Janak Mistry

Who am I to walk up to someone at a party and introduce myself? Who are you to start a new project? Who are they to give a talk on the main stage? Don’t raise your hand–someone else might have a better question. Don’t ship that work, it’s not ready… There are endless excuses, comparisons and reasons to hold back. Unless… Unless you’re on lifeguard duty and someone is drowning. In that…

Do you feel rich?

It’s not the same as being rich. Rich is always relative. Compared to your great-grandparents, we’re impossibly, supernaturally rich. We have access to information and technology that was unimagined a century ago. At the same time, compared to someone ten miles away or ten years in the future, we’re way behind. Two people with precisely the same resources and options might answer the question…

Perhaps it’s worth throwing it out today

If you’re considering putting an unmarked key into a drawer filled with keys, you’re better off simply throwing it out instead. Not only won’t you be able to find that unmarked key when you need it, but you’ve just made it more difficult to sort the other keys as well. We hesitate to embrace or announce failure right now, preferring to put it off to some indeterminate date in the future. But…

Very good at a simple game

Outsized rewards go to people who figure out how to master a skill or a point of view, and then commit to doing it again and again. This insight helps us with two things: if you want a certain kind of success, it will require obsession plus the good luck to find the right thing to obsess about. be careful not to confuse being very good at a simple game with character or wisdom or good…

They’re not the same. Precision brings granularity to measurement. You can drive around 50 miles an hour, or you can drive 54.7 miles an hour with precision. But accuracy is how we describe doing what we intended to do. Driving in the wrong direction with precision isn’t much help, when accuracy in describing the goal would have been a better plan. Most organizations spend their time on…

Do you have a tuner?

Piano tuners have a vital job… and very few pianists do that work themselves. Who maintains your tools? Perhaps it’s a computer with all the software that goes with it. Do you have a world-class pro, someone who is up-to-date, skilled, innovative and empathic making sure that they’re working well? Or are you doing it yourself, muddling through? If we have mediocre tools, why should we expect…

Write a better spec

If you’re asking someone to work for you, help you or advise you, it turns out that being specific about what success looks like is an obvious way to get better results. If everyone can agree on what success looks like, you’re more likely to achieve it. And yet… And yet we prefer to say, “I’ll know it when I see it.” We’re vague, murky or even contradictory about what we want. The reason is…

Blaming the weather is a trap

“If it were only nicer out, I’d be happier.” That’s just a step away from, “If the current world crisis would abate, then I’d be able to concentrate.” Which is not that far from, “If you would simply behave, I wouldn’t be upset.” When we focus on external forces and tie them directly to our state of mind, we’re giving up agency. The hard-won privilege of being in control of our own status and…

And when is the shift over?

If you sell your time as the measure of the work you do, the work is over when the shift ends. Clock in, clock out. If you sell your output as the measure of the work, your work is over when the inbox is empty. Once you’ve made all the pizzas that were ordered, you’re done. But more and more, our work can be endless. One more sales call might lead to one more sale. One more cycle of innovation…

“And then what happens”

We’re not very good at predicting the future. We’re very good at being aware of the urgency of the moment, and familiar with our need to deal with emergencies. Before we react, though, it might be worth asking “and then what happens,” five times. Five steps from here to there… If any of the steps involve, “and then a miracle happens,” or “we’ll deal with that later,” it might be worth taking…

The way things are

That’s how culture perpetuates injustice and indignity. Because that’s just the way things are around here. But the status quo isn’t permanent. The world doesn’t stay the way it was. It changes. And it’s been changing faster than ever. It doesn’t change because the status quo sub-committee had a meeting and decided to change it. It changes when someone decides that the way things are around…

Why are we more likely to take off our masks or avoid social distancing with a group of friends at a party instead of strangers on the train? Why do we drive more carefully in a new neighborhood instead of near our home? Why trust the advice of a doctor who looks like us, or went to the same school we did? Our evolved preference for familiarity often backfires. There are many signals that give…

We get a huge benefit from making a simple commitment: Don’t miss deadlines. The benefit is that once we agree to the deadline, we don’t have to worry about it anymore. We don’t have to negotiate, come up with excuses or even stress about it. It won’t ship when it’s perfect. It will ship because we said it would. Once this is clear, the quality of what we ship goes way up. Instead of…

Reality isn’t optimised

Falsehoods, spin and legends can be tweaked and tested and changed to exactly match the dreams and desires of the people they’re aimed at. This is why manipulative stories are so much stickier than what really happened. What reality has in its favor is that it’s generally resilient. Gravity doesn’t care who believes in it. It’s still here. Reblogged from: here

Often overlooked is how uncomfortable it is to sit on a fence. Get in, or get out. Wasting time sitting on the fence wastes far more time and emotion than you’d expend committing to something. Reblogged from: here

Infinity is a great idea, but unless you’re doing math, it’s mostly an idea. Everything else in our world has limits. It’s the limits that make it interesting, the limits that give us an edge to the box, something to leverage against. Instead of denying the existence of limits and the trade-offs that they bring with them, it might be helpful to begin with an understanding of what they are, or…

It’s almost impossible to tell if a playing card is marked. But if you take ten cards and riffle them, you can tell instantly. The changes from the back of one card to another jump out at you. It’s difficult to tell where we are if we only have a few data points–sooner or later, anywhere feels normal. The key question is, “compared to what?” On the other hand, if all you’ve got is all you’ve…