Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Nagesh Belludi

No Need to Send a Thank-you Card for a Thank-you Card

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As a rule of thumb, feel free to send a thank-you note whenever the impulse strikes you. But a thank-you card (or a thank-you gift) sent to you is already a token of appreciation, so putting in yet more effort into thanking somebody for thanking you is purposeless, irritating even. It’s kind of morally superfluous.

Now, failing to acknowledge a thank-you note is a universal annoyance. By all means, you can text them, “Got your note. I’m glad you had a good time,” or inform them the next time you run into them in the hallway. However, no need to perpetuate a recursion of thank-you notes.

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How to … Avoid Family Fights About Politics Over the Holidays

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The simplest and most pleasant thing to do is just to agree not to talk politics. There’s no need to stoke the flames, especially if you know these conversations are likely to teeter on the edge of discomfort and may end up hurting people’s feelings. In today’s particularly charged political climate, even trivial differences in opinion have the potential to turn into a nasty fight. If members of your family can’t deliberate charged topics without losing calm, then stay out of debates. Talk to the key players—the strong personalities—beforehand and request them to tone it down for the evening. Have conversation starters and activities at the ready.

Don’t expect to change minds. Sure, they’re your blood, and you love them, but it ain’t your responsibility to make them understand how wrong they are. Political judgments are value-based, and these values are very hard to change. People have contempt for ideas that they disagree with, and, when presented with information that goes against their beliefs, some people not only snub their challengers but also double down on their original viewpoints (“the backfire effect.”)

Idea for Impact: Bringing together family and friends with different political views can make holiday gatherings painful. Just be realistic about getting past opposing viewpoints and keeping the peace this holiday season.

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Inspirational Quotations #972

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The richest man in the world is not the one who still has the first dollar he ever earned. It’s the man who still has his best friend.
—Martha Mason (American Memoirist)

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.
—John Major (British Head of State)

Nothing is impossible for those who act after wise counsel and careful thought.
—The Thirukkural (Indian Tamil Literary Classic)

Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
—Dorothy Day (American Journalist Reformer)

It’s afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn’t necessarily prove that you loved him.
—Marguerite Duras (French Novelist, Playwright)

So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.
—Baha’u’llah (Persian Religious Leader)

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.
—Stephen Jay Gould (American Paleontologist)

Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues.
—Giuseppe Mazzini (Italian Revolutionary)

I could prove God statistically.
—George Gallup (American Statistician)

Life flows on within you and without you.
—George Harrison (English Singer)

Intuition isn’t mystical.
—James D. Watson (American Biologist)

Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.
—Malcolm Mclaren (British Impresario, Musician)

Thou shalt not get found out is not one of God’s commandments; and no man can be saved by trying to keep it.
—Leonard Bacon (American Preacher, Writer)

Half uttered praise is to the curious mind, as to the eye half veiled beauty is more precious than the whole.
—Joanna Baillie (Scottish Dramatist, Poet)

Life is a means of extracting fiction.
—Robert Stone (American Novelist)

Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.
—Karel Capek (Czech Novelist)

And the Theranos Board Walks Away Scot-Free

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Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes has finally been sentenced to over 11 years in prison. Too bad our corporate law is too narrow to attribute some criminal liability to the company’s board of directors. Such luminaries as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, Marine Corps General James Mattis, and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, once famously portrayed as “the single most accomplished board in U.S. corporate history,” should be partly culpable for Holmes’s malfeasance.

When Holmes explained away her underlying technology as “a chemistry performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel,” all the board had to do was demand, “Show me.” Determining how a device or service works—exists even—as purported, is the essential obligation of a board member. A truly engaged overseer may have preserved $945 million in investors’ capital and kept a naïve, immoral, and feckless entrepreneur from bullying the press, intimidating her employees, and gambling with the patients’ lives. (Read WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s excellent chronicle, Bad Blood (2018; my summary.))

The board individually and collectively failed in their responsibilities as trustees of investors’ interests. Undoubtedly drafted as trophy directors to reinforce the company’s standing such as it was, not for any knowledge of blood testing, they now walk away with nothing more than a blot on their illustrated careers.

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  4. What Virgin’s Richard Branson Teaches: The Entrepreneur as Savior, Stuntman, Spectacle
  5. We Trust What We Can See: James Dyson Builds for That Instinct

At the End of Every Meeting, Grade It

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After steering a consensus at the end of every meeting, allow two minutes to grade it.

Have the meeting’s chairperson go around the table and ask every attendee to give the session a letter grade. If someone doesn’t characterize it as an A, ask them to pinpoint what would have made it an A.

Through this initiative, your team can recognize the factors that influence the success of your meetings. The attendees are responsible for making future meetings an A and cutting barriers to achieving your organization’s objectives.

Few managers do this, but it’s a game changer. Close every meeting on a tone of achievement.

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  3. How to … Deal with Meetings That Get Derailed
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  5. How to Minute a Meeting

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

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While it is helpful to be motivated and get into the right mindset to, say, exercise, it’s far easier to just show up at the gym and get started on a small quest, even when you don’t really feel like doing it. You’re likely to habituate to new behaviors in a way that circumvents your innate resistance to change.

Minor adjustments can add up and make a big difference. As Harvard psychologist Susan David writes in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016,)

Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view—that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habitual parts of life, which then afford tremendous leverage for change.

Idea for Impact: Waiting for the right mindset to “show up” can be a losing strategy. Taking action is often easier than controlling your mental state. Don’t overly focus on the very thing that’s harder to control. Take the next baby step forward.

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  4. Big Shifts Start Small—One Change at a Time
  5. Use Friction to Make or Break Habits

Risk More, Risk Earlier

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Some of the best careers are crafted by those who use their initial working years to gain diversified on-the-job business education.

The compounding returns of vetting opportunities wisely and taking sensible risks are particularly valuable today. Business is more complex than ever, and competition for top positions is intense.

Idea for Impact: Take on as much risk as possible early in your career. You may have less to lose than you think—and a great deal to gain. Your older self will not have the energy, time, autonomy, or temperament that you contentedly have now. Plus, you’ll have more time to make up for mistakes.

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  5. “Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Career Advice

Books in Brief: “Hell Yeah or No” Mental Model

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American entrepreneur and blogger Derek Sivers popularized the “Hell Yeah or No” mental model (YouTube Synopsis): unless you’re super excited about something, don’t commit to it.

If you’re ready to say ‘yes’ to the things that aren’t that great, you won’t have time, energy, and focus for the “hell yeah” stuff in your life. Sivers has summed up,

We tend to say yes to too many things. And because of this, we’re spread too thin. We’re so busy doing average things that we don’t have time for the occasional great thing.

So instead I propose raising the bar as high as you can, so that if you’re feeling anything less than, “oh, hell yeah, that would be amazing,” then just say, no.

By doing this, you will miss out on many good things, but that’s okay because your time will be quite empty. So then by saying no to the merely good things, you’ll have the time and the energy and the space in your life to throw yourself in entirely when that occasional great thing comes up.

Recommendation: Read this insight-dense book. The “Hell Yeah or No” mental model will reframe how you control impulses and consider life’s big decisions.

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Lilies and Leeches

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Lilies and Leeches: Surround Yourself with Those Who Elevate You You may have heard of the notion of lilies and leeches. The lilies are the people—and situations—that bring out the best in you. The leeches just grind you down.

Learn to say ‘no’ to relationships or situations that don’t work for you. Life’s too short to waste time on anything that can suck your happiness and energy. Avoid those emotional leeches, productivity leeches, and financial leeches.

Idea for Impact: A little-cited key to a rewarding life: choose to surround yourself with those who elevate you. With those who are caring, supportive, and nonjudgmental, and who make you feel loved, appreciated, and respected.

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Inspirational Quotations #971

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Every man has his faults. It all depends on whether he has enough good qualities to counterbalance them.
—Ferenc Santa (Hungarian Novelist)

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actress)

Nobody motivates today’s workers. If it doesn’t come from within, it doesn’t come. Fun helps remove the barriers that allow people to motivate themselves.
—Herman Cain (American Businessman)

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.
—Brenda Ueland (American Journalist Memoirist)

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
—Jane Jacobs (Canadian Urbanologist)

Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.
—Rose Macaulay (British Author)

Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.
—John Amos Comenius (Czech Educator)

Human rights are not a luxury, or something to be observed if they don’t conflict with some other priority, like peace or economic development. They are instead the key to achieving those things and anything else of urgent importance to the world.
—Robert L. Bernstein (American Publisher, Activist)

I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.
—Giuseppe Garibaldi (Italian Revolutionary)

Success isn’t magic or hocus-pocus—its simply learning how to focus.
—Jack Canfield (American Self-Help Author)