What Do You Want to Be Known For?
I had recently subscribed to a newsletter, in which Nikhil Krishnan, runs an interesting experiment. He asks a question every week and asks his subscriber to respond. In the next week, he publishes the best answers for the question. Think it like Quora run over email for a small set of audience.
One of the fascinating question he had recently asked is:
How do you want your legacy to be remembered? In other words, what do you want to be known for?
David Brooks calls this as the [Eulogy Virtues.] https://medium.com/@MikeSturm/resume-virtues-eulogy-virtues-and-the-impact-of-small-moments-dc2742fbac3b What kind of eulogy you want to be read in comparison with the other key virtues, which we all give priority to: Resume Virutes, that makes us employable or earns money.
This is my attempt to answer this question:
I want to be remembered as an awesome dad.
Stoically, I am aware that I cannot influence any other person in my life. Even my son. But I can control only my actions and my behaviour. I am not striving for my son’s audience in me to show my awesomeness. I have been bestowed by a great set of parents and lucky to have lovely spouse. So I simply want to be the best of myself in whatever amount of time possible to my son and to my family.
My dad has been a huge influence on me. I have been a son, who went through the phase of resisting to see his values, fighting with his views in my teenage and slowly respecting & embracing his views and values. So, if I have some iota of influence in my son in the future, I hope I am remembered as a fond and a loving person.
Its All About Taste
Yesterday, when some neighbours were chatting with my wife, one person made a comment:
“My brother is not only interested in movies, but he has such a good taste for movies. He watches a variety of movies, and he has cultivated a real good taste.”
This is such a compliment that I really yearn for myself. I really like this kind of compliment because I believe taste & style is the culmination of all the hard work and effort put over a long period of time. I used to think that, style and taste are an elite value that one should be not so proud of espousing it.
If you think hard, it is completely not true. We are all striving our best to a good judge of things that we consume. We might start consuming everything at the start. But after sometime, we will know what is good and bad. More importantly we would all know, what is excellent. This is applicable to every tangible and intangible thing that we consume. Books, music, food, apparel, shoes, perfumes, chocolates.
I don’t know where to draw the line on when to compare our taste with others and claim our superiority over others. I don’t know about that part at all. I wish I can articulate a little more on that in a latter occasion. But I want to quote Ira Glass on this to emphasise the importance of cultivating taste:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
Thoughts on Reading
Jorge Luis Borges says:
“…if a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you…. look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.”
This is a very pithy rule but it is very powerful and true.
When I started blogging in 2002, I used to be a listicle freak. I will follow the year end lists or lists from popular bloggers. Then buy the books and literally plough through them. But many a times, I have felt it like a huge ordeal in completing those books.
Some of the mistakes I did in those times are:
Not stopping reading the books that I didn’t find interesting and slogging through it. It was a bias of not judging the content of the book and simply trusting the authority of the writer.
Sticking to just reading one book instead of reading multiple books at a time. I used to read a lot of blogs and opinion about that book, instead of reading the actual book and judging it.
Selecting the books to read on a topics that I was remotely aware of and not hugely enthusiastic about. These books used to be the classics in literature or something about an influential theory like post-modernism.
Killing Our Heroes
In a comment to my post on “Role Models”, Basile Samel wrote (emphasis is mine):
I think we should stop listening to role models for the sake of it. Multiplying our experiences and indulging in a regular practice of introspection is way better to grow and find our own answers. There was a time where I loved listening to self-improvement podcasts or reading like-minded books, but too often it ends up in intellectual masturbation. In a sense, you need to kill your heroes to become your own hero.
I want to expand and ruminate a bit on the topics raised. I fully agree that introspection and meditation are a way to understand oneself better and lead a flourishing life. But frankly, I feel it is not an easily accessible one. In the din of everyday life, with a barrage of information pouring in and with so many life/work commitments, it is extremely tough to sit back and act in a mindful manner. As a human species, we need skills to wade through this abundance. I digress. My point: it is a privilege to introspect.
I want to draw an analogy of “killing our heroes” to “being an atheist or agnostic”. It is so easy to call oneself an atheist and denounce many rituals associated with it. But religion is a tour-de-force. It is one of the longest surviving institutions of our society. Religion helps people to bond and find meaning to people who are deprived of many comforts of society.
It will be an interesting experiment to see, how an economically well-off society behaves without any religion in it. My bet is: instead of religion, sub-cultures will be formed. Crossfit, keto diet, microservices, EDM fans are some of the sub-cultures which is similar to religion. Instead of deities, you have coaches, singers or hackers, dispensing their wisdom and opinions from their pulpits.
When deep thoughts, introspection and meditation becomes a luxury, our default mode is that we all tend to orient ourselves into the sub-cultures and emulate our role models. These things are important, because belong in a sub-culture gives you the identity, meaning, helps you bond with society.
When need not worship and blindly follow our heroes and role-models, but for the role models we sub-consciously choose, we need to be aware of their warts and moles. We need to cultivate the skill of when to take their advice and when to ignore them.
Barbell Strategy for Role Models
I came to know about Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy in his famous book, The Black Swan. Taleb talks about that strategy from the financial investment perspective. The strategy is:
“Your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.”Put your eggs in two baskets. One basket holds extremely safe investments, while the other holds nothing but leverage and speculation.
I want to apply this in all the areas in life. Like fitness (HIIT, Intermittent Fasting), learning (Anki, bootcamps).
But I want to use this barbell lens strategy lens to view something that is something personal. Role models. Human beings’ are bound to have lots of shades of grey, no one is great beyond criticism or no one is so bad beyond redemption.
Lets take a role model, Elon Musk. He is a swashbuckling, multi-tasking, bold and hugely inspiring entrepreneur pushing the limits of humanity. We can all have him as a standard to aspire for. But to believe everything that comes out of him mouth or cheering along with the fanboys will do no good for us. To really appreciate him, we need to know what a harsh critic about him has to say. The critic may also be not right. But we will get a sense that the truth is somewhere in between.
In Elon Musk’s case, one of the popular critics on his methods in Basecamp’s co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). DHH is very vocal about Elon’s 80-hour work week or brandishing the existence of work-life balance. More than DHH, to intellectually validate or verify the claims of Elon’s moonshot efforts, we also need to listen an energy expert critic like Vaclav Smil. Smil talks very criticially of Elon’s efforts and dresses him down.
So whenever someone praises Elon effusively, its better to take it with a pinch of a salt, considering the views of DHH and Smil. At the same time, whenever someone is too harsh or ridiculously critical of Elon, again we need to take it with a pinch of salt. But we need to listen to both the extremes.
Freedom From Platforms - No This Is Not About Digital Detox
Enough has been written about digital detox and our need for moderating screentime. I want to talk about reliance on social media platforms for our growth.
A small story. My wife started a company to train dentists and upskill themselves. She reached out to a marketing consultant and after some discussions, they decided to have a Facebook page and run some campaigns, to spread the word out. The initial weeks of the campaign went on really well. The Facebook page had many likes and subscribers. People were asking about the courses and it was awesome.
Suddenly, a company from the U.S, mailed to my wife, saying the company’s brand name is somewhat similar to my wife’s Facebook page name. My wife’s company was Medsparks and the US company’s name was Med Spark. We realised, they are a big company and it’s futile to fight. So she changed the name of the company to Lumio Academy. All branding and marketing collaterals were updated and the campaigns resumed in full swing. She conducted many workshops, courses and the brand was popular among the dentists in Chennai, India. All of this was done only through ads on the Facebook platform.
I was skeptical about this social media based selling but I was surprised at the way the customers were growing and engaging with her.
But something huge happened that made me tell, “I told you so”.
After six months or so, we got a mail from the company saying that the Facebook page’s handle was still the old name. (Facebook allows you to have a page name and a handle name. Page name can be changed easily at anytime but not the handle name). We explained saying that we cannot change that on our own, we have raised a request to Facebook and they are not replying to the query. The lawyers of the company were aggressive and demanding we act soon. We were simply waiting for Facebook to reply back. (Facebook sucks in these critical things 😡)
Suddenly one day, my wife got a mail from Facebook saying the page is a copyright violation and it was taken down. It further went on and said, get the consent of the company’s legal team to bring the page back. Apparently, the legal team complained about the page’s handle name being similar to their brand and Facebook decided to shut down the page, even before hearing out the other side. We reached the support team and some friend who worked there to help us out but in vain.
It was then I realised, all the money spent on acquiring customers (page like, subscribers and brand visibility) vanished in seconds because of our reliance on a platform like Facebook. She didn’t have the phone number or email or name of the customers acquired so far. We should have put on efforts in acquiring the customers through Facebook but not depend on the platform completely.
The talks of email being dead and Slack (or any other alternative) is the future sounds like bull shit to me.
Email is the most powerful and resilient technology that the Internet has given to us. A website is the true real estate on the Internet. Not a Facebook page or a Twitter handle or a Medium account or an Instagram account.
This is not a Luddite cry to stay away from them. All these platforms have different incentives than ours. Their business models are being experimented based on market changes and various stakeholders. We need to use these platforms to catalyse the growth but not fully rely on them.
Spend money in Facebook or Google ads, but getting your customers details like email or phone number to build a relationship with them is extremely important. WhatsApp number or a SnapChat handle might look very sexy, but through that, build a relationship with customers, but don’t rely only on that.
We should all be using these platforms to fuel our growth, but we all need to rely on the tried and tested technologies to build businesses and relationships with customers.