Daniel's blog

I have recently recalled a conversation I had with my German boss in Grameen Creative Lab in Colombia. He gave me a very powerful insight, which he himself heard from his previous boss, about priorities in life, which I would like to share with you.

We are often juggling with many balls at the same time. Some of them, such as our professional life, are made of rubber and bounce back if we drop them. But other ones, such as our relationships and health, are made of glass and can shatter into many small pieces if we let them fall on the ground.

I would also add our own pride amongst the rubber ones.

I guess it is more easily said than done, but next time you are juggling with your priorities again, be careful not to drop the fragile glass balls.

I am now working in Moscow as a facilitator in an English speaking club which means I have lot of interesting conversations on a range of issues with local Russian people. Sometimes we continue these discussions even after club meetings. Couple days ago, I was talking to a physicist in his fifties who recently changed a job and now works as a sales manager for a Swiss engineering company. Being interested in my master’s degree which I will be starting soon, he said that he would like to share with me two big discoveries he made throughout his life. I was expecting something highly theoretical but instead I got two very practical advices, which can hardly be explained using mathematics and which on first glance might seem rather obvious but are actually very powerful and often not used.

He made the first one right after finishing his degree: If you are thinking about somebody, that person is usually thinking about you as well.

The second one occurred to him only three years ago, as an evolution of the first one: If you are thinking about somebody positively, the other person will think about you positively as well and vice versa.

On reflection, I realised that I have observed these phenomena many times before as well but I have never stopped to think about it and to formulate it. And they are so true!

Try recalling some situations as well. Think about when you approached somebody in a bad temper, feeling hostile towards that person. Chances are the person responded in a similar fashion, even if what you actually said was perfectly polite. Now think about a situation when you came to somebody thinking about that person really positively. A big difference, right?

I know one Canadian girl who is always happy, smiling and talks to people in a really positive way. Even if she is asking them to work harder or giving bad news, people react to her very well and generally tend to agree with whatever she says. I have always been admiring her for that but have never realised that the reason for such reception might be as simple as thinking about people in a positive way.

Try it, it works

When I got elected as the President of AIESEC UK, my predecessor told me that one of the key things to learn for the role is the art of saying no. My mentor from my Board of Directors was telling me the same thing throughout the year as well. I can still hear him saying something along the lines of ‘Deciding what you are going to do is the easy part, the hard bit is saying what you are not going to do and sticking to it.’ And he was right! I have just finished reading Steve Jobs’ biography and one of the main reasons for his success was… you guessed it – saying no.

Jobs often hurt people when saying no. He would call up a team meeting and then publicly say that what they did is shit and fire half of the people. May be it hurt somebody’s feelings but it also created a culture of excellence whereby only the best people stayed in the company and were not dragged down by the mediocre ones. Those people then worked beyond their perceived limits to create revolutionary products. The ones that survived remember those times as the most fulfilling ones in their lifes. Those that were fired or resigned went on to work for average companies where they may be succeeded and lead happy lifes. While saying no was painful in the short term, it was to everyone’s advantage in the long term.

Apple started making lots of average products after Jobs left. One of the first things he did upon his return, besides firing mediocre people, was to cancel most projects and focus only on a few key ones. This way, we have only few types of Macs, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Other companies have much wider ranges of products but they are nowhere close to the simplicity and functionality of Apple’s gadgets. He was able to zoom out to see the big picture, say no to 90% of ideas and then zoom in again to focus all his energy on the most promising 10%, making sure they are executed flawlessly.

Saying no is not easy, but it is necessary to learn it. Jobs did not care about the feelings of others and was always very direct. The Chinese or Japanese are on the other hand very subtle and express disagreement in very convoluted ways which however do work as well because the whole society works that way and people know how to decode the message. So make sure you find your way and start saying no to mediocre things that suck your energy and do not contribute to much.

I was recently thinking about what makes a conversation good because we meet lots of people and some of them are utterly boring, some are OK to hang out with while others are a real pleasure to spend time with. In my previous blog post I mentioned the concept of three golden circles by Simon Sinek – The Why, How and What (you can watch the video here). I think we can apply them to a conversation as well.

The normal ones deal with the What. What have we been doing, seeing or whom have we been meeting. They are descriptive and quite dry, treating topics of conversation like black boxes – looking only on the outside.

More interesting conversations include also How. How did we do it, how was the experience structured? They look inside the black boxes but still do not move beyond a descriptive level; you purely understand how the black box moves inside, what it consists of.

 
The best one cover also Why. That is once you have understood what topics under discussion look like and how they are structured, you talk about the underlying principles which make them work the way they do. You can often extrapolate these principles and apply them to understanding other black boxes as well.

Has it ever happened to you that you were sharing with your colleagues or friends an innovative approach to move things forward but instead of trying to fully understand you, they started asking loads of questions right from the beginning? It has certainly happened to me. Some time ago, I had a chat with one my good friend who was preparing for his upcoming elections and who seemed to have had the same problem. Here is the advice I gave him based on my experiences so far.

>Just read an interesting article of Forbes.com saying that there are really only three questions you can get asked at a job interview. All other ones are just different ways of getting to the same point.

I am writing this post on an overnight bus from Rishikeshh to Delhi, getting back to the metropole after incredible four days in the Himalayas. We tracked up to the Indra Hara Pass, approximately 4,300 meters above the sea level, and back to Mcleod Ganj in three days, spending two nights on the mountain. It was tough. But how tough was it? That depends on one’s point of reference.

In September this year, I summited the Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. 5860 meters in altitude, five days of trekking, sleeping in tents with temperatures dropping to -15C at night and no shower during the whole time. From about 4500 meters I got some kind of mountain sickness combined with diarrhoea which meant I could not eat anything. My muscles were really tired but my mind was still sharp and it dragged the body all the way to the top. Compared to this experience, getting to the Indra Hara Pass was a piece of cake.

We can extend this concept to anything we do. Working 60 hours a week? Feasible compared to 80 hours. Having to find your way around New Delhi? Easy compared to being alone in say, Nairobi.

It is good to have extreme experiences sometimes because they just make everything else seem manageable to us afterwards.

>One of my first blog posts was about the importance of listening with a genuine desire to understand what the other person is trying to tell you. I now had follow up conversation on this with my friend Freddie from Uganda.

The key take away is that when deciding for how long we should be listening to others before proceeding to giving our point of view there are two key questions to answer.

The first one is how much time should I take to listen to others in order to fully understand what they are saying. This is quite an obvious one. The second one is less obvious and I honestly have not thought about it before. It is how much time should I take to listen to the other person so that he/she gets an impression that I have listened long enough. Sometimes we think (correctly or not) that we got what the other person is saying but he/she might be thinking that we could not have understood it yet. Then we need to listen for a bit longer otherwise the person will think that we do not care about what he/she is saying and will disregard our comments. This is very cultural but especially in Africa it is from my experience a very useful concept to consider and apply.

>Freddie, my friend from Uganda told me a great thing when we were at the Kenyan coast together. We were a group of 10 people from various countries and were having some great discussions. Some of them got quite fast paced as we were very passionate about the topics. And then Freddie, who was listening to us for a while, came to me and told me about the benefits of being like a teacher.

A teacher has an audience of kids that all learn things at a different pace. She has to be patient and take the time to explain the topic to all kinds otherwise part of the class will not be able to participate and will not be able to do what the teacher is asking them to do. It is the same with travelling across different cultures. You have to understand that not all people get things as quickly as you and you have to adjust your pace.

Taking time often results in getting a better answer. Be it because of a language barrier, lack of knowledge of the particular topic or simply an inability to think critically (from my experience the type of education one received has a huge influence on this) people often get stressed and just say yes or are unable to respond. Take your time and you will get a better answer.

I saw these couple lines by Dey Dos recently. They are so true!