Bamboo In The Wind

How do we prepare for anything we do? How clearly do we plot what outcomes do we expect vs what outcomes we might receive? It is important that we know our need and want. And then it's vital that we know whether we have a supply of planning, required participation, and a recipe of how to get something done together in place. Dissatisfaction stems from ill-prepared efforts. Our trip to a great destination may not fructify if we don't plan, get someone to accompany us, or if we don't assign duties to fellow travelers that will get them interested in the plan. A start-up may have a great idea. However, it will not solve the relevant problem and generate customer delight unless there is a good plan about what to build first and who might be the best participant in the exploratory phase. And then we need a galvanized leader who brings the whole effort together. Dissatisfaction is a backward movement because of underestimating what it takes to progress the effort we are undertaki...

The choice reflects freedom. We choose because we decide to. There is inherent control when we make a choice. And that is a good thing. Making a choice gives us the agency we need.  Industrial work has mostly focused on taking away from us the agency to decide. This is the most important reason we do not associate work with responsibility. Early-stage efforts struggle with loyalty and cannot get the footing because we do not hand authority over those we join hands in where we want to go. Offering Choice is a highly powerful tool to retain control and make people feel empowered. Making choice is a road to participate with ownership, responsibility, and decisive participation. Organizations that nurture the culture of delegated choice-making will go a long way in creating something meaningful and something that solves real problems.

Difficulties are practical. Unavoidable. Depend on what skill we possess. Depend on how we apply experience. Difficulties persist until we get to the root of what caused them. They persist until we build a neutral opinion about what they require us to personally do.  Thus difficulties are resolvable when we have an acceptance for them without any biases. Have an open mind to understand what is in our control. Have transparency to seek some else's feedback about about us, our approach detached from what appears difficult. Difficulties are realities of life. There are multiple forces that cause them. Our best shot is the accept them. Do the best we can to understand those and take actions that fully are in our control to minimize their impacts.

Stumbling? No worries. It's common. No one gets it right the first time. When we start out, we tend to falter. Our expectations of what would happen do not turn out correct and we feel the block. It all appears to be a dead-end and the end of the world. Such stoppages are all in our minds. What if we kept just a little room to say to ourselves, "Oh that does not seem to work. Never mind. Let me try that".  Trying that instead of this is a powerful way to restart when we feel blocked. In fact, it is a hallmark of an entrepreneur or a bootstrapper. They want to keep doing the next best thing that is available. They do the next right thing as they perceive and do not hesitate to test those out in the market. Can we keep doing the next right thing forever? Of course, we can. Of course, we should. Because we rarely have a good idea of what is likely to work. What is likely to receive acceptance. Through doing the next right thing we start unraveling our needs, our limitations,...

Our biases make us interpret everything around us in a way we have been raised to think about them. If we are taught to respect elders and if someone is seen not to respect elders, we think it's wrong behavior. What if we see this circumstance only through the lens of our prior beliefs? The circumstance of disrespect may stem from the disagreement in point of view and the elderly may be countered by the younger person with a different logic. Such a circumstance does not amount to wrong behavior. All it means is there is a differing point of view between the two people regardless of their age. And that they are dealing with their different backgrounds and different experiences of the same situation. Biases create expectations and expectations are always unilateral. Clearly, circumstances are based on biases. Undoing biases is thus a very powerful tool that makes us see things rather neutrally. It takes the practice of empathy to remove our biases. It takes guts to take personal crit...

Having a rhythm is an essential aspect of being productive. Rhythm gives us predictability. Doing certain things at certain times, doing certain things at a certain pace, doing them for a particular time, with particular people. Rhythm allows us to mentally prepare for what is to come next. We are on board with what is to come up. Why is that important? Our resistance to getting involved, engaging, do anything is largely due to our mental unpreparedness. We own things, interactions, and decisions when we are mentally willing to get involved which oftentimes is simplified by just having a rhythm. Rhythm teaches us the discipline of being there for a certain cause that affects us. Rhythm can look like a regimented method of forcing us to do something. But in reality, it's just a habit of developing notes to ourselves to tell us how we plan to divide our day into productive spurts of activities. For instance, 30 minutes of walk in the morning, writing for 20 minutes after breakfast, a...

Intense efforts are usually based on foresight, tremendous focus, and rallying like-minded people to the cause. It's not a surprise that communities tend to exhibit energies, and care for collective wellbeing with an eye on the cause they are together for. Such camaraderie reflects the culture of the community. A sense of belonging is unmissable and everyone is willing to throw themselves lengths and breadths for the common cause.  Communities (and early-stage organizations) have the power of creating impactful ripples and contributions. Communities (and early-stage organizations) tend to have one thing in common. They have an internal culture that resists any change. So when they feel the need to grow and expand, their resistance to keeping the status quo is most evident. Embracing change means,  the view of insiders and those outsiders eager to become the new insiders is at play. The collision often means that the intense cause for which the effort was organized begins to di...

Friendship do a whole lot of good to us. It boosts our morale, keeps us honest, and helps us understand ourselves better. Friends cover for our weaknesses, fill our gaps make us learn from each other, and make us excel in what we are good at.  Friendship teaches us to forgive. We learn to forgive ourselves more so than anyone else. This is a great ability to develop. It makes us act with a rational mind and balanced thinking. Friendships make us live happily, and keep us healthy and grow through our collective life experiences. Mentorship is a form work friendship that has similar potential to grow us as a person. Real mentors help us see through our inadequacies. They open us to realities of us rather than play into our view of ideal us. Mentorship is rarely a forced relationship. It's develops into one, if one is patient like we are with friends. There are no hierarchies, no age bar or no similar work experiences. Friends and mentors cut across, education, language, experience, h...

Overemphasizing data is hardly useful. Turning data into information is costly, especially if we are not planning on deploying information to some use. Knowing how the job market in US or Europe or Africa is doing is of no use if that information is irrelevant to the local market where you are. Knowing that information more accurately is even more futile and keeps you away from putting information to some use. It is resistance to doing our actual work.  Data can be turned into evidence which manifests into useful information for what may be missing and places where we could act to have what is missing. We call such call to action as making decisions. When data corroborates situations or problems in an understandable manner we are expending our time on doing the right things. However, when we tune into the stream of information, we are forced to swim the flow that we don't want, or need. Knowing how the video post was received, the number of likes to accomplishment posts. Such infor...

There is a tendency to do more, frequently, with an expectation that others want us to do more. This is a serious energy killer. It gets us focused on what others might ask of us rather than what we would have wanted. We overestimate what is to be done and then expend energy doing something that may not turn out as impactful as it could have been. What if we instead chose to keep our eyes and ears open and noticed what makes engagement a lot less self-gratifying and more rewarding and engaging for us and for those around us? Doing just enough so that there is room for us to hear a reverberation of what we did, a response, feedback, a comment that provides us an engagement opportunity? In a rush to get things we don't realize what is the value we are generating as a result of doing those. Are there recipients eager to see your ship out so continuously - especially when what is meant to be for others right from the go? So while putting our work out there is important, knowing how to ...