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Met a smart candidate yesterday for a senior role

Towards the end the usual question popped up – what is the larger goal of nearbuy.com

Not directly asked, but hidden in that question was the more basic one – what’s the potential of this deals and discounts industry?

I shared my views. Views that I can share even in my sleep now :)

At the end of it – he was clearly shocked. Surprised. Pleasantly.

I wasn’t talking about deals and discounts. I was talking about how a basic human trait is the foundation for the company’s vision. And how everything starts from there and revolves around that belief.

An outcome of this belief is a crazy imagination of the future.

And I believe that any definition of the future sounds ridiculous when one hears it.

Which is why, to quote Jeff Bezos, People will misunderstand what we mean to do, and we have got to be ok with that.

My view of my future sounds ridiculous and I am willing to be misunderstood until it unfolds.

Are you a different person on weekdays and weekends?

Are you a different person right before you step in to office and once you are inside?

Are you a different person when with your team and when with your boss?

Are you a different person through the year and towards the appraisal process?

Are you a different person when working with your colleagues and when drinking with them?

Are you a different person because you wish to be or you think you are meant to be?

The separation of work and life has caused concepts such as work life balance to flourish in today’s culture
The pressure to “balance” the two – as separate entities on two scales of a weighing machine

Does it have to be this way?
Can life be such where we stop living two lives?

The need to balance work and life, is only if you are living each separately

As cave people in the stone ages, there was just one rule of success

DON’T DIE

If you survived, you would reproduce and that allowed your tribe, your community to move ahead

So do whatever it takes to not killed by an animal, get hit by the weather or murdered by a known one

And that has evolved our bodies in a fashion where they will do anything at all to adopt to the environment and not die

We can use the thousands of years of conditioning, to our advantage (or not)

Because our bodies are still, constantly, in survival mode

OMG, this individual is lifting weights everyday. I need to build muscles to cope up with it

Awesome, this guy eats frequently. I don’t need to conserve – I can keep burning

Oh sweet, this person is always in the present. I don’t have to keep pinging with in the head, with my inner chatter

or

Well – if he just sits all day why do I need to build anything to help him walk or run?

If you don’t eat right or regularly, I will have to store – to survive

Going back and forth between the past and future seems to be your favorite hobby. Sure – let’s make it happen

We don’t need to tell our body what we want from it

We just need to decide what we want it to be

Here is an under-rated quality

The ability to have a 10,000 feet view that it seems to suggest you don’t care about the details
and
in the very next instant, focus on something so specific that it may indicate you don’t have a larger view

It comes from intense training
and an unreal level of discipline

It comes from deep thought
Where you have started with asking yourself – WHY is this important
And led yourself to the WHAT and HOW of the problem

Zoom-in-Zoom-out is a great way to use maps
Its an enviable way to live life too

I was at the TEDx IITRoorkee this weekend and as always loved my time with young minds

What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that this generation in under immense pressure.

The nature of questions thrown at me by the students reaffirmed this opinion.

At the bottom of this pressure is this paralyzing sense of self doubt. Led by the view that everyone else, except them, have it figured out.

Because hey,

People seem to be eating the nicest looking food

Wearing the nicest looking clothes

Clicking the nicest looking selfies

Vacationing at the nicest looking beaches

Matched with the nicest looking self esteem possible

Someone has to tell them that it’s all a fucking lie

That everyone is going through the same anxiety as you

Everyone experiences self doubt

Everyone thinks the opposite person is more sorted

Everyone thinks they are not good enough

It’s how they react to it that makes all the difference

Your uniqueness is not defined by your experiences

Rather your reactions

Repeat after me

I am not alone in feeling this

I am alone though in fighting this

How many times has it happened that you looked at the past and went,

“What was I thinking?”

“That was so obvious. How did I miss it?”

“I can’t believe I didn’t see that”

You did see it.

You saw it loud and clear

But at that point, what you saw conflicted with your world view

What you saw conflicted with your desires at that point

So what may seem like a capability issue

Is really not

You simply didn’t want to notice

The lack of willingness to notice the opposite perspective is more harmful than the capability to do so.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories on how apple might be purposely playing with the software of existing iPhones, when a new one launches

Reports of phones slowing down, sudden problems – are all well documented.

Of course never proven to be true.

Here is a conspiracy theory that goes beyond

My current iPhone has slipped off my hands numerous times. Never to ever crack!

Day before, it slipped again.

And shattered into pieces

No small crack

Complete annihilation!

Is it possible, that Apple is controlling the properties of hardware, through software?

That it can influence how glass behaves, how headphones work, how the volume button operates – all through software?

That would be a superpower

Because if it can’t be used for evil, it ain’t a superpower

And then I extended it to my favorite hardware device

Humans

We do this all the time

Our words can influence change. Not just emotional. Even physical.

Our words can make people sweat, make people run, make people sleep, give them goosebumps.

Our visuals can do the same.

We all have a superpower

That of being able to influence

Do we realize

Do we use it for good

I see incentives as an intersection of two traits

How predictable are they?

How accurate are they?

Predictability:

Do I know of them beforehand

Can I predict what they are

Do I have an understanding of how it works

Accuracy:

Are they correctly measured?

Are they accurately delivered?

Are they tracked correctly?

If you think of a 2×2 matrix

The worst box clearly is the unpredictable-inaccurate box

This will lead to noting but resentment. And ultimately failure to drive the intended outcome

But the best isn’t the predictable and accurate one

In my experience, the unpredictable and accurate box drives the best outcome

As humans, we so want to settle

To capture the known

To make things predictable

And so with predictable incentives – it quickly becomes the new normal for those who hit it

And that depresses the impact, because the ones hitting it drive a larger sure Kd the performance.

In other words

“We are measuring your performance based on sales at the end of this month”

Predictable: if you hit the target you get 10% incentive

Unpredictable: if you hit the target you will get an incentive

This approach may seem stupid, because why would anyone be driven some undisclosed incentive scheme?

And surely – they perhaps won’t be

Until, at the end of the month when they see that you reward the ones that hit their target (and some always will)

Leaving the next months’ incentive as a surprise again

Variable rewards, changing rewards, dynamic rewards, surprise rewards

These types, when matched with accuracy, work like magic!

People react best when they are rewarded when they least expect it.