A Warrior’s search for Synchronicity

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Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it's not a particularly enjoyable experience. We wanted to change this and make sharing other posts with your readers as easy as posting to your blog. Today we're introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled … Read More

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In organizations you come across surprises where people spent whole days of discussions and negotiations where each side is trying to sway the other to its way ( we call it collaborative decision making) and after couple of weeks you realize that agreements reached were shelved even before the project started.  The only driving factor is the irrational pull towards each groups subjective realities ignoring the necessity of  ’one goal’. Human nature is such that it gets uncomfortable when dealing with multiple realities and complexities and does not seem to accept the fact that the world (business) cannot simplify itself to the limitation of comprehension that human brains are stunted with. It also fails to digest its  limitation of comprehension. It ceaselessly  try to fit the world into its framework. What is at stake are real opportunities, real identification of talent and a tendency to live in a world with distorted realities.

When you start living in such worlds, you read books that reiterates your view point only,

you are not open to change (even though you always talk about change)

you try to create a world of soothsayers and turn away disrupters (truth is always disrupting)

you celebrate achievement of targets (when you have missed millions of opportunities)

you celebrate scores (even though they do not reflect any of the complexities and realities of the market)

“You are taking it so deep”, Sales person

“Some people are deep aren’t they” , Customer

“What happened last time? You sounded so disturbed on the phone?” Sales Person

“Probably the questioning was not there, straight on to the product. I want to give my child full freedom of choice. I do not want to push him on to reading. I am a voracious reader, however I firmly believe each person has his own way of learning and growing. A kid destined to dance may not read.” Customer

“So far from what you have said I do not see a disconnect.” Sales person

“You may know already. I did not know till recently that most of a child’s brain development happens before he or she is 8 years old.” Sales Person

“I am not interested rational and scientific fact. Any research is done on a specimen and cannot be taken as a rule for anyone and if you do look, you can find contradicting scientific studies.” Customer

“But there are some facts that you cannot ignore.” Sales Person

“A book is not a book it is the content.” Sales Person

“Content is meaningful only if the person within relates to it”. Customer

“It is not the children who need direction. It is the parents who see their children as extension of themselves. They need to be trained to understand their child better.” Customer

“I disagree to that, you need to give your child some direction, for example you initiated your children to video games, didn’t you “ Sales Person

“Yes” Customer

“You know the brain activity is very less when watching TV or playing videogame as against reading a book” Sales Person

“I disagree, having played videogames extensively. I would have agreed with you in an era of broadcast media, not in the age of interactive media.” Customer

“But children love books, why don’t they. Why would not they love something with pictures and activities,” Sales Person

“How can you say you are going to give my child Total Development through these books you don’t even know him” Customer

“You are saying that you do not like the pattern, the numbering of books etc”

“Yes, I do not like structured learning solutions. It is instinctive response. I am a person who can choose books based on the cover and get 80% accuracy on choosing something I love and value. I do not feel any pull looking at your product.” Customer

“See you are using all these build up because your product is expensive and you are not confident to leave it to the customer to make the decision. For me as a customer, it is not a throw away price to experiment with” Customer

“I agree to that completely” Sales Person

“An intuitive person senses when change is round the corner. When something as revolutionary as ipad is introduced you should be waiting for the developers who are going to revolutionise Reading by integrating visuals and references and videos into books. The seemingly dominant existence of books as they are currently viewed & stored will start to get questioned. When iTunes was launched no body doubted the CD industry’s foundation would be questioned. Let us wait & watch how iBooks and ipad will shake up the world. They have not claimed they hold any total solutions, yet they have left a huge blank space and potetntial to tackle the unknown.”

The expression of reality is very different according to the beholder in terms of inclination towards each quadrant of the brains – Ned Herman says – the quadrants being Rational, Safe-keeping, Feeling and Experimental.  The way people interact and take decisions also change according to the inclination to each quadrants. Interesting fact is that the conflicts you feel against people simply dimnishes once you understand this difference in people. Rational quadrant dominant people uses substantial facts to drive decision making and is always in conflict with the emotional quadrant who lacks substance. Safekeeping people is always in conflict with the experimental quadrant and vice versa. Once you identify the dominant quadrant amongst your group, you are in a better position to lead decision making and drive actions. I am a dominant rational quadrant along with experimental self with an antipathy towards safe-keeping and little emotions.

This insight kind of explains why people call Steve Jobs an expert at reality distortiion – my guess he is a dominant experimental and emotional self.

Solution oriented approach and problem oriented approach – You can approach a problem and say what can I do to resolve it or You can go and complain to management there is a problem. Some people prefer to do the latter and thus try to hide their inefficiencies or are scared to take the problem heads on and knock it around. Some people plunge deeply into it and come up with a hit or a miss, but surely with a richer self. How am I measured is mostly the question, not what I can learn or what is in it for me? When your question is the latter there is always an angle which is inclined towards you. In the book ‘Punished by Rewards’ Alfie Kohn says that people cannot be motivated, you can only set up conditions that may develop an interest in the task at hand and remove the conditions that functions as constraints. However from school if you are programmed towards achieving grades and has not developed an interest in what you do or what need to be done, what do you expect at work?

So when recruiting, probably the first question to ask is – have you been thrown out of school and if the answer is yes, you probably have the possibility of recruiting a star performer who will raise the standards for the organization. He is already declared war with conventional system, what you need to assess is that the battles he chose to have, are the right ones and for the right reasons.

There is an aspiring or unsuccessful artist in everyone.

One of the reasons I was attracted to Art was because of my impression when the inspiration arrives you just have to be led by it and you will not need to be restricted by routine.

As per Somerset Maugham, he writes only when he is inspired, but inspiration comes everyday in the morning sharp at 0900 hrs.

So inspiration does not lead you, you summon it up at a regular time every day and make it work.

Second bit, comes from Seth Godin, who in his new book Linchpin says, art is in everything you do, when you challenge ways of work, when you introduce new way of thinking, when you surpass limitation, design solutions for problems that are yet to be invented – all that is art. For that art also you sit down and summon up inspiration every day in the morning 0700 hrs shart at your desk. Success starts by showing up.

And if that streak is in you, you owe it to yourself, your family and the entire humanity to use it to full – That’s what this book is  is about – bringing out the creativity in you, taking risks and failing and sticking to your plan, delivering against all odds, being a gladiator in the colosseum because there is no room for borderline existence or cheerleaders any more because there is less of us and we have a lot to do

It is not about fitting in or standing out, it is about knowing some thing is over when it is over. I have seen a lot of people carrying their baggages of life all along with them, mostly artists, who still can relate to their mental state decades ago, who can identify with what they felt when they were 18, even when they are 33. For me, even a couple of years back,  seems a distant life, I can’t go back and live the same life with the same intensity, I can understand that, at some point, it was the truest thing for me, however it is not anymore, there is only a small remnant of that feeling or belonging lying some where and rekindling it is the most unnatural emotional labour I have to go through. And many a times I have been gifted with the bliss of oblivion, where passing of a day has been equalled to moving from one life to another without any baggage, becoming totally new

There are many other pursuits that has taken precedence, the world  has tilted, emotional awakening has changed, spiritual inclination has changed. Interconnectivity between personal, professional life has been put aside and search and practice for personal mastery has been seated at the centre stage. Mastery some times mean knowing and controlling and some times mean, dissolving and let go. Mostly it means seeing the unseen, hearing the unspoken and celebrating the unknown.