Insights

Learn to pick your fights

Not gun fights or fist fights but goals and tasks that you decide to challenge in your everyday life. You can't just get yourself into every fight and expect to win. Here's some tips to prepare yourself for the next challenge.

  1. Divide and Conquer - Split the objective into smaller ones. This should be intuitive. You are not Ip Man so stop trying to fight 10 battles at the same time.
  2. Henchmen first, Boss last - Like in movies, the protagonist always fight his/her way through the henchmen before confronting the boss. Complete the simpler tasks first to build up confidence.
  3. Skip some fights - There is no reason to fight every single battle out there. It is wise to only fight those you need to and let your sidekick handle the rest.
  4. Don't bring a knife to a gun-fight - Make sure you are well-equipped. You are going to need all the help you can get.
  5. It's okay to run - If it's just too hard, retreat and fight another day. Go for something that's easier first (Rule #2). Don't waste time on fights that you can't win (yet).

If you keep these tips in mind, you'll never lose a fight again.

Books, education and life

When I was kid, I was quite proud with the fact that I knew the names of all the 9 planets (yes it was 9 back then) in the Solar System. I read about them in books and one of my favourite book was the Oxford Children's Pocket Book of Facts. It's like a mini encyclopedia with lots of colorful illustration. 

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In high school, however, the only books that I read or rather forced to read are textbooks. Textbooks are these evil tomes of facts strung together in random order to vaguely resemble a story. Basically, reading a textbook is boring and that somehow made reading itself seemed boring too.

My passion for reading books was re-ignited with the release of The Da Vinci Code after I just entered the workforce. From there, I went on to non-fiction books like The Innovator's Dilemma, Crossing the Chasm and Permission Marketing. It's more fun when you get to choose what to read.

Some of these books literally changed my life and the best part is about reading is that the more you read, the more you want to. There is always more things to learn out there. Things you'll never learn in school.

So is it possible that the negative experience from reading textbooks in school is the reason many of us stop reading? Or could it be that the education system actually stifled our curiosity and creativity? Whatever the reason, I do hope everyone can rediscover their passion to read again. It shouldn't be that hard. After all, you are reading this post.

The Web never forgets

If you think women have good memory and seems to be able to recall even the tiniest of details, the web is probably a million times better at it. It remembers every post you blogged, every picture you uploaded and every status update you tweet. Google crawl and index everything on the web. The Wayback Machine archives web pages which allows you somewhat go back in time and as of 2009, has accumulated 3 petabytes (3 million gigabytes) of data.

Facebook is now the biggest photo site on the web followed Flickr and Photobucket. Geo-location on Twitter now tracks not only what you are doing now but also where you are.

People are now sharing almost every part of their life on the web sometimes with dire consequences. RobMeNow is a site created to warn us about the danger of sharing our current location to the world.

The web used to only contain histories and memories of our life. But with the recent rush of real-time technologies like Twitter and Foursquare, it is possible to find out up-to-date information about someone on the web.

Think twice before you post that status update about your vacation or that rant about your boss on the web. Think of your online presence as your personal brand and try not to taint it. Don't forget that the web never forgets.

Money as motivation

There is no doubt that in some point of your life, you may have been motivated by monetary rewards. Your parents might have offered a nice sum if you pass your exam or you reconsider your resignation after your manager give you a pay raise. But does this always work? Economists set up an experiment to see if offering to pay for blood donation effects our behavior. It turns out that the act of paying for blood donation somehow tainted this act of altruism and less people show up. In this case, monetary incentive actually reduces the performance of the activity.

If monetary incentive don't work all the time, what about monetary punishment. In another experiment, a kindergarten decided to fine parents who come late to pick up their child. Instead of reducing the number of children staying back late, it increases the amount of late parents. They can now be guilt-free by paying the fine.

Money being an extrinsic motivator, seem to back-fire in some cases. They say money can't buy happiness. It seems there is much more that money can't buy.

What drives and motivates us

Humans like animals have a biological drive that motivates us to eat, drink and copulate. It's the most basic form of motivation that keep us alive and well. We are also motivated by extrinsic elements like rewards and punishments. These extrinsic motivations are the basis of our business world. You want something done better and faster, you pay more. If you want to prevent a certain behavior, you punish them.

The third drive is by far the most powerful form of motivation. It's intrinsic motivation that drives programmers to release open-source software and made Wikipedia the best encyclopedia in the world. They are doing it for the enjoyment of the task itself. The performance of the task is in itself the reward.

This is the reason why you should be doing things that you love. Intrinsic motivation is both renewable and limitless.

One at a time

They say women are better in multi-tasking than men. I say if you want to get something done, something that matters, you have got to do it one at a time. Focus is the key and luckily both men and women can do just as well. If you focus on a single task, it's way easier to get started. Shut out the distractions and concentrate on the task at hand.

It also helps to get you into the flow. It's like a mental state where you are fully immersed by what you are doing and sometimes referred to as the zone. Programmers often get into the zone and lose track of time.

Another benefit of this approach is that you can prevent yourself from getting the idea-to-idea syndrome. You spend your time and effort on execution instead of coming up with new exciting stuff to do.

Most importantly, by doing one thing at a time, chances of completing the task is way higher. All these small victories will slowly build up your momentum and confidence.

Time to get started on your goals and ideas, one at a time.

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Life is too short

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I received this last week. It's one of the painting from Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid. This is not actually the one I ordered but I like all of the Linchpin series so it's fine. 

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Life is too short not to do something that matters, not to become a "Linchpin". I know it, you know it, we all know it, so let's stop futzin' around at get on with it. Like Seth says, "Decide". - Hugh

This will serve as a daily reminder for me that life is too short to waste time and get myself to start working on those ideas. You just have to try to know if it will work.

If it is mine, it is worth more

Economist Richard Thaler was the first to came up with the endowment effect theory. He theorized that people tend to value goods that they own more than those they don't even if the goods are both identical. In an experiment, those who are given a mug consistently price it higher than those who are asked to just value the mug directly without owning them. This is a cognitive bias and seems to be related to status quo bias where we prefer things to remain unchanged.

This is probably the reason why I'm unable to sell off most of my unwanted things and leave them rotting somewhere in the house.

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Too many ideas, too little time

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If you have too many ideas and you don't have enough time to execute them, you should check out this article by Scott Belsky on how to overcome the idea-to-idea syndrome. By now, I hope you understand the real value of an idea is in its execution. But there's another problem that arise while you are executing your idea. You might get bored and lose your initial momentum and creativity. And being addicted to ideas, you come up with a new one to keep yourself interested and abandon the old one.

Scott proposed some tips on how to stop yourself from going from idea to idea. First we need to restrain ourselves from coming up with too many ideas. Execution of the idea is still the main goal. Stop being addicted to inspiration and start the perspiration.

We also need to run our idea through the others, the ones that live in the real world. Their input is invaluable if you want your idea to go mainstream. Scott calls them the sober monitors.

Try skipping meetings and appointments that doesn't align with your goals. Because when idea-lovers get together, all they can do is just generate more ideas and prevent you from actually bringing yours to live.

I suggest you keep an eye on the next article of the series to get more tips on how to turn your ideas into reality.

Are you a laggard?

When a new piece of technology or gadget comes out, are you the early adopter that couldn't wait to get your hands on it or are you the laggard who waits till everyone else is on board before getting one? Or maybe you are the innovative mind behind the new invention? Below is the Technology Adoption Lifecycle that shows how new ideas and technologies are adopted by different demographics.

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For a product to enter the mainstream, it needs to move from the left to the right of the curve. State of the art and ground-breaking technology we hear about from researchers and scientists are still in the early innovators stage. Electric cars are still stuck in the early adopters stage until they figure out how to cross the chasm or the earth blows up.

In recent years, Facebook and Twitter have finally captured the attention of the early majority and sooner or later almost everyone is gonna have a Facebook account. To most businesses, reaching the late majority is the ultimate goal. The laggards are just too troublesome to be bothered with.

The Chasm is something proposed by Geoffrey A. Moore in Crossing the Chasm. For disruptive and discontinuous technologies, there is a chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. Inventions like MP3 format and the Internet is disruptive because they are innovation that are unexpected by the market.

If you want these disruptive technologies to be adopted by the mainstream, you have to position your product differently. Moore argues that the early adopters and early majority have very different expectations from your product and this is the main reason why most high tech products fail to reach the mainstream.

I'm still on the fence about using a smartphone but I do want to adopt the iPad as soon as I can.

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