Intellectually Curious - Edition 27
Welcome to the 27th Edition of the Intellectually Curious Newsletter. Wish you all a very happy, healthy 2025!!
I would like to thank all the subscribers and for those who haven’t subscribed, please do so that you don’t miss the editions.
Why this Book:
We are starting a new year. Technically it is nothing extraordinary, it is Earth’s one full rotation around its star the Sun and it has been happening for past 4.3 billion years since Earth was formed. Different cultures celebrate this in different times of the year i.e the year as defined by the Roman calendar. But as we all know, we have been indoctrinated about starting a new year and it is fresh in some way. If you are entering the new year with the same set of skills and knowledge behind you, many Earth’s rotations around the Sun will not be helpful to you as an individual.
Continuous learning and improving oneself is one of the key characteristic of this epoch. By doing this one can achieve their potential and beyond. This book defines potential in a different way from many others in the market – It is your potential as a human being – contributing not just to your professional career, also to yourself, your family and the society. Understanding all the dimensions and working towards improving in all the dimensions is the way we can play to our potential.
So, connecting the first paragraph with the second, the best way to start the New Year is to learn how to Play to our Potential. It is called as Fresh Start Effect: What is the Fresh Start Effect? The Fresh Start Effect is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the increased motivation and renewed energy that people often feel at the start of a new time-based milestone. This renewed energy and motivation can be harnessed to improve our lives and help us achieve our goals.
So the book that we are going to review is the book : Play to Potential by Deepak Jayaraman.
I have been listening to Deepak’s podcast Play to Potential for the past 6 years and I am very much impressed with his approach to the podcast – very interesting selection of guests, his connecting various different podcast episodes based on certain topics/themes and his calm voice makes a big difference. Overall very impressed by Deepak's journey and accomplishments. So when he announced about this book, I pre-ordered and read. Now let us deep dive in to the book.
Concept of the book:
In the book’s introduction, Deepak quotes from his interview with the Indian tennis legend Vijay Amritraj who when defining what is ‘playing to potential’ according to him is a plaque he saw at the home of Buzz Aldrin “who said sky is the limit when I left my footprints on the moon”( Internet search gives: “The sky is not the limit, because there are footsteps on the Moon.” as the quote of Buzz). Deepak defines this as a reminder of the infinite potential within a human and how it is limited by our imagination.
The book is packaged in three sections and first section talks about the messy mid-life, how ikigai can help and also its challenges. The next section is all about constructing self-awareness, importance of feedback and approaches that we can take to understand our values and principles. The next section gives us a framework, life journey of selected people who have succeeded in playing to their potential, meta-skills and mindsets that we need to develop to be successful using the framework and rediscovering ourselves.
Deepak brings in his personal life experience and his experience of being a coach to construct this book and making it more practical and easily applicable in our lives.
What do we learn from this book ?
The book starts with the mid-life crisis. I feel mid-life is experienced by everyone depending on their personal life journey. Irrespective of this, people go through this in different manner – by planning and being proactive; by just going with the flow and get stuck badly somewhere but remaining there; not being able to take things and get into a negative self-fulfilling prophetic loop and never coming out of it forever. People who achieve success much early face something called the Astronaut Syndrome – they don’t know what do with the long future that they face. The book talks about the term – MAMIL - ?Middle aged men in Lycra to describe men who ride an expensive racing bicycle for leisure, while wearing body-hugging jerseys and bicycle shorts. I can expand this to middle aged men running, gymming and all activities because there is no other visible progress metrics at some point in time of everyone’s life if they have adequate money, good marriage, decent job, kids studying well and good health. This perfectly defines the conundrum of middle age. Deepak then moves on to the limitations of the Japanese concept of Ikigai that gives a framework for identifying our sweet spot that can help us to play to our potential.
To overcome that, Deepak first suggest we understand ourselves better. Self-awareness is a very interesting paradox and if you think you have it that means you don’t have it. A person with good self-awareness will also be looking for feedback to improve and never be satisfied with status quo on where they are. If you become CEO of company and you assume that you have all the self-awareness as you have reached the top, then you are very badly mistaken. Whatever you are in life, you need to continuously invest in understanding our blind spots and correcting them. I will highlight on two out of six ideas that Deepak covers in the book as I have been applying them in my personal life and have found them very useful: 1) Find opportunities to pause at different timescales to evaluate the situation more mindfully. 2) Be mindful daily
If you are someone who is already a leader or aspiring to be a leader then cultivating and improving your self-awareness is super critical. Deepak then goes into the importance of gathering insights from others that provides external self-awareness and matching that what your internal self-awareness is telling you and work towards improving the same.
Then the book talks about the importance of tuning into our values and principles.
This is a very important concept that is often neglected and not thought through much. Yesterday I was listening to a HBR podcast https://hbr.org/podcast/2024/12/how-to-enhance-your-leadership-with-personal-power there was an interesting part where Chris Lipp says:
“The research is super clear that many of the behaviors that you radiate outward when you step into your power are behaviors that people see as more leaderly, they’re more likely to promote you to management leadership positions as a result. Okay, so then how do we do it right when we’re disempowered?
ALISON BEARD: Right.
CHRIS LIPP: Researchers have found very simple way to do it is not to affirm your capability, but to affirm your values. When you affirm your values, a couple of things happen. Number one, it focuses you internally on what’s important to you. So you begin to experience that agency again. Number two is it reframes your perspective into the bigger picture. Naturally, when people begin to think more abstractly, that’s associated with greater personal power versus more concretely, which is associated with less personal power. So what they found is if you go, for example, 20 minutes before an interview, if you sit down and you write out from a list of values, you pick your top values, and then for four to five minutes you write about why this one value is important to your life, not necessarily to the job but to your life. Doing nothing else, no interview skills, no better resume. Doing nothing else, if you affirm that value for four minutes, when you walk into the interview you’re almost twice as likely to get the job.”
This very clearly endorses what Deepak has written in the book about Tuning into our values and principles.
Now Deepak turns towards offering us a framework that helps us to understand six different dimensions that we need to balance to realize our potential which he calls as a FLAVOUR to achieve a FLAVOUR-ful life.
These dimensions are (I am keeping it very abstract, so that you will buy the book to read and learn)
Family (F); Love (L);Aspirations (A); Value creating Opportunity (VO);YoUrself (U); Relationships (R).
Deepak then shares some interesting examples of people whom he has found to have a FLAVOUR-ful life.
The book then goes on to define the meta skills that you need for moving towards a FLAVOUR-ful life and how to rediscover our FLAVOUR. These two chapters offer lot of valuable skills to learn and implement.
This book has one innovation that I have been looking for in books for many years – apart from the chapter summary it also has a QR code based contextual audio snippets from the Play to Potential podcast hosted by Deepak, which are very valuable to appreciate the chapter in depth.
So should we read this book ? - Absolutely yes
A fascinating read and one that you shouldn’t miss. In the Foreword to this book Sudhir Sitapati quotes from an essay he read during his school days from G K Chesterton called The Fallacy of Success: “There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which?I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known?among men.?They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract.?Moreover, the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious tracts are about religion.?But these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success.?On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed.?They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.”
I recently read somewhere about the people who put advertisements saying that if you pay then money they will share the tips to earn millions in share market and this article mentioned that if someone knows how to make millions in share market will not be spending time in putting advertisements asking for few hundred dollars to share the secret where they can spend that time to earn more money.
Deepak’s book as Sudhir Sitapati says is exactly opposite because he himself has personally succeeded in leading a FLAVOUR-ful life and he has been on a continuous learning journey being a coach, being a podcaster and doing his contribution to make the society a better place.
It is also a very good book in the area of management and self-improvement coming from an Indian author based out of India that is very different from many 'management'/'self improvement' books we see in the market that are nothing more than self-aggrandizing.
New Technology / Scientific Curiosities:
There is no dark energy but bubbles of space:
https://www.sciencealert.com/dark-energy-may-not-exist-something-stranger-might-explain-the-universe
How Wind energy can make our ships more green:
Read, Learn:
Podcast episode of this Newsletter:
One very good podcast episode to start the year – Listen to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia – a real master class:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/jensen-huang-how-use-first-principles-thinking-drive-decisions
Something Interesting to know about:
Do you know what is humourgragging ?
Interesting isn’t it ?
Hope you enjoyed this edition! ?Do share your feedback/suggestions on how the Newsletter can be made better in 2025.
Coach & Sounding Board | Author | Podcaster
1 个月Thank you for the kind words Anand.