For happiness, think beyond yourself

I've discovered a simple rule to stay happy most of the time: "Think beyond yourself".

In our discussions at Proton, we keep implying that your ambitions should be very big, and some of you ask, "What if we never meet those goals? Won't we be disheartened?"

The answer is simple, "If the goals are about YOU, then of course you'll feel broken. But if the goals are about something larger than you, then you'll be all right."

For me, this realization came while I was at Stanford. I had just finished my IIT at the top of my class, been funded by a prestigious fellowship for Stanford, my Master's was going okay, I had many options in front of me - and I felt confused and low. Which road should I pick, I asked myself. Should I be a consultant at McKinsey? A corporate executive? An academic at some good university? An entrepreneur? Should I come back to India? Or should I do what all my colleagues were then doing and stay in the US for a while? What if I make the wrong choice - how dreadful will that be!

Then I remembered what Gandhiji had said, and I quote from memory, "When in doubt as to what to do, remember the face of the poorest, most wretched person you have seen. Do what is best for that person."



I was walking when I remembered this, and I literally stopped in my tracks. Imagine the sprawling Stanford campus, tree covered roads, bicycle paths, low yellow buildings with red roofs, a Californian idyll. And me standing there, marveling at how my life had suddenly become clear.

I am not as great a person as Gandhiji was, so I immediately adapted his rule. My personal rule became - and I remember it to this day - "Primarily, try to create the most happiness for the most people over the course of your life. Secondarily, give yourself a chance to achieve the things that excite you." I've never felt confused again about the direction I want to take. I started working with Manu with just this rule in mind.

The same thing will occur to you within a company. Someone will backstab you, someone will steal credit for what you have done, someone will speak harshly to you. Think beyond yourself. Think about the good of the company, work for the good of the company, see if you might be misunderstanding the situation, keep moving forward. Do not get bogged down by petty things. It's natural to be hurt by what others think and say - it happens to everyone - but try to control your thoughts, set your ego aside and think about the greater good. Think beyond yourself.

Warning: The one place where this doesn't work well is in matters of the heart! In relationships with family and friends and significant others, it is much more difficult to think beyond yourself. That is why these relationships are very special, perhaps the most valuable and vexing things of all!

Two for the price of one!

Here's a blurb in the Times Ascent on poor performers and their impact on their organizations.

Depression

Depression is a topic people don't talk much about, but not talking about it is costly in human terms. Three people dear to me have taken ther lives due to depression. Several others have seriously attempted to but were luckily saved.

What hurt the most was that the things that drove the unlucky friends to despair and ultimately to their deaths are things I relate to perfectly. I was left wishing I could turn back the clock and share with them my own disappointments and pain so that they would have realized that they were not alone. Then perhaps they would have chosen to live. This pain and regret will never leave me.

The terrifying despair often stems from the shame of failing, of feeling worthless. After a while the despair feeds on itself. To break out of the vicious cycle, you need to know that it is not uncommon to feel that way and that you will one day make it through to the other side and what is destroying you today will only be a memory.

As human beings we are prone to depression, some of us more than others. I think that people with a deeply intellectual, philosophical or romantic bent of mind struggle with depression more than others. There are also genetic predispositions. The poets Percy Shelley, Samuel Coleridge and William Blake, and perhaps most famously the artist Van Gogh, all suffered from it.

I personally have a mind that is perhaps very mildly bipolar. It tends to oscillate between periods of inspired creative energy and periods when I really have to push myself from within to do the things I have to do. The latter are luckily very short and infrequent, but they give me an insight into what full blown depression might be like.

I respect people like Ted Turner (founder of the Turner Broadcasting which launched channels such as CNN, TCM and TNT) who announced that he had bipolar disorder so that others may cope with their own problems with more confdence. For some of us, these mental problems may be very powerful diseases requiring medical treatments. For most of us though, an acceptance of the working of our minds and a positive life approach may be enough to pull us through. Either way, there is nothing to be ashamed about. Think about your problems with the positive belief that you will solve them or at least learn to deal with them. Do not ever think you are alone, do not ever contemplate taking your life. And if you ever come to those dark crossroads, come and talk to me, frankly and openly. I'll change your mind, I promise.

Noise canceling technology for babies

Noise canceling technology is quite effective - it "listens" to the sounds in the environment and then cancels them by emitting sound waves that are exactly out of phase with the original ones and have the same amplitude. If all works well, you hear silence.

Now most new parents are hampered by the propensity of babies to cry. The parents are sleep deprived, they perhaps sleep in separate rooms when one of them must sleep to be ready for work the next day, they do not go out to restaurants or movies, they do not visit people, they cannot take the baby to their workplace, they find it difficult to invite people home.

Which made me wonder - perhaps a noise canceling technology for babies is an idea with legs. What if when a baby cried, a noise canceling set next to it canceled out the noise but activated a handset that a parent could carry?

The handset could perhaps have a flashing red light indicator - "Warning, baby emitting noises". Perhaps it could have a Listen setting where it would work as a baby monitor, allowing the parent to hear the baby's cries from a distance. Might there not also be a Vibrate mode? And to deal with a truly cry-baby, a Silent Do-Not-Disturb mode?

Tongue firmly in cheek, :-)
Manas

Call centres for "Elderly Companionship"

Remember, you heard it here first - I think call centers to provide companionship to the elderly in the West is a big business opportunity. Call it EC-BPO if you will.

Our culture makes us more respectful of age - sometimes to a fault - at least while we live in India (for what happens when we emigrate, read "Invisible Immigrants - Old and Left with 'Nobody to Talk to'" in the New York Times... you may need to log in). The situation is different in the West, especially in the US I think, where there is little time in busy lives to spend on slow, elderly people. Many of the young energetic Americans you see will live out the end of their lives in old age homes, visited by their families perhaps once a week, perhaps once a month.

I do not imply a value judgment here; the US has its history and culture, we have ours. But it does open up an opportunity. Like elderly people everywhere, these elderly Americans want to talk and be heard. Meet an elderly American in a pub or on a plane and he or she will talk with you at length about all matters in a way that most younger Americans simply won't. Indian call center employees report of having elderly Americans hanging on the conversations. Visit an old age home in the US and you will find people desperate to talk to you, to hold on to you as a link to the outside world.

In the world of telephony and even telepresence, this is a business opportunity. It's a chance to do good and to make money at the same time.

It will not be an easy job. The callers must be prepared to be shouted on from time to time, and then will be tearful rapprochements. It'll be emotionally stressful and possibly even traumatic.

In other words, it'll be just like family!

Astrology

I must admit I do not believe in astrology.

On the 7th of August, Nidhee and I were at an ultrasound clinic at 1 pm. We called the doctor with the results. She said, "We should a caesarean section. If you want and can come to the hospital right away, we can do it today. Else we can do it tomorrow morning. There's no urgency - it is up to you."

We thought about it and said, "We're coming directly."

We reached around 2 pm and Nidhee headed to the OT at around 2:45. At 3, Ekagra was born.

Would his future wealth, health and happiness have changed in a predictable way had we waited till the next day? Or if we had gone to another clinic at another location?

If people can predict what will happen to a single child's future (out of 6 billion on the planet) perhaps 20, 30 or 40 years later, why can't they predict what will happen to the Sensex tomorrow? Or even what the weather will be like? :-) Let us start with simpler problems.

I know a lot of people have a lot of faith. I admire faith per se, but in this case I think it is a little misplaced. And often dangerous to health and peace of mind.

If you read the early astrology treatises, you can see they started off as scientific works. Someone may have observed occasional connections between certain star positions and certain types of events and tried to see if the patterns were consistent. Over time though this "science" appears to have gone haywire - people seem to have started seeing patterns without validating them statistically. You will find in those books predictions similar to the following (I quote from memory): "If such and such stars are in such and such places, then all the metal artisans who work with brass and also own cattle will run the risk of financial ruin." It is observation of an event or two without statistical validation.

I am open to the possibility of existence of certain "occult" phenomenon such as Extra Sensory Perception. There is a LOT we do not know about the universe. But I must admit that, as it exists today, astrology is impossible for me to believe. Believers, I beg your forbearance.

Analysing the Economist, analysing ourselves

Manu and I both respect the Economist tremendously. It was a great moment when we decided that if we love this magazine so much, we must share it with the students. And it has been Manu's dauntless energy that has made the Economist sessions a powerful reality.

In a recent post, Manu wrote about the Economist's "anti-India" stance. I have a somewhat different view on the biases of the Economist with respect to India. To my mind, the slant may indeed be patronizing but it's not really anti-India.

I say that the Economist is not anti-India because India has much more coverage in it than in similar American publications. I first went to the US in 1993 and was shocked that while the Indian papers imagined that India sat at the world's top table with Russia and the US and China, no US paper appeared to think that India was at all relevant. India just never came up in class business discussions, on any serious television shows, in any geopolitical analysis; India was merely a land of snake charmers and elephants and tie-and-dye dresses and Osho. It was common for people I met to think that the language of India was Hindu.

So at a time when no one in the US would mention China and India in the same breath, the Economist dared to hope that one day India would be as important at China and offered advice, encouragement and criticism, however patronizing.

It has been a long road from then till today. When India's GDP growth briefly matched China's a few months ago, I exulted although there is a lot more to be done (just look around you).

Anyway, let me end with a few relevant remarks, a few minor ones and a few of great consequence:

- First, Britain will always have a strange relationship with its colonies (the US included, though the American Revolution was so long ago!) just as Russia will always have a strange relationship with its colonies.

- Second, we in India have gotten to where we are NOT by being self-congratulatory, self-righteous and insular (we were that way for decades) BUT by opening up to the world and facing the competition with confidence.

- Third, we are going to have to carve a delicate balance between our spirituality (Osho) and our urge for progress (Nano) . As Dr. John DeMarteau observed during the Global MDP from a very American viewpoint, they are both important.

- Fourth, it's all right to disagree without being disagreeable. :-)

Be a little suspicious of technology!

In the book "You Can Negotiate Anything", Herb Cohen suggests a simple way a salesperson can defend the pricing of her product to a potential customer - just display a printed price list! He says that if you give someone a printed price list, he will easily believe that the price is non-negotiable whether it is or not. (In Herb's view, the price is always negotiable.)

I would like to extend this idea: be a little suspicious of technology. The immediate motivation for this post is that in the last few days, I stopped getting any emails for moderation of comments. I assumed that no one was putting up comments and began to draw conclusions about the short-lived interest of the students!

Then I realized there had been a technical glitch and I had 48 comments waiting for my approval!

The same thing happens with Excel. People start drawing all kinds of conclusions from spreadsheets until they realize that there was an error in some formula and all the numbers were useless. I've found this - believe it or not - in a well-known Harvard Business School case study during a periodic review. :-)

And I may have mentioned in class the example of the multi-million dollar forecasting system of a world leading pharmaceutical company, which on our closer analysis happened to add absolutely zero predictive value!

So be prepared to be slightly suspicious of machine-produced reports and be ready to dig a little deeper...