Mindfulness

Let the Buddha Help You Appreciate the Role of Questions in Inquiry

March 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Athenian philosopher Socrates used a dialogic teaching method, now known as “Socratic Questioning.”

Socrates famously observed, “I know one thing, that I know nothing.” He habitually posed of ignorance even though he knew more about any subject matter than he let on. He led his pupils through a sequence of questions—not to test or assess them, but to draw out their “tacit knowledge.” According to Plato, Socrates assumed that a pupil already possesses the knowledge or the understanding, but is not aware of this until a skillful teacher can help the pupil draw it out of himself using leading questions.

In his dialogues, Socrates imparted no information about the subject of inquiry, but systematically asked questions. By responding to Socrates’s teased-out line of thinking, the pupils eventually arrived at the desired knowledge.

The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Discoursing about finding cognizance through systematic inquiry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer explains how the Buddha, like Socrates, used questions to help his disciples reveal the truth:

Buddha talked not because he was particularly loquacious, or because he was given to elaborate explanations, but in order to help people see through the smoke screen of their own language and views. Once someone asked him for his secret in answering questions as effectively as he did. He said that he had four ways of answering questions.

One way was categorically—just to say yes or no without ambiguity.

The second way was to examine the question analytically, clarifying definitions and trying to determine what was actually being said, usually by deconstructing it. Most of the time when the Buddha employed this method there was no need to answer the question: under analysis the question proved meaningless.

The third way was by posing a counterquestion, the purpose of which was to bring the questioner back to his or her own mind, redirecting attention away from the entanglement of the language of the question to something real that stood behind it.

The fourth way was simply to put the question aside, knowing that some questions are so hopelessly entangled that to take them up at all means beating your head against a wall—there is no end to it and you end up with a bloody head. To put the question aside is simply to walk around the wall. This way you can get to the other side without beating your head bloody. So sometimes the Buddha’s response to a question was silence.

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

Become skilled at how to facilitate critical thinking with the Socratic Questioning technique. I recommend Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s excellent The Thinker’s Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning (2006; excerpt.) Here’s a handy primer on the nine types of Socratic Questions.

With patience and loving-kindness, ask questions in such a way that can skillfully lead your interlocutors to a better understanding of themselves. Help them cross-examine and uncover the inconsistencies and errors of their thinking, and even change their mind—all without arguing with them.

You can also use Socratic Questioning for self-reflection, which in itself is a rhetorical device to discover the true self. Engage yourself in contemplation not to judge your past choices, but to ponder on them, learn from them, and make whatever changes you believe are right for you in the here and now.

Question Success More Than Failure

March 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

Understand What’s Stressing You Out

March 2, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what you’re feeling right now and then taking the first steps to let go of your regrets, worries, and fears.

To gain an insight into why you’re feeling stressed out, first get into a relaxed frame of mind. Take a deep breath. Hold it for a moment, and then exhale.

Mentally ask yourself, “Why am I so tense right now?” Then, listen to whatever feelings pop into your mind or notice any images of distress or anxiety that emerge.

If you can’t get an evocative response to your question, imagine that you’re confiding in a best friend or chatting to a counselor.

Your spontaneous reflections can give you valuable insights into your inner feelings and concerns. Become acquainted with your inner experience and embrace what you see with a kind heart.

Try a relaxation technique—play with a pet, soak in a warm bath, listen to soothing music, practice yoga or meditation, do physical activity, write a journal entry (try expressive writing,) or get a massage. When you perform a relaxation technique, you’re stimulating activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, which can offset the effects of your body’s overly activated stress response.

While relaxation techniques may calm you down and relieve the immediate symptoms of stress, they’ll not help alleviate the underlying triggers of stress.

If you resort to relaxation merely to suppress or bury your emotions, the tension will find its way to pop up somewhere else.

For a more in-depth, enduring solution to your stress, you must learn how to unshackle yourself from this source of stress through alternative actions. Ask your inner self, “What do I need to do to stay calm?” Be receptive to what your mind tells you.

Don’t overanalyze the past, get upset, and increase your stress. Stay in the moment.

Look forward. Ask yourself, “What is the first baby step I can take toward mitigating my stress?” Or, “What is a stumbling block that I can overcome now?”

Idea for Impact: By practicing positive modes of reflection and taking small corrective actions now, you can bring balance to your inner life and deny those negative emotional patterns their power to affect your sense of self-control.

How to Reduce Thanksgiving Stress

November 26, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Getting everything organized in your kitchen for this week’s annual celebration—one that nonetheless marks the Anglo-Saxon incursion of someone else’s country—is challenging enough, but hosting Thanksgiving gets even more stressful as soon as guests start arriving. You’re obliged to talk to them, entertain them, and keep them busy and occupied, all the while prepping and oven-coordinating.

One way to reduce your festive stress is to assign each guest a simple responsibility. Get aunt Mary to set the table, uncle Roger to get all the wine and the champagne ready, and the children to prepare the place cards. Somebody else can organize simple Thanksgiving games for the restless kids.

Give them all specific goals; don’t dictate perfection. Make sure the jobs are easy enough, short, and, preferably centered away from the kitchen, allowing you to focus on getting the food ready.

Appoint one dependable person to operate as your right-hand person—this person can coordinate with everybody else.

Your guests will feel satisfied that they’ve helped, and you’ll get some valuable space to get everything ready and have a fun time with your family.

Reduce Thanksgiving stress further by not partaking in that ritualized consumer orgy called Black Friday. Join the Buy Nothing Day movement in protest against excessive consumerism.

Addendum: When multiple families assemble for large gatherings, there’s a tendency for entire families to sit together. That’s a shame; if people could scatter around the dining table, there’d be more interactions and a livelier event. Bear this in mind while you decide on seating arrangements.

Lessons from the World’s Worst Aviation Disaster // Book Summary of ‘The Collision on Tenerife’

November 5, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Jon Ziomek’s nonfiction history book Collision on Tenerife (2018) is the result of years of analysis into the world’s worst aviation disaster on Tenerife Island in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

On 27-March-1977, two fully loaded Boeing 747 passenger jets operated by Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines collided on the runway, killing 583 passengers and crew on the two airplanes. Only 61 survived—all from the Pan Am jet, including its pilot.

These two flights, and a few others, were diverted to Tenerife after a bomb went off at the Gran Canaria Airport in Las Palmas, their original destination. Tenerife was not a major airport—it had a single runway, and taxi and parking space were limited. After the Las Palmas airport reopened, flights were cleared for takeoff from Tenerife, but the fog rolled in over Tenerife reducing visibility to less than 300 feet. Several airplanes that had been diverted to Tenerife had blocked the taxiway and the parking ramp. Therefore, the KLM and Pan Am jets taxied down the single runway in preparation for takeoff, the Pan Am behind the KLM.

At one end of the runway, the KLM jet turned 180 degrees into position for takeoff. In the meantime, the Pan Am jet was still taxiing on the runway, having missed its taxiway turnoff in the fog. The KLM pilot jumped the gun and started his take-off roll before he got clearance from traffic control.

When the pilots of the two jets caught sight of each other’s airplanes through the fog, it was too late for the Pan Am jet to clear out of the runway into the grass and for KLM jet to abort the takeoff. The KLM pilot lifted his airplane off the runway prematurely, but could not avoid barreling into the Pan Am’s fuselage at 240 kmph. Both the jets exploded into flames.

The accident was blamed on miscommunication—breakdown of coordinated action, vague language from the control tower, the KLM pilot’s impatience to takeoff without clearance, and the distorted cross-talk of the KLM and Pan Am pilots and the controllers on a common radio channel.

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Sweeping changes were made to international airline regulations following the accident: cockpit procedures were changed, standard phrases were introduced, and English was emphasized as a common working language.

In Collision on Tenerife, Jon Ziomek, a journalism professor at Northwestern University, gives a well-written, detailed account of all the mistakes leading up to the crash and its aftermath.

The surviving passengers’ first- and second-hand accounts recall the horror of those passengers on the right side of the Pan Am jet who saw the lights of the speeding KLM 747, just as the Pan Am pilot was hastily turning his airplane onto the grass to avoid the collision.

Ziomek describes how passengers escaped. Some had to make the difficult choice of leaving loved ones or friends and strangers behind.

Dorothy Kelly … then spotted Captain Grubbs lying near the fuselage. Badly burned and shaken by his jump from the plane, he could not move. “What have I done to these people?” he yelled, pounding the ground in anguish. Kelly grabbed him under his shoulders and urged “Crawl, Captain, crawl!”

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

Some of the bewildering details make for difficult reading—especially the psychological effects (post-traumatic stress syndrome) on the surviving passengers. But Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife is important reading, providing a comprehensive picture of the extensive coordination required in aviation, the importance of safety and protocols, and how some humans can freeze in shock while others spring into action.

The key takeaway is the recognition of how small errors and problems (an “error chain”) can quickly become linked and amplified into disastrous outcomes.

Who Told You That Everybody Was Going to Like You?

October 24, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

From investor Joshua Kennon’s perspectives on being disliked,

Years ago, a family member had to deal with a work colleague who utterly despised her to the point this colleague couldn’t conceal their disdain.

Exasperated, my family member called the prayer line of a televangelist and pleaded, “Please pray with me to have God to change this coworker’s heart so they like me. I’m friends with everybody. There’s no reason they hate me so much.”

The lady on the other end of the phone was quiet for a moment. When she finally spoke, she asked, “Who told you that everybody was going to like you? You weren’t promised that. In this world, there are going to be people who hate you for one reason or another, perhaps even without justification. As long as you’ve examined yourself and are sure it’s not something you’re doing wrong, if you’ll let me, I’d instead like to pray with you that God helps you find peace with the situation so it doesn’t steal your joy and you can move on to more edifying things.”

If others’ disapproval tends to nurture your self-dissatisfactions, question it. If you’ve made a mistake, try to right the wrong. Learn from it, pardon yourself, and move ahead.

If your quest for others’ approval is rooted in insecurity, remind yourself that your contentment in life cannot spring from other people’s perceptions of you; it has to come from an inner scorecard. Warren Buffett famously said, “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”

Striving to live your life to satisfy others always is an impossible aspiration. You’ll wind up losing your sense of individuality in the quest to conform to others’ expectations. “It is our very search for perfection outside ourselves that causes our suffering,” warned the Buddha.

How Stress Impairs Your Problem-Solving Capabilities: Case Study of TransAsia Flight 235

October 1, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As I’ve examined previously, airline disasters are particularly instructive on the subjects of cognitive impairment and decision-making under stress.

Consider the case of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 that crashed in 2015 soon after takeoff from an airport in Taipei, Taiwan. Accident investigations revealed that the pilots of the ATR 72-600 turboprop erroneously switched off the plane’s working engine after the other lost power. Here’s a rundown of what happened:

About one minute after takeoff, at 1,300 feet, engine #2 had an uncommanded autofeather failure. This is a routine engine failure—the aircraft is designed to be able to be flown on one engine.
The Pilot Flying misdiagnosed the problem, and assumed that the still-functional engine #1 had failed. He retarded power on engine #1 and it promptly shut down.
With power lost on both the engines, the pilots did not react to the stall warnings in a timely and effective manner. The Pilot Flying acknowledged his error, “wow, pulled back the wrong side throttle.”
The aircraft continued its descent. The pilots rushed to restart engine #1, but the remaining altitude was not adequate enough to recover the aircraft.
In a state of panic, the Pilot Flying clasped the flight controls and steered (see this video) the aircraft perilously to avoid apartment blocks and commercial buildings before clipping a bridge and crashing into a river.

A High Level of Stress Can Diminish Your Problem-solving Capabilities

Thrown into disarray after a routine engine failure, the pilots of TransAsia flight 235 did not perform their airline’s abnormal and emergency procedures to identify the failure and implement the required corrective actions. Their ineffective coordination, communication, and error management compromised the safety of the flight.

The combination of sudden threat and extreme time pressure to avert a danger fosters a state of panic, in which decision-makers are inclined to commit themselves impulsively to courses of action that they will soon come to regret.

Idea for Impact: To combat cognitive impairment under stress, use checklists and standard operating procedures, as well as increased training on situational awareness, crisis communication, and emergency management.

The Truth About Work-Life Balance

September 17, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bill Gates still doesn’t believe in taking breaks

This recent Bill Gates interview got a great deal of attention for what he considers his biggest regret—not working harder, and taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android, now the dominant phone operating system, which, according to Gates, “was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.”

Asked about work-life balance and if Gates’s opinions had changed from a past statement that he did not believe in holidays, Gates replied with a no. He reiterated that working without a vacation is one of the sacrifices a company has to make in its early years.

The vacation-free approach in Microsoft’s early years is legendary. In the memoir Idea Man (2011,) co-founder Paul Allen recalled,

Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself.

Bob Greenberg, a Harvard classmate of Bill’s whom we’d hired, once put in 81 hours in four days, Monday through Thursday. … When Bill touched base toward the end of Bob’s marathon, he asked him, “What are you working on tomorrow?”

Bob said, “I was planning to take the day off.”

And Bill said, “Why would you want to do that?” He genuinely couldn’t understand it; he never seemed to need to recharge.

In a 2016 interview for BBC’s The Desert Island Discs program, Gates revealed that he was so obsessed during the early years of Microsoft that he couldn’t help but keep tabs on which Microsoft troopers stayed vigilant along the frontlines and which ones had retired home for the night. “I knew everyone’s license plate so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in, when were they leaving.”

For most overworked and overwhelmed people, life’s great tipping point is the moment they realize something’s got to give

Hear any successful executive talk about work-life balance and you’ll recognize a pattern—they had an epiphany about the need for work-life balance. They were totally driven and single-minded for a long time, had difficulties in their personal life, and ultimately realized that they needed to have more balance in their life.

While this always makes for a stimulating narrative, the one aspect that is less emphasized is how much of their success was a direct outcome of single-minded focus. The truth is, most workaholics are successful.

Balance is Bunk: You can’t have everything—even if you work really, really hard

Some things are tough hard, and require an absolute commitment and high-level performance for sustained periods. Achieving distinction in any field requires extreme dedication, drive, and commitment to success—this is true of scholarship, business, art, music, sport, or parenting.

While it’s nice to extol the virtues of work-life balance, it must be acknowledged that balancing personal life with a career will inevitably lead to forgoing some advancement in the latter. Balance is sometimes about choosing between the two and setting priorities—it’s not just a matter of juggling on the way to “having it all.” This “balance” is something that each person has to decide for himself/herself.

Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect

September 3, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In the context of decision-making and risk-taking, the “overconfidence effect” is a judgmental bias that can affect your subjective estimate of the likelihood of future events. This can cause you to misjudge the odds of positive/desirable events as well as negative/undesirable events.

As the following Zen story illustrates, experience breeds complacency. When confidence gives way to overconfidence, it can transform from a strength to a liability.

A master gardener, famous for his skill in climbing and pruning the highest trees, examined his disciple by letting him climb a very high tree. Many people had come to watch. The master gardener stood quietly, carefully following every move but not interfering with one word.

Having pruned the top, the disciple climbed down and was only about ten feet from the ground when the master suddenly yelled: “Take care, take care!”

When the disciple was safely down an old man asked the master gardener: “You did not let out one word when he was aloft in the most dangerous place. Why did you caution him when he was nearly down? Even if he had slipped then, he could not have greatly hurt himself.”

“But isn’t it obvious?” replied the master gardener. “Right up at the top he is conscious of the danger, and of himself takes care. But near the end when one begins to feel safe, this is when accidents occur.”

Reference: Irmgard Schlögl’s The Wisdom of the Zen Masters (1976.) Dr. Schlögl (1921–2007) became Ven. Myokyo-ni in 1984, and served as Rinzai Zen Buddhist nun and headed the Zen Centre in London.

The Simple Life, The Good Life // Book Summary of Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

August 21, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of the great struggles of modern life is the intense complexity, chaos, and exhaustion of activity and reactivity. We have a tendency to take on too much, become accountable to too many people, and say ‘yes’ to too many demands on our time and our energy.

As I mentioned in my world’s shortest course on time management, the merits of ignoring the trivial many and focusing on the vital few is often overlooked. The need for essentialism—less responsibility, less fame, less money, fewer possessions, less mess—is something that’s easy to identify with, but requires abundant self-discipline to put into consistent action.

Business consultant Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2014) is an excellent reminder that a rich, meaningful life entails the elimination of the non-essential:

Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.

McKeown’s wide-ranging discussion covers insightful get-a-hold-of-your-life principles—frugality, sufficiency, moderation, restraint, minimalism, and mindfulness—reframed in the essential-avoidable dichotomy. Here are prominent insights from Essentialism:

Get to grips with selectivity—whenever you can, judiciously select which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go. “The basic value proposition of Essentialism [is,] only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”
Most top performers have one thing in common: they accept fewer tasks and then fixate on getting them right. “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
If you don’t arrange your life, someone else will. “When we forget our ability to choose, we learn to be helpless. Drip by drip we allow our power to be taken away until we end up becoming a function of other people’s choices-or even a function of our own past choices. In turn, we surrender our power to choose. That is the path of the Nonessentialist. … The Essentialist doesn’t just recognize the power of choice, he celebrates it. The Essentialist knows that when we surrender our right to choose, we give others not just the power but also the explicit permission to choose for us.”
Pop out at least once a year to reflect and ask questions about what you’re doing and why. “The faster and busier things get, the more we need to build thinking time into our schedule. And the noisier things get, the more we need to build quiet reflection spaces in which we can truly focus.”
Pursue a well-lived, joyful, meaningful life. “The life of an Essentialist is a life lived without regret. If you have correctly identified what really matters, if you invest your time and energy in it, then it is difficult to regret the choices you make. You become proud of the life you have chosen to live.”

Recommendation: Speedread Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. It will remind you of the wisdom to think through—and act upon—what really matters. Essentialism is chockfull of useful instructions on how to say ‘no’ gracefully, exercise your freedom to set boundaries, discover the power of small wins, and harness the power of routines to evade the pull of nonessential distractions that can subsume you easily.

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Mindfulness

The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

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Distinct Small Errors Can Become Linked and Amplified into a Big Tragedy

Breakdown of Coordination Under Stress

Recommendation: Read Jon Ziomek’s Collision on Tenerife

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

A High Level of Stress Can Diminish Your Problem-solving Capabilities

Wondering what to read next?

Bill Gates still doesn’t believe in taking breaks

For most overworked and overwhelmed people, life’s great tipping point is the moment they realize something’s got to give

Balance is Bunk: You can’t have everything—even if you work really, really hard

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