How to Lead & Live a meaningful Life
Ashutosh Vikram
Venture Builder, Helping ambitious founders to start-up, Cofounder Ninjacart, Forbes 30u30 2019
Marshal Goldsmith author "What Got you here, won't get you There" joined Shane Parrish on his Knowledge Project Podcast.
The 1 hours + long podcast was filled with insights & wisdom on Leadership, & Living a meaningful life.
I have tried to summarise the key insights & golden nuggets below. I would highly recommend listening to the complete podcast.
Breathe & let's dive in.
On Feedback:?
How to ask for feedback?
"I'm not asking you for more feedback about the past. I'm going to ask you for ideas for the future. If you have ideas to help me be a positive and open-minded listener in the future, what might they be?"
How to react to feedback?
"Whatever the person says, sit there, shut up, listen, take notes, say thank you. Don't judge and don't critique."
How to end feedback session?
Always set correct expectation.
"Thank you. I cannot promise to change everything everyone says. I can promise, though, to listen to everyone, to think of these ideas and do what I can. I cannot change the past. I can change the future. You know I can't get better at everything."
Why doesn't feedback work??
Time & again we have seen managers & leaders ask for feedback & then things go back to normal. Marshal talks about the importance of follow up
"Leaders that don't follow up and don't talk to people, guess what? Don't get better. Improvement looks like random chance. Leaders that do talk to people and follow up to the degree they make it a systematic process, huge improvement"?
How to transition into leadership
"You have to learn to quit being right all the time, and quit being smart all the time, and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are."
We are programmed to prove we’re smart and it’s hard to stop
Golden Nugget
Stop trying to be smart & right all the time, at work & in relationships.
You will have a happier relationship.
It's tough for technical people not to add value constantly.
As a boss/manager/leader, you always feel you can improve an idea.?Maybe with your suggestion, the quality of the idea would go up by 5%. But the commitment levels of the person who brought the idea would go down by 50%. Because now it's your idea. ??
Golden Nugget
As you move up, "Your suggestions become order."t
How to improve on this?
Breathe, & ask yourself.
"Is my comment going to improve this other person's commitment? If the answer is yes, fine. If the answer is no, breathe again. Is it worth saying? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not."
What does it take to have a great life?
Process over outcome
Assuming you have health, at least a middle-class income, & have great relationships with people you love.?
Don't give overweight to ambitions & achievements.?
"Never make your value as a human being conditioned on the results of what you're trying to achieve. Never do that. It's a fool's game."?
Why?
We always feel that happiness is a dependent variable based on achievement. The key is to realise that these are independent variables. You can achieve everything and be miserable, achieve nothing and still be happy.?
Thus focus on the process:
"Love the process of what you are doing. You do your best. It's connected to a higher purpose, and you achieve what you achieve. You win, you win. If you lose, you lose."
How do we deprogram ourselves from focussing on the result??
Every breath paradigm technique
"Buddhist belief is every time I take a breath, it's a new me. So you breathe, new me, new me."
Don't live in the past and beat yourself up over the head for things the previous versions of you did.
What you did in the past was your previous version. So you have to find a new meaning now.?
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Golden Nugget
24-hour rule by Shane "No matter what happens in your day, you get that day to celebrate or cry. The next day you have a new page, a blank one, and you must move on.?
You can't hang on to yesterday's wins or yesterday's losses.You just need to go forward."
Leadership
"The leader of the past knew how to tell, but the leader of the future are going to ask. They’re going to be inclusive, they’re going to ask why. In the past, it was a different world. In the past, the leader knew more about what they were doing than the followers. In the future, the followers know more than a leader." - Peter Drucker.
Golden Nugget
If a CEO knows more about marketing, finance, and HR than the respective heads. It's a hiring problem.
You have to hire people who know more than you.
Empathy
Concept of Singular empathy:
I'm going to be who I need to be for the person I'm with now. I'm going to be who I need to be now. I'm not carrying around the past.
You should know when empathy is useful and when it's not.?
How to become better at praising & recognising people??
Things to remember
Online works as well as in-person when it comes to giving recognition.?
You don't need a fancy program to recognise people.?What you need is
Do we control the environment, or does the environment control us?
"To a degree, we are controlled by the world. And to a degree, we do, to make a difference ourselves."
The key is to realise when you are being controlled by the environment.?
"What happens is we all wake up with this dream of what we're going to do every day. Yet, things happen. And these triggers usually don't push us toward becoming the person we want to become. Instead, they usually push us away from that person."
Identify the triggers.?
How to change ourselves??
Marshal talks about a simple technique.
Evaluate yourself on the following questions on a scale of 1 to 10 daily. Maintain a spreadsheet Yes=1, No=0, and get your score card at the end of the week
By doing this consistently, you learn that life is incredibly easy to talk about, and life is incredibly difficult to live.
You'll have a better life if you just do these six questions every day.
Q1: Did I do my best every day to set clear goals??
Sounds easy right? "One guy said, how did I do about setting clear goals on a one to 10 scale? Zero. Unless my goal was to respond to crap all day, which I guess I did a good job of that. That was it. All I did was respond to crap all day."
Q2: Did I do my best to make progress toward achieving my goals?
People get lost and confused, and they forget what their plans were. It's not so easy.
Q3 Did I do my best to find meaning every day?
Rather than wait for the world to give me meaning, did I do my best to make my life meaningful every day??
Q4 Did I do my best to be happy?
It's amazing. Most people often never think about being happy. They're just too busy doing crap.
Q5 Did I do my best to build positive relationships??
Q6: Did I do my best to be fully engaged and present every day?
Q7: what % of the day was I present and engaged?
Most of the time, we're not engaged. We're not present. We're just wandering around, stumbling around through life. It's one of those sayings. You wake up in the morning, and you come home at six.?
How do you define success?
?"As you go through life, you have alignment between, one, your higher aspirations in life. Two, what you're trying to achieve. And three, your enjoyment of the process of life itself. Regardless of the outcomes. I enjoy the process of what I'm doing. I won. That's it."
A bunch of old folks who were dying were asked, what advice would you give to your younger self??
Final advice.?
"Go for it. Your world's changing. Your interests are changing. Do what you think is right. May not win. At least you tried. Old people, we seldom regret the risk we take and fail. We usually regret the risk we failed to take."