Month: March 2011

How little things profoundly change your life

Akshat Rathi2 Comments

First appeared in The Spirit in March 2011. ICT is the Institute of Chemical Technology, my alma mater.

When I first chose to come to ICT, I had in mind a very different future for myself. I had come to get a professional degree, expand my horizons, gain perspective and go on to get an MBA degree, hopefully end up with an MNC with a fat pay check.

Of course, I got all I wanted but instead I chose to do a PhD in organic chemistry and live on a meagre studentship. Those years at ICT profoundly changed my way of thinking. And no one thing in my four years caused me to change my decision. It was a combination of many things: Samant Sir’s lectures, encouragement by the PG supervisors in the lab, many words of advice from the seniors, the opportunity to explore the practical side abroad, encouragement from the faculty about research, watching the seniors get into good universities and the inspiration from the alumni who have added much to their entrepreneurial skills through research.

The fact that I can actually look back and count on the things that made me choose my future path is indeed something almost all of us can do. We can connect the dots and realise how the little things in the four substantial years that we spent at ICT made us take the decisions that we take.

By no means are these factors only going to affect our academic choices or career choices, they affect our hobbies or even life choices. The efforts put in to starting this newsletter called The Spirit were substantial. The people involved spent a big chunk of their free time working for it and learning from the experience. It changed me and I am sure it changed many others who were involved.

What began as efforts towards building a newsletter at ICT ended up today being the source of my passion for science communication. Over the years, I’ve become more and more passionate about writing. The editorial experience that I gained with the Spirit have enabled me to access better places during my studies at Oxford.

The network of friends that we build during our days at ICT becomes the source of many things, unrelated to our careers and yet of prime importance to our lives. I’ve seen many seniors get married very recently, people who either met during their days at ICT or met because they were from ICT.

Our time at ICT has affected us in many big and beautiful ways but there many small things that we may not appreciate which we can give ICT the credit for.

I will always remember the struggle we had to go through to convince the faculty before we could start The Spirit. We had to make sure that we had a good plan. One that will not bring any financial burden on the Institute and yet last for a long time, not stop after we left. The exercise although at the time seemed unimportant has actually kept us all connected to the newsletter even after 5 years. Having successfully done that, somewhere in the back of my mind I know that if you try hard and work towards something that you really want, it is possible to do it. However insignificant an achievement it might be in the grand scheme of things, it has left me with a must have life lesson.

It’s not all been about learning from just succeeding. More lessons were learnt through failing. Working in teams has been a great experience. It has made me realise that in all teams there are a few people who will always object or oppose progress and it is those few that you really need to convince. If not, they will convince the rest of the team to do exactly the opposite.

But it is humbling to know, as dubbed in the popular culture that the butterfly effect affects all of us:

When we look back in detail on the major events of our lives, it is not uncommon to be able to identify such seemingly inconsequential random events that led to big changes.

– Leonard Mlodinov in The Drunkard’s Walk

The beginning of the Spirit was one such ‘seemingly inconsequential’ event. It was meeting Anil Nair, a journalist who wanted to do a story on ICT in summer of 2006. At the time, the TA had decided to give special importance to getting some media attention to the Institute. Alok Patil and I were responsible to take things further and in the time that we spent with Anil talking about the Institute and about the article, was when the idea of the newsletter was conceived.

The quote comes from a book that discusses the effects of chance on our everyday lives. We human beings aren’t wired to take into effect the randomness that affects us daily. Instead, many of us live under the psychological illusion that we alone determine our own future. Of course, I am not denying that we play the biggest part in shaping our future, as you all know, but at the same time we must never forget the many things that have contributed to make us who we are even if they might have seemed inconsequential at the time.

ICT is, and will remain, an important parts of our lives. Sooner or later we all will appreciate the major role it has played in shaping us. And having left the place, we must all remember that there is much we can do to contribute to the experience that we all gained from.

An experiment with delegation

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

I recently attended one of the best talks I have been to in Oxford. It was a talk by Felix Dennis of Dennis publishing. He is one of the most famous self-made billionaires in Britain. And to his credit he can do much more than just make money. He is a great poet, a philanthropist and in my opinion, a great orator.

At the talk, he spoke about his life story, some lessons that he has learnt and what he plans to do ahead. In question and answers he also gave a brief picture of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. I was particularly impressed by an answer that he gave in response to a question of how to deal with employees. He said:

I am only really good at two things. First is recognising talent. I can say within a very short time whether someone is suitable for a certain task or not. Second is delegating. And by delegating I don’t mean giving work away to someone so that I don’t have to do it. What I mean is really delegating, letting that person handle the task on their own, giving them the space to work and making them understand the expectations I have of them. I’ve seen very few people delegate work effectively.

Although, I can say very little about recognising talent (which on occasions all of us do), there is something I can say about delegating. For any of us who has been in a position of responsibility (however big or small), where we lead a team to a complete a task, we will know that delegation is a really important aspect of the job. It requires us to understand the other person well enough to assign a particular task to them and to be able to ask them, in the most effective manner, to do that task for the team. In most cases, there is also a degree of trust that needs to be present

Looking at my previous experience with delegation, I realise that I am able to do it and to a certain degree well enough. And I say well enough because according to my definition (not Dennis’) delegation means getting someone who to do a certain thing for the team. In that regard, I have definitely managed to get a fair amount of work done.

But according to Dennis’ definition, I feel I have utterly failed at it. That’s because very rarely have I come across a piece of work that I have delegated and which has come back to me in a way that serves the set purpose best. I tend to feel that it could be done better or sometimes, that it would have been better had I done it.

Clearly, there is something I need to change about the way I delegate work. And I think after listening to that answer by Dennis, I realise that I can definitely improve on communicating my expectation of the task that I am about to delegate.

 

Delegation is important. Credits: pmtips.net

Here’s what I think I will do: when delegating a piece of work, I will ensure that I will give the person doing the job as much detail as possible about what I expect as the outcome of the job. After that, I will set a deadline for the task and then give them complete freedom to do it on their own. And at the end, I would request them to let me give them some constructive feedback about the task they just completed.

I think this in many ways should improve the quality of work that I receive on delegation. With this freedom, of course, there comes some added responsibility on the person doing the job. And I think that is what can serve as the true driving force of some quality work.

The feedback idea should also serve the purpose well because it then gives the person who has been delegated the task a chance to reflect upon what they have done and take in the feedback in much a better setting. Doing this at the end is advantageous, of course, because they don’t have the pressure to finish the task. Additionally, it is a better setting because interrupting someone while they are doing something is very inefficient (and I realise that because I have done it on some occasions).

 

Finding sources of motivation

Akshat Rathi11 Comments

Motivation to do something acts as that driving force which helps us through every phase of an activity. It gives us the energy to initiate the task, then to continue through its ups and downs, and finally also to bring it to an end.

Without the right amount of motivation, doing anything feels like dragging yourself down a road that you don’t want to walk. I am sure you can all relate to this feeling especially when as teenagers you were asked to do certain things by your parents without a good reason, for example cleaning your own room 😉

Additional motivation always help us to do something better or faster. Or at least that is what you feel happens when you feel that wee bit more motivated.

I don’t think I have to give you more reasons to convince you that motivation is an important factor in our everyday lives. I have spent quite some time in trying to understand this mysterious force with a wish to know how can I harness it better.

After speaking to many people about their source of motivation, I can conclude that almost always people have multiple sources of motivation. And it is not surprising that there are many common sources of motivation. We are all human after all. I’ll enlist a few:

Some positive sources: the desire to constantly improve (to be a better person, a better scientist, a better father or a better son), to achieve higher pleasures of life (happiness derived from completing a massive project, from helping someone or achieving a big goal)

Some negative sources: peer pressure (if she can do it, why not me? admittedly it can be a positive force sometimes), fear of failure (almost always bad and which causes so much anxiety).

Some of these sources may have struck a chord with you (like the one in the picture). And may be that after reading this short list you may not be surprised because they are very commonly the sources of motivation that many people use.

But my exploration has helped me find an additional source of motivation. One that I have used many a times unknowingly. That source of motivation comes from my constant quest to find a new source of motivation. It’s as if I treat my motivation to do something as drawing from a motivation bank. And because I treat it as a bank, I tend to look for sources that can replenish this bank.

And I don’t think I am alone in that quest, people seek new sources of motivation all the time. See for example what Alex says:

A friend told me that she had a three-tiered approach to motivation: First is motivation from the cause itself, but this is simply not enough to sustain motivation indefinitely in all situations, so the second layer was motivation from fun: the work itself should be enjoyable, but it’s just not possible to always make work fun, so the third tier was friendship: that you would work through tough times buoyed by friendship with colleagues and co-workers.

Have you got any sources of motivation that you could share with us?