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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

How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative

April 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative If you need to make much progress on a project, you may feel constrained to work on it in one sitting-down.

Don’t.

No one can concentrate on a single task all the time.

Break up your day—and your thought patterns—by regularly engaging in activities that aren’t intellectually taxing.

Plan your distraction. Have a little something to look forward to—a 15-minute break to watch the highlights of last night’s match, for example. Stretch, dance, or get a glass of water. Go for a short walk around your neighborhood.

'The Distracted Mind' by Adam Gazzaley (ISBN 0262034948) According to neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (2016,) regular breaks can lower mental fatigue, boost brain function, and keep you on-task for more extended periods. Creativity can flow when your mind wanders, allowing you to synthesize information uniquely.

When you sit back down to resume working, you’ll be emotionally regulated and have your mental resources replenished. This helps you be more creative and get more done.

Idea for Impact: Work in spurts. Set specific times to take recesses and stick to them. Your mind needs a break—a “state change,” in fact—at least every 30-45 minutes to work more effectively.

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Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Balance, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Procrastination, Pursuits, Time Management

Follow Your Passion Is Terrible Career Advice

April 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

'Follow Your Passion' Is Terrible Career Advice The cliché “follow your passion” is easily the worst career advice you could ever give or get.

My guidance: Don’t do something you love. Do something you’re good at, even if it may not be something you’re passionate about.

Contentment isn’t likely to come from figuring out what you love and doing it for your career. Career success really comes from doing what other people will love you—and ‘compensate’ you—for doing.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give up your dreams, but pursue them as a hobby. Don’t try to find a perfect job. Find a good, if not a passion-filled, career and find the gratification of pursuing your passions outside of work.

Besides, people don’t really know what reality is like until they’re doing it. Therefore, perhaps a better way to choose what you do be to follow your effort? Be flexible. Have a broad view of what you wish to achieve, and be prepared to compromise on how you make it happen. Enjoy the work that you do, and discover aspects of it you’d enjoy regardless of being paid or not. True career contentment comes from an appreciative boss, helpful coworkers, the opportunity to learn and grow, a reasonable commute, and a middle-class living.

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Filed Under: Career Development, Living the Good Life Tagged With: Career Planning, Coaching, Employee Development, Personal Growth, Pursuits, Role Models, Winning on the Job

We Need to Unlearn Not Being Creative

August 26, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity is a fundamental tenet of being. Every idea, no matter how trivial, is a spontaneous association between established earlier ideas.

Creativity is how we think and reason. It’s how we understand and explore. Everything else—education, upbringing, social conditioning, cultural mores—confines our creativity.

The principal villain is that little voice inside our heads that holds us back because a creative activity is disruptive. Originality begets instability. Creativity takes time, effort, and courage. Being imaginative is more unpredictable than the comfort of the repetitive pattern of everyday existence.

We Need to Unlearn Not Being Creative

Watch children at play. They can invent new worlds, compose new narratives, and fantasize in double-quick with an endless stream of creativity. Children don’t hold back—to them, all things are possible because they haven’t learned that some things are impossible.

In other words, children are less hindered by prior patterns of thought. They don’t judge the quality of their creations. Nor must they “save face” if others think their ideas to be stupid. They simply move on to something else.

Alas, this high level of creativity isn’t necessarily sustained throughout childhood and into adulthood. By high school, most children have their creativity gently squeezed out by those (adults, undeniably) who think more conventionally.

Idea for Impact: We adults don’t need to learn to be creative. We need to unlearn not being creative. As Albert Einstein once said, “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play.”

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‘Follow Your Passion’ is Really Bad Career Advice

May 17, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment


One of Our Greatest Literary Stylists Was a Full-time Business Executive

Wallace Stevens - Insurance Executive Wallace Stevens, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated poets, was a full-time insurance executive for The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The son of a wealthy lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard, where he became recognized on campus as a prolific and multitalented writer. He moved to New York City to become a poet. His father was a lover of literature but was also prudent. He disapproved of Stevens’ literary aspirations and directed his son to cease writing and study the law.

Stevens eventually caved to his family’s pressure and went to New York University Law School. He practiced law at several New York firms for more than a decade before becoming an insurance lawyer and executive.

Stevens wrote most of his poetry on his daily two-mile walks to and from work: “I write best when I can concentrate, and do that best while walking.” He would take slips of paper in his pockets and jot down words. His secretary would type them up for him.

Despite the job demands, Stevens produced a fantastic body of imaginative work in his spare time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955 for Collected Poems (1954.)

A Paycheck Comes First

Artists of all kinds have kept their jobs their entire lives. Among just the writers,

  • T. S. Eliot did some of his best work while employed at Lloyds Bank in London.
  • Two-time Poet Laureate Ted Kooser was also an insurance executive for much of his career. He would get up early, write poems for an hour and a half, and then go to work.
  • Pulitzer winner A. R. Ammons was a sales executive at his father-in-law’s scientific glass firm.
  • Richard Eberhart, another Pulitzer winner, worked at the Butcher Polish Company, his wife’s family’s floor wax business.
  • Poet Laureate James Dickey started his career at an advertising agency to “make some bucks.” A copywriter, he worked on the Coca-Cola and Lay’s Potato Chips accounts. He famously said, “I was selling my soul to the devil all day… and trying to buy it back at night.”
  • William Carlos Williams was a doctor in New Jersey practicing pediatrics and general medicine.
  • Novelist Henry Darger was a custodian at a Chicago hospital.
  • Harvey Pekar was a VA Hospital clerk in Cleveland. He held this job even after becoming famous. Until he retired in 2001, he declined all promotions.
  • Jules Verne was an agent de change (a broker) on the Paris Bourse. He woke up early each morning to write before going for the day’s work.
  • Novelist Jodi Picoult worked at an ad agency and a financial analyst, a textbook editor, and an eighth-grade teacher. She wrote her first novel when she was pregnant with her first daughter.

Follow Your Passion is Really Bad Career Advice

Disregard the Inspirational Mumbo Jumbo

Each of these authors had ambitions to be a writer but didn’t think they could earn a living at it initially. They started working as a means to an end. At the same time, they plodded away at writing, honing their craft, trying to appeal to readers, and refusing to stop trying because of their ambition and passion.

The boilerplate career advice “Do what you love and the money will follow” is aspirational but hardly practicable. Plenty of people are passionate about their craft, but few people can turn those passions into an actual paycheck.

Many people want to “do what they love” and specialize in, say, 17th-century Metaphysical poetry, get disheartened when there aren’t a lot of job positions available in that field, let alone that narrow area of expertise.

Pursue a passion but as a hobby. Work at it, and until you can find people who’ll like your work well enough to pay you for what you love to do, get a day job that’s acceptable and pays reasonably well. A steady professional income will take the pressure off. You’ll still be pursuing what you love, and, hopefully, someday, you can make a full career of it.

For now, though, let the money follow, if only from a different source.

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a Passion, But Don’t Expect to Make it a Career Right Away

Follow Your Passion - Disregard the Inspirational Career Advice To follow a passion, go get a day job. Think of it as your side gig. Then make time to cultivate your passions. When you’re good at something that people are likely to want, the money will come.

Despite the well-meaning counsel to follow your passion, the truth is, it’s easier to pursue your passion and achieve your dreams if you can afford to work free. Until then, seek the peace of mind that comes from being able to pay your bills and attaining financial stability.

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Filed Under: Career Development, Living the Good Life, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Career Planning, Life Purpose, Persuasion, Pursuits, Role Models

Don’t Cheat. Just Eat.

December 12, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Calorie-Rich Festive Treats: Don't Cheat, Just Eat If you’re someone who likes to “cheat” over the holidays and indulge in calorie-rich festive treats, why think of food as yet another serving of shame?

Being out of shape isn’t a failure of character.

Guilt around food is not just pointless—it actually can be harmful. Distress can sabotage digestion. Research suggests that anxiety kicks your autonomic nervous system into high gear. The capacities of your digestive organs are subdued, and instead of metabolizing and assimilating your food, it’s processed less effectively. In other words, guilt—or any sort of negative self-judgment—can initiate stress signals and neurotransmitters. These hinder a healthy digestive response.

Eat whatever it is you want mindfully and let it make you happy. Indulging is part of what sets a holiday apart. As the Roman dramatist Terence counseled, “Everything in moderation” (to which the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde added, “… including moderation.”)

Also, stop “food policing” others.

Idea for Impact: Give Your Guilt a Holiday

Eat, drink, and be merry this holiday season. Yes, slackening up on your diet plan doesn’t feel great, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, either. However, labeling it “cheating” probably is. Your language matters!

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Learning How to Eat Better // Book Summary of Bee Wilson’s ‘First Bite’

August 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Why You Eat What You Eat and How You Can Eat Better :: Bee Wilson in 'First Bite'

British food writer and food historian Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015) may just be the most important diet book of the past decade.

'First Bite' by Bee Wilson (ISBN 0465064981) First Bite isn’t a diet book in the sense that it doesn’t offer you tidy little prescriptions about how to get slimmer. Rather, it’s about why you eat what you eat and how you can be persuaded—and persuade yourself—to eat better by changing your habits and removing barriers to change.

Eating Should Be a Pleasurable Activity

At its core, First Bite is an exhaustively researched discourse on how you’re taught to eat since your childhood and the various social and cultural forces that have shaped your individual—and society’s collective—appetites and tastes.

Many children habitually seek out precisely the foods that are least suitable for them. … Over the centuries, the grown-ups who have devised children’s food have seldom paid much attention to the fact that its composition matters not just in the short term but because it forms how the children will eat in adult life. … The kids’ foods in supermarkets, laced with sugar and adorned with happy cartoons, teach children that what they eat must be a form of entertainment, portable packages of fun.

Parents have an incredible power to shape their kids’ appetites for various foods

Parents shape their kids' appetites for various foods :: Bee Wilson in 'First Bite' Many of us now have found ourselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is tragic.

Wilson asserts that the real root of your eating problems is your very first childhood experiences with food. First Bite will help you look back at your upbringing and reflect upon what—and how—you learned to eat.

The foods parents give to babies provide them with powerful memories that trigger lasting responses to certain flavors.

Wilson summons an abundance of anthropological, psychological, sociological, and biological research in examining how food preferences come into play. She considers food in the context of family and culture, memory and self-identity, scarcity and convenience, and hunger and love.

The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products—despite their illusion of infinite choice—deliver a monotonous flavor hit quite unlike the more varied flavors of traditional cuisine. … The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.

People are not physiologically inclined to dread certain foods

Especially appealing is Wilson’s exposé of modern Western-style food production, marketing, and accessibility:

Modern meals marketed at children send the message that if you are a kid, you cannot be expected to find enjoyment in anything so boring as real, whole food. The kids’ foods in supermarkets, laced with sugar and adorned with happy cartoons, teach children that what they eat must be a form of entertainment, portable packages of fun.

Whereas in the past, manufacturers aimed their messages at the parents who bought the groceries, they now found that there was money in aiming products directly at children. Somehow, a new generation of youngsters were able to manipulate their parents into buying them exactly the foods they desired, which were the ones they saw advertised on TV.

Since the 1950s, children’s food has gone from being something nourishing but pleasureless to something whose primary aim is to pander to childish tastes.

In China, which suffered the Great Famine not three generations ago, obesity is on the rise, partly because of affordability, convenience, and the overabundance of food choices now available.

Relearn the Art of Eating and How You Approach Food :: Bee Wilson in 'First Bite'

To change your diet, you have to relearn the art of eating and how you approach food

Wilson makes a compelling case on how food preferences can change—for individuals and for entire societies. Some chapters discuss stubborn toddlers, overeaters, undereaters, fussy eaters, the obese, the anorexic, and people with various other eating disorders—and how they’re being taught to relish food and learn new tastes.

In modern Japan, Wilson notes that people mostly eat an ideal diet with adequate protein, modest amounts of fat, and enough fiber. Contrast this to the middle of the 20th century, where there was never enough food in Japan, and what little was available lacked flavor and variety. Then meals consisted mostly of rice and pickles; Miso, sushi, and ramen noodles became prevalent only later.

Learning how to eat better isn’t easy, but it’s possible

Wilson’s central premise is, for all intents and purposes, you have more control than you think over what you like and dislike. You can teach yourself to enjoy food if you do incorporate more of specific types of food.

First Bite is ultimately a very hopeful book. If you’ve learned what and how to eat as children, you can unlearn and relearn, and change your food habits—at any age:

Changing our food habits is one of the hardest things we can do, because the impulses governing our preferences are often hidden, even from ourselves. And yet adjusting what you eat is entirely possible. We do it all the time.

Wilson argues that your taste buds are very adaptable and malleable. You can alter your relationships with foods that you tend to desire unreasonably and those you inherently dislike. In other words, if you can persuade yourself to understand that food is a treat, eating well becomes a delight. Eating for nourishment need not be something you should grudgingly do half of the time.

Recommendation: ‘First Bite’ is a Must Read

Bee Wilson’s First Bite: How We Learn to Eat can be quite dense in some parts, but it’s incredibly engaging and fascinating. It’s filled with lots of food-related facts, e.g. many TV ads for chocolate are targeted at women, depicting them as powerless to refrain from chocolate’s “melting charms.” Moreover, there’s none of the moralizations you’d find in diet books.

Food Habits are Learned, and They Can also Be Relearned :: Bee Wilson in 'First Bite' This book will transform your perspective on the importance of healthy eating and developing your tastes for more nutritious choices. If, indeed, food habits are learned, they can also be relearned.

Wilson suggests three big changes you’d benefit from assimilating:

  1. Pivot to real, flavorsome food by trying new foods. Taste them willingly, without pressure or rewards. “We mostly eat what we like (give or take.) Before you can change what you eat, you need to change what you like. The main way we learn to like foods is simply by trying them. If you ask young children which foods they most detest, they tend to be the ones they have never actually tasted, often vegetables. You can’t know if you hate something until you have tasted it.”
  2. Learn how to identify hunger and satiety cues. “Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating—and the one that we least often master. The first stage is learning to recognize whether the stomach is empty or not.”
  3. Eat mindfully and slowly. Trick your brain so you’ll eat less. “Smaller plates—and smaller lunchboxes and smaller wine glasses—really do work. Eat dinner on side plates or bowls and dessert on saucers. Rethink what counts as a main course. Instead of having a large pizza with a tiny salad garnish, have a huge salad with a small pizza on the side. It’s still a very comforting meal.”

If you’re a parent, First Bite offers great ideas on introducing food and developing a great palate in your children.

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On the Sherpas, Tenzing Norgay, and Edmund Hillary

February 17, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Preamble: Tomorrow’s article on the ‘Process Sherpa’ will reference the Sherpas—porters and mountaineering guides of the Himalayas. My editor suggested that I include in that piece a paragraph on the Sherpa people and the relevance of their professions to the ‘Process Sherpa’ concept. What started as a mere footnote soon grew into this standalone article.

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary

Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering

The Sherpas (literally “men of the east”) are legendary high-altitude porters and modern-day mountaineering guides in the Himalayas.

Originally, the mountain-dwelling Sherpas were part of a nomadic Mongolian tribe that descended from Genghis Khan. The Sherpas are deeply religious and, as part of their Tibetan-Buddhist faith, considered the mountains to house their deities. Out of deference to these reigning deities, the Sherpas historically possessed no desire to climb the sacred mountains.

The Sherpas settled predominantly in the villages of Nepal’s Solu-Khumbu valley, where westerners began their expeditions into the Himalayas. As interest in ascending Mount Everest ramped up, western expeditions started to rely on the Sherpas as porters. Their great strength, physiological ability to acclimatize to high altitudes, and dexterity in negotiating dangerous paths in the ice-covered mountains made the Sherpas formidable load-carriers. Since then, no expedition to the top of the Everest has succeeded without their assistance.

In the high mountains, the term ‘Sherpa’ is now synonymous with an expedition guide. Sherpas work as not only mountaineering guides in the Himalayas but also as expedition guides in places as far flung as Africa’s Kilimanjaro, South America’s Patagonia, and other mountain tourism hotspots around the world.

Sherpa Sirdar Tenzing Norgay

The most famous of the Sherpas is Sirdar (Chief) Tenzing Norgay who, alongside New Zealander-teammate Edmund Hillary, was the first to reach Mount Everest’s summit. In setting foot on the great mountain’s summit at 11:30 A.M. on 29 May 1953, the two defined a key moment of 20th century exploration.

For the incredible account of the personal triumph of a poor and illiterate but ambitious and deeply religious explorer, read Tenzing Norgay’s autobiography “Man of Everest” and Yves Malartic’s biography “Tenzing of Everest”. These two books were required reading for my eighth grade-language class.

Sir Edmund Hillary

No discussion on the Sherpa people would be complete without mention of one man’s extensive humanitarian efforts. Edmund Hillary’s endeavors so endeared him to the mountain people that his scaling the Himalayas pales in comparison. Since the 1960s, Hillary’s Himalayan Trust has raised funds to build schools, clinics, hospitals, bridges, and water pipelines for Nepal’s Sherpa communities. Beyond the achievement for which he is best known, Hillary’s entire life story is also incredibly inspirational. To learn more, read Whitney Stewart’s “Edmund Hillary”. I also recommend Hillary’s autobiographies, “High Adventure” and “View from the Summit”.

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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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