Date – 7/12/19
Hello Folks,
It’s Saturday again. Time literally flies! Looking forward to Sunday tomorrow – it would be my first Sunday off after Nov 3rd. Not that I’m tired – it just helps to have some time in life for deep reflection other than the daily one.
And in fact, this week I want to talk to you guys about the same – reflection and introspection.
Before I start, I just want to call out the obvious – I hope that everyone is aware that we are planning on growing 300% in a year. Now, for you To play on your front foot consistently, you would have to at least scale up your skillset to 200%, if not 300%. However…
…the bad news is that most people struggle to upgrade so fast and start failing after a certain scale. And the good news is that some people are able to pull this off (we have a lot of examples at Zolo). The biggest difference in the first and second category is not IQ, nor number of hours spent at work – it’s the ability to introspect and consistently find areas of improvement (hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition).
Now, the question is why majority of us hate to introspect – when no one minds improving or rather most people want to improve. The simple answer is because we are not comfortable knowing the fact we don’t know so many things. It makes us feel like an idiot. So, we choose to create a narrative for ourselves that I have done my job to the best of my ability and if anything has gone wrong/suboptimal – it’s the fault of the world outside (company, policy, manager, training, or even God!).
With this narrative as our shield, we miss out on hundreds of opportunities to improvise. So, at best, we improve quarterly review to quarterly review. That’s too slow a progress. Funnily enough, it brings out the biggest irony soon – we keep avoiding small failures (by not acknowledging and learning from them) only for all this to lead to big failure of not scaling up.
So, my humble request this week is for you to start a daily practice (yes, there are no shortcuts!) of introspection – write what went well today and what didn’t – so what do you have to double down on and what can you do better next time. It’s okay if you start feeling like a fool looking at your mistakes, I too feel that regularly 🙂 Everyone makes mistakes – it’s about not repeating them.
