Published February 16-20, 2023
46
Switching Off
Every so often, it is important to stop the continuous stream of thinking and just switch off. It is not something that is easy for me to do. My mind is constantly at work, and I feel that if I take even a short break, that will be time wasted and which I will never get again. As I have realised over the years, this is a flawed thesis. We all need to take some time off – and we will end up being even more productive at what we are doing. At times, the subconscious will even point us to a solution to a problem we have been wrestling with. Here are some of the techniques I use to switch off:
Reading Thrillers: There is nothing better than to sit for a few hours and get lost in the world others create. I am partial to mysteries and legal thrillers. The key is to get into a zone of reading at a stretch, and not get distracted with the interruptions that are never too far away.
Watching Movies: Abhishek and I watch some movies together. We recently saw the entire 9 hours of the three “Lord of The Rings” movies, and are making our way through the Star Wars movies again (having been set on our course after watching “Andor”). For these few hours, I am immersed in a different universe.
Meeting Friends: There is nothing better than meeting those with whom we can just be ourselves – without any pretences. There are friends whom I have known since college and just reliving memories of the past can be such a joy. A few months ago, I had reconnected with some IIT friends, and for those few hours we were all 20-year-olds again, reliving old memories, speaking a different language, and finishing each other’s sentences.
Walking with Abhishek: Every couple weeks or so, Abhishek and I go to Kitab Khana and then walk around South Mumbai. The last time, we walked through Ballard Estate and then to VT, and spent some time walking the platforms and watching the long-distance trains. We weren’t talking all the time; he is old enough to have his own memories. And I was reliving some of my train journeys that had begun from VT when I was much younger.
Napping in the Day: There was a time when I thought that sleeping in the day was for losers. The pandemic changed me! I would take short naps when I felt tired, or just wanted to process what I had read or learnt. Waking up almost feels like a second morning. In fact, even when things are not going right, taking a short nap can help provide a different perspective on what is happening. I now no longer hesitate to close my eyes and let sleep envelope me – even as the sun shines brightly outside.
We all need to create our own techniques for switching off. These mini-breaks can serve as very good refreshers for the main tasks at hand.
47
Asking Questions
As children, we are full of questions; that is why we learn. And yet, as we enter school, the questions stop – almost as if there is an unwritten rule that asking questions is showing ignorance and therefore should be frowned upon. We become meek spectators – suppressing our innate curiosity, afraid to open our mouths. This then carries on even in the workplace – in meetings, questions only get asked by those up the hierarchy.
For much of my life, I was also like that – hesitating to ask questions and thus showing my lack of understanding. I started changing when I saw Abhishek ask questions as he was growing up. Sometimes, the way he asked the question would make me think even after I had answered him. I have in recent times started asking more questions: sometimes to others, at other times to myself.
Warren Berger writes: “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” He adds: “Questioning can spark change in your life, your business—in the world around you. I first began to understand this as I studied some of the world’s leading innovators; many of them are masters at the art and science of asking questions. They have a knack for looking at the world around them—at the existing reality that everyone else usually just accepts—and asking: What if we did this? Or tried that? Interestingly, we all start out as super-questioners—no one asks more questions than your average 4-year-old. But the habit of asking questions is trained out of us by the educational system. And then, as we make our way into the business world, we find that too often the emphasis is on short-term answers rather than exploring more far-reaching, potentially game-changing ideas. Many people in business are actually afraid to question the way things are done because they worry it will make them seem incompetent or insubordinate.”
What I find saddening at times is that in meetings it is all one-way information flow. One person is speaking or presenting, and others are meekly accepting what is being said. Each of them – a fully thinking person – has either switched off or is simply too embarrassed to ask. Questions spark discussion and debate, that drive new ideas. It is the questions that create better widgets. Yet, at least in the Indian education and corporate system, we tend to discourage questions. Each of us needs to change that. Because answers can only come if we ask the right questions.
At conferences, I make it a point to ask at least one question. By doing that, I get to introduce myself so everyone attending gets to know me. I can then also walk up to the speakers for a conversation knowing that there will be some familiarity because of my question. And sometimes, good questions can also be rewarding! I won an 1881 American Silver Dollar for asking the shortest question at a conference session.
We can only make our life, workplace and world better by searching for answers. But they all start with us asking beautiful questions.
48
Self-Upgrade
We upgrade our devices all the time, but do we think of upgrading ourselves? How do we become better, more productive, more learned with the passage of time? While there is no shortage of advice in books, videos and podcasts, the bottleneck is always us – there is a reluctance to change existing habits. As is said, we can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink. A question I ask myself constantly is: what can I do to improve? Are there learnings from others which can help me improve?
Many years ago, I had read in a book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen that it is important to keep one’s mind free from the clutter of things to do and thus a system is needed to write it down. That helped create my note-taking system. In conversations after the 2014 elections, I realised that to understand why India is poor and what needs to be done, I need to learn about classical liberal and public choice ideas, and set about doing that – by reading about Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan and Milton Friedman. In 2020, when I returned to Netcore after shuttering the Nayi Disha project, I set about understanding digital marketing via conversations with CMOs. I had always thought about writing a book, but never got around to it – until I was approached by a commissioning editor, which then encouraged me to write the Proficorn series, as a precursor to getting the book done. Most recently, I started listening to music with noise-cancellation headsets to create an envelope of quiet to help me think better.
We are creatures of habits and changing anything takes effort. It is easy to stick to the status quo simply because we are so used to it and doing anything different disrupts set processes in our life. And yet, we must edit ourselves. Like great authors do through multiple drafts to create the final perfect book, we must also make some edits to our lives in search of the better.
There is much that I have to do. I have thought about creating a more active digital presence on Twitter and LinkedIn, but worry about the fragmentation of my time. I have thought about taking time off to travel and see new places, but I keep thinking I will do it next year. I know I have to make a better system to organise all my readings and writings, but don’t know where to begin. I sometimes go into panic mode when things are different from what I expect them to be, and that is when I make mistakes. I have been told by a friend that in conversations, I have a tendency to interrupt the other person because I cannot wait to get my point across which is impolite and which is a behaviour I need to modify.
The process of creating better versions of us is never done. What is important is to start with a recognition of the flaws which need to be corrected and drawing inputs from others about best practices that we can incorporate. New, improved versions of us are a good contribution to make to the world.
49
Friends – 1
Recently, a couple that Bhavana and I used to meet every few months prior to the pandemic invited us (along with the rest of the group) for dinner – to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. I was meeting most of the group after almost three years. What surprised me was the ease with which the conversations flowed – even though we had not met for a long time. For those few hours together, we were all just ourselves – laughing, joking, sharing, gossiping like we used to. As Bhavana and I returned home late, she remarked, “This is what friendship is about – the ability to easily pick up from where you left off even after so much time.”
It is important for us to have friends. We have some good friendships when we are in school and college, and then tend to drift apart. We can build new relationships, but it gets harder as we get older and busier. And yet, friendship matters – we need a few people in our lives we can share without restraint. Time and distance may push us apart but if we take the effort to keep the relationship going, we will find great benefits from these friendships. As Vincent Van Gogh said, “Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves.”
In school, there were three of us who were inseparable. And even as we have all aged, we have kept the friendship going. All of us are in different parts of the world, and it has probably been more than 15 years since we all met together in person. Now, we do Zoom calls on each other’s birthdays and talk about not just the present but also the shared past. It is the same with some friends from my days at IIT. A year ago, I connected through LinkedIn with a Greek friend from the Masters program at Columbia University after more than 30 years. We had shared some wonderful times together doing late-night projects even though we were from very different cultures. We discussed our professors and memories from the days at the Engineering school. One could argue whether this was really a friendship given the gap in communications; the way I think of friendship is that there are some tight relationships and some loose connections, but the bond of shared experiences is one that never fades away.
Robin Dunbar writes in his book, “Friends”: “Friendship and loneliness are two sides of the same social coin, and we lurch through life from one to the other. What has surprised medical researchers over the last decade or so is just how dramatic the effects of having friendships actually are – not just for our happiness, but also for our health, wellbeing, and even how long we live. We do not cope well with isolation. Friendship, however, is a two-way process that requires both parties to be reasonably accommodating and tolerant of each other, to be willing to spare time for each other. Nowhere has this been so obvious as in the modern world. Just when we might think social life couldn’t get better, suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of a plague of loneliness…Friends do a lot for us and we invest in them to ensure that they do.”
Here is a pictorial representation of the “circle of friendship” from the book:
50
Friends – 2
There are many other friendships: some one-to-one, and some in a group. What’s important is that each serves a purpose of enriching life in its own way. We all accept each other for what we are; there is no class or status barrier that limits conversation. For friends, we are just the way we were when we first met. Some friendships may fade away with time, but that doesn’t diminish their importance; every time we have felt lonely, we will find that someone has reached out to us and helped us through a difficult period.
Marisa Franco writes in “Platonic”: “When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection. Our personalities, alongside the way we show up as friends, then, are shaped by our past—we feel lovable because someone loved us well. We are prickly because someone hasn’t loved us enough…When we feel accepted and loved, it helps us develop certain qualities that lead us to continue to connect better (the rich get richer, as they say).”
Lydia Denworth adds in “Friendship”: “Invisible but essential, it’s the web of connections we forge with others, the network of individuals whose actions and emotions affect us just as we affect them. We may be separate beings, but we are deeply bound, as if there truly were silken threads tying us all together physiologically. Our personal webs of connection include our family members, our romantic partners, and our friends…A friendship is an organism that shifts its shape across our life spans according to our abilities and our availability—in other words, according to how much we open ourselves to its possibilities. While there is natural variation in our taste and need for companionship, there are some universals in what draws us together or throws us apart. And there is a bottom line—a biological need for connection that must be met to achieve basic health and well-being.”
Science is only now explaining what we have perhaps known intuitively.
Friends can drift apart. It has also happened to me. And each of the few times that it has happened, I have regretted it. It started with something small and then I let ego get in the way and refused to reconnect, ultimately reaching a point of no return. Losing a close friend is like losing a limb. The hurt never fully heals. While time does reduce the pain, there is always that element of regret and the playback of what either of us could have done differently to prevent the break.
Build friendships, and especially some close ones. They will enrich life. Friendship is a two-way street; it requires us to invest time, effort and feelings. While the returns cannot be measured in monetary terms, when we look back at the balance sheet of life, we will find that good friends, rather than money, were what delivered the real joy in our lives.
I hope that each of us can say these words from Bette Midler to the friends in our lives:
Did you ever know that you’re my hero
And everything I would like to be?
I can fly higher than an eagle
For you are the wind beneath my wings