In which I describe two powerful ideas —
- there are no shortcuts to happiness in careers and relationships,
- the importance of doing the important things in life.
Hey there welcome back to the “Go-Hatke” podcast. Over the last few weeks I’ve been boring you a lot about vows in engineering and you know how people get bored in at the beginning of their very monotonous careers. So let’s take a break from all that and today we’ll just discuss – two interesting ideas that I read about or listen to on YouTube.
1. Learn to be humble
So the first one is a talk by a guy named Simon Sinek. So Simon Sinek is supposedly this big motivational guru on Youtube and other places. He’s probably been on the Ted stage; he’s a big-big guy. So there was a particular talk of his that was being advertised a lot on YouTube, I saw it coming up on my feed forever. And I said, “okay I’m at the gym today, while I’m on my treadmill I’m gonna listen to his talk”. So I clicked on it and it turned out to be pretty valuable and nice. He is focusing on Millennials — people born I think after 1984, who are now in their early career. He’s talking about people who are basically always excited and always eager to go on and make big achievements. And they are always thinking, “Yeah I should get this, I should do that and that this should happen very quickly for me, I should be successful, I should have a lot of money, I should be famous”. In short, they have great ambitions. And he talks about the fact that many of these people are extremely dissatisfied with their careers, with their personal lives.
And you know in this talk the basic idea that Simon talks about is that this generation of people has been brought up with this idea that, yes they can achieve anything. So that is by itself a very dangerous idea, there’s no humbleness in that idea. They are in a way they are overachievers that’s what they think of themselves. But there should be some humbleness, some ability to understand that all people are you know are part of big teams and they are just one piece in the wheel to get progress – scientific, technological, cultural. They are part of the whole wheel, they are not gonna single-handedly do anything.
Okay so that’s one problem that these people face. The second problem that they face is they are burdened with social networking apps that are instant, that provide instant gratification. There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there’s Instagram. You basically you know counting likes, you’re just swiping left and right, you are always you know getting something immediately. You want something quick, you want to get likes, if you want to watch a video you go on YouTube or Netflix, Amazon Prime video and you just watch it immediately, you binge on stuff. So there’s this thing about not waiting for stuff. And he says that both these things are bad. And I kind of agree and I think there’s you know value to what he says. He says, “you shouldn’t expect too much very quickly, especially in two things: in your career and in your personal life. You have to work hard to make, you have to establish this foundation in these two very important things in your life”. I mean the major items in your life. You can’t get quick success there, you just can’t do that. And especially in your career if you start leaving jobs quickly and if you just keep jumping from one another, one job to another, you might get you know a lot of pay initially, pay rise initially. But that’s not going to get you anywhere in the long run. That’s his thing you won’t be satisfied. I kind of liked the idea that’s why I thought I’d share this with you.
2. Eat that frog
The other thing that I read about, the other idea that I read about, is this very-very famous book which is called, “Eat that frog”. That’s a pretty nice name first of all “Eat that frog”. So what this book says is in your life and he mostly talks about career. In your career at any point there are 10 things you can do. Some of those involve you know busy work that will make your life go on, that will make you take a few checkboxes. Say eight or nine of the tasks are like that but there’s one task amongst the 10 that is very difficult to do, that you just don’t want to do. It’s not you know not good, interesting or easy task to do. And then the fact is that if you do it you will get the most output. It is the frog in your life, it is that thing which is you know sitting there, you know you’ve got to do it but you always postpone it, “oh I will come back to it you know another time, next week, next month, let me finish these simpler items first”.
So that’s that Pareto principle applied in your career, the 80-20 rule. You basically have this one piece that is worth a lot but its important piece and you avoid it. And the books thesis is that you must eat that frog, you must do that thing first. And you have to get to the point where you are consuming frogs, that’s a nice metaphor, where you’re taking those important milestones first. So this is a very nice lesson he also talks about some other things saying that you can’t eat too many frogs at one time. Basically you shouldn’t burden yourself thinking you can do many things, you must concentrate on a few things. And so this is another great life lesson I think. It’s very foundational, very basic and I found this book also very helpful, it’s worth reading.
So between these two ideas these concepts that I shared today I think both have a common core to them. They talk about spending time and focusing on certain things. Basically there is no quick path to success or happiness or satisfaction in career and in your life. You have to make sure you’re tackling the important items and that you are spending sufficient time and gaining and also making a foundation in that particular field whatever it might be. Alright so that’s all for today, just some interesting ideas that I thought I’ll share with you okay so take care till next time, bye!
