Bringing Your A-Game

A-Game is basically when a person is operating at the peak of their abilities. I have come to the conclusion that it's part nature (ie some drive and passion that people are born with) but most of it is nurture, that we have to hone it. These are some of my learnings along the way on what helps me, your mileage may vary!

This article is more leadership and personality oriented, not specifically targeting any skillset or field of work. The things I lay out have worked well for me as a software engineer / individual contributor. Many of the things here are grounded solid research that are done with people across many disciplines, so I hope this helps you irrespective of what field you are working in.

Motivation

Early in my career, I realised that money and status only can drive me so much, if I want to have 60-70 hour work week regularly I needed something more. The four key things that I feel help my drive and motivation is:

1. The opportunity to learn and handling difficult problems (mastery).
2. The ability to help others grow or make the life of someone else better (purpose).
3. Freedom to some degree on what I work on or how I approach the problem (autonomy, tell me what you want and I'll figure out the rest).
4. Most importantly, working along side people I like / admire / respect. These people should have a growth mindset, recognise when I do good work and generally be a positive part of the team.

Self Determination Theory was instrumental in building the four dimensions above, it just happened that I wanted to understand what drives intrinsic motivation or what makes some activity enjoyable for the sake of it and not for external rewards and then I stumbled across this seminal paper.

If you want to have an A-Game, you need to put in the hours, there is no other way except for that. Mr. Narayan Murthy was right when he said that folks need to put in the 70 hour work week, what he didn't say probably was how can they make that 70 hour work week worth it. Motivating yourself to work that hard only with the external reward of money will leave you burnt out very very quickly. There has to be a purpose and meaning behind it. The four criteria above helps drive that meaning.

Of course once you have the above four criteria sorted, you get better at what you do, the free market kicks in and the external rewards follow.

Now, are external rewards not important? They are, but they can't be the only thing that you are after. That promotion, the extra money etc.. will all be meaningless if you are not intrinsically motivated.

How to Play to your Strengths

Only saying "Play to your Strengths" is probably the most superfluous advice that is given to people. The problem with it is not that it's wrong, but most of the time people are wrong about what their strengths are. People generally know what they are not good at but even here, they are usually more wrong than they are right.

What makes this harder is that even others will not know exactly what you are key strengths are, only you are the best judge on that. Others can only judge based on what you show them and you are not necessarily showing all of your skillsets to everyone.

I came across the idea of feedback analysis from the seminal article called Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker, who is also known as father of modern management. The idea was so simple and effective that it has stuck with me ever since.

In order to do this feedback analysis, just write down the key decisions you are making and the consequences of those that you expect to happen, a neat way for me to do this was via Architectural Decision Records and the template by Michael Nygard had an explicit section for consequences in it. You then come and look back at your decisions around 9-12 months later and see whether the consequences were the same as what happened in reality.

Doing this analysis for 2-3 years on your key decisions clearly tells you what are the areas that you are good at based on the design you made and the results you expected, you also get to see the areas where you need to improve.

Don't just focus on the technical decisions, keep in mind the non-technical ones as well. One of my favourite was implementation of checklists and simplifying the deployment document that I did in GoTo Group after become a convert when I read Checklist Manifesto.

My strength was clearly in analysis, design and deep dive. The area which became clear to me where I have a challenge was dealing with trouble makers, those type of people who are bullying others or needlessly confrontational (that story is for another time). I figured out how to play to my strengths, and for my weakness, I generally delegate or have a set strategy of how to deal with trouble makers - hire slow, fire fast.

Get into a Servant Leader Mindset

I was introduced to the concept of servant leadership in Tala , it was an eye opener for me. Servant leaders are essentially force multipliers who thrive in building and see hierarchy as something that is a necessary evil but not important. Servant leadership is having the best ideas win mindset and also focusing on how they can help others.

To get into this state, people need to ask themselves four key questions:

1. Do I have clear results / goals in mind? Many of the leaders don't have a result or an outcome in mind, they hop from meeting to meeting without any clear idea of how the time allocation meets a larger goal. This is also called as busy work, the person is busy but not getting anything done.
2. Am I internally directed? This is basically asking yourself whether you are willing to go against the flow or convention or are you just following orders. Being internally directed is important because it means you will stand for what you believe in. Like the Amazon leadership principle goes "Disagree & Commit", here the disagree is important where you make it clear what your issues are.
3. Am I serving others? Sometimes people get self-centered, they are after a promotion or a hike and they are willing to step on their peers, make their team slog like crazy, among many other penny wise pound foolish strategies. Being self centered hurts the person the most than anyone else. By asking this question, you ask yourself are you just playing for yourself or are you playing for the team. Most big wins in the industry are the win of the team.
4. Am I open to change? The ones who are least open to change are the ones who keep on insisting that they are open to change. There is the idea of strong opinions, weakly held. You need to have strong views but in light of evidence to the contrary you should change your views, more importantly feel OK to have a different view, it shows that you have learnt.

Reflect on Family, Self, Work and Community

Scientific method has been one of the greatest tools that human beings have invented. We need to regularly apply the same to our lives. The idea is pretty simple you need to have experiments that will meet some goals in four dimensions, family, self, work and community.

The template is in the image above, you need to track the experiment, the goals and success criteria for various life dimensions and finally how you are going to do the experiment in the implementation steps.

I tend to keep around 1 - 2 experiments in a year, right now I am experimenting with running, I regularly review these and track my progress.

Doing this regularly helps you get the data on what works for you in the four dimensions. Most of the time people focus on work and lose on the other dimensions. Once the lose out on the other areas even work goes for a toss, hence its important to focus on all the four things.

Build Resilience

The last but the most important section of having a sustained A-Game is to have resilience. While I write this, do note that this is a work in progress for me as well. This is something that we all have to keep working on.

The key idea on resilience is from the book Man's Search for Meaning, which is a book written by a psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps. The idea is simple that when you find meaning in what you are going through and you have a purpose in life, whatever you are going through becomes a lot more bearable. Given that the author survived the concentration camp and then went on to develop a whole field of psycho analysis called logo-therapy, the proof is definitely in the pudding.

Resilient people have three key traits:

1. They accept reality and are not in denial of it
2. They find meaningful, ie that they are here in the world for a reason
3. They improvise, they make do of what they have and they are creative

In order to be resilient build your purpose, this is basically looking at your strengths and then having an idea of how you will serve others using it. This is usually an iterative process where you keep trying out things till something finally clicks. Having a purpose or a meaning to your life is ultimately what will help you be resilient.

Summary

I talked about five key things that helps me be on my A-Game, one is to focus on intrinsic motivation, second is to play to your strengths (I have also given some concrete steps above on how to find your strengths, its simple but its not easy), third is to be a servant leader, fourth is to experiment and find what works for you and finally on building resilience. Try the things above, let me know how it goes for you!