Failure

My Tribe…

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

We live our lives surrounded by people. Some close, some just acquaintances.

It is very rarely though that we think about how those who are close to us are playing a great supporting role in propping us up.

Everyday. Every month. Every year hopefully.

I just finished reading Andre Agassi’s biography, Open. It is a good book, he comes out quite honestly about everything he had to go through to be the player he was.

One big thing that however has stuck with me was the mention of how he built his team, his tribe. And how important he considered them in his life, going to the extent of depending on them even in the most sensitive and difficult situations.

As I reflected on this revelation, it seemed to me that we mere mortals don’t do this enough.

We don’t think about our tribe enough. Or how important they are and how we need to keep them closer.

Going back to my own experiences, I realise now that places where I had an amazing set of people around me, I did amazingly well there.

In middle school, when in quick succession, I changed schools thrice in three years and didn’t have my good friends with me, I struggled to do my best. Then, as I moved to high school, I found an amazing set of friends and those years were way better.

In my work life too, places that got the best of me, including my first job and a couple of others, I had a great set of people around me. Whom I worked with, became friends with, and hung out with. That positivity reflected in my work at those places. And vice versa.

The biggest lift I have seen however has been in my personal life. Whenever I have drifted away from those who are close to me, physically or mentally, I have suffered.

Conversely, when I have paid attention to keep them close and given importance to what they say and how they keep me honest, I have flourished. Not just once but multiple times.

And so, to me this makes a lot of sense! Keep your tribe together.

And hopefully, as years go by, that bond yields much more than what went into forging it…

Inspired!

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

There’s something magical about sports. I love it.

For the fun and joy it provides, of course. But also for the inspiration it provides to a mere mortal like me.

This week I had two such inspirational moments.

First was when I was reading through Andre Agassi’s biography. An extremely well written one, where he talks about his love and hate relationship with the game and his personal struggles to lay down the path of glory.

And second when I watched Virat Kohli get to his 30th hundred leaving behind the great Don Bradman. Having waited for more than a year, it was a sweet feeling to see him get there despite all odds and everyone having written him off.

These moments made me recall all the amazing things I have learnt from sports and sports people.

Playing made me grow as a person, both on and off the field. I always played something or the other – football, cricket, hockey, athletics, and volleyball.

Mutual respect, trust, resilience, discipline – all qualities I picked up along the way.

But the bigger lessons came watching some of the professional superstars.

Observing Tendulkar, and then Dravid on the cricket field made me respect discipline and humility. I modeled myself to not get swayed by success or stuck due to failure.

Following Agassi and then Federer, hitting tennis balls through the line, taught me how to do it elegantly with my head held high. Knowing I had given it my best.

Watching the great Schumacher zag through the lanes and winning against odds made me appreciate the value of never giving up. And continuing even after a bad start.

Enjoying Messi’s play on the football field helped me understand how skills and team work need to come together to do great things. And why I always need to collaborate.

There are many more instances I could take and learnings I could recall.

But one important thing I really imbibed reading about these greats behind the scene, was the fact that success doesn’t come overnight.

It has to be toiled for, day after day, hour after hour of practice. It has to be planned for, even when the chances are slim. And it has to be aspired for, to really make a dash for it.

As I wind up a whirlwind week, these are all good reminders of the game I am playing. And checking myself on how I am playing it…

Remember the Highs!

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

I was going through a dull moment. Feeling down and out.

My mind was racing down the spiral, into the nadir. And my demeanour had changed into a sobering, deflated one.

It was a low point. And I was thinking of all the things that had gone wrong. All those mistakes which I could have prevented.

As I gazed into the ether, my inner voice was somewhere egging me to get out of the slump. Trying to remind me of the good things that had happened or which were in store in the future.

But my mind had shut off the good side. The bad side was winning at the moment.

Seeing me lost, my wife came and sat besides me. And told me that when I had overcome so many bigger challenges in my life, what I was going through was relatively minor.

She added that she was fully confident that I would not only overcome this low point but come out stronger on the other side.

As I listened to these words, something stirred in me. I went back to those past challenges and compared those situations with the one I was in currently. I also recalled the success I had seen once I overcame those challenges.

And suddenly, just like a light bulb illuminating a dark hallway, my good side took over and started throwing light over the gloom, pushing the bad side away.

It was just a small statement by my wife. But meant so much to me in that moment when I was feeling low.

My confidence returned and my demeanour normalised. Positive thoughts started coming back and the feeling of I am not alone in this made me sit up with a resolve to fight.

Thankfully, I have her by my side, helping me avoid these pitfalls every now and then!

Pedigree

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

Why do we bias towards pedigree? Is it or is it not as important as we think it is?

This is the kind of term we use when we want to show that the subject in focus belongs to a particular group. Mostly, the highly desirable groups who have been educated or come from a higher class background.

Is it our fascination with higher classes in general? Or has it got to do with some deep rooted feelings that get ignited within us?

These past few weeks, I have been listening to a podcast by ‘The Ken’, titled ‘First Principles’. It is interviews with some of the well known startup founders and what drives them and their companies.

As I listened to some of the well known and successful founders, I tried to observe patterns. And some interesting insights have emerged in my head.

One such important question, that rears time and time again in my head, has been this one about pedigree…

Those who graduated from the top schools and universities had a strong alumni backing, plenty of confidence in their abilities, and above all, a general sense of accomplishment that they embody. They seem to have a sense of purpose and a particular vision about how they see the world and their specific area of interest.

But even those founders who are not very high pedigree display a high sense of accomplishment and confidence. They have the same sense of purpose and vision. The society probably doesn’t hold enough confidence in them. Or they don’t have the same strength of alumni’s backing. But their success isn’t middling, in fact much better in some cases.

In fact, I think for most people who are capable enough, pedigree stops mattering after the first few years. It may have helped in getting a start but the person’s progress is more dependent on how s/he does going forward rather than what s/he did earlier.

If I look at myself, it is the same pattern. Pedigree stopped mattering after the initial years. What I lack in some way I make it up in other aspects because of my capabilities and abilities. And where I come from matters less and less.

Am guessing it is the same for most folks.

We however, personally, still view pedigree as important. We go out of our way to recognise it, idolise it, aspire for it, and discriminate basis it!

Perhaps, it is too ingrained a thought in our beings. Trapped within this thought process, we consciously or unconsciously try and move in that same direction as we have been accustomed to going in.

That’s probably why sometimes we overlook potential and fitment, incurring a loss when instead we should have kept the pedigree aside and chosen on the merit of the case…

Not the same person…

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

The man looked around. He could see his colleagues applauding. With a big smile on his face, he strode toward the stage.

He had been chosen as the best performing sales person for the second year in a row. It was indeed a proud moment. His family was standing and cheering for him. So were some of his colleagues.

But only some…

Not as last year, when the entire team was on its feet, applauding him. Nor were some of the other peers standing, who had been good friends since they had started working in this organization a few years ago.

Going up to the stage, he kissed the trophy that was presented to him, and held his fist in the air. Signifying his win in yet another battle.

A battle he had made his own. Which he fought with his friends within the company and alienated them for. Which he fought without his team at times for he couldn’t afford to lose, bringing them down in the process.

Which he ultimately won after pulling some strings that weren’t the obvious ones to pull. After all, he knew how to get something if he really wanted to.

He got down, walked toward his wife, kissed her on the cheek and sat down. She noticed he did not hug her like last time nor was he holding her hand like he did every time he achieved something.

She wiped off her tears of joy, for they meant nothing to him. All the sacrifices she had to do to weren’t remembered. The smile on her face vanished and was replaced by a farcical grin.

As the ceremony closed, she could see that only a few people in his office approached him with real warmth. Most others just congratulated him quickly and went away on some or the other pretext.

From a simple boy, wanting to work hard and do good, he had transformed into a task master obsessed about winning. At all costs.

Winning had taken over him and consumed him. And he was not the same person anymore…

He had become a slave of victory in the professional arena. And in the process tasted defeat on personal grounds!

“Fear”

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

We always want to succeed. But we often fail. Why does that happen? And what does it consciously or sub-consciously teach us?

These questions swirled in my mind as I was watching my daughter yesterday evening.

She was fearlessly trying gymnastic routines that she has been learning. Without the fear of falling or getting hurt. As I saw that, I recalled my own younger self playing with cousins, jumping on the ground from low heights, fearlessly oblivious to any potential hurt.

The kind of things that we did as kids! Without giving it a second thought. Without worrying about the consequences of a move gone wrong.

Most importantly, without fear of what would happen!

We used to say, let’s try. And if we failed, we just got up, dusted ourselves off, and probably had a go at it again. Until either we mastered the swashbuckling move we were trying, or were warned off by someone elder to us.

We wouldn’t stop and analyze what went wrong for a long time. We wouldn’t think about quitting because we didn’t succeed the first time. We wouldn’t give up so easily just because we didn’t know enough.

But now, as a grown up, we do that often.

We balk at the unknown all the time. We make calculated moves because we think it’s not worth risking things. We limit ourselves because we don’t want to stand out, we want to blend in.

And yet, we are none the wiser. We are far more conservative in our approaches, often short-sighted, and at times frustrated about our limitations.

Well, life happened and we faced enough failures through our journey that we started fearing a lot of things. We started obsessing about what shouldn’t go wrong. And what we shouldn’t do.

What if we keep that experience aside and instead adopt the approach we took in our childhood?

Go at things unhindered, without the fear of failure. Without the fear of “what if”. Without the fear of embarrassment. And without stopping when we meet obstacles or when our plans don’t go as we wanted them to.

Without wanting to succeed at all costs.

I believe we will do ourselves a world of good. And to those around us. By challenging ourselves and others, we will unearth more within us.

For what is life, if we don’t try enough…

Bragging Rights

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

The boy was ecstatic. After all, most boys his age wouldn’t have been able to win even 1 tournament at this age. And he had won the under-12 junior championships.

His parents were beaming. They had produced a prodigy, who at a young age of 9 years had excelled at playing table tennis. On the way to his tournament wins, he had beaten some other boys who were 2-3 years older than he was. Surely, they had a winner in their hands.

His coach was proud. He had honed the boy’s raw skills and made him adept at playing matches. He was surely going to win more, and with it would come the recognition for his coach also.

His friends were happy. They could now say that they were thick and close with the rising star in the school circuit. And they would often be able to go for these matches with free passes. Who wouldn’t want to…

The pattern of winning kept on repeating itself. Year after year. The boy became a young legend, ready to take on the world.

School finished, the boy entered a college. He could easily get in the top one on the basis of his sporting accomplishments. He had won the under-15 as well two years ago and was preparing to turn professional. They all wanted the best athletes to brag about their all-round personality development story.

Ultimately, at the age of 18, he turned pro. He broke into the scene with a bang and made a big splash. Ex-players were keen to take him under their belt and coach him. Administrators wanted to ensure they wouldn’t come in the way of a medal prospect. People around him always told him he is the best and no one can beat him.

This story kept on going in the expected direction for the next couple of years. The feelings kept on getting satiated and inflated at the same time. Of being more ecstatic. More sure. More proud. More happy. More confident.

No one noticed, but slowly that confidence and pride turned into a big ego. Also, into a boastful nature. The boy and everyone around him started bragging about how he was the best. How he could do no wrong. And how others couldn’t match up to him.

Everyone thought he could do it because it wouldn’t affect anyone. It was anyways just this one time. But those times kept on adding up.

No one paid attention to how it was affecting the boy’s game. How he had become over confident and dismissive of other players. And his coach. And his parents. And his friends. They all kept on feeding his ego. Because, after all, he was special.

And then, it all unravelled. With less and less practice and more and more distractions, errors creeped in. With less time focused on improving self and more in making fun of other players, small mistakes became bigger.

In the next tournament, the unexpected happened. The boy faltered at the finish line. But no one dared to call out his mistakes. No one attempted to talk to him about what was going wrong. They called it out as just a bad day and went about their own business. For, it was business after all.

As he played more tournaments, the performance bar kept on getting lower and lower. Slowly, those who applauded his every more, disappeared. Those who were close to him were shut down by him because he had always known that he was the chosen one, he was doing the right thing. Slowly, some of them went away.

Even this didn’t alarm him. He dismissed them as deserters and continued in his ways. He lost the touch he had in his game and became a regular, average player. While he chose to rest on his past laurels, others moved on and became better.

Ultimately, the one who was supposed to bring name, fame, and money, passed into the annals of time as an also-ran.

Only if someone would have taught him humility. Of being confident about himself but not being dismissive of others. Perhaps, if someone would have called him out at the right time. Things would have been different.

But alas, everyone was only interested in bragging rights…

The weight of expectations

~ Rishi ~ 1 Comment

2005 was an eventful year for me.

I graduated out of college, got my first job, had a whale of a time with my college friends, and had an amazing time on the work front. But it was also an year of disappointment.

After coming out of the Army owing to an accident, I had taken to 2 things. One was computers, which I was rather good at. And hence I chose to immerse myself into the field. The other was management; something I found affinity for and wanted to get deeper into.

With the last year of my graduation, I decided to appear for CAT, the common test to get into some of the best management institutes of India. I prepared for more than a year, burning the midnight oil to be ready for one of the toughest competitive exams in the country.

I was doing well for myself leading up to the test. I had consistently scored well in mock exams and had a good grasp of most things. I had also practiced a lot and was generally confident about my chances.

So were others. Most people around me believed that I could crack the exam. I got a lot of positive feedback from my friends, teachers, other students preparing alongside. And that all gave me more hope.

When I finally went to give the test, I was pretty sure of a good score. And was naturally aiming for the IIM’s.

As luck would have it, that day’s test proved to be elusive. I thought I did well but I wasn’t sure of how well. Eventually, I scored pretty well on the test scale but somehow couldn’t land an interview call for the IIM’s.

This devastated me. It was as if I was destined for a higher plane and suddenly the ground sunk. Most people around me also were surprised. They had expected I will be able to sail through.

I took it to my heart that I couldn’t fulfil others expectations. And that reflected in my behaviour and performance in an interview I gave based on those results. It was for a good college but because I was carrying a lot of weight on my mind, I didn’t give it my best and hence couldn’t get through.

This week, as I was listening to Carol Dweck, an American psychologist on the growth mindset, I realised that what had transpired with me then, was bending down due to weight of expectations I was carrying with me.

So even though I could have still done well and gotten through one of the other good colleges, I let myself down because I thought I had not met the expectations others had of me. Because everyone expected me to do well and I couldn’t, it disturbed me.

A lot of times we carry along weight in our mind that is borne out of expectations that we ourselves or others have of us. Sometimes it is explicitly stressed, sometimes self inflicted. Most times it is completely avoidable!

The easiest solution is to know that this weight of expectations doesn’t help anyone. Neither the person who is expecting and certainly not the person from whom things are expected. Even if it is oneself.

Better to just let things flow and live life with an attitude of trying one’s best and continuing even if the results don’t match what was expected…

The Team

~ Rishi ~ 1 Comment

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So said Aristotle.

The past 2 weeks, as I worked out of our London office and met people in the team, a lot of them for the first time, these old words rang true.

It’s been a deeply interesting subject for me for sometime now. How does a team click together? How does it become a high performing one? How do you maintain the bar you set and raise it higher?

It’s been equally fascinating to also understand why some of these things work and some don’t. The answers or observations can be quite different, depending on what perspective one employs.

What’s true however is there are some specific tenets which propel or hinder us on these fronts.

Trust is a big one. If there’s trust between people who are on the team and they believe in each other, progress is easy and performance dramatically improves as a byproduct. Lack of trust destroys and inhibits members, pushing the team further down the rabbit hole. I have seen this firsthand and experienced both sides of the coin and I must say, trust is the no. 1 thing to establish.

Respect is another. If the members cannot respect one another and their leader, the team won’t go anywhere. If on the other hand, there’s respect, even the most difficult situations can be navigated with ease. Again, something that I have had the good luck to experience and learn from first hand.

The other natural one is competency. If people on the team aren’t competent enough, do what you may but the team won’t be able to scale up and perform. This is also the most tricky as we tend to define competence narrowly and test it within specific sub-contexts only.

While these 3 tenets are basic and critical to team success, there may be more I am not covering here which are crucial. What’s important though is for us to understand that a lot of times we overlook them.

In our quest to prove ourselves the best or just to ensure we are doing enough to keep our place, often times we compromise on these building blocks and end up experiencing sub-par team dynamics.

It isn’t our fault. This is natural human tendency. We lean toward it unknowingly, trying to protect our individualistic interests.

But what we could do to get out of this trap, is to remember that we are doing well or being shown in good light because of the cohesion we or other members have within the team. It is because of them that we are able to move seamlessly and achieve what we set out for.

Keeping our ego and individual interests aside, working with others to build trust, respect, and competence. To enrich ourselves and the experience we gain from being in the team.

For above all, the foremost reason for being in the team is to be able to contribute and grow together, learning from others! Great teams do this at a collective as well as an individual level…

The day that was supposed to be…

~ Rishi ~ Leave a comment

It was evening. Walking back from work, ‘he’ was thinking how could it have been him and how did it even happen.

Eventually tired of thinking and walking, he stopped near a lamp post and leaned against it. He couldn’t take it any more. The weight he was carrying in his mind made him slump down on the street and he landed with a thud.

There were no people nearby, only passing vehicles on the road. With each passing car, his shadow was elongating and running on the facade of the nearby building. He was oblivious to it.

They all assumed he was sitting there for some reason. No one bothered to check in. It was as if he was but a mannequin on the road, left by some disorganized owner.

The man sat there for what seemed like eternity. He kept on thinking about how the day he anticipated he will taste success, turned out to be a dud and a huge embarrassment. How things didn’t turn out as expected. And how will he face others now.

As the clock ticked on, his mind only went down the rabbit hole. It had convinced him that no one would be happy with the outcome he had managed and he had only himself to blame. At some point in time, as he reached the nadir, a speeding car whizzed by. The driver was probably drunk and honking the machine incessantly.

He looked up startled and realized that he had been sitting there on the pavement for long. Gathering his bag, he slowly walked the remaining couple of blocks to reach his home.

As soon as he rang the doorbell, his kids came running and his wife opened the door. They all smiled at him and hugged him. He hadn’t anticipated this and was slightly taken aback. Still trying to gather himself, he pushed along with the family into the living room and settled down with them. They were still holding tight on to him.

After a couple of minutes, as the heartbeats settled down and calm returned, he looked up. His wife was crying happily. His kids were still glued to him, not leaving his side. One of them spoke, “We missed you so much Papa, where were you? We thought you wouldn’t come home today.”

He looked at his wife puzzled. She pointed to the clock. It read midnight. She explained that as usual, they had been expecting him since dinner time and when they couldn’t reach him, had asked his colleagues. No one knew why he hadn’t reached home and no one could place him. They had all been worried and had been biding their time for the last few hours.

Looking askance, he asked “It isn’t the first time that I have returned home late. Why this strong a reaction from all of you?”. And then he remembered. It was the monthly family dinner. They had all been eagerly waiting for him to come back home and celebrate with them.

But he, foolishly had let a temporary setback at work affect him so much that he had forgotten his date with his family.

As they embraced each other once again, he realized that even if everything else fails, he has his family along. And what to make of the day is unto himself and only himself!