#41 Being a potato, choosing a normal, and quitting on a high

Our choice of normal decides our filter and why you can do better than being a potato

Hi friends! 👋👋

Thank you for subscribing to Curiosity > Certainty! It’s a big motivation to be writing, knowing what takes shape in my head will move on to you, over a cuppa coffee or a moment of reflection, and then hopefully with your help to others like you. Welcome to Issue #41!

Why you should not deliver your best poem in one go

I’ve been facing a challenge that you may be familiar with. The question of whether or not to stop mid-flow. 

When to stop is a choice writers have to make every day. Should you continue on the gravy train because good ideas are coming along and you aren’t sure if you’ll find yourself in that situation again? Or should you call it a day because you’ve clocked the hours and get back to it tomorrow?

Writer Ernest Hemingway has something useful to offer: ‘𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭’.

Repetitions matter for any habit. When you go all in, once you realize you’re having a good day, you’re likely to regress to the mean the next day. Your legs will be mush having done too many deadlifts and so you’re unlikely to resume your workouts anytime soon. Or you’ll be toast having pulled an all-nighter and not likely to open a book for the rest of the week. 

When it comes to any habit, especially if it involves generative or creative thought, sure you could try leaving something midway when you’ve got gas left in the tank. But there are two other tricks that you must practise afterward that few tell you about. 

✔Do not think about it until your next crack at it. Anyone who’s put in a big shift knows the feeling of hitting the bed so wired that you cannot get a wink in for hours. That kills your morning after. It’s like a bad work hangover.  

✔Put your ideas/thoughts down just before you wind up. That’ll be insurance for a memory lapse and help you power down.  

Cash in when the going’s good is common advice. But if you’re looking to sustain a habit, try cashing out when you’re doing well. And unplug yourself until you go at it again. That way you’ll come back well-rested the next day. 

I would not worry about losing my rhythm. I would be worried about losing my habit.

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If this piece, or my writing in general, sparked a thought in your head, I would love it if you could leave a comment telling me so.

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Choosing ‘normal’

When moving between projects, teams, jobs, careers, have you ever thought about how what is acceptable often changes with the environment? 

In the 18th century, it was considered normal to be a body snatcher. Your job was to collect dead bodies and sell them to anatomists in medical schools to help them learn about the human body. A typical work day had you digging up bodies from graves or raiding funerals for the freshly dead. 

But this isn’t the highlight of what I want to say. 

It was easier to steal the bodies of the poor–they couldn’t afford coffins, they were more likely to be cast away. So the poor began to be disproportionately cut open. By the mid-19th century, 99% of autopsied bodies belonged to the poor. Two threads emerge from here and join in an unholy end. 

Thread 1: Poverty brings stress. And stress leaves telltale signs on the body. It causes parts of the body to atrophy, one of which was the thymus gland, located in the throat. The gland regulates immunity. Smaller thymus gland, poorer immunity. What the anatomists saw consistently was a shrunken thymus gland. 

Thread 2: By 1900, a new disease was emerging. Perfectly healthy babies from well-off families were inexplicably dying in their sleep. It was called ‘crib death’. 

Upon autopsying the rich dead babies, anatomists concluded the thymus glands were abnormally large because they were comparing them with the ‘normal’ ones of poor babies. 

A theory developed: an enlarged thymus gland presses on the windpipe and chokes the sleeping baby to death. A solution emerged: Let’s irradiate babies’ throats to shrink the enlarged gland. A problem no one connected to: The thymus gland was located next to the thyroid gland, and radiation increased the chances of thyroid cancer. 

It was a couple of decades, and tens of thousands of deaths, before doctors realized what was happening.

The lesson transcends medicine. It applies to how we make decisions. Be careful when deciding what is normal because once you’ve decided, you have forever doctored your ability to see something for what it really is. 

👉A product manager in a product-led organization will have a sphere of influence much bigger to one in a product-serviced org and may take that to be a given.
👉A marketer in a data-led org will see understanding user psychology differently from one in a data-serviced one.
👉A founder will look at the decision impact horizon differently from a CEO with a three-year shelf life. 

The filter with which you see the world has a far bigger impact on what you see than the correctness of your vision. Your choice of normal decides your filter.

What are you looking at everyday that you believe to be normal? 

The Area Under the Curve Framework for Problem Prioritization

All day, every day, you’re being bombarded with problems that need solving. Here’s a simple framework that’ll help put things in perspective so that you don’t lose sleep over an ant bite or sleep through a snake bite.

I propose a general purpose framework that I call the 𝐀𝐫𝐞𝐚 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤. It’s got two dimensions–how big a problem appears to be and how often it seems to occur–and you can use it to rank problems and plan a response.

Imagine a 2X2 matrix with Problem Size and Problem Frequency as the vertical and horizontal axes. Let’s plot some examples.

Low size-low frequency: A malfunctioning gadget 
Low size-high frequency: A long commute
High size-low frequency: A job change 
High size-high frequency: A toxic personal relationship* 

*You don’t get yourself into bad relationships repeatedly but let’s say you’re in one where bad interactions happen repeatedly.

The bigger the area under the curve, the more attention it needs. 

What’s new here, you may ask. Well, if you’ve ever posted anything online to generally good reviews and then you find yourself fixated over that one negative comment, you would know your internal apparatus is fallible. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐠𝐨 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨-𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥.

Here are typical scenarios where we misread either problem size or frequency.

Underestimate problem size (in fat tailed distributions): health. Because these are fat-tailed problems, which means that there’s a likelihood, however small, of disasters. But we tend to ignore that part. Think about chronic diseases and ask if your life is designed to avoid them.

Overestimate problem size (in normal distributions): salary. There are several things that determine your happiness at work, but you could focus all your attention on moving this one number up. But even in the best case, it’ll only move so much for reasons of parity. 

Underestimate problem frequency (common inconveniences): traffic. People visiting Mumbai are often taken aback by the traffic. Locals simply get on, like after a mosquito bite. Yet, what animal kills the most humans every year? The mosquito. 

Overestimate problem frequency (the odd unpleasant emotional experience): terrorism. It may not be at your doorstep but thanks to availability bias it’s what you think and talk about disproportionately. 

Once you plot problem size and frequency on the AUC matrix, you can think of how to tackle them: plan for, prioritize, control, or ignore.

If you really want to tackle a problem or not, you’re likely to find a way to justify it. What the Area Under the Curve framework does is slow that decision-making process down so that your rational mind has a say. 

Special credit to Aditya Sehgal who's been kind enough to teach me how to think about frameworks.

Surely, you aren’t looking for potatoes!

Conversations around workplace diversity are often hot potatoes. But they miss a crucial ingredient: the potato  

You’re at the bazaar. You’ve enough money to buy just one choice of vegetable. What will it be? Chances are you’ll go with the 🥔. All season, all-rounder, has a bit of everything you need.

Cut to: a week later at the bazaar. You’re still looking for just one type of vegetable. What do you do? The versatile 🥔 again.  

After two weeks of a potato diet, you’re back. But this time you decide to buy two weeks’ worth of stuff (you’ve discovered the wonder of refrigeration). What do you do? You mix things up. Cauliflowers and cabbage. 

When we have just one decision to make, the fear of getting it wrong rules. We ignore putting ourselves in a position to get it right. We go with the conventional, the potato. Because you can’t go wrong with a potato.

This is at the heart of the challenge businesses face in hiring talent. They are looking for diversity but when they go out to hire talent, one at a time, they’re crippled by the fear of getting it wrong. They look for someone who can bring a bit of everything. They look for potatoes–good CGPA with majority undergrad discipline with majority post-grad specialization with good communication skills and a willingness to learn. It’s hard to look beyond the safest bet.

Here are two ways to work around this problem of too many potatoes.

👉Batch your hires. When you’re looking to hire one at a time, as the book Alchemy says, you’re seeking conformity. Batching hires allows for complementarity. You can cover all bases, not with every individual but with the group as a whole. Very well, you may say, but who hires in groups? Even hiring two at a time allows you to look beyond the obvious. 

👉Identify the most important thing you’re looking for in each hire. Too many job descriptions look for potatoes. Too many job descriptions can be copy-pasted. If you’re gonna do the same thing as everyone else, you’re gonna get the same results as everyone else. So, make a specific ask. Ask for zucchini, artichoke, or asparagus.

Neither of these are easy but there are two upsides: You’ll learn from your hiring practice if you’re looking beyond potatoes AND you’re likely to skip past competition that’s in the market for potatoes. 

Lack of diversity can be propagated without a shred of racial or gender bias. We can be so fixated on not getting it wrong that we apply identical criteria, look for identical heuristics, and follow identical processes. In doing so, we move the outliers, the minorities, the ones with spiky world views further to the margins. We get closer to the center of the middle in the core of all the produce available to us–the potato. 

It is no one’s intent. It is everyone’s action.

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If this piece, or my writing in general, sparked a thought in your head, I would love it if you could leave a comment telling me so.

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Being yourself when it matters

We often hawk ourselves like potatoes when it matters. Even when we’re zucchini or asparagus or anything but a potato. Why?

Say you’re a professional sportsman. Consider two scenarios. 

One: You get, spread over a year, 10 separate chances to prove your worth. But you don’t know before an opportunity if there’ll be another after that.

Two: You get, and you’re told this at the start, a guaranteed stretch of 10 chances to show your mettle. 

For the first scenario:
You are cagey.
You play well within your limit. 
You hope to tick all the boxes because you think all matter.
Multiply this ten times.

For the second:
You are relaxed.
You show off the bits that make you, you.
You accept you can’t tick all the boxes.
Multiply this ten times.

If you’re familiar with the first scenario, you would know that this gravitating to conformity applies to any important decision. You want your dream house–you want it roomy, in the right neighborhood, within your budget, and so on. You want your dream job–you show a bit of everything mentioned in the job description. 

Your need for security is real any time you feel opportunity is scarce. But everyone else feels the same fear too. All of you want to be in this delicious recipe and each of you has chosen to be a potato. Because that is the safest bet.

Two lessons:

👉For up and comers, popularity is a great social-proof measure to reduce uncertainty. Yet, if the majority goes with the popular choice, it creates competition. How can you beat the trap?

Find the one thing you are an outlier at and find someone who needs that most. That way, even if you get just one chance and you have a bad day, your bad is likely to still beat others’ best (margin of safety). If you don’t know what your ‘hip pocket skill’ is, it’s worth finding that out first. Indra Nooyi explains it well.

👉Leaders need to be careful about assessing anyone over one project, one hire, one campaign, one try. 

The excellent Wait But Why blog says, ‘In life, you usually don’t get good at something until you’ve done it a bunch of times.’ It would be a wonderful world where the starry-eyed didn’t need permission to try, and therefore to get better. So it is left to the leaders, to either be gatekeepers or enablers.

The idea that your best chance to win is by coloring within the lines is a false construct. It has to be. Because if you look around you’ll notice that the word needs many things. Not just potatoes.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!

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Until next week…