ve been telling myself that it’s all about communication, not art.

But recently I found a book called The cartoonist’s workbook by Robin Hall which breaks down the drawing process in a way I hadn’t seen before – and this is what you see in the image above.

First, if you want to learn to draw cartoons, you will need to draw people – but those people are often built up from simple shapes – circles, boxes and so on.

So, you need to practise doing those fundamental shapes because you’ll use them again and again.

That’s the first thing then – selecting high frequency elements to practice – common chords in music, common steps in dance and so on.

The next thing is to make it easy to get things right.

Hall is the first cartoonist I’ve seen who says to draw on lined paper – and that makes a huge difference.

Suddenly, getting the size of things right is easy because the guides are there.

A head, for example is one line while a whole body is four lines.

In another life when I used to teach dance we used to tell students to take a step that was hip-width apart.

This often ended up with some people taking tiny steps and others taking huge leaps – and we had to clarify – but eventually they got it.

And then the last bit is repetition – doing the bits again and again until you start committing them to muscle memory.

And then you move on to the next element.

Now, I suppose if I were to add my own approach to this I would do a couple of things.

First, it’s not enough to practise the elements alone – it’s important that during each learning attempt you try and create the sum of the parts – a whole.

Break the thing you want to do into its elements, practice the elements but then put them together as well.

And the second is to worry only about what you’re doing – not about reward or failure.

It’s worth learning if you’re having fun doing it.

And that’s enough reward.

In Indian culture we think of Yoga not as an exercise – but as a way to do something – a way to learn, a way to be, a way to act.

The way is what matters.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh