[Book Review] Autobiography of a restless mind

Learnings from the book Autobiography of a restless mind about Dee Hock, CEO and founder of VISA

1. Every mountain is two mountains: the one that urges us to climb and the one that punishes us when we do.
2. The ferocity with which a dog defends its bone tells us a great deal more about the nature of the dog than the quality of the bone.
3. Habits are never in a hurry.
4. Nature will never take direction from us no matter how much havoc we create in the attempt.
5. Despite the desperate effort of parents to teach their children good behavior, children continue to behave pretty much like their parents.
6. Politicians are addicted to mendacity, indecision, and inaction because they know that such things are rarely noticed, readily forgiven, and quickly forgotten, while a mistake is usually detected, seldom forgiven, and rarely forgotten.
7. People who set out to rule are never free. They are forever chained to the mob whether it be rebellious or subservient.
8. A fool is no less a fool when a wise man errs.
9. Tyranny shouts, “You must!” Leadership whispers, “Perhaps we should.”
10. The pleasures of youth are the pains of old age, just as the pleasures of old age are the pains of youth.
11. To speak is craft; to listen is art.
12. We judge others harshly by the standards we profess rather than those we practice. Yet we resent it bitterly when they return the favor.
13. Vice and virtue have one thing in common: the more people have of either, the less they think they have.
14. Without purpose will is blind. Without will purpose is impotent. Without ethical and moral content both are barren at best and dangerous at worst.
15. One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.
16. When we fully attend to the management of self, excellent management of all else is unavoidable.
17. Old people have so little left of life they should cease trying to make it bring what they desire and make the most of what it offers. Come to think of it, that’s not bad policy for young people as well.
18. Man is the only animal that will squander living to prolong existence. 
19. It is not more answers we need, but better questions. It is not more action we need, but deeper reflection. It is not more knowledge we need, but profounder wisdom. It is not more technology we need, but greater aspirations.
20. Those who despise people are the most desperate to be favorably recognized by them.
21. Ignorance is a great deal more eager to instruct wisdom than wisdom is to instruct ignorance.
22. The world of Homo sapiens is, indeed, a fantasyland, for we seek to control organizations, peoples, economies, and nature with minds that can’t control their own thoughts and emotions for thirty seconds. 
23. Love, share, accept, care; what else matters?

 

How to build happy teams

This post is not necessarily for managers. If you want to increasing the bonding between the engineers on the team, how well they gell together, here are some ideas. Happy teams where individuals enjoy good interpersonal relations often lead to good psychological safety which improves team productivity, brainstorming about ideas, challenging decisions and leads to better outcomes. Here are few simple things that teams can do :

1. Weekly team lunch
2. Weekly game nights
3. Bi-weekly happy hour
4. Quarterly team dinner
5. Bi-annual offsites that improve team dynamics. My favorite is escape room

Framework to decide between jobs - 3 Cs

1. Career
2. Compensation
3. Commute

The subtle art of not giving a f* : debugging suffering

If you are on blind and really frustrated with your job, you need to read this post

Questions to ask yourself about your suffering

• Dont ask "How do I stop suffering". Ask "Why am I suffering : for what purpose" ?
• What emotions am I feeling ? 
• Why am I feeling them ?
• Why do I consider this to be success/failure ? How am I choosing to measure myself ? By what standard I am judging myself and everyone around me ?

Onoda's value of loyalty to the Japanese empire is what sustained him on Lubang for almost 30 years. But this same value is also what made him miserable upon his return to Japan. 

Mustaine's metric of being better than metallica likely helped him launch an incredibly successful music career. But that same metric later tortured him in spite of his success. 

Pete Best got kicked out of Beatles, but he maintained a happy family life which the other Beatles members struggled to do. This is because he changed his values and the metric by which he measured life success. 

You need to be prioritizing the values that are important to you. Your happiness will depend on that. 

thoughts about self-worth, entitlement, resilience, endurance

Performance reviews, 360 degree feedback, fast feedback is common theme in today's corporate america. Employers today care less about well being of employees. Workplaces are stressful and challenging. Businesses are way more dynamic than ever before. This trickles down to less planning and more adaptivity, be it in your roadmap, your career growth, your next promotion. There is always uncertainty.

In this age it is ever important to understand the difference between self-worth, entitlement, resilience and endurance. The difference between the four can be trick and the balance is key to good emotional health.

Self worth : Firstly, your year end performance is not a measure of your self worth. The true measurement of self worth is not how a person feels about their positive experiences but rather how they feel about their negative experiences. You have probably heard about the self esteem movement : feelings of self-esteem were the key to success in life. However, overdose of this can lead to entitlement. Read more about entitlement below. Healthy doses of self esteem needs to be balanced by healthy doses of self awareness and reality checks.

Entitlement : People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we are uniquely special. Somehow unlike others, the rules must be different for us.

If you have a problem, chances are more people have had it in the past or will have it in the future. It just means that you may not be as special as you thought. Your problems may not be priviledged in severity or pain.

How do you balance between self-worth and entitlement and not feel like suffering/entitled ?
The answer is mindset. Do you have a mindset of resilience or endurance ?

Endurance and resilience sound very similar, but are very different. Endurance is short term and resilience is long term.

If resilience is lively, challenging, bouncy and full of flexibility; endurance is characterised by stiffness, survival, cutting off from oneself to get through it. When we endure, we keep going heads down through difficult situations and heavy workloads, sacrificing sleep, activities that we enjoy, relationships with others and self care promising that when this current storm is over, we will rest, connect, get fit, eat healthily. But what happens?

As you have read in the previous posts, life is about moving from one milestone to another. It is about solving a new set of problems. Once you solve a set, there is another set at home or at work which demands you endure again. So the cycle starts again.

Chapter Summary : The subtle art of not giving a F* : Happiness is a problem

Happiness is a problem

1. The first noble truth of buddhism is that life itself is a form of suffering. I think the author here combined buddhism with recursion. The author here says acceptance is the end, the pursuit of the end is another form of suffering. 
2. The rich suffer because of their riches, the poor suffer because they are poor.
3. Happiness is not an algorithm, it is not an end goal. It is a process and a journey. Hopefully the view along the road is what you enjoy. Dont go to the mountains if you like the ocean. 

Reward vs Process

1. You have to figure out whether you are fascinated by the reward. If so you cannot have the reward without the struggle. You cannot choose the result without the process. 
2. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. 
3. This is not directly about willpower or "no pain, no gain". There might be tradeoffs, you may like the reward so much that you are willing to bear the process which you may not enjoy as much. This is not just corporate america : college students when doing branch selection, often make such tradeoffs. Eg : I am great at chemistry, but I am ok studying computer science because chemistry may not pay the bills. Applogies for chemistry majors reading this, this is not to cherrypick on you, but to explain the concept of tradeoffs. Willpower and grit comes in that whether you are ready to pull through on the process. That is where the sacrifice comes into play. 
4. Its a never ending upward spiral. If you feel that at any point you are allowed to stop climbing, then you are missing the point. The joy is the upward climb itself. You reach milestones on the way : get into top school, graduate top of class, get the top job , get the first promotion, become a manager, become a director. At each step, the problems you are solving are different. What got you here to milestone n, wont get you to the next milestone n+1. So your problems will change, but that doesnt mean they will get easier. The nature of the problems you are solving will change. It is all about whether you enjoy solving those problems or not. It will also depend on which milestone you get to. For example : if you think you are a great engineer and hate management, you will not like the problems that managers have to solve day to day and that kind of job wont scale. That is where matching your milestones with the problems you like to solve matter. 
5. 
   

Chapter summary : The subtle art of not giving a F* : The feedback loop of hell

The feedback loop of hell

1. The feedback loop of hell
• You are anxious about being anxious of something all the time
• You are angry about being angry too quickly all the time
• You are worried about being worried about something all the time
2. Social media today has bred a whole generation who believe that these negative feelings on anxiety, anger and worry are totally not ok. The feedback loop of hell has become a borderline epidemic
3. We feel bad about feeling bag
4. The desire for positive experiences is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience in itelf is a positive experience.
5. Countercultural philosopher Alan Watts calls this the law of reverse effort or the backwards law: trying to make everything right often causes things to go wrong. Watts writes, “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.” Security is an illusion. It is only when we acknowledge that insecurity is an inevitable aspect of life that we cease to fear it.
6. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering
7. The avoidance of struggle is a form of struggle