Saturday, June 30, 2012

19 They’re not doing it to you – they’re just doing it!


One of the toughest lessons we need to learn in life is that most of the time, people are thinking of themselves, and not about others. To understand this, one has only to observe and monitor one’s own internal dialogue. The implication of this is that most of the time, people are just not thinking of you and how their actions will affect you; there’s just carrying on with their lives and deeds in their own world. When these ‘people’ also happen to be your close family and friends, it hurts all the more… but that’s the truth about life.

Just in case you are thinking that you will be able to influence, control, or transform others, it would be as well to accept that they are not really going to change as we wish, unless they’re actually looking for change. It is of no use working against the grain; that goes for our children and spouses, extended family members, subordinates and superiors, and the world in general, too…

Of course there have been persons who have exerted a strong influence on the course of events and history, and on their fellow humans. One problem with them is that they have been so sure of their own ideas, that they have usually ended suppressing others’. With the best of intentions, those who go through life thinking they know best, cause untold grief and suffering, It takes close on a hundred years for the world to come out of their shadow. Beware the reformer! Beware the persons who subscribe to the philosophy that it’s our job, not just to study history, but to make it. They are one short step from megalomania and despotism.

In our families, in our work places, things will not go as we planned them, people will not behave as we would wish them to. Does that mean we should just put a lock on our tongues and become non-entities, push-overs, limp rags? Not necessarily; but our reactions should be seasoned with detachment.  We react to what the other person is doing, we give a little ‘push-back’ so that they don’t ride rough-shod over us. But we do this without a sense of personal recrimination; we do not allow ourselves to start disliking the person for what they are doing to us. We do not go to sleep fretting and fuming over this person, we do not stay awake half the night plotting revenge. We reason that these persons have something to gain, and obviously the mere fact of my being in the way is not going to deter them. They owe me nothing; I should not interpret their actions as directed against me, as much as for themselves. We assume that they are mostly innocent of any specific hostility to us, we understand that it's not that they care less for us, but that they love themselves more.

This is linked to the concept of ‘mens rea’, the guilty intent, the state of mind, in law. Actions committed without an actual intent, are excused, even if they end up in damage to others. Some such concept should guide us in our reaction to obstinate children, selfish spouses, ill-advised relatives, nagging parents, uncooperative colleagues, and in general a world that spins on as if we didn’t exist! 

18 Why parenting and mentoring are so tough to do

As anybody who has ever been a parent, or even been in a position of mentor, will know, these are among the toughest things to do in life. Barring a few cases where the mentee is totally attuned to the mentor, which perhaps obtains only in fanatics’ training camps, the fact is that the individual is always questioning and questing. No amount of telling is going to convince them, unless they convince themselves.

Although  our telling is not going to change them, we still have to do the telling. This is the source of the mentor’s tension and frustration. If we don’t tell, it will all come out much, much, later, and probably not in front of us. If we do tell, it is apt to fall on deaf ears or closed minds. Indeed, classical musicians, ustads, if yore would refuse to take on a student until they were convinced of their devotion and strength of aspiration. In some cases, the student would have to wait at the master’s gate for months; in others, he would be admitted, but made to fetch the water and light the fires for years before starting the actual teaching. The student obviously would have his own ideas, which would challenge the master’s authority; indeed, they had a rule that the student would not perform on a stage, as long as the teacher was around! Teaching a performing art like music is probably even more difficult than mentoring for life skills, as the teacher has to sit through the pain of tortured swara (note) and laya (tempo).

It’s difficult because teaching, or mentoring, or parenting requires constant tongue-biting, choking down our immediate reactions, and letting the student learn from their own practice and self-criticism. You have to put a ‘stone on your heart’, as the Hindi expression goes, when dealing with the learner’s clumsy attempts. In spite of all this, in the end, nothing may come of it all. As Khalil Gibran said, you have to treat your children (and, by extension, your mentees!) as guests, and your guests as your children. That is, it’s best not to expect that those you are trying to teach, or bring up, will turn out as you wish, or even that they will use your inputs the way you, as teacher, would expect. They are no longer your property, either your ideas, or your mentees, once you have given your inputs or given expression to your ideas. They will both develop the way they are fated to, outside your sphere of control.

17 The ‘mousetrap’ mind – cages you and closes off your options

Have you observed people’s minds chugging along quite reasonably down a train of thought, and then suddenly closing up… almost like a mousetrap closing shut on its victim? A person will be discussing options for study, and suddenly they will say, of a slightly prestigious academy or, say, study abroad, ‘but that’s not for me!’. One person thinks they can never learn to drive; another that they can never get a job in a big company. You can see their minds suddenly closing shut, and they are trapped in this non-negotiable cage of their own making.

The sad part is that to the outside observer, objective facts simply don’t seem to make the self-defeating conclusion at all obvious or inevitable. One would like to say, but why don’t you just keep an open mind about it, and give it a try, even if nothing were to come of it. As they used to say to the question, are you a man or a mouse, give me a piece of cheese and you may be surprised. In this context, just give it a try, and you might be surprised at the result; at least you wouldn’t have the eternal regret of never even having tried.  Unfortunately in today’s world of political correctness, you’re not supposed to tell other people what you think of them, but to only support them in a totally non-judgmental manner. You are also not allowed to tell a person that they could be better than they are, because that would demean them and only invite the retaliation, what have you done with your life that gives you the right to advise.

The result is that these people lose out on the opportunities that abound in the modern world. By not setting out the pros and cons objectively on a piece of paper, they jump to conclusions. Their mind closes in like a mousetrap, and nothing will then permit or induce them to reconsider. They will, equally, change their minds all of a sudden in the future, and will probably ultimately live in regret. And all through this, they will never understand how they came to this state. They will live their lives of quiet desperation in unreasoning and incomprehension.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

16 Regret: a most futile pastime

Of all the thoughts that pass through our minds as we go through life, the most futile are the words “it might have been”… as the poet has sung. We torture ourselves with the phrases “if only…” and “I should have” (the famous triad of Woulda, Coulda and Shoulda in typical American short-speak!). Regret is especially corrosive and self-destructive, because almost by definition it’s usually the case that nothing can be done about it, nothing that will change the past or set it right. You can only writhe helplessly in the talons of this demon, and blame and curse yourself into an early grave.

Of course persons who have been positively malicious or vicious have a lot to answer for, and we are not talking about such situations. We are referring to normal every-day human beings, who go through life with the best of intentions, who are not perfect or even consistent, who have their individual hang-ups and eccentricities, who affect others in various ways, who blame themselves for a number of things that happened, and a few that didn’t. My own father, for one, used to sometimes slap himself on the head and mutter some imprecations against himself… mainly calling himself a fool, for instance! He had not got to the stage where he could forgive his own failures, as he saw them.

The fact is that most of us are not in complete control of what happens, even within our immediate family circles, leave alone the greater world. On the other hand, we do have to constantly make choices, with reference to ourselves and others, which are going to have repercussions and consequences. How then can we go through life without constantly having to blame ourselves, or on the other hand becoming insensitive to the consequences of our actions?

Taking as a given fact that we have to act, make choices, many of them on behalf of others, the only way is to adopt consistently a decision policy known as minimizing the maximum potential loss, or the minimax criterion. What each of us will be asked, when we are called to the Final Judgement, is not whether we have been blameless, or whether we have never caused any harm, which of course is an impossibility in this imperfect world. What we will be judged by, is whether, in the same situation and with the same information, a well-meaning person would have acted the same way. This is why intentions are so important in judging our actions; we can all be wise in hindsight, but it’s much more challenging to give good sane advice before the act, on a consistent basis. 

If we did something with the express intention of humiliating or punishing someone, out of a sense of outrage or righteousness, for example, such acts would be suspect. There was a famous novel which was quite a cult during my student days, where the rich mother sends an art critic to her art-afflicted son in Paris, to tell him he has no talent; the son dutifully returns to take up the family business. When somehow he comes to know all this later (I think the mother herself crowed to him about in one day), he is furious. The last straw comes when he finds out that his loving girlfriend had also been paid by Mummy to befriend him in his painterly odyssey; that girl also conveys to him that the critic had actually been quite appreciative of his artistic talent. This realisation of his mother's betrayal and manipulation, leads a total breakdown of his self-image and self-identity, and he kills himself. The mother might claim she did all this for him; but it is not admissible to do something like this, which would predictably have enormous consequences if found out, without even consulting the person who would be affected. 

In my experience, the more we try to live others’ lives for them, the more mistakes we will tend to commit, because it is most difficult to know and understand what is happening in another’s heart. If the potential down-side, in case of things going wrong, would be a complete collapse of trust and self-identity, any person taking such a huge risk would have to take the blame. You do not send out your army with blank ammunition and paper coats, without taking the blame for their decimation.

Things will still go awry in human affairs, but if we have chosen sensibly, with the need to choose alternatives having the minimum potential loss in mind, then even amidst failure and disappointment, we can do away with the corrosive feelings of regret and guilt.

Despite all this, in every person’s past, there will still have been certain acts or omissions, that ultimately are our responsibility. If they have caused small damage, and we have learnt from these instances to avoid certain types of reactions, then we should accept our blame and carry it through with humility and dignity. If we have not tried to learn and reform, we should acknowledge our negligence even now, and make amends, if not to the original victim, at least to others who may cross our path tomorrow.

Young and adventurous persons make fun of the minimax principle as leading to a dull, safety-first approach to life. They must be reminded that their choices for themselves are not taken in isolation, but have repercussions on the lives of others. They have to make a choice how much they want to risk; but then their parents and care-takers must equally avoid the feeling of guilt if things don’t work out. 

15 How easy it is to make ourselves miserable…or happy!

This one is a simple no-brainer: we can make ourselves totally miserable, just thinking of all our ills, all the things we should have got, or done, or had done to us, the things that got lost, the deals we missed, the commissions or compliments we had to pay others, and so on.
It’s equally easy to make ourselves happy, or at least less miserable, by not thinking about these things, or by thinking the opposite type of things. Easy to say, but human nature being what it is, one loss outweighs all the gains: we tend to dwell on the negative, probably an evolutionary trait that must have been good in scanning the neighbourhood for threats to survival. Persons with a very strong long-term memory system (women are said to have this type) obviously have a tougher time doing this. 

I would look on those lost deals, the tips paid for poor service (or none at all), the wasted advance payments, the unrecoverable loans and unrequited gifts (including your first love affair!), as just paying your tithe in life! There has to be a certain amount of friction in life, that converts energy into useless heat; similarly, there are losses in transactions over a lifetime. Things don’t ever balance perfectly. The fact that you have your limbs and eyes and hearing is itself too much... you’re already far ahead in the game! All the rest is a bonus… and I say this from harsh personal experience, not as a general platitude.

Granted, these bits of “wisdom” sound like a string of homilies… but if so, they’re homilies, or bits of the experience of living, that have been propounded and expounded over the millennia, and have been tested and found effective. I will come to some of the old literature by and by, but in the meanwhile we can easily extract what little lessons are possible, from our own day-to-day, year-to-year experience.

We’ve seen people in front of our eyes, day by day, ruining themselves by doing some or all of the things we’ve been talking about… maybe they’re our loved ones in our own families! Maybe it’s your friend’s old man who had shut himself into a well of silence for fifty long years… maybe it’s a child who grows into a brat and then goes off the rails… maybe it’s a colleague at work who complains so much he has no time for anything else… we observe, we think about these things, and we draw lessons for our own conduct and attitudes.

14 Why it’s good to have hobbies..but not too many!


The front burner--back burner approach  often becomes a necessity rather than just a virtue, because most of us have to get on with making a living, but often harbour other interests, or even passions, that we are forced to relegate to a lower priority. Also, there are periods in the best of careers that end up as a gap, a hiatus, in our lives, with perhaps nothing to do and no public role to play. 

This happens to the best of us: I was reading a book by an eminent police officer, who in fact even became a Governor, but at points in his career he was made to wait months for a posting because he had displeased the bosses. Often these hiatuses occur because our bosses simply aren’t interested, and not necessarily out of any malice afore-thought. So in our working lives, and in the in-between gaps (not least, after the final good-bye when we retire), we switch the pots from the back-burner to the front. Some of these pots are our hobbies and other interests.

In fact I’d say it’s essential to have a hobby or two, to tide over these dry spells, which are as inevitable as rainy days in our lives. We take them as an opportunity to develop other parts of our inner lives, our skills, our knowledge, our circle of friends and acquaintances, our store of experiences and stories. It could be something challenging like a genre of music, or an art which absorbs all our faculties, or it could be a day-to-day activity like arranging our possessions, cleaning and refurbishing our house, and so on. It could be anything, and it doesn’t have to be too intellectual or physically demanding. It could be the regular stuff we do in our lives, but taken up in a more focused, mindful, and learning way.

The one hobby which I would caution against is the consumption of over-refined and pre-digested stuff, whether it’s food or entertainment.

This brings me to the last part of this piece, the coda or tail: why would we have to guard against too many hobbies? For we often hear that there can never be “too much of a good thing”, and having hobbies is definitely a good thing.

Well, one reason is that we, normal, every-day human beings, have to maintain many types of balance in our lives. We have families, colleagues, and society depending on our carrying out certain tasks or functions regularly. That’s our mundane, day lives, which we cannot exchange entirely for a sizzling night-life of bohemian activity and self-indulgence. In the long term, purely self-gratifying activity fails to sustain and satisfy our inner desires for order, meaning and significance. Our lives become meaningful only in reference to our immediate and extended family, community and society, the absence of this being the main cause of the post-modernist sense of alienation and “anomie”. Too many hobbies will take us away from that important but mundane parts of our lives, leaving us feeling even more frustrated and futile.

A second reason is that hobbies satisfy by engaging us fully, as producers in howsoever a modest fashion, and not just as consumers. That’s why watching TV is not a hobby (it’s also not a good activity in general!). If we don’t achieve a certain level of competence, howsoever modest, in our chosen field, it leaves us unfulfilled. We like to take a brush and produce a painting, and not just look. We want to get behind the camera, not just pose for it. We want to write a story, not just read other peoples’ work. We want to travel and see new places, hear new languages, not just see it on the screen.

A certain minimum amount of time is required even to become a discerning hobbyist. It’s often said that the difference between an amateur and a professional, is nothing but ten thousand hours of concentrated application; the difference between a passive consumer and the knowledgeable amateur should be some fraction of this, but still requiring a substantial investment of time, effort, and, let’s face it, money. So it’s better to have a small number of serious hobbies, than a phrase-book worth of random diversions. Even the back-burner has to be attended to, howsoever low the flame, lest it boil over!

13 Have a short-term plan of activities!


One of the most useful hints I ever got was from a young politician, who didn’t have any sophistications or advanced degrees in management. He happened to become a first-time Minister  for the Environment, while I became a first-time Secretary (a civil service, or bureaucrat’s, position) in the same department. In the first flush of enthusiasm (power and position are such energy boosters), I told him of my 2-year planning horizon, to achieve this, develop that, envision the other. That’s when he gave a bit of sage advice... he said, who knows, in two years’ time, where you and I will be, why don’t you first draw up an action plan for next two months. After overcoming my initial chagrin, I realized the merit in doing that, although in my heart of hearts I must have harboured a bit of resentment. His words, however, turned out to be prophetic: in a few months, I was out of that position (environment is a hazardous portfolio!), and he followed soon after… so whatever we left behind, was what we achieved in those few months.

This is often the story of most of our lives: just when we are getting going, it’s time to go! Or rather, let me say that we often start feeling a surge of energy just around the time that events—and our dear comrades and colleagues-- are conspiring to hive us out of our position. So we need to come to every new assignment with a pretty good idea of what we can achieve in “the first 90 days”, as the leadership mantra goes nowadays. Using another metaphor, life is what happens to us even as we are planning for our life… go figure!

How then do we relate to long-term goals, which from all accounts are what give us meaning and consistency in our lives? Here is where a corollary of our 20:80 rules comes into play: the front burner--back burner approach. Be aware of the long term, but in the meantime be focused on outputs in the short and medium term. Why I relate this to the 20:80 rule is that there is a very similar thinking involved here: the 20% of stuff we actually have some degree of control over can satisfy pretty much 80% of our life goals (of course, the numbers are not precise, maybe it’s 25:75 or 30:70, but the idea remains). The remaining 80%, which to our mis-aligned psyches looms larger than life, can well be relegated to the back-burner. We don’t need to completelt forget that part, but we could relegate it to a background activity of general data collection, background research, traveling, with a view to hearing, seeing, and collecting references, analysis, and so on. These activities, which form a bed for the flowering of our more immediate actions, can and should continue throughout our life.  It will gradually influence our active life, and who knows, may even become a foreground activity at some point in time.

At the risk of sounding stylistically incorrect, let me add a few more metaphors. Fortune favors the prepared mind, but there’s no sense planting in the wrong season or in an unprepared bed… as the Preacher said, there is a time to sow, and a time to reap. In life, as in growing flowers, we need timely actions, combined with the patience to wait in the long term, like the gardener… we don’t keep pulling up the plants to check on the growth of their roots!

 

Sunday, June 3, 2012

12 The Rule of Fives: deploy resources effectively!

This is a principle closely related to the 20:80 rule. Just as a minor portion of our acquisitions can satisfy the bulk of our requirements, so are our human resources not equally effective. The trick is in recognizing which are those resources that are the most productive. In the sphere of human resources in a work place, the principle translates into the Rule of Fives.

To put it simply, out of five persons, two will be quite productive… the 40% that are contributing the most. Two will be positively negative; and there will be one in the middle who may go either way. The principle of Fives helps us to marshal our own managerial resources and energy into working with the better 40%, and working on the middle order 20%. What of the unproductive 40%?  The principle suggests we should avoid wasting our own limited managerial resources on the most difficult persons. In other words, here is one more situation where avoidance is better than confrontation…

This is not what is usually advocated, and not what most of us would do in a work place… especially a new one where we have been given a managerial role. Most of us take it as our job to identify the slackers, the trouble makers, the resisters, the non-contributors, and GO AFTER THEM. We build up dossiers, we spy on them; we track their entrances and exits, we try to find out what they are saying about us. We try to stay one step ahead of them. They need not even be very senior or ‘important’ persons in the hierarchy… a troublesome clerk, an indifferent driver or peon… any one could cause your ulcers to act up.

Our waking hours are filled with a sense of foreboding, and our sleeping hours are disturbed by dreams of what these people are up to behind our backs. We focus so much on the negative elements, that our positive energy is sucked out. We are unable to devote much time to our good and willing people, which means that they lose out, we lose out, and our organization or company suffers.

The huge importance given to the bottom two, only strengthens them in their negative activities. You have to accept the bitter truth that it is almost impossible to change people by force: suasion. The bottom two may appear all wrong to you, but perhaps that is not what it appears to others, and definitely not to your peers and your superiors, who obviously want to hear only bad things about you, and will aid and abet the rebellious two, forming a conspiracy against you. Perhaps top management sees these two as being difficult only with you; maybe with another manager, these two become efficient, whereas a different set becomes unproductive. Therefore, you would be much better off leaving those two alone, and getting on with the two good guys and working your arts of persuasion on the guy in the middle.

Have you ever had people who would contribute better by not coming to work at all? Since your power to hire and fire will be limited, sometimes it requires you to give some vague job and send such people off without hurting their feelings! Part of your art as manager consists of containing these people, rather than contending with them. This is also the reason why, if you need say ten good working hands, you will have to carry some extra weight… maybe not 40% of your work force, perhaps, but surely not less than 20%. I believe the older corporations used to create fancy positions for their senior people just to keep them out of everyone’s hair! That’s why God invented the golf course…