Author: Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 8.34pm

Sheffield, U.K.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. – Buddha

There are a few problem structuring tools that are so familiar that we simply assume we know how to use them.

This often isn’t the case.

They are powerful techniques – that’s how they became popular in the first place – but if we use them in a careless way we don’t make full use of their power.

One of these techniques is the SWOT analysis – where you reflect on your strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats.

It’s a basic model that you learn well before business school – the kind of model you bring out whenever you’re trying to think through a new project.

In this section I’m going to revisit the SWOT analysis and try to see if we can deepen our understanding and use of the tool by being more specific and critical of what we focus on as we do the analysis.

What are your strengths?

Imagine that we’re testing whether a business idea has potential – that’s the kind of place where a SWOT analysis comes in useful.

Let’s start with why this business idea is a good one for you to do – what is it about you that is going to help.

These are your strengths and you should list them in the first quadrant of the SWOT matrix, as above.

This can be surprisingly hard to do.

If you ask someone to list their strengths they’ll probably come up with things like their experience, their qualifications and their personal qualities.

Something like 10 years work experience, an engineering degree and hard work.

And then they start to run out of things to say.

Now, are these strengths?

Well, the thing to notice is that they aren’t too different from what anyone else in the same situation might say.

If you’re going for a job or trying to win a client – everyone who is in the running has the qualifications, experience and personal attributes – you wouldn’t get shortlisted if you didn’t.

So you have to look deeper, draw on the factors that set you apart.

Look for proof points – what results did you achieve, how much revenue did you bring in, how many clients did you add, what volume of work did you do.

When you’ve been involved in a billion pounds worth of transactions you’ve probably learned a few things along the way.

The other source of strengths are the things you are obsessed by – what is it you do on which you spend more time and effort than almost everyone else?

That’s the thing that’s most likely to set you apart.

Circle those strengths – and keep them in mind as you carry on through the process.

What are your weaknesses?

People hate admitting that they have weaknesses.

The classic interview coaching response to this question is, “My greatest weakness is that I don’t know when to stop working.”

You might lie on an interview, but you shouldn’t lie to yourself.

There are some things that you are just not going to be good at – things you don’t like to do.

They are things that you avoid doing and so you practice them less and so you’re not as strong.

Maybe it has to do with managing others, or keeping up with administrative paperwork.

Look hard at your weaknesses because quite often they are simply the counterbalance to your strengths.

For example, if you are a creative person who spends the majority of their day engaged in focused creative activity – you probably don’t have time to file away documents and do the garden.

It’s your focus on creative excellence that means you are weak at administrative excellence.

A weakness simply means it’s a job you should give someone else to do.

If you are clear about your own strengths and weaknesses, you’re now ready to look around and examine opportunities and threats.

What are the opportunities you have?

When you look around and see booming businesses it’s tempting to think that there is opportunity everywhere.

Surely you can make the next Facebook, Google or Amazon?

What’s stopping you from making a killing in the property market?

With all these people making money on YouTube what’s stopping you from achieving passive income and financial freedom as well?

If you’re asked to list the opportunities out there you might easily put down technology, property and finance.

That’s where most fortunes are made, after all.

But what you also have to work out is whether that opportunity is one that’s going to work for you.

If it’s the right opportunity it’s like a greased slide, you’ll be able to get on and gravity will be on your side.

So you have to look hard at your list and think about why you’re going to be able to develop those opportunities.

Do you have a background in property?

Do you understand finance or technology – are you an analyst or a coder?

Just because you can see other people making money from an opportunity – it doesn’t mean that those are the only ways to succeed.

In fact, it’s more likely that there is a way for you to succeed that you are perfectly positioned for.

Maybe it’s a change in the market, maybe it’s a job that others find hard to do, maybe it’s something you’ve developed for your own use that could be useful to others.

Rather than looking for opportunities, what you need to do is think about how you can develop them – using the strengths at your disposal.

Opportunities are not things you find – they are things you create.

But in order to develop them you have to do one last thing – remove risk.

And you do this by analysing the threats you face.

What are the threats?

As with the other three categories it’s easy to list threats in a vague and general way.

You might be threatened, for example, by bad customer feedback, cash flow problems, late payments from customers.

These threats might cause you to trip, make mistakes, cost you money.

But there are two elements to a threat – the first is the impact it has on your business and the second is how likely is it to happen.

The less you understand about your business, the more likely it is that you will make mistakes you can’t recover from.

It really comes back to knowing where you’re strong and where you’re weak – and being clear about what opportunities you pursue as a result.

If you’ve got those first three elements lined up, then the last job you have is identifying and eliminating threats.

It’s risk management, really – if you’re climbing a steep hill with loose rocks – start by asking yourself whether you really need to do the climb at all.

Why not go around, get a cab or hire a helicopter.

But if you have to climb it wear good footwear, take some equipment to help and have a plan in case you run into trouble.

There are some threats you can’t do anything about – the weather, the electricity network.

So you only focus on the threats that you can do something about – the ones you can mitigate.

And by doing that you’re dramatically increasing the overall chances of success you have.

The key is being specific

A SWOT analysis is least useful when it’s done in a quick and lazy way – when you fill it with the first thoughts that come to mind.

What you need to do is sit there and keep writing until the second and third thoughts come to you.

Draw, doodle, do anything but keep that pen moving until you get down more ideas than the ones that come immediately to mind.

Be critical of what you put down – ask yourself whether they are really different from what anyone else would say – are you drawing on what is your own unique experience or is this something anyone could put down?

The purpose of the exercise is to deepen your understanding of yourself and the situation you are in.

Armed with this knowledge you can start to move on to understanding the next part – seeing yourself in context and figuring out how to play nicely with others.

We’ll talk about that next time.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 10.06pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin. – Mother Theresa

Over the next sixty to eighty days I will be roughing out the structure of a book in these posts.

I’ve tried this a few times in the past and it hasn’t quite worked out, but I’m using a different process this time, so bear with me.

The working title of the book is “Getting Started” and it’s about the messy process of getting going on a project, an idea I introduced yesterday.

Eventually, I’ll turn the raw material from these posts into a book – I hope.

But for now I want to talk about understanding where you are right now.

What is it that makes you you?

You learn a lot by listening to children, by trying to understand what they’re going through and trying to remember how you felt back then.

Perhaps the most important thing you can help your child to learn is the art of interaction – the skill to play with others.

Not, you should notice, play nicely, but play with others.

That means learning how the game is played and, equally importantly, how you’re playing it.

Each of us is a complex mix of chemicals and signals – bags of thinking water as Terry Pratchett puts it.

And what people around us get from us is what we say and what we do.

They listen to our stories and look at what we produce – these are the two categories of things that help them learn about us.

For all practical purposes, what the world thinks is “you” is this bundle of words and actions – so if you want to understand how you are seen, you have to start here.

Let’s take each one in turn.

How do you describe yourself to someone else?

We’ve all heard about the elevator pitch – but life isn’t really spent in elevators.

It’s spent in social and business gatherings, where you’re introduced to people and eventually they ask you to tell them about yourself.

When that happens you usually have a selection of stories ready to choose from.

Maybe it’s all about your job for you – what you do in the office and how important or powerful you are.

Maybe it’s about your research, your interests, your hobbies.

Perhaps it’s about where you live, your family.

There will be things that come to mind as you talk about yourself and you need to write them down – the actual words you use, not what you think you would say.

Next, write down what you do each day

Once again, go through your days and pick out the main things you do.

What do you work on, what kind of projects take up your time, how much time do you spend doing creative work and how much doing managerial and administrative work?

Perhaps you spend a lot of time in front of a computer doing analyses.

Maybe you’re doing a lot of internal work, helping various departments operate more effectively.

Or you’re out there, getting in touch with prospects and taking them through a sales development process.

Get these activities down – you’ll need to look at them every once in a while to remind yourself what was important then.

Why do you say what you say?

If you’ve followed these steps you now have a collection of words and phrases that capture what you say and do.

It’s time to look at these in some more detail.

What you need to ask yourself is where these ideas come from, starting with what you say.

For example, you might have written something like “money is not important.”

Where does that kind of idea come from?

Does money not matter because you had everything you wanted when you were young and you don’t want for anything now?

Is it because you’re not materialistic and don’t really need things to make you happy?

Is it because you went to boarding school and learned early on that if it didn’t fit in your trunk you needed to throw it away?

Those ideas you have about yourself have roots – roots in experiences and stories and families.

Pay attention to them – write them down.

The ideas held by an immigrant will quite often be very different from those held by someone who has had generations live in the place they are in now.

Think about why you do what you do

Finally, do the same exercise for what you do now.

Is the work you do something you trained for?

Are you a doctor or lawyer, did you spend years building your knowledge of an area?

Or is what you do a job you stumbled into when you were young, a temporary job that turned into a career 20 years later?

Or did you develop a skill to the point where you could get a job – perhaps you’re good at computers or got accepted into an apprenticeship because you were interested in a particular subject or craft.

This exercise is about knowing who you are and why

You may feel like you know all this stuff but this exercise is designed to make you look through yourself, not just at yourself.

The world sees what’s on the outside – what you say and do.

So, first you need to try and understand what they’re looking at.

But then you also need to try and understand why you are the way you are – look back to see what pressures formed you over time into the person that you are now.

None of these exercises have a “correct” answer – they’re about collecting impressions, collecting data about yourself.

We’re going to look at a few ways to do this – some different approaches to see yourself through someone else’s eyes.

Because before you try and make any changes, you really have to see yourself the way others see you.

It’s the difference between looking in a mirror and seeing a recorded video of yourself.

The video is always surprising because it’s a different point of view.

And that’s what we’re trying to do here.

We’ll try another approach, a more traditional one tomorrow.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.00pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started. – Drew Houston

I was thinking about the kind of advice people give you when you’re thinking about starting a project.

Let’s say it’s a marketing campaign or a new book or a startup idea – what are they likely to say?

There are two main places people start – at the end or at the beginning.

For example, backward thinking starts with where you want to be and works back from there to work out exactly what you need to do.

With a startup this might mean knowing exactly what your customer looks like – working out their avatar, their persona – whatever description helps you to get a really clear idea of how they think and feel and act.

If you know that your target market is a particular age, gender and demographic you can then work back to figure out which channels are the best ones to reach them.

On the other hand you could start at the macro level – look at the environment you will be operating in and the main characteristics.

Look at the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors – the PESTLE – and see how you need to position yourself to fit in.

There’s nothing wrong with these methods – they’re all useful ones to have in your toolkit.

But is it the right advice when it comes to starting something?

Let’s stick with the startup example for a minute – imagine that you have to start your business tomorrow morning.

There’s no time to prepare, no time to research or question – it’s late.

You’re going to go to bed and in ten hours or so your new day begins.

Where will you start?

The answer is pretty obvious – you’ll start from where you are.

Right in the middle of now.

If I were to sit you down and ask you to tell me about all the stuff you do right now and all the tools you have right now – that’s the core of your startup, that’s the raw material you have to get started with.

For some people this means that what they have to start with is their brains – the knowledge they carry around inside their heads.

For others it’s the skills they have in their hands, the muscle memory they’ve built up over years of doing something.

Brains and hands – those are the assets you’ll have tomorrow morning.

Now everyone will be in a different stage – some will be young and still learning their trade.

Others will be old and will have forgotten what they know and not learned anything new in a while.

It really doesn’t matter – it’s not going to change that reality of what’s happening right now.

And that’s actually quite exciting, when you look at it in the right way.

There’s a reason why writers are told to start their books in the middle of the action – that’s where things are happening.

The middle is where the action is taking place and where the possibilities are – you are in the best possible place you could be right now.

You might as well believe that – there’s no real alternative to that reality.

When you open that window into your space – when you look at yourself in the middle of the action and what you’re saying and doing – you’re know where you’re going to start.

Right there and right now.

We’ll come back to how you do that in another post – first it’s worth looking at why you should do this, why you shouldn’t go back and do your research on everything from the start or work backwards from the end.

And it’s because when you’re in the middle, possibilities stretch out both backwards and forwards in time for you.

When you start at one beginning, it might seem like you can do anything, but you’re also constrained with the possibilities that start from just that point.

In the same way when you start from the end and constrain what you do to activities that help you get to that end – you’ve limited what else could happen.

In the middle, you have the opportunity to craft a beginning and an end that suits your purpose.

For example, let’s say that your skillset right now is data science – advanced analytics in nanotechnology.

What led up to that expertise?

It’s probably a mix of things – you found maths easy, a friend liked the same subjects, your parents pushed you in that direction.

Let’s say you’re talking to a prospect and they really want someone to help them with analysing social data – Twitter feeds.

If you started by limiting yourself to data science work in nanotechnology, you might simply pass on the Twitter feed analysis opportunity.

And you might just have missed your opportunity to found a cutting edge data-driven marketing consultancy.

You might not know anything about marketing – but you probably use Twitter, you can probably get up to speed on the APIs in a few hours.

But why should they work with you?

Well, that comes back to your origin story – your beginnings.

And if you’ve left yourself room you can craft an origin story that helps customers understand why they should trust you with their business.

Now, as you develop your business you’ll start to see different opportunities to progress.

Maybe you see yourself becoming a consultant, telling others what to do, standing on stage.

Or you get on and produce tools and content, books, podcasts, videos.

You make what your audience wants and what you want to make – and if you’re lucky those two things will be the same.

But all that comes later.

The journey begins with realising an inescapable truth.

You are going to start from where you are right now.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 9.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them. – Ralph Marston

The essential ingredient you need to make a story work is to give your hero an obstacle to overcome – something that they can beat.

That’s the essence of conflict – put your characters in a difficult situation, make it so it beats them down and then show how they fight back and emerge victorious.

Stories are about triumph, about victory, about winning.

They are not about real life.

In real life the detective does not pick on a collection of tiny clues and figure out the entire life story of a person.

In real life a teacher does not walk into a deprived school and turn the lives of all the children there around.

In real life getting that huge promotion doesn’t hinge on you getting that lucrative contract signed against all the odds.

Real life is about finding the easiest way to move onto the next thing – move through the day and get ready for the next one.

If you want to be happy – to create a life that is low-stress, what you have to learn is the art of getting around problems.

It is far better to notice problems when they are some distance away and take steps to avoid them.

In much of life the image to keep in mind is that of water.

Water flows downhill – it goes the way it’s easiest to go, the way gravity tells it to go.

And there are always obstacles in the way, sometimes big ones, sometimes mountains.

When this happens there are two main choices.

The first is to go around the mountain – as long as you have gravity on your side you can keep moving.

Find a way that’s easier than climbing the mountain.

It’s the same in business – go around problems whenever you can rather than fighting them.

Handle objections before they turn up.

Train staff before they have a chance to make silly mistakes.

Don’t put your money into projects you don’t understand.

If you stick to the easy path you will rarely put a foot wrong.

But, the romantic side of you screams, you’ll never achieve greatness, you’ll never create the next Amazon or Google.

Why not?

Google’s big idea is pretty simple – peer review is the basis of getting you good information.

Amazon’s big idea is pretty simple – make online shopping frictionless.

Now, those founders didn’t get there with gigantic, heroic leaps.

They had the right background, were in the right place with the right idea and executed it as best they could and survived and grew to the point where they are now.

The fact is that you are where you are right now – not where those founders were then or are now.

And the only thing for you to consider is which way is the easiest for you to keep moving.

Standing still is the problem – becoming stagnant, building up behind a dam.

That’s what stops you.

While there are options to keep flowing you’re never really stopped – you just need to find another way.

Which brings us to the second main option.

Sometimes you are stuck, sometimes there is no way forward.

You need to be absolutely sure about this.

Because when there is no way around an obstacle the only way left is to go through it.

That’s not always easy.

It helps if you have nothing to lose.

Most of us are not in that situation – we are lucky enough to have some element of choice.

We’re not restricted by oppressive regimes or the limits of our education.

We’re lucky.

The only real obstacle that stands in our way, all too often, is our self.

The self that talks to us, filled with doubt and fear – the voice that says we cannot do it or are not good enough.

The voice may be right.

But gravity is still gravity and downhill is still downhill.

And all you have to do is move – find a way to flow.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 6.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself. – Arthur Schopenhauer

For a while I was a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to work.

It worked when there were lots of things to do and you wanted to capture them all, make sure that they were moved on.

Now, however, as I look back – what is the main purpose of a system like that?

Is it to do things in the best way possible – to apply yourself to the most important problems?

Or is it a way to avoid being shouted at?

I think productivity systems like GTD are actually armaments for the workplace – a way of showing people that it’s definitely, absolutely not your fault with extreme prejudice.

Here’s the task, I sent you the analysis and then I followed up every week and you didn’t respond.

So, how can you blame me for the mess you’re now in?

Now, in many situations, you need that kind of approach, especially if you work in an industry that addresses failure demand.

Failure demand, if you remember, is John Seddon’s term for work that has no value – work that is done to fix failures elsewhere.

It looks like work, but it isn’t.

Real work is value demand – stuff that matters and makes a difference.

Should you treat value demand the same way – record everything, list it all out and make sure you get it done?

I’m starting to think that isn’t the point.

Stephen King, I think, said something like he doesn’t take any notes, doesn’t put down ideas when they come to him.

If they’re good enough they’ll stick in the mind, they’ll come back to nag at him.

I guess you should pay attention to the things around you, the thoughts and events, but you don’t need to document everything, put everything on a list.

“Not-doing” is a form of filtering.

You have a limited amount of time – you should probably spend it doing the highest value work you can – the work that calls to you.

Everything else can wait – preferably for ever – but certainly for next week.

Until someone nags you, anyway.

This idea has a certain power when you start to implement it.

There are so many boxes you could pick up – but only so many you can hold.

There are only so many things you can own before you become a person whose job it is to own things, to look after them and sort out their care and maintenance.

Having more things might make you feel rich – but it’s also a form of imprisonment, an open jail that you have to bar against others.

Now, does that mean you should never collect anything, never look back, never finish jobs?

Nothing really is ever that absolute.

It all depends.

If you want to do something – write a book, create art, grow a business – there are things you need to do and things you don’t.

You have to decide which things are which.

Doing everything will probably just make you tired – too tired to notice that an opportunity has passed you by.

You were too busy working to see it.

There will always be more jobs to do, more tasks to do, they will fall from the sky like rain.

And like rain, they will come around again.

But your time will not.

So spend it wisely.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh