Tag: contemplation

What if you could control the drive within you?

Akshat Rathi5 Comments

Anything you do gets done faster and produces better results if you have the drive to do it. A drive that pushes you, that sets new limits and that forces you to seek new sources to power yourself.

When you see someone with that drive within themselves, you can immediately recognise it. They have a different persona: they are brimming with confidence, they bring great enthusiasm to the table and they make a difference to the people around them. Their work is a source of inspiration to their peers or to the generations to follow.

There may be many reasons for why you have the drive to do what you do. It may be because that thing is on your to-do list, or it might be something that you have wanted all your life, or anything in between. The drive might exist because of some fear that has been troubling you or because of that anxiety which you find unsettling. It could stem from a desire to take revenge or simply because of an inspiration to do something for your loved one.

Whatever may be the reasons, having the drive to do something is a powerful tool to be able to leverage. Not only does it give you an edge over your competitor but it also gives you a lot more pleasure in what you do. It makes you feel that the effort you put in to doing something is worth it. That drive enables you to overcome the pain to experience the joys.

Now here’s the million dollar question:

What if you could control your drive, turn it up when you want?

I don’t claim that I have the answer and to be frank, it will be hard to convince me that there is only one answer. Each individual will have their methods to crank up ‘the drive’ they possess. And I think it is good to have more than one absolute way of being able to create a powerful force within you which will help you achieve your goals.

I certainly have my multiple ways of generating that drive for myself. One that I would like to talk about today is the method of raising the bar or the method of trivialising the achieved.

Here is how it works: Say you have just achieved X and have now you set yourself a new goal Y. You can now generate that drive to do Y by reflecting upon your previous achievement, X. You find ways of convincing yourself why Y, if achieved, will be a bigger achievement than X. That is a perfectly sound reason for you to push yourself to achieve Y. At the same time you may also find aspects of X which you can consciously trivialise because now you have the skill/confidence to be able to do X again. For Y though, you will need new skills and extra confidence. Another reason for why you should go after Y given X has been achieved.

The drive generated by this method can be as strong as you want it to be. You will have to put in the effort to better reason for Y over X.

The biggest advantage of this method is that it can set in to motion a machine that generates ‘a drive’ for you. All you need to do is make sure you fuel it up when necessary. Fuelling the tank up shouldn’t be that hard, after all it is a simple trick that you consciously play with your own mind.

Tell me what you do in one sentence

Akshat Rathi7 Comments

…if not in one then surely in less than in five sentences.

Exchanging pleasantries with new people generally involves giving names and current occupation. That is fine in a brief encounter but if conversation is to continue further, more information needs to be exchanged. It is then when we are asked that tricky question:

So what exactly do you do? or what is research all about?

At this point, it is very important to be able to comprehensively explain your work in as few sentences as possible and at the same time make sure that the excitement you have about what you do comes across in those few words.

It is a tricky one because we have to be able to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and speak by assuming the right amount of knowledge. If you were given 30 minutes, you would be able to get your point across but to ensure that a conversation remains interesting, you have to be able to answer in only a few sentences.

Just think about the many people who you’ve met and found them to be unimpressive within the first few minutes of conversation. They might be people at good positions or with good companies but if they are not able to tell you how exciting their work is, they will not be able to leave a lasting impression.

Interestingly though, this exercise of forcing yourself to think about describing what exactly you do, has double benefits. It does not only manage to get your point across but also helps you to streamline your own thoughts about what you do.

It is not often that you sit and think about how best to describe your job. But when you do, you realise that it is a valuable exercise. You observe yourself from a third person’s perspective and consider the many things that you affect while you work. Many of those may not seem obvious to you and some may have easily skipped your attention previously. It can be a rewarding experience and can help motivate you further.

But more importantly, if you do manage to explain what you do in just a few sentences and are able to show that excitement you harbour about your work then the person will have no choice but to be impressed.

It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you believe you do something worthwhile and are able to get that point across.

 

How to be different: Learn, forget and apply

Akshat Rathi1 Comment

Seth Godin‘s latest book, Linchpin, tries to convey the message that to become indispensible one has to be many things but one definitely needs to: Be remarkable

An aspect of being remarkable is to be able to do something that is much better and yet quite different from the norm. To be remarkable you have to be able to complete a task, achieve a goal, make a report or sell a product, but by doing it in a different way.

Saying that you need to be different is easy but doing it is hard.

You need to be able to have the right skills to do that job, you need to know enough about what you are doing and you need to think a lot about the problem that you are solving. And even after you have put in the effort to do all that, there is no guarantee that you will be able to do it differently.

Why is it that difficult to be different and yet better?

To be able to come up with a better solution or better results, you put in a significant amount of time learning about what is it that you are doing. You speak to people, you look at what they have done, you read previous reports and you browse through old examples. Your mind understands the pattern, makes the connection and with repetition it strengthens those connections. You have now learnt the skills necessary to tackle this problem.

This exact process of learning to do your job is what makes it hard to be different. Think about it for a moment. You spent all that time to learn the skills by looking at other people, seeing examples of what has worked and understanding the process that went in to doing that. You have created a bias towards what the possible solutions to your problems can be. You might not have had the aim to acquire that bias, but you have.

To be different: you need to overcome that bias

The easiest way to do that is to forget all that you have learned. Overcoming bias is hard but forgetting something isn’t that hard. If you put in the conscious effort of forgetting particular things, you eventually can. Forget those particular examples that you came across and forget those exact conversations that you had with people about the problem. Forget them to the extent there is just a vague memory of all those things. That does not mean that you are also forgetting the skills to do what you ought to do but merely those singular examples that have helped you gain those skills. Now you revisit your problem. Give it a lot of thought, make use of your pattern recognition skills, apply the art that you learnt, explore the many possible solutions and choose the best one.

You can be different and better, but you must really want to be

There is no guarantee that having done the hard work of overcoming biases will give you a different solution, but this time around the chances of coming up with a different solution are much higher. That’s because you have gone beyond the sea of solutions that your biased mind had restricted you to and you have now a much larger pool to choose your path from.