When in doubt - Reach for Marshall Goldsmith !

My reading cart for 2017 is adding up into a pretty heterogenous platter . While I didn’t have the luxury of indulging in too much of fiction this year ( Except for the new Murakami hardcover . I mean, that’s a fanboy activity I cannot simply avoid ! :) ) , I managed to read some pretty amazing stuff in non-fiction , which includes two brilliant books - Nassim Taleb’s “ Black Swan” & Angela Duckworth’s “ Grit”. I would also like to specially mention @ Sarah Robb O'Hagan's “ Extreme You”, which I absolutely adored.

Then , there were some others.

Among the 10 odd business books from my Q1’17 cart , was also Marshal Goldsmith’s “Triggers”, his latest. Being a long term admirer of his, I try to keep up with his books. Every now and then, I also keep revisiting his earlier work for that odd nugget of inspiration to draw me out of my blues . Reading “ Triggers”, which is so similar and yet so different from his earlier books, I kept marveling at how conversational he can get as an author. Once you finish a Marshal Goldsmith book, you actually retain a lot of it, simply because his books are designed like coaching programs and not as complex ensembles of information for intellectual stimulation that evaporates within a week. Although he has authored about 35 books, my favorites over the years have remained as “ What got you here, won't get you there…” and “ Mojo”.

And now, “Triggers”. What a wonderful book again ! ( The ‘ Six question’ method is brilliant ! And it works like magic. See more in point no. 5 below. Try it ! )

Since I have been playing truant from my blog for the past few Sundays, I thought of trying to jot down some key takeaways from my favorite Marshal Goldsmith books this Sunday . Obviously, these takeaways are no way exhaustive in themselves. For, Goldsmith is a goldmine of leadership wisdom and you need to keep reading and re-reading him to really ‘ get’ him in you ! So here goes – the top ten takeaways from MG.

1.      Mirrors can lie – While it’s easy to point out what we don’t like in others, it is not always simple to see what other people might not like in us, in our own mirrors. We often hold on to erroneous and inflated assumptions about our virtues and blind spots towards our fault lines. Every once in a while, it makes sense to just LISTEN to other people’s opinions about us without being biased towards our own selves. This is the stepping stone to all self- development.

2.      Tame the ‘monkey’ – The human mind, as we all know, loves swinging between memories of the past and dreams or anxieties about the future. The great Eckhart Tolle has rightly attributed most problems of human existence to being attached to too much past and not having too much presence. This is what leads us to unconsciously drift from thought to thought during our waking hours, or spend mindless hours in front of a mindless television or to keep idly surfing through pointless internet pages. Marshal Goldsmith offers many practical ways to tame the monkey mind, like for example – blocking fixed and small pockets of time for ‘monkey activities’, or implementing a strict routine of how and when you do your emails. You will be amazed how much of your ‘super stuffed day” gets freed up, once you apply his techniques !

3.      The ‘Great Western Disease’ – Or, as Goldsmith says, the illusion of happiness that always lives in some future land in the guise of “ I will be happy when…”, attaching itself to some materialistic rider ( a car, a house, a promotion, and so on). Attributing this flawed messaging to the modern age of commercials where happiness is always shown as a by-product of acquiring something from ‘the outside’, Marshall Goldsmith explains the fault in the rationale by explaining the inverted U-Curve in the happiness of lottery winners who always slide back to a feeling of emptiness after an initial period of euphoria, suggesting that happiness or fulfillment is something deeply intrinsic and needs to originate inside-out and not the other way round. This holds true for employee engagement , as well narrated by many modern social scientists ( Read my take on Simon Sinek’s say on the same subject -https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/big-why-how-only-few-get-right-ayon-banerjee )

4.      The five deadly whines – Quoting Peter Drucker, Marshal Goldsmith often reminds us that our mission in life should be to make a positive difference in the world and not to prove how right we are. In what I consider as a comprehensive summary of human negativity that plagues each of us at some point in time or the other , he lists down the five famous whines we resort to, whenever we cannot control things and tame them to our liking –

a.      It’s not FAIR ! ( Goldsmith quips – Decisions are decisions, made by someone having the power to make them. It serves no purpose, trying to judge them for fairness or lack of it)

b.      It’s not SMART ! ( Goldsmith reminds us that ‘smartness’ is relative, and adds - what is smart for us, need not always be also smart for the decision maker. We need to live with it and work around it).

c.      It’s not LOGICAL ! ( The curse of engineers and scientists, as puts Goldsmith – the tendency to waste years, trying to dig for logic, when none exists !)

d.      It’s not RIGHT ! ( Obviously something that is not as per our liking won’t seem right to us. But like with fairness, right and wrong are often relative and subjective conclusions)

e.      It’s not THEIR JOB ! ( The CEO trapping, as per Marshal Goldsmith – the pseudo self-image blindfold that makes people take foolish stands, just to pamper their own ego, and get egg on their face)

5.      The six active questions – Marshal Goldsmith masterfully steers the focus of your mind inwards, making YOU responsible for your own success by making you probe within, with the six active questions you need to ask yourself every day – a. Did I do my best to set clear goals for myself ; b. Did I do my best to make progress towards my goals ? ; c. Did I do my best to find meaning in my day ? ; d. Did I do my best to be happy ? ; e. Did I do my best to build meaningful relationships ? ; f. Did I do my best to stay fully engaged ? The point worth noticing in this method is that all the questions are internally directed, keeping the onus on US, rather than assigning some external third party the responsibility of our destiny. Cool stuff !

6.      The deathbed quiz – Morbid as it might sound, this is yet another simple yet brilliant lesson from Goldsmith. Research of dying men and women, when asked about their greatest regret, has always had a common outcome – Every person at the end of his life, regrets having stayed wrapped in what he didn’t have, instead of having focused on what he did have. And then one day, life gets over. So go for your dream now, before you are too old and resentful at not having attempted it at all . Don’t worry about others making fun of your dreams, goofy as they might seem to them . They are your dreams and not theirs ! I love this one !

7.      Love what you do – I know this sounds like a done to death & stale idea that every successful person keeps talking about. Yet, it is amazing how few is the actual number of people among us who embrace it, as we go about in our disguises, play-acting roles we don’t love, doing jobs we loathe and working with people we don’t connect with, driven by a sense of false triggers that make us mistakenly assume that if we did those, we shall be happy. The human heart can be truly happy only when we are engaged in a vocation we love and one which gives meaning and fulfillment to us. Everything else, is mere noise.

8.      Adding too much value – As briefly touched upon in one of my earlier blogposts, again partly inspired by Goldsmith (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ten-deadly-sins-high-achievers-ayon-banerjee) , this is a classic modern day meeting room dampener when you tell someone – “ I like your idea, BUT IF YOU DID THIS…”, going ahead and butting in, deflating the spirit of the person who came up with the idea in the first place by trying to add your genius to it and hijacking it, ensuring that the will to execute the idea goes down by 50% due to your value which might not have been a > 5% adder to the original idea. So, when someone else has a good idea, listen to it. Embrace it as it is. And then - keep quiet !

9.      Mojo - Taking a dig at aging professionals including himself in a self- depreciating way, Marshal Goldsmith insists that we all need to probe and define exactly what gives meaning to our life at each stage of it. As long as we find purpose at any age, we shall have our Mojo in place.

10.  Identity – Marshal Goldsmith explains that each of us has four sets of identities – Programmed ( origins, gene pool, race), Reflected ( Perceptions by others and associations we make ), Remembered ( As per our actions and behaviors that are observed and tagged to us) and Created ( Consciously carved). Using the example of Bono, Goldsmith explains how Bono effortlessly carries his different identities on himself – that of a ‘ regular guy’, a ‘rock and roll fan’ , a ‘music lover at heart’, a ‘ rockstar’, and a ‘humanitarian’, obviously the last one being his painstakingly created identity, having risen above naysayers and cynics. A sense of identity is what keeps us grounded, consistent and happy in our own skin.

So if you are sitting at career crossroads, unsure why you are not making that next big promotion, read Goldsmith. If you are down in the dumps and looking for inspiration to pull you out and get you back on your feet, read Goldsmith. And if you are bugged about a certain stubborn behavior you are unable to change in spite of having tried a lot, read Goldsmith. He is the life coach we all need !

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( Note – Thanks Evan Carmicael for your neat collection of interviews of Marshal Goldsmith that helped me with the order in this post of mine. You are awesome !).