Very enlightening talk about why we cheat and steal. The “personal fudge factor” is a function of whether we’re reminded of the honor code, distance to the true “cash” value of the gain, and whether our peers are “cheating” makes it OK to cheat. These are all related to the current banking, financial crisis of today. Question your and others’ intuition. They could be wrong!
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Book Review: “The Dip” by Seth Godin
The Dip – A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick) by Seth Godin
Winner wins big because the marketplace loves a winner – Zipf’s Law. Why it matters? People don’t have a lot of time and they don’t want to take risks. Also, scarcity makes being at the top worth something. With a flatten and long-tailed world, perhaps, this theory may not hold well or perhaps there are more ways to be the best. Big companies fail in a new market, according to the author, because they’re too willing to compromise to avoid offending other divisions or to minimize their exposure. They fail because they don’t know when the quit and when to refuse to settle. In a free market, we reward the exceptional.
The big surprise – the wrongest thing you learned in school – being well rounded is the secret to success in life. Superstars can’t skip the questions they don’t know – they get good at questions they don’t know.
Architecture of Quitting: Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Almost everything in life worth doing is controlled by the Dip, which the long slog between starting and mastery and the combination of bureaucracy and busywork, the difference between the easy “beginner” technique and the most useful “expert,” the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment, the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out. Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip; they lean into the Dip, push harder, changing the rules as they go.
Curve 2: the Cul-de-sac (dead end) It’s keeping you from doing something else. The opportunity cost of investing your life in something that’s not going to get better is just too high.
Curve 3: The cliff – like smoking.
If it’s worth doing, there is probably a dip. The dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value. The Dip is the reason you’re here. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat like the opportunity that it really is. It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality and quit. Quit in the Dip often enough and you’ll find yourself becoming a serial quitter. If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.
Seven reasons you might fail to become the best in the world:
1. Run out of time.
2. Run out of money.
3. Get scared
4. Not being serious enough about it.
5. You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre.
6. Focus on the short term instead of the long .
7. Pick the wrong thing to be the best in the world.
Eight Dips:
1) Manufacturing dip, 2) Sales Dip, 3) Education Dip, 4) Risk Dip, 5) Relationship Dip, 6) Conceptual Dip, 7) Ego Dip, 8 ) Distribution Dip.
Quitting the stuff you don’t care about or the stuff you’re mediocre at or better yet quitting the Cul-de-Sacs frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter. If you’re going to quit, quit before you start. Reject the system. Don’t play the game if you realize you can’t be the best in the world. You have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
The market wants to see you persist. If demands a signal from you that you’re serious, powerful, accepted, and safe. The bulk of the market, any market, is made up of those folks in the middle of the bell curve, the ones who want to buy something proven and valued. If your product isn’t working, if your service isn’t catching on, if you’re not even appealing to the crazy geeks who like the new stuff, you mustn’t persist with a tactic just because you feel stuck with it.
The opposite of quitting isn’t “waiting around” is “re-dedication” – an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.
It’s OK to quit, and quit often. Quit if you’re on a dead-end path, facing a cliff, has a Dip that isn’t worth the reward at the end. Not giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy but quitting the tactics that aren’t working. If your job is a Cul-de-Sac, you have to quit or accept the fact that your career is over. Strategic quitting is a conscious decision ou make based on the choices that are available to you. Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you to excel at something else. Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.
Three questions to ask before quitting:
1. Am I panicking? Quitting when you’re panicked is dangerous and expensive.
2. Who am I trying to influence. Influencing one person is like scaling a wall. Influencing a market, on the other hand, is more of hill than a wall. You can make progress, one step at a time, and as you get higher, it actually gets easier.
3. What sort of measurable progress am I making?
Quitting before you start: Write down under what circumstances you’re willing to quit and when. And then stick with it.
Soft tires: pick your dip. It’s the last 10 pounds, the ones that get it to full that really pay off. Figure out how much pressure you’ve got available, then pick your tire. Not too big, not too small.
If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.
This book presents some interesting ideas: 1) be the best, no reason to be mediocre, 2) a sound quitting strategy. At first, I was confused about author’s message whether it’s best to slog through the Dip or quitting. After reading it second time, I finally got the message. Yes, quitting is not so bad if it’s the means to an end. The hard part is to figure out if you’re in a Dip or a Cul-de-sac or cliff. Well, I think I can apply some of the learning here to my career.
Movie Review: “Ran”
A warlord in the 19th-century Japan gave up his authority and anoint his eldest son of three to be the new lord. This resulted in a bloody 3-way fight for power. The youngest son was banished because he was against the idea. The 2nd son was a true politician, pretending to go along with the decision, ended up killing his eldest brother and took over his conniving wife, whose had her head cut off after making her avenge. The old lord finally went crazy but was later saved by his youngest son, who loved him the most. The youngest son, on his triumphant return, was assassinated by the 2nd brother’s assassins. In the end, all three sons died and the old man survived with his light turned off.
The movie was fit for an on-stage drama. The acting of the elder warlord was simply amazing. The war scenes with infantry and horse-back riders mixed with gun, arrows was very interesting. The war strategy, taking Sun-tzu’s art of war to an art form, was pretty advance too.
The lessons learned are 1) don’t give up power until you’re convinced the people who inherit the power are well respected and would not abuse the power and you’re well protected away from power, 2) what goes around, comes around. You may end up eating the fruits of your own. 3) Listen to why people object to your ideas. They may mean the best for you and love you the most. 4) Re-pay people’s loyalty with kindness. They may have more choices than you think when they chose to stick with you. Very good movie, indeed.
Movie Review: “Kite Runner”
This is a great movie about a young child (Amir) good at storytelling growing up with his best friend (Hassan) in Afghanistan in a well-to-do family. His best friend was the son of his father’s servant, Ali. They played together; Amir told good stories and Hassan was good at slingshot. During one of the kite runner festival, Amir won the race by “cutting” off all other kites. Hassan, like a good friend with an unconditional love for Amir, went to retrieve the kits and was raped by the bad neighborhood boys. Amir witnessed the whole thing and yet did nothing to help his friend. In fact, he turned even nastier toward his “damaged” friends and started to despise him and put him in trouble and resulted in his family’s departure from the household.
When the Russians’ tanks rolled in, Amir and his father escaped to America where Amir grew up to be a writer and his father owned a gas station in Fremont. After a marriage to a local Afghan girl, an Afghan’s general’s daughter, he was called back to see for the last time his mentor, his father’s best friend who listened to his stories and provided guidance to him when he was a child. Before his mentor’s death, he was told that Hassan was his half-brother and he was killed guarding his childhood home against the Talibans and he was asked to save Hassan’s son. With courage and determination and as a redemption of the sins he committed against Hassan, he went back to Kabul, Afghanistan and faced his arch rival Assef and rescued the boy.
This is a really good story about personal redemption and making amends to our friends and relatives, who may have given us unconditional love. The road to paying back may help us find our true self and make us a true hero. Love the story and the beautiful kite scenes. I have come to understand the life of the Afghan and the people a little more.
How to Grow a Rainforest – TED Video
Wow, the following TED presentation by Willie Smits is simply amazing. There is still hope that we as the guardian of the earth can make a difference in saving the rainforest at a sustaining basis. Willie’s recipes to save the orangutans that includes local people in his equation are simply amazing.
Dirty Job’s Mike Rowe Re-defines What Dirty Jobs Really Are
I always enjoy Mike Rowe’s Dirty Job on the Discovery Channel. His talk on this particular dirty job shoot on castrating a sheep really re-defines what direct jobs are. Some things are not what they appear to be until you start doing it yourselves. Is doing a mundane job well and consistently all that bad? How do you explain why the workers are as happy as they can be? Perhaps, fancy jobs that you’re passionate about may not cut out to be what you think they are? How true!