Stoicism 101: Essential teaching of Stoicism in a page

Listened to well known author of books of Stoicism, Ryan Holiday and Shane Parrish's The Knowledge Project podcast. Here's a quick summary on stoicism as articulated by Ryan.

Key Teaching of Stoicism

• The primary task of stoicism the dichotomy of control - understanding the distinction between what upto us and what is not upto us. Any energy spent on stuff not upto us is wasted  and what we primarily control are our thoughts, opinions and actions. (Epictetus)
• We don't control what happens, we control how we respond. 
• Everything that happens is an opportunity to practice a virtue. (Markus Aurelis) 

Stoics are embracing both their powerfulness and powerlessness at the same time and fusing it together and deciding where we have agency, where we don't and what are we going to do with the agency.

The four stoic virtues

• Courage: Putting yourself on the line literally or figuratively
• Temperance/Self-discipline: The standards to which you hold yourself. Not what you "can" do or not what is "legal", but what you choose
• Justice: The golden rule - treating people the way you want to be treated, honest, respect, decency, what is the right thing to do.
• Wisdom: Not just the pursuit of knowledge or understanding, but the intuitive sense of how much courage, temperance or what is the right thing etc. This virtue unlocks the other virtues and is more about when and how to use the other virtues.

Here is the full podcast.

Who moved my proxy?

On my morning walk I listened to Seth Godin on Tim Ferris's latest episode on his podcast. When Seth talks (or blogs), there is a nugget of advice in nearly every sentence and this podcast was no different. However, what stuck to me was the discussion around "false proxy". 

Proxies are something that are easier to measure and a close approximation to something that is hard to measure (Ex: Weight/BMI as a measure of health, using ranking as a proxy to decide to buy a book, using reviews as a proxy to select a good restaurant etc.,). While they all make sense, it could become a problem if we elevate the proxy and get obsessed with making the proxy look good and completely forgetting to improve the real thing we wanted to improve.

I could clearly see a lot of false proxies all around:

• Processes that have been degenerated by measuring things that won't make any meaningful difference to the org or the customer the org is serving.
• Continuations of certain roles which are no more relevant, but makes one feel good about something just because the role exists
• Bureaucratic/centralized controls that stifle creativity and pace but makes someone creating such things to feel good
• Measuring cost over value
• Various employee engagement surveys that someone believes will give an accurate picture of what people feel in the trenches
• Meetings and more meetings to measure progress

Many of these will start with all good intentions, but usually outlive their relevance and gets continued only because someone can feel important and have a sense of contribution. 

Even at a personal level it is easy to fall into the trap of measuring what's easy to measure and forget the core reasons of our being:

• Expensive gifts as a proxy to show love
• Expensive exercising gadgets to believe we are progressing toward our health goals
• #books read as a proxy to knowledge/wisdom
• #meetings attended/set-up as a proxy to productivity

What are some of the proxies you are stuck with? If you have come out of them, how did you do that?

What RamP's Reading: Jun'21

 

    

Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
Microservice technologies are moving quickly, and this revised edition gets you up to date with a new chapter on serverless and cloud-native applications, expanded coverage of user interfaces, more hands-on code examples, and other additions throughout the book. Author Sam Newman provides you with a firm grounding in the concepts while diving into current solutions for modeling, integrating, testing, deploying, and monitoring your own autonomous services. You'll follow a fictional company throughout the book to learn how building a microservice architecture affects a single domain.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.


Persuadable : How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World
Drawing on evidence from social science, history, politics, and more, business consultant Al Pittampalli reveals why confidence, consistency, and conviction,are increasingly becoming liabilities—while humility, inconsistency, and radical open-mindedness are powerful leadership assets. Pittampalli doesn’t just explain why you should be persuadable. Distilling cutting edge research from cognitive and social psychology, he shows you precisely how. Rife with actionable advice, Persuadable is an invaluable guide for today’s data-driven, results-oriented leader.

Type of task and the effort needed

 Often times we spend disproportionate amount of time on tasks that are non-value adding (wordsmithing a trivial mail, getting to precise numbers accurate to 2nd or 3rd decimal when a whole number would just do, take attention to detail to extremes on marginal tasks etc.,). Opposite is also true - that we spend very little time on high impact tasks (create shabby slide decks, convey incorrect/ambiguous data, forget target audience etc.,), most often due to lack of time (perhaps coming in from lack of prioritising). Heck, most of the times, we may not even be aware of relative impact of the task on hand to even apply some heuristic to decide how much effort to spend or what constitutes 'good enough'.

I found the following model very simple, actionable and profound (courtesy @shreyas).

Are you spending enough time on tasks that has high leverage?

What RamP's Reading: May'21

 

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we're distracting our lives away? In Indistractable, behavioural designer Nir Eyal shows what life could look like if you followed through on your intentions. Instead of suggesting a digital detox, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving you to distraction, and teaches you how to make pacts with yourself to keep your brain on track. Indistractable is a guide to making decisions and seeing them through. Empowering and optimistic, this is the book that will help you design your time, realise your ambitions, and live the life you really want.

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success
A few common principles drive performance, regardless of the field or the task at hand. Whether someone is trying to qualify for the Olympics, break ground in mathematical theory or craft an artistic masterpiece, many of the practices that lead to great success are the same. In Peak Performance, Brad Stulberg, a former McKinsey and Company consultant and writer who covers health and the science of human performance, and Steve Magness, a performance scientist and coach of Olympic athletes, team up to demystify these practices and demonstrate how you can achieve your best.

The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life
Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout.

Running a Successful Global Capability Center (GCC)

Running a successful Remote or Global Capability Center (GCC) is no ordinary task. Here are a few things that worked for me as I ran successful India Development Centers (IDC) for several MNCs. The principles and ideas can be as easily used outside of India. 

While technologies, projects, priorities change all the time, the HQ always expects the GCC to be:

• Aligned with the overall mission of the larger organisation and change gracefully
• Flawlessly execute on the commitments
• Maintain the cost-structure and continuously improve

As the center matures few additional expectations would come:

• Increase in innovation and technical leadership
• Become autonomous, own entire product lines end-to-end
• Contribute to overall strategy by introducing local eco-system (Universities, Start-ups, specialised vendors)

... and do all these while

• Maintaining hiring and retention goals
• Being compliant to all the local and international regulatory needs
• Represent the organisation in the local geography 

Companies use sophisticated metrics (financial, project management metrics etc) and processes (Site Maturity Matrix, for example) and these are well documented. The focus of this post though is to specifically what the site leadership has to do grow the center and become a critical part of the organisation. 

We will not get into standard project/program/product management processes, HR methodologies and the like. There are a few things that the center leadership ought to carefully do and here's a list:

• Positioning the center
• Understanding and Navigating the internal power dynamics
• Picking fights - Balancing alignment and site vision
• Cultural sensitivity
• Higher level metrics
• Communicating "Cost vs Value"
• Growing Technical Leadership
• Sustaining for Long term success

In the next set of articles we will dive deep into each of these and discuss some actionable ideas.

What RamP's Reading: Apr'21

 

How Innovation Works
Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
The bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people's minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life

The Psychology of Money
Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In the psychology of money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.