Bamboo In The Wind

At first, it looks like we need to learn from our experiences and adapt. Changing our thinking can provide us better ways of doing things. A big part of finding a better way is learning. When we learn to synthesize what we have experienced, we begin to turn that into residual know-how. Residual know-how helps us in triggering a beneficial change. Without residual know-how, changes can still happen but without purpose and benefit. The benefit of the residual knowledge-driven change is it has the potential to provide us the leverage. Having leverage provides us significantly greater results for the efforts put in. Consistency offers significant leverage. Consistency in trusting, listening, honesty, obedience, exercise, learning... There are many ways to be consistent in how we are. Consistency is a significant advantage. When we are consistent, we are believable to others; we can be trusted. Being consistent pays off in the long run. It defines who we are.

Acknowledging the problem does not mean we cannot do anything about it.. Sometimes we show the tendency is to stay.away from problems, trouble areas, awkward situations. We think we are better off by closing our eyes to something we don't like or want.  We think rejection of bad influence is a recipe for good influence. Alternative is to confront adverse situation by standing up to it. First step of that is to acknowledge that there is something that requires our attention and action. Ignorance of it never a good strategy. Acceptance on other hand offers a progressive response.

It is to create something. On your own time and effort. Bootstrapper creates something of value. Creating value is such a commonly used term. In the business world, it has almost lost its sheen because of the promise of the term, ie. Value is never delivered! Our job as a bootstrapper is a run good social circuit, a good family, good business, products excellent creativity. Corroboration of that happening is when others feel like inspecting, experiencing, and using what we bootstrapped from our imagination. Imagination is such that it has a real angle to it. It benefits the recipients of that creativity. It makes them happy. They enjoy the experience of it. Garnering someone's attention and expenditure is a testament to great creative work. Since we know our work may have core constituents and consumers we must think hard about whether what we do is for someone real. It's worth their attention and money. So bootstrapped pledges that they must not get paid until creating somethi...

To deify or to vilify someone or something means having extreme views. It reflects being on one of the two ends of the spectrum.  It sometimes means reacting instead of responding. The reaction is generated because of insufficient information. Our views are temporal in nature. They are not grounded in reality. Anything that is not grounded in reality can build extreme views. To deify a person, a process can be a sign of followership and progress at first. It can, however, derail into a follower-ship of status-quo and regress later. Vilification is the aftermath of an uncorroborated deification. It represents a swinging opinion. It is best to be on the spectrum with some grounding in reality. It is best opinions are rooted in care, evidence, and understanding.

Industrial age businesses are used to hierarchical structures that over time become overheads. To know the actual work taking place, we have to penetrate the peel layers of the management structure. As an organization grows and receives customer interest, we see the need to add to the army of people to create sliced-up responsibilities. This army of people requires supervision for carrying out organizational processes. Over time supervisory role has become responsible for knowing who has the information about the work.  In organizations that do well, the supervisory role is encouraged to know everything about the n-1 layers in their work units. Knowing what your teams are involved in at a thorough level is a competitive advantage in such organizations. Communication is uncluttered and unambiguous. That supports sound data from a responsible person and triggers quick decision-making. Interested, informed, and involved supervisory personnel is an asset that makes an organization make...

It's a defense mechanism. When we realize that things are unlikely to go our way, we raise our defenses. The instant reaction is to conserve ourselves for later. After all, we do not want adverse conditions to take away our ability to do something more. What if what we are doing is going the way we expected. It does not mean we cannot put a pause or even a stop to it and do something else. However, we can do something else if we come out of the present crisis unscathed. Protecting ourselves from damages to reputation, financial overcommitments, and lost relationships goes a long way in having a runaway even though the present one is not looking great. Protecting ourselves does not mean we do that for personal benefit. It does not mean staying out of harm's way at any cost. Protecting ourselves means doing the right thing when things are not going our way. Doing so even when what we focused on dearly is seemingly falling apart. There is recognition that, along the way, our assum...

The achievement reflects a great alignment of cause, plan, and ensuing actions. Without the clarity in each of these, the achievement is usually sheer luck. We cannot build wealth by fluke. We become wealthy when we have an asset that works even if no one watches.  We need machinery, a software program, or specialization that can be offered as a service. Careers don't happen without clarity on which skills to develop and how to utilize them in specific situations. We develop affiliation and reputation through a worthy cause and intense story-telling of how it benefits some and thus resonates with others. Achievement is an aftermath of the deployment of available resources, thoughts, and steadfast execution - an act of doing the work. Achievement is a mere fall out of what came before it. We simply need to orchestrate the required alignment.

Tension has the potential to show us the need to do something. It can get us unstuck from inaction. It provides a sense of urgency to change the status quo. In the workplace, tension creates an urge to attack a problem. For instance, it creates an urgency to talk to an aggrieved customer or creates an urgency to produce challenging employees tired of the monotony of work and want to quit the job. Tension is an act of inducing pressure in the system. Tension makes something move inside. It stresses the system such that we err on the side of acting. Have you ever been in a quiet wild only to find a fierce animal coming before us? It creates tension. Monetarily we freeze with fear.  And, very next minute, we try to shed the fear and look for our way out. We either make gestures, mount an attack, or even try running away. All these are actions to change our circumstances. The opposite of tension is worry. Worry stops the action. It puts us in a bind. Tension creates an urgency to addre...

We have a very strange way of solving problems. We try to guess what others might want, turn that into a real need, and provide them with what we think they need.  An example of this is a child returning from school trying to make a desperate attempt to connect with her parent. They have many stories from the day at school and need someone to listen. We think they are trying to catch attention. We happily assume what they want and shut them down under the garbs of being busy. A co-worker wants a quick chat with a manager, and the manager brings his own context of co-workers' past interactions and assumes that they know what the co-worker needs and offers no time or tosses them on an inconveniently scheduled meeting.  When we are in a store, the store in charge has a customer who needs a sledgehammer but misses the point about what the customer wants to do with a sledgehammer. Why is he in the store in the first place? These examples tell us how we connect with people and misun...

From whose perspective? How do we know if the right is right and wrong is wrong? Our biases develop from quite a lot of things. We are affected by what we read, how we are raised, our experiences, and our actions. We absorb information from our environment and try to make sense of it through our emotions. What we learn becomes a vital input to our thinking and subsequent actions. So it is important that we decipher what we experience through a balanced lens. For example, if we are concerned about a lack of career progress, can we come up with at least a few reasons for why we lack progress? Reasons provide us with relief. Rationally thought-out reasons provide unbiased possible explanations. They tell us why certain things may work the way they do. When that happens, we are comfortable with the clarity we ourselves provide. An important side effect of building out reasoning is, that in the process of reasoning, we avoid self-criticism. Don't blame anyone for our situation. We tend ...