Sharpening Your Skills

How to Own Your Future

January 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Self Directed Learning: How to Own Your Future Work seems to be shifting faster than ever. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman provides a particularly emblematic example of the profound changes in the way people work and the way organizations design jobs and work environments:

Work is being disconnected from jobs, and jobs and work are being disconnected from companies, which are increasingly becoming platforms. A great example of this is what’s ha ppening in the cab business. Traditional local cab companies own cars and have employees who have a job; they drive those cars. But, now they’re competing with Uber, which owns no cars, has no employees, and just provides a platform of work that brings together ride-needers and ride-providers.

Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

Dramatic economic, social, and technological changes necessitate professionals at all levels to be almost continuously trained and re-trained just to keep abreast of all facets of working life.

The career implication of this continuous transformation is the increasing need for ongoing learning. You’ll have to equip yourself to stay ahead of changes. In other words, you’ll need a growth mindset to learn, apply, reorient, and keep learning.

More Will Be Now on You

You’ll need to be self-directed. You’ll need to take the initiative and responsibility for the learning process. You’ll need to recognize training needs and choose how you’ll meet these needs rather than rely on your organization to tell you what to learn and how to do it. The smarter organizations out there are enabling and promoting individual choice and self-directed and self-determined learning.

What will set successful professionals apart in the future is that they take responsibility for their continuous learning. They proactively explore what they may be interested in and what the future will demand instead of indifferently waiting for options to present themselves.

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

Set your sights on a long career with multiple stages, each involving ongoing training and re-skilling. If you want to achieve career greatness, you will likely find your current skill sets obsolete in less than five years without self-directed learning.

Develop a growth mindset that’ll help you grow, expand, evolve, and change.

This New Year, Forget Resolutions, Set Intentions Instead

January 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

New Year Intentions, Not Resolutions I think resolutions set you up for failure because they’re usually daunting, and they don’t give you a plan for how to realize what you want to achieve. More to the point, you underestimate how long it’ll take you to kick a bad habit or adopt a good one.

On the other hand, intentions propose paths forward—they can keep you accountable in the process.

Intentions dig into the WHY

Change is hard—change requires real commitment, planning, and follow-through. Intentions help by grounding you to what you can commit to today and tomorrow. Intentions will remind you of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live.

Intentions don’t demand perfection, and intentions leave some room for error. Intentions will help you commit yourself and not fill you with guilt and shame if you fall off the wagon for a short period. With intentions, you can anticipate lapses and plan for them.

Setting intentions and then taking action becomes an exciting path of self-discovery rather than a guilt-trap set up with broken resolutions.

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

Put less pressure on yourself and set yourself up for success by making regular daily, weekly, and monthly intentions. Once you set the intention, focus on getting to the first step. Then, regroup and think about step two. This way, you target short-term achievable results, and the intention orients you.

Don’t make intentions for the entire year. It’s just hard to keep up with something and stay excited about it year-round.

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2020

December 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Top Blog Articles of 2020 Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2020. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our RSS feeds or email updates.

A Quick Way to De-stress. Whenever you feel frenzied, meditation can help you focus inward, pull together your scattered energies, and allow your mind to become calm.
Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Mistakes. Don’t agonize about what other people are thinking about you. They’re perhaps busy worrying over what you’re thinking about them.
Better than Brainstorming for Rapid Idea Generation. Studies have shown that people think of more new—and practical—ideas on their own than they do in a group.
Don’t Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity. Good routines can protect you from your more effective negative impulses and bring order and predictability to your life.
Never Outsource a Key Capability. By owning the entire customer experience, Domino Pizza has provided a consistent experience for customers and iterate quickly.
When You Talk About Too Many Goals. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical.
Best to Cut Your Losses Early. Best to cut your losses early—you’ll have the least sunk costs and the fewest emotional attachments.
What Went Wrong on the Boeing 737 MAX. When you devise a highly reliable system, identify all single points of failure, and investigate how risks and failure modes can be mitigated.
How Much Risk Can You Tolerate? Encourage careful experimentation and conscientious risk-taking by lowering the risk waterline.
The Power of Negative Thinking. The Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum helps intentionally visualize the worst-case scenario in your mind’s eye and tame your anxiety.

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2021!

Books I Read in 2020 & Recommend

December 29, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Coronavirus lockdown and travel restrictions gave me more time for bingeing on books this year:

Leadership: Simon Sinek’s Start with Why (2009) explains that great leaders motivate with the WHY (a deep-rooted purpose) before defining the WHAT (the product or service) and the HOW (the process.) ☍My Summary
Conflict Management: Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers’ commendable I Think You’re Wrong (2019) proposes a framework for having productive conversations with those you love and yet disagree with. ☍My Summary
Self-Management: Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr’s The Power of Full Engagement (2003) is a persuasive reminder about pivoting to time-management to energy-management. ☍My Summary
Customer Service: Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard (2008) describes how the Ritz-Carlton brand has programmed its organization to foster customer-centric behavior in employees at all levels. ☍My Summary
History & Leadership: Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (2019) is a gripping testimony to the perils of hubris and a poignant monument to the untold misery it imposed upon swathes of people. ☍My Summary
History & Leadership: Captain Sully Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty (2009) as a supplement to Clint Eastwood’s Sully (2016,) the overrated drama about the US Airways Flight 1549 incident. Leading authentically starts with being in charge and understanding that your actions can make a difference. ☍My Summary
Self-Care: Susan Jeffers’s self-help classic Feel the Fear … and Do It Anyway (1987, 2006) is a powerful reminder to get on with the things you want to do. The momentum of positive emotions builds up as soon as you start taking action. ☍My Summary
Customer Service: Lee Cockerel’s The Customer Rules (2013) summarizes the many simple—but often overlooked—first principles of building a customer-oriented culture and delivering excellent customer service. ☍My Summary
Customer Service: Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness (2010) on how Zappos’s business model empowers employees, creates a sense of community, and fosters cult-like customer loyalty. Sadly, Hsieh died in an accident in November. ☍My Summary
History: Mark Binelli’s The Last Days of Detroit (2013) is an extensive chronicle of Detroit from the initial days of the French settlers to Henry Ford’s arrival in 1913, the racial unrest in 1967, and the present-day hipster arrivistes who’re trying to resurrect the city. ☍My Summary
Self-Care: Food historian Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015) on why you eat what you eat and how you can be persuaded to eat better by changing your habits and removing barriers to change. ☍My Summary
History: Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s A Brief History of Humankind (2015) is a brilliant thesis on who we are and how we overcame the most extraordinary odds to dominate the world the way we do at present. ☍My Summary
Self-Care: Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s bestselling The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness (1991) is a poignant reminder that, whatever the circumstances of your life, you can become awake, more mindful, and bring your goodness to the world. ☍My Summary
History & Leadership: Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005) is a fascinating account of how President Abraham Lincoln held the Union together through the Civil War, partially by bringing his political rivals into his cabinet and persuading them to work together. Complement with Steven Spielberg’s remarkable Lincoln (2012; Daniel Day-Lewis’s masterful portrayal of Lincoln.) ☍My Summary
Self-Management: Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog (2001) is a reminder that you must discover the one momentous task—the most dreaded task or the “frog”—that you need to do. ☍My Summary
Leadership: Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002) on setting expectations, holding people accountable, and following through. ☍My Summary
Leadership: Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule (2017) reminds you to take action before your brain can make excuses—or justifications—and gets in the way of acting on that idea. ☍My Summary
Inspiration: Oprah Winfrey’s The Path Made Clear (2019) is a fine-looking coffee table book with an assortment of think-positive sound bites. ☍My Summary
Leadership: Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann’s Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric (2020) is a revealing, reasonable, and accessible narrative of how the once-prolific company was humbled by sheer misfortune and poor leadership. ☍My Summary

See also my book recommendations from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

My reading goals for 2021 are to be ruthless with the books that are not so good and to reread many books that have delighted me previously. The five books I reread every year are Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Phil Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive.

You may be interested in my article on how to process that pile of books you can’t seem to finish and my article on how to read faster and better.

I wish you enlightening reads in 2021. Recall the words of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two

December 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the end of each day (or first thing in the morning,) plan tomorrow and the next two days.

Review your commitments and write out the full list of what you want to accomplish over the three days. Outline the first day more thoroughly than the other two.

Plan Tomorrow, Plus Two - Three-day Planning Horizon

This act of writing down what needs to get done helps you feel less anxious—tasks seem smaller on paper than in your head. According to the Zeigarnik Effect, just the simple act of recording a task in a plan relieves the mental stress attributable to unresolved and interrupted tasks.

Having a three-day horizon allows you to be flexible.

You’ll know where your “wiggle room” is, so interruptions don’t invade your day. You can move your priority tasks around should the circumstances change. You can set apart emergencies from non-emergencies that can be addressed later.
When you have a lot on your plate, or something is taking longer than you planned, you can defer what’s avoidable today and move tasks around.

At the end of each day, rewrite your three-day roadmap. Reconsider how each task aligns with the current priorities and spread them over the next three days.

Idea for Impact: Plan tomorrow, plus two. You’ll have a clearer insight of the immediate future—and you’ll be better prepared to attend to those inevitable unforeseen demands for your time.

Couldn’t We Use a Little More Civility and Respect in Our Conversations?

December 9, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The New York Times recently had an article about a Smith College-class that addresses America’s burgeoning addiction to contempt.

The power of mindful conversation to change minds

The lecturer, reproductive justice-activist Loretta J. Ross, is highlighting the ills of call-out culture. Her class challenges the proclivity to persecute every presumed infringement against morality and represent the victim as somebody intolerable to decent society.

Ross doesn’t believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as “The Cosby Show.”

What I’m really impatient with is calling people out for something they said when they were a teenager when they’re now 55. I mean, we all at some point did some unbelievably stupid stuff as teenagers, right?

Call-out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling. “It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up.”

The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is “calling in.” Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. “It’s a call out done with love,” she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one “do better” without explaining how.

Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. “Every time somebody disagrees with me it’s not ‘verbal violence.'”

Debate the issues, Avoid gratuitous name-calling

The recent election has underscored that we continue to be a deeply divided nation. Americans are ever more passionate about their beliefs and committed to their causes. Ideological affiliation is increasingly a matter of tribal identity. Presenting facts can sometimes backfire. In the narrow-minded pursuit of “goodness,” our society has manifested a disgraceful habit of dismissing people with differing attitudes as less than human, “deplorable,” and not worth consideration.

Differences of opinion are natural and healthy facets of any community. The various issues that we face are complicated, affecting different people in different ways. We must be able to express and accept our differences with civility.

Listen to the other in interpersonal confrontations. Put yourself in the other’s shoes and mull over a perspective you hadn’t considered previously. There may be a well-founded concern that you weren’t aware of, and you could soften your position and, perhaps, lead you to different conclusions.
Don’t approach debates as “take no prisoners” battles. Build bridges with your ideological opponents. If you never earnestly consider others’ opinions, your mind will shrink and become its own little echo chamber.

Idea for Impact: You can’t change minds by damning your opponents

Be civil and respectful of others’ views. As President Obama has reminded, the world is “messy” and full of “ambiguities,” and “if all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”

Before trying to change others’ minds, consider how difficult it is to change your own.

A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self

December 3, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Self-confidence, so often peddled by the self-help genre as the panacea for low achievement, can indeed cause it. Beyond a moderate amount, self-confidence is destined to encourage complacency—even conceit. You’ll never reach anything better with that attitude.

Paradoxically, conceding your insecurities—and having a certain amount of humility about your capabilities—-is usually to your advantage.

Deep down, some of history’s greatest icons—from Abraham Lincoln to Mahatma Gandhi—regularly worried that they weren’t good enough. That’s what kept them striving harder.

A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self Face up to your self-judgment. Low self-esteem is present only when your self-appraisal is more acute than reality.

Channel that nagging voice in your head that keeps saying negative things about you. Don’t be self-defeatingly vulnerable. Don’t worry yourself into perfection, anxiety, or despair.

Engage that little “sweet spot” of insecurity to motivate yourself to exert the additional effort required to seek a better self. For example, ignore anyone who tries to calm your nerves by telling you to “just be yourself” or “who else could be better suited” before a job interview.

Idea for Impact: Satisfaction can be deadly. Lasting self-confidence derives from your ongoing effort, not by virtue.

Saying is Believing. People Are Reluctant to Change an Expressed Opinion.

November 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Politicians shift their views shamelessly with the winds of opportunism. To their defense, they must choose to stand up for what they believe or risk political capital.

Most politicians believe in one thing—winning elections and latching on to power. Seems they’ll say anything that can get them in the office and stay there. Like when, during the 2004 presidential elections, Democratic nominee John Kerry famously proclaimed, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against” funding to rebuild Iraq.

Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

Well, that’s the nature of the beast. Politicians enter politics for ideological reasons but must readily sell their souls to prolong their political careers. Politicians never seem to be willing to say, “I was wrong” or “Upon mature reflection, I’ve changed my mind on such and such.”

But what about the rest of us? It seems that, unlike the politicians, we’re shamed relatively easily when we change our mind and adjust our approach. Admitting we’ve made a mistake is too threatening to our sense of self. We end up over-compensating by denying fault and refusing ownership of our own mistakes, thereby protecting our self-image.

There’s evidence that suggests that saying is believing. Making a known pronouncement strengthens our commitment to that point of view. By committing ourselves openly to our present opinions, we may be hardening ourselves to future information that would otherwise change our minds.

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

According to Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (2006,) social psychologists have shown that openly committing to an opinion makes you less willing to change your mind.

Cialdini cites an experiment by social psychologists in which three sets of students were shown a group of lines. One set of students was asked to write down estimates of the lines’ length and turn their estimates to the experimenter. The second set was asked to write down their estimates on a Magic Pad and then wipe out their estimates before anyone else could see them. The third set of students didn’t write down their estimates at all. After the students were shown new evidence that suggested that their initial estimates were wrong,

The students who had never written down their first choices were least loyal to those choices. … By far, it was the students who had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitment had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Yup, the act of publicly documenting your opinion enforces the feeling of others knowing what your opinion was. This produces fear of being judged.

The hard part about admitting you’re wrong is, well, admitting you’re wrong. This may induce you to refuse to accept new ideas.

The American economist Paul Krugman has remarked on the “epidemic of infallibility,”

Just to be clear, everyone makes mistakes. Nobody is perfect. When you’re committed to a fundamentally false narrative, facing up to facts becomes an act of political disloyalty. What’s going on with Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems to have less to do with ideology than with fragile egos. To admit having been wrong about anything, they seem to imagine, would brand them as losers and make them look small. In reality, of course, the inability to engage in reflection and self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul.

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Changing your mind based on new information isn’t bad. It’s something to be encouraged. As the Transcendentalist essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

In our vigilant, hypercritical, and judgmental society, the problem isn’t with people voicing and documenting their opinions (particularly on social media) but with people not being OK with someone changing theirs.

A professed commitment shouldn’t cause reluctance to change your opinion.

Fail Cheaply

November 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

E-Fan X wind tunnel test model (Courtesy: Airbus)

One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.

Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.

Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.

Engineers often use surrogate modeling techniques that use simple prototypes and mock-ups that are as representative as possible.
Counter to the phrase “it takes money to make money,” shrewd entrepreneurs know how to experiment multiple ways for minimal cost. Next, they scale up one or two experiments that have given them favorable results. The losses are small, and the potential gains much larger.

Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.

Just Three Things

November 12, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Get Just Three Things Today Having a lot on your plate can be challenging.

Stimulating busy is good. Frenzied busy isn’t.

Here’s a tried-and-tested tactic to deal with the pressure. Ask yourself, “If I could just get three things today, what would they be?”

Set the stage. Then get cracking.

It’s an excellent way to cut to the heart of what matters most.

Plan, but don’t blindly stick to it. Be flexible and willing to change them when circumstances change.
Drop unnecessary work. Focus on what you want to achieve.
Don’t try to do every task perfectly … that’s the easiest way to be bogged down.

Sharpening Your Skills

Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

More Will Be Now on You

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

Wondering what to read next?

Intentions dig into the WHY

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

The power of mindful conversation to change minds

Debate the issues, Avoid gratuitous name-calling

Idea for Impact: You can’t change minds by damning your opponents

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Politicians Will Often Flip-flop to Maximize Their Popularity

The ‘Saying-Is-Believing’ Effect

Publicly committing to an answer makes people less receptive to information suggesting they were wrong

Idea for Impact: Changing Your Mind is Actually a Good Thing

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?