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Sharpening Your Skills

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid

December 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid No superhuman ability is usually required to dodge the many foolish choices to which we’re prone. A few basic rules are all that’s needed to shield you, if not from all errors, from silly errors.

Charlie Munger often emphasizes that minimizing mistakes may be one of the least appreciated tricks in successful investing. He has reputedly credited much of Berkshire Hathaway’s success to consistently avoiding stupidity. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And, “I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.” They’ve avoided investing in situations they don’t understand or summon experience.

As a policy, avoiding stupidity in investing shouldn’t mean avoiding risk wholly; instead, it’s taking on risk only when there’s a fair chance that you’ll be adequately rewarded for assuming that risk.

Idea for Impact: Tune out stupidity. Becoming successful in life isn’t always about what you do but what you don’t do. In other words, improving decision quality is often more about decreasing your chances of failure than increasing your chances of success.

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Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Biases, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Problem Solving, Risk, Thinking Tools, Thought Process, Wisdom

The Creativity of the Unfinished

December 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bull's Head, 1942 by Pablo Picasso Don’t dot every I and cross every T. Leave a stone unturned.

Ignore a rule. Don’t tie up every loose end.

Leave some questions unanswered. Let something be out of place.

Violate the expectation and usher a realm of potentiality. As the American artist Julia Cameron noted in her seminal self-help book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (1992,) “Art needs time to incubate, to sprawl a little, to be ungainly and misshapen and finally emerge as itself. The ego hates this fact. The ego wants instant gratification and the addictive hit of an acknowledged win.”

A piece of art, a movie, a melodic line, or a production all tend to be more captivating when they leave you wondering—when they urge you to explore the possibilities your mind has to offer.

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  5. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Artists, Clutter, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Innovation, Mental Models, Thought Process

It’s Time to Tune In: Give the Gift of Listening

December 5, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It's Time to Tune in: Give the Gift of Listening

The cacophony of our fast-paced life inhibits listening. We need our interlocutors to “cut right to the chase,” to “get right to it” so we can move on to whatever else is urging our attention.

Listening goes beyond just hearing what people say. Most of the time, when someone is chatting with us, we are talking in our heads about what we’ll say next! Indeed, we don’t even let them finish their thoughts before sharing something about our experiences or offering our perspective on what they have to say.

Idea for Impact: This holiday season, commit to giving the gift of listening. Focus on others when they talk to you. Don’t interrupt or shift the conversation to yourself. Give them your full attention. Listening starts with an openness and willingness to indeed follow another person’s story without premise or getting sidetracked by what’s going on in your own head.

This is maybe the greatest gift we can give another human being—our undivided attention. To listen without judgment or agendas.

Nothing makes us feel more human and important than feeling listened to—even accepted.

Be a shoulder. Be a friend. Be an ear to someone who needs it. Tune in. Connect and empathize. Make the other person feel valued and important, and you might learn something and develop as a human being.

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Filed Under: Effective Communication, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Conversations, Likeability, Listening, Mindfulness, Social Life, Social Skills

‘Tis the Most Wonderful Time of the Year … to Job-Search

December 1, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Job Search during the Holidays The holidays are around the corner, and this is an excellent time to job-search, especially since most jobs come from networking and referrals.

As you spread the holiday cheer, use greetings as a pretext to catch up with friends, reach out to LinkedIn contacts, and network with people in your industry. Take the opportunity of Christmas and New Year parties to socialize with new people that can help you.

Some workplaces have use-it-or-lose-it money and headcount in the current year’s financial plan that they’d like to commit before year’s end. Other workplaces that have the upcoming year’s plans approved may be eager to jumpstart hiring.

The holiday spirit and the season of giving make hiring managers even more likely to treat you favorably. Moreover, with work winding down for the holiday season, decision-makers are less likely to be in long meetings and business trips, and, therefore, more likely to be at their desks to be contacted.

And you’ll face less competition since few people bother with job-searching at this time of the year.

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Filed Under: Career Development, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Career Planning, Job Transitions, Networking, Relationships, Social Life

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

November 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action 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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Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Decision-Making, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Goals, Motivation, Procrastination

Risk More, Risk Earlier

November 16, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It's Important to Take Risks Early in Your Career 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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Filed Under: Career Development, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Career Planning, Confidence, Personal Growth, Pursuits, Skills for Success, Winning on the Job

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

November 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

'Hell Yeah Or No' by Derek Sivers (ISBN 1988575060) 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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Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Clutter, Decision-Making, Discipline, Negotiation, Persuasion, Wisdom

Public Speaking is Traumatizing Vulnerable Students

November 7, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Public Speaking is Traumatizing Vulnerable Students For decades, universities have forced presentations and class participation to be integral to students’ grades. Sure, employers are interested not only in graduates’ subject knowledge but also in their ability to communicate, work in teams, problem-solve, build consensus, and so on.

However, public speaking anxiety is too common in college students, particularly those suffering from chronic social anxiety. Some even dread the sheer prospect of raising their hands in class for fear of being judged.

Sadly, our academic institutions aren’t doing enough to support such students. College is, after all, a place to practice in a supportive environment—it’s better for students to confront their fears in a relatively low-stakes classroom setting than in the real world. One lecturer I know of accommodated a nervous student by dismissing everyone else and making her present only to the professor.

Colleges must emphasize that anxiety and fear of public speaking are entirely normal—Mark Twain famously noted, “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Colleges should assess individual students’ natural ability and teach public speaking as part of university learning, starting with systematic desensitization and conditioning confidence until the students feel they can tackle entire presentations.

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  4. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
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Filed Under: Career Development, Health and Well-being, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Anxiety, Confidence, Presentations, Social Dynamics, Stress, Suffering, Worry

Don’t Over-Deliver

November 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Don't Over-Deliver: Decide To Be Better Many tasks in the workplace could be done with total adequacy and barely more.

Don’t get fixated on ensuring that every task is entirely done, every email edited and re-edited to get the grammar right, or every spreadsheet is flawless. This is a pointless pursuit.

Sure, you don’t want to be a careless hammerhead. But don’t waste time sweating the little stuff. There comes the point where any changes you make to whatever it is you’re working on no longer makes it better but just different. Identifying the inflection point of diminishing returns is one of the hardest skills to learn and one of the most necessary.

Don’t agonize over tiny improvements in your work and thwart yourself from achieving the actual goal of doing the work.

Idea for Impact: Most acceptable outcomes correlate with “good enough,” not “perfection.” Being consistently excellent is essentially a matter of fierce discipline—doing the essential things well.

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  4. The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’
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Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Assertiveness, Balance, Getting Things Done, Goals, Perfectionism, Procrastination

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong?

October 31, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong? We spend so much of our lives being right that, I wonder if, we’re ill-prepared for being wrong.

Since childhood, we’ve been inured that being right is more acceptable than being wrong. Being wrong feels so unpleasant—repulsive even—that we instill a series of strategies to salvage ourselves when we are exposed as being wrong. We learn to trip from our forked tongues explanations, justifications, excuses, and blames for our errors and oversights.

What’s worse, we develop a deep-seated impulse to shirk responsibility and accountability for our actions. We become loath to change our beliefs or behaviors because change takes effort. We envisage change as a challenge to our identity. In the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. They wake up and re-analyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases.”

Idea for Impact: What’s lost in all this is that being wrong is not only a central feature of being human. It’s one of the most potent ways of learning. Admitting we were wrong—and conceding we’ll be wrong again—can be so liberating and welcoming.

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  4. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  5. 3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Confidence, Critical Thinking, Decision-Making, Mindfulness, Wisdom

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!