Signs

This has been the saddest experience of my life, as I was very close to my mom in spite of the distance. She was a loving and caring woman who loved life and people and it makes me very sad that she no longer will be able to enjoy the life she loved so much. She loved to travel, to eat, to meet friends, to watch movies, to read books and to be with her family and even though she was 80 years old and with poor health for the last couple of weeks, it’s very difficult for me to comprehend that she can no longer inhabit this world she enjoyed so much.

I’m eager and happy to get on with work, knowing that all business problems always have a solution, which is not the case with health and life issues. I’m looking forward to seeing you and talking to you at the soonest occasion

My manager's mother passed away recently and she was away for close to a month. When she came in, she sent a very touching note, a part of which I have pasted here (without her permission). I found the last line very interesting. 'Knowing that all business problems always have a solution, not.....'

I sometimes wonder that our lives are so complex, difficult and for most parts out of our control that may be we yearn for that feeling of control, that certitude which would enable us to say, if we do X, Y will happen and so on. And it is this nature of business i.e. problems can be solved and that most things are causal, that, it is so alluring, that many people give 'business' so much importance, sometimes at the cost of other also important things in life.

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I am turning out to be a big believer in signs. I have noticed that I am in a unclear situation, I have been fortunate to read ‘signs’ that have made me pause, re think, re assess and decide the right course of action. And every single time I have recognized and acted on these signs, I have chosen the 'better option'. I can't call it right decision, but definitely the 'better option'. This signs talk sounds so mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus right? Let me try and explain.

By signs, I don’t mean some sudden writing which appears from nowhere but I think I mean an intuitive feeling. A phenomenon, where I am able to comprehend a situation for more than what it looks at first sight, go behind and beyond and understand what it means in a broader context. I know all this talk of signs sounds like witch craft or something but it is not.

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There is this other article I read - 'How Will you measure your life’ by Prof. Clayton M Christenson in the Harvard Business Review. The article raises interesting points and has drawn diverse reactions. I reproduce one part of it here that I quite liked.

It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.

That is an astute observation. While we are not all pricks by default, meritocracy which we all swear by as the panacea to all problems in the world, is in my circles at least, defined by certain restrictive cues like the name of school or college, designation on our visiting card, the locality where we have bought houses, vacation destinations, fortune 500 ranking of our employer and so on. And we often compare ourselves with people who are better off or in our perception have accumulated more tick marks on list that invariably has items similar to the ones listed above. And these people become the smart people we want to associate with/ learn from and hence by the nature of limited capacity, energy, time, we don't seem to learn things from the rest. Thus it is not by choice that we ignore or close our minds to others, but just by social conditioning.

Of course, this also begs a larger question. How should we define merit?

Its only words....

I came across this news article yesterday. Brazil has setup a Grammar hotline. You can now dial in - ask your doubts and experts will answer. The reason they say is that 'Brazilians are sensitive about making grammatical errors, which are often associated with a lack of education.'

Well, I do not think that grammatical errors imply a lack of education. Neither do I believe that proficiency in a language is a pre-requisite for success. Take the example of Indians like me. Most of us are not native English speakers. We are invariably bi-lingual if not tri-lingual or even multi-lingual. I can safely claim that I am proficient in English and can speak/write/read - Hindi and Tamil and can speak and understand Kannada and a bit of Bengali and can understand a bit of Gujarati. And almost all Indians I know are multi-lingual. So when we talk, we switch between two or even three languages, often in the same sentence. The rules of grammar are different in each of these languages. Hence we aren't often grammatically right when we speak. But hey, as long as we get the message across, it is fine, right? May be.

So what about when we write? We don't write in three languages. We do so in only one. Writing doesn't demand instantaneous reaction or spontaneous expression. In fact it gives us enough time to proof read for errors, if any. So then, are we justified in being a little more critical of errors when they occur in writing?

I think the discussion is not as simple as right vs. wrong or justified vs. unjustified, I would like to view the question in the broader context. Why is writing and writing well so important? Why do I and many others place a premium on the written word?

In this age of complexity and high noise, the ability to express our thoughts and ideas in a simple and cogent manner is a skill that is very scarce. Spoken words suffer from transmission loss. Our writing has the ability to travel both geographically and across time. Putting our thoughts down on paper, many a times, helps ourselves get clearer about the topic. As we write, we are often forced to think beyond gut reactions. We are forced to differentiate and discern between judgments /biases and facts and thus and many a times we re-evaluate our own points of view. Writing necessitates us to understand who our reader or audience is, expect or anticipate their questions and answer them in advance. This definitely develops our own intellectual faculties and many a times signals maturity of our thought process. We slowly but surely learn to appreciate nuances and subtexts better.

Effective writing is what I refer to as the ability to write well. I would in fact argue that our readers are investing their time to read and interpret what we are trying to say. So in a sense, we owe it to our readers to invest our own time, to enable easy comprehension. Not all of us are gifted with linguistic skills to write lyrically or poetically, but in this day and age we all have access to spell check and grammar-check tools. When we make the effort to spell check and grammar-proof our writing, we are in fact telling the reader that we appreciate and value his or her time. It signals that that we pay attention even to the smallest of details.

In professional context, I don't have to over emphasize the value of the written word. We are as good as our ideas and our ideas are worthwhile only if the receiver gets what we are trying to say. Our managers and business leaders have little time, so effective communication is of paramount importance. What we need to realise is that in today's electronic world, our written word travels before us. It builds a mental image and influences the perception of the writer in the reader's mind. And why wouldn’t we want to leave a positive impression?

Increasingly, we are concluding business deals via mails and documents alone, without interacting even once personally or over telephone with the other party. In such cases, it is crucial that we take effort to communicate effectively, so that we may influence the deal positively. I would even reckon that if we write well, with attention to details by dotting all the i's and crossing the t’s, our client or manager or business partner could very well believe that we would be as meticulous about our work/projects as we are about our written note.

Now, we write in different contexts. An email, a chat conversation, a personal invitation or a thank you note and so on. We don't necessarily have content that is intellectually heavy that needs to be thought through, simplified, communicated effectively all the time. I am sure our friends and acquaintances understand our message when we communicate using short forms or even non-grammatical terms. They could only care less about spellings, grammar, framework, thought process etc. So do we need to spell check, grammar-proof our writing even for a simple chat conversation? I am biased to say yes. It is my very personal point of view that we should make every effort to write well. After all, our friends are still investing time and effort and by taking pains to enable easy comprehension, we are only appreciative of their effort. Also, if we want to make a habit of writing well, why exclude certain conversations/ interactions. Excellence is after all achieved only when best practices become a habit. I would also contend that our friends are the best people to hone our grammar and spelling skills with. We are, after all most receptive to their criticism.

Finally, I would like to leave you with a cheeky note. When God gave the Ten Commandments, he wrote them / got Moses to write them down on stones vs. just sermonising. Now, I wonder why.

Perspective

I was talking to a younger friend of mine. He is just starting off his career. Out of an engineering college, he landed into a software techie role. He detests the coding job from bottom of his heart. This is causing him much grief. I guess he is in the process of figuring out what he wants to do with work/ life etc.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine mailed me and 5 or 6 others, generally updating us on her life. This mailing list is a group of us who know each other well, used to hang out in college. Over the past few years after engineering, each of us moved on in the path that we chose/ life took us. So when this one friend mailed in couple of days ago, everyone chipped in with their replies and updates.

That mail trail is an interesting read. People are in different parts of the world and each of them in a different phase of life. One is married, one more engaged. The rest of us are still free birds. Some of us plan to stay single for good. One is searching for a job, one left a lucrative career to be with the love of her life in a different country. One loves her job and is enroute to becoming a CEO but she sits in a small factory town. One quit coding because she hated it, did an MBA and now isn't too happy with her job post MBA. One likes what she is doing, but wondering when exactly she should shake up the status quo. I like what I am doing, but am restless, don’t know why. In all, all of us seem to have made some progress but we are still searching, prodding around. In fact as many stated in as many words, we could spend another decade and not be sure what we want in life.

I wish, I can tell my young friend that he may be in the same situation 5 years later or may be even 15 years later. But I am sure this is the last thing he wants to hear. It is not just the destination but the journey also that is fun. Success, when one achieves the defined by destination, is a big high, giving a feeling of being on the top-of-the-world. But sometimes defining a destination alone can be limiting, giving us a false or temporary sense of success. The journey on the other hand, is where I believe, we grow up (hopefully!). For a while, it may seem like for every one step forward, we slip two steps back, but ultimately the momentum kicks in and things take off. After all, mistakes, miss-steps and false starts are what successful (wo)men call experience.

And finally, we need to sometimes, take a larger perspective and enjoy this journey, for we will pass through this way, only once in our lifetime.

So, what do you do?

'We may not admit it, but the truth is that we all seek to be loved by the world. When we are babies, we are loved whether we burp or scream or break our toys. But as we grow up, we are suddenly thrown into a world where people judge us by our achievements or our status(rather than as our mothers did). Hence our anxiety about how we are perceived. No human being is immune from this weakness. The ego (Ahamkara) is a leaky balloon, forever requiring helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect There is something at once sobering and absurd in the extent to whiche we are lifted by the attentions of others and sunk by their disregard.'

Alain de Bottom in Status anxiety.

I was blown away the moment I read this passage. This is so true. All of us love to be loved, be recognized and appreciated by others. We all exhibit this basic, almost primal need at various levels, at various forums and at in various contexts. Slowly, this need to be recognised by others gets converted to some form of affirmation of our achievements and in turn of how successful we are. Subconsciously the habit of constantly comparing ourselves to others is reinforced right from our childhood. we are given ranks when we are in school and everyone wants to know who is first. When we score a 85/100, we are asked, what did xxx score and so on? This 'need to compare' is institutionalised.

Through school and possibly college, we all as a peer group face similar situations of exams and that in one way serves as 'the' way in which people compare themselves. Once we reach late twenties and early thirties, there are no exams. Salaries, size of house, cars, places where we take vacations etc become barometers of achievement and slowly an affirmation of our success and hence in some way a measure of self worth.

This basic need to be recognised for our achievements is more often than not expressed in terms of material possessions. These material possessions are attached to some with emotional value. Thus there is this almost visceral feeling of joy and accomplishment when we acquire this material possession. I am also part of this deal. I do pause and listen to what my peers are up to, with a lot of pride and happiness and sometimes a tinge of envy. Today, more so than ever, we are asked to follow our dreams. And it is not just important to follow them, we also need to achieve some form of success. Books and movies and email forwards today glorify those who have followed their dreams and become successful. The pressure on each on of us to be successful is humongous. Let us not underestimate it. And the world is ready to give us a set of checklists, achieving which counts as success unless we clearly define what the parameters are for ourselves.

I don't think we will ever be free from the need of wanting to be recognised. The best we can do is to be cognizant of this desire in us and keep it under check.

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PS: I haven't read Alain De Botton's books but have read reviews. Do check out his website. He seems to have written on very interesting topics. http://www.alaindebotton.com/