Skip the line

There is a rule called the ten thousand hours rule. If you want to learn something world-class, you need to give ten thousand hours of deliberate practice time to achieve it. Then there is a good chance that you will achieve it. It involves ten thousand hours of practising the skill that you want to achieve; it will include practising and then succeeding or failing. You should measure the achievement/failure and seek some guidance from a coach based on his feedback. But life does not always give you the luxury of ten thousand hours. In such a case, what do we do? Squeeze the timeline, and Skip The Line!

I am sure COVID has played havoc with people’s lives. Many must have found themselves in a situation where they did not know where their next meal would come from. How were they going to pay the utility bill? Sometimes the problem is forced on you, and many times you do not find progress in what you are trying to achieve.

Richard Douglas Fosbury (born March 6, 1947) is an American retired high jumper considered one of the most influential athletes in track and field history. Besides winning a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics, he revolutionized the high jump event with a “back-first” technique, now known as the Fosbury Flop, adopted by almost all high jumpers today. His method was to sprint diagonally towards the bar, then curve and leap backwards over the bar, which gave him a much lower centre of mass in flight than the traditional method, shown in the first photo.

In 1960, Fosbury was an average high jumper, and his career was not going anywhere. His coach insisted that he follow the conventional technique, called upright scissors technique! It involved running towards the bar, jumping forward and swinging the front leg over the bar. He remained an average jumper. Then one day, he experimented with the method of jumping backwards. He not only did better but soared higher and went on to become the Olympic Gold medallist. Fosbury Flop is now the standard method for the high jump the world over displayed step by step in the second photograph.

What happened? He experimented and tried a totally new technique compared to the conventional approach. He was not afraid to try out and probably squeezed the ten thousand hours to a thousand hours or maybe even a hundred hours—this the power of not being afraid to experiment.

Consider the case of the Brazilian superstar Pelé. He never played football till the age of 15. He was born in a poor family and lived in the slums. At 15, he joined the club Santos FC. When people are generally selected to play at such a prestigious club, they are expected to have completed their ten thousand hours of grind. But within a year, Pelé went on to play for the national team and became the most famous and liked player in the world! Pelé used the technique of “borrowing” the hours. He never had access to the sophisticated equipment required to play football in childhood because of poverty. Instead, he would play another popular game called futsal. In futsal, the ball and the hardcourt is on a much smaller scale than in football. Hence the players have to have a great passing technique and footwork. Playing futsal made Pelé think and play faster in football than other players. He simply borrowed the hours from futsal and became an all-time great in football. Pelé was a kid when he switched over to football. He must never have thought about the end result of the switch he was doing. Being detached is the most important rule for skipping the line. He simply followed his passion which allowed him to achieve greatness. Trying something new without any restrictions is a way to succeed.

Generating some ideas every day can lead to one’s success in the career. Which idea will work under different circumstances is difficult to judge when you are trying something new. But if you do not add new ideas, you will never succeed. Similarly, subtracting ideas is also equally important. You want to do something new, you get different opinions. You think, but you are really not sure. Then something will come into your mind which will prevent you from attempting new ideas. You may start thinking that if I do not do a certain thing, then you will not succeed. But you are afraid to take that decision. You do not want to subtract that idea or remove that idea from the scheme of things. The way adding a new idea is meaningful; subtracting something is equally essential. We are afraid to stop doing something or removing something because we have been doing it for years. Do not be scared. Addition and subtraction are the two sides of the same coin.

You will wonder if I am writing a treaty on Maths. The following ideas will be multiplication, division and procreation. The classic example of the multiplication of ideas is Amazon. They started by selling books online. If we see, we will have to search what they do not sell online. There are some ideas which start big but end up into a small focussed job. That is like division.

iPhone is an idea made by combining the concept of a cell phone and iPod into one device. These two ideas apparently had sex and procreated iPhone.

Unless you think of something new and are not afraid to do it, you cannot really succeed. It is possible to transform fears into an opportunity. Innovations happen when you push boundaries. Unless you are comfortable with fear, you can never succeed. Do not forget that failure can be the first step towards your success. Only thinking does not lead you to the path of success. Do something different, something unexpected.

On March 27, 1994, the world discovered a player that would take the game of cricket by storm in the coming decades. In 1994, Sachin Tendulkar opened the innings, in a one day game, for the first time in his career, and the rest, as they say, is history. Then, captain Mohammad Azharuddin asked Tendulkar to open the innings in the absence of Navjot Singh Sidhu, who was out of the game with a stiff neck. Tendulkar was asked to open the innings, and it turned out to the turning point in his career. It was Azharuddin’s out of box thinking, an innovation that changed the face of one-day matches! Till that point, for about 80 one-day games, Sachin batted at number 6 or 7 and was known to be a hard-hitting average batsman. Credit goes to Azhar, who understood Sachin’s talent and took a bold decision.

You may be Sachin, but we need an Azhar too to think boldly! He skipped the line!

 

What is the Mantra of Success?

What is success? Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. So, you are lucky, born with a high IQ and willing to work hard will lead to succeeding in life. Is it that simple? Is it so straight forward? The combination that I have written above will take you to the path of success, but it may not make you successful. Why is it so? There are many theories, and reasons for not succeeding. Success rate would be much less than expected with this combination.

So what else do you need? It has been generally observed that geniuses are introverts compared to those lesser gifted people. But the so-called “social” people will be actively social, but chances of their being less talented are more.

In business, it is never enough to have a great idea. For any innovation to be successful, it has to be shared, promoted, and bought into by everyone in the organisation. We focus on the importance of those great ideas and seem to forget about the work required to spread them around.

Whenever we are building a team, we tend to look for smarts. We are attracted to people with lots of letters (oh, sorry! Those are degrees!) after their names or awards on their resumes. We assume that if we hire the smartest people we can find, they will come up with new, better ways of doing things that save us time and money. Of course, they will provide us with great products or ideas too.

Steve Jobs was one of the smartest persons in his time, and that was proven by his success in life. But did he succeed right away? No! He was very smart but was not very practical. He wanted to push his ideas all the time. In the initial phase of Apple Computers, the board of directors brought in a commercially successful person, John Sculley, to head the company- first thing he did was to make Jobs resign as the director. During tough times Sculley navigated the company and survived for a long time. During the same time, Bill Gates and his company did not even have great products. But they were more social than Jobs and went way ahead of Apple Computers. Finally, it needed for an iPod to be born that led Apple Computers to race ahead of others. Rest as they say is history.

I read an exceptionally different way of making a comparison. I am sure you will also like it. I will share with you the comparison verbatim so that finer points are not missed.

Consider two very large prehuman populations, the Geniuses and the Butterflies. Suppose the Geniuses will devise an invention once in 10 lifetimes. The Butterflies are much dumber, only developing the same invention once in 1000 lifetimes. So, this means that the Geniuses are 100 times smarter than the Butterflies. However, the Geniuses are not very social and have only 1 friend they can learn from. The Butterflies have 10 friends, making them 10 times more social.

Everyone in both populations tries to obtain an invention, both by figuring it out for themselves and by learning from friends. Suppose learning from friends is difficult: if a friend has it, a learner only learns it half the time. After everyone has done their own individual learning and tried to learn from their friends, do you think the innovation will be more common among the Geniuses or the Butterflies?

Among the Geniuses, a bit fewer than 1 out of 5 individuals (18%) will end up with the invention. Half of those Geniuses will have figured it out all by themselves. Meanwhile, 99.9% of Butterflies will have the innovation, but only 0.1% will have figured it out by themselves.

What if we take this thinking and apply it to an organisation? We want to have smart people. But we may not want an organisation full of geniuses. They might come up with a lot of brilliant ideas, but without being able to learn from each other easily, many of their ideas will not have many takers because these ideas will remain in their cubicles. You may think of making a pairing of Geniuses with Butterflies. Since the butterflies are not very smart, they are used to having a few very smart people around them- the geniuses. The butterflies do not  mind this.

Try to understand the usefulness of butterflies. A terrific product has been created, but the organisation is not able to sell it, as something is missing somewhere. Nobody can find out what is going wrong. In a meeting with a prospective customer, the customer asks if the product could be used for another application. It is a small change in thinking. But the butterfly understands this little point- you do not have to be a genius to understand this. The butterfly being social, discussed this small tweak with other “butterflies” and the word spread. It reached the marketing head, and the product started selling like hotcakes. The example also explains that geniuses always do not think through about their inventions. Many times it is the end-user too, who will find a different game-changing use for the product or service.

I will share with you an example from an ERP that we had developed. The product was called DMS and was used in automotive workshop management. Before selling this product to the vehicle manufacturers, we sold many copies to local workshops. One of the workshop owners said that the drivers of car owners asked for some money for bringing the cars to their workshop- they could have taken the vehicle to any other garage. We provided a facility to falsely “issue” a spare part from the store and was billed to the customer- it reflected in the invoice but not in the inventory.

But another customer used this facility during engine overhauling. When an engine is opened up, say 50% parts are reused, and balance new parts are issued. This customer used the facility as mentioned above during engine overhauling and made big money. While designing this trick, we had never even thought of engine overhauling application- users of the products know better than the designers, many times.

Finally, what is the conclusion? For new inventions, products, theories we need geniuses. But to spread them and market them for large acceptance we need butterflies. Please do not forget the customer, the end-user! Customer is the king anyway! There are plenty of butterflies around too!

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Advantage, Poor Economies!

As the cliché goes, “Change is the only constant”! Human race with smarter brain and use of Thumbs of both hands has leaped frogged ahead of other species. From stone age tools, to the wheel, to metals, list is endless. During any and every change there has been resistance, there has been reluctance to accept new things. Flat earth theory is the classic case of non-acceptance of the progress of science. But in the end, all the new changes became routine.

During last 50 years of previous century and 17 years of current century, the changes and innovations have happened at an breath taking speed. Some things kept on becoming more efficient and improved tremendously. Some products, became obsolete even before their potential could be realized. Classic example is Fax. Before we started using fax in a big way other methods of communications came into use, PC became a mass product and over period fax machines simply disappeared. Some products which never existed before suddenly became household names, like iPod.

Computer proliferation has been the most important change that happened during 80’s and 90’s. Advent of computers, first as big as a room, then came desk top machines, followed by laptops, tablets and smart phones. This sequence is important. Computing and storage capacities went on increasing so rapidly that current smart phone capabilities are far greater than original desk top machines. One of the most important effect of these changes is to speed up discoveries in various fields, improve diagnostics in medical field due to better imaging techniques and faster results of collection and analysis of data.

I have only touched upon a couple of innovations and technological changes, but I always wonder how the general population of the world will handle these changes. One important thing about some of these changes is that they are seamless and are accessible without the hindrance of international borders. This reminds me of a Hindi song Panchi Nadiya, Pawan ke zoke, Koi sarhad na inhe roke! Birds, Rivers, the Breeze fly and flow at will and no border can stop them. Internet is one such thing like the birds and rivers and breeze! Except in countries like China, who go by their own laws of freedom. Another unfortunate seamless development is terrorism but that is a subject by itself.

How is general population able to handle these changes? In developed countries where literacy levels and education levels are higher, you might think that they handle it the best. But we already know that India is leading the usage of Cell phones, more than 80% of India’s population has biometric identification, which is practically unbreakable. High % of Kenyans use cell phones to make their financial transactions. I am quite sure many more Indians can do it but they avoid doing formal transactions so that they can cheat on taxes. I do not know the data about how many Indians have started using Bitcoin crypto currency! This switch over will be fast because it is currency which is non-traceable, seamless internationally and illegal in India. This will help people keen on dabbling into “black money”; at least currently it is better than keeping money in Cayman’s island!

How can new technologies change the world order? This may not happen overnight, but it can happen. Countries like US, England, Germany and many other are money rich countries, but countries like India are data rich. In 70’s in the last century when gulf countries realized the importance of oil, in a decade or so they became rich countries because they exploited the oil! Mukesh Ambani has recently said that Data is new Oil! What is the meaning of this statement? It means that the country which garners and manages the data well, will become rich fast. China is both rich in money terms and is data rich, so they will probably gallop over the others.

The Rich world already had systems and with new technologies they have improved on their systems. But in countries like India a large % of people who are not in the system, are taken into formal system, thanks to Aadhar which has biometric authentication. This has enabled India to create completely new systems. This will enable such people to access loans, and funds to which they never had any access. These systems can give poor, subsidy in Electricity bills and Fertilizers, directly. Before new systems there was a big leakage of funds and benefits never reached the poor. Systems are being designed for day to day use where biometric authentication is the only thing that is checked e g vending machines. Using this authentication, financial transactions can be completed. In India power deficit has been historical. Recently, a solar power plant for 800 Megawatt was commissioned in six months in Andhra! Five thousand people were employed on this project. One more example of new technology doing quickly, what old and polluting technology was taking years to do. Those who can afford, should put a solar plant on their own rooftop, for home use. What this does is 30/35% transmission loss is gone because there is no transmission!

Will the “uneducated un included” population be able to handle these rapid technology changes? If cell proliferation is an indication, then things look good! Cell phone is going to be the tool for all so it is upto the app developers and various agencies to create business processes in such a way that life becomes easier and easier; biometric authentication is already there! Before signing off let me share one more example of new technology and thought process. There is a Dam near Pune with a very large reservoir! The is plan, is to cover 4600 acres of water with floating solar panels to generate 1000-Megawatt power! Do you know what the bonus is going to be? Great saving of water which is lost due to sublimation! Great thoughts and new technology are simply going to change things for “Have Nots”!