Archive for 'Distinguish yourself'
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 20 Jun 2006, 7:22 AM - 2 Comments
Note: This is my 500th post since I started blogging on February 14, 2005. This is special for me and I am blessed to have made a ton of new friends through this blog. A big thanks to GOD and to every one of you.
In India, thousands of kids are taught to follow this simple practice before every meal. I am sure this is true in many cultures across the world. The message to the kids is clear and simple:
Before you start your meal, close your eyes and thank GOD for providing that meal.
It is a simple act of counting your blessings EVERYDAY. In our quest to go after what we don’t have, we tend to totally forget what we already have.
Let’s do a simple exercise. Start with zero. Take a look at the following list and for every item you got, add a point to your score
1. You don’t have any physical handicaps
2. You get at least two meals everyday
3. You have a family
4. You get safe drinking water
5. You have a college degree
6. You have a job
7. YOu have a car to get to work
8. You have at least 2 close friends
9. You have a home to live (rental or own)
10. You have a TV at home
11. You have freedom of speech in the country you live.
12. You can afford to send your kids to school.
I can go on further. But I guess you get the point. Did you notice how many things you took for granted?
Because everyone around us are running like crazy to get what they don’t have and because nobody around us wants to be grateful for what they ALREADY have, it may seem reasonable to follow the crowd and get into the same trap – but that won’t let you distinguish yourself. Common sense will say that if you follow the crowd, you should not expect to “stand out” from it.
When I talk about this during my speaking engagements, typically there are some people that argue against it. Their main points against this are:
a) this will lead to complacency
b) there won’t be a motivation to stretch
My point though has nothing to do with ambition or motivation. I don’t think there is any connection to having the gratitude and feeling blessed everyday with going after your dreams. Of course, you can always connect seemingly unrelated things with your creativity. That’s not the point. Why should feeling blessed dampen your dreams? In fact, if you don’t learn the art of having the gratitude, when you reach your dreams, you may not even see it as your sights are new on the “new” dream. This dream, that you just achieved is taken for granted in a heartbeat.
Here’s another scenario. Being where I am (Silicon Valley) I get to meet a ton of wannabe entrepreneurs – young and energetic dreamers. Sometimes their ideas are broken but their enthusiasm is not. However, after listening to them for a few minutes, you know that they won’t take the plunge. It’s easy. The reason – most often they quote something that they don’t have – experience and skills. May be it’s marketing or sales or finance or something that they don’t have. They almost want a strong reason to NOT take the plunge. In the process, what they forget is what they have. In a quest to get what they don’t have, they stop spending time and improve their areas of strengths. Meet them few years later and you will see that they are in an eternal quest – may be an MBA program or a change of job that will “round up” their skillset or something of that sort.
Here is an alternate approach – plain and simple:
1. Be thankful for what you have (your strengths)
2. Work relentlessly to improve them
3. Find team mates to complete a configuration necessary for your business
4. Get lots of help – you will need it
5. Execute!
The first step is VERY important – you got to start loving what you have!
The bottom line: If you can’t feel blessed for what you HAVE, why go after what you didn’t have? Because, simply speaking, when you get what you don’t have, you will HAVE it and you won’t feel blessed because you ALREADY HAVE it and your new goal will be to acquire something that you don’t have again. Want it to be more simple – why try to get something that you don’t have time to enjoy?
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By Rajesh Setty on Mon 19 Jun 2006, 10:00 AM - Leave Comment
Imagine this scenario:
You are in a relay race. You are the second person in the team. The race begins and when your turn comes up, you pick up the baton and run like hell. The speed is great and you cover a lot of ground in a very short time. However, when the time is up to pass the baton, you fumble and drop it. The next person in the team is ready to receive the baton but is confused. He somehow picks up the baton. Again, runs like hell but can never make up the time lost due to the time lost in recovering the baton in the first place. Long story short – your team loses the race.
In the above scenario, the cause of failure was very clear. Unfortunately, in real life,things are not that black and white.
Transitions are part of our life – both personal and professional. In fact, without transitions, life may be boring. On one hand, if there is no change, we complain of monotony. On the other hand, if there is a lot of change, we resist and complain about uncertainty and the unknown. It seems obvious enough to observe that many of the projects that we are involved today will continue long after we have transitioned out of those projects. In fact, we really WANT every single one of those projects to continue smoothly after we transitioned from them.
Two things are important -
1. Who do you pass the baton to
2. How smoothly do you pass the baton
If you pick the wrong person to pass the baton to the second point almost becomes irrelevant and a non-issue. If you find the right person to pass the baton to, the second point – how smoothly do you pass the baton becomes important. Here’s why: The person who picks up the baton from you quickly wants to hit the ground running. Everyone is watching him and his every move in the first few days and weeks. He or she wants to succeed in the role and needs all the help that he needs. This new role MAY also be a big change for that person. Passing the baton smoothly will not guarantee the person’s success but not passing the baton smoothly will increases the chances of the person’s failure.
Now, things to think about:
1. What are some of the major transitions coming up in your personal and professional life?
2. How can you plan to ensure that these transitions are smooth?
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 15 Jun 2006, 12:07 AM - 4 Comments
Referrals happen almost on a daily basis. You are participating in the referral game either as a receiver of a referral or as a giver of a referral. The referral can be as simple as what movie to watch this weekend or which M&A attorney to use for a possible M&A transaction in the near future. With our busy schedules, it is possible that we may not give a request for referral that kind of attention that it truly deserves.
Imagine a simple scenario. You are lost in a new city and you ask for directions and the person who gives you the directions gives you incorrect information. You believe him and after some time realize that you wasted a lot of time. You get annoyed. Depending on how important it was to get to your place at the right time, the annoyance level will vary. If you were going there for an interview and because of the wrong directions you blew it, you may almost not forgive the person giving the wrong directions. In fact, you think and wish that the person said he didn’t know the information. That way you could have asked someone else.
Referrals are similar. Getting a wrong referral can mean a huge cost as there is an opportunity cost involved going down in the wrong direction. When someone asks you for a referral, they typically do so because of the trust they have in you. Give them a wrong referral and there is a dent on the trust level. Repeat the stupidity again and you probably won’t get a request for another referral from the same person. When you refer someone, it is important to note that:
a) your reputation is on line and
b) the level of trust that that person has placed on you is on line
Before you jump and provide a referral as soon as you get a request, think carefully for a few seconds and ensure that whenever you refer someone both parties will benefit and there is a possibility of a win-win. You can guarantee that every time but it is absolutely important that you do your best to get to that scenario.
Note: It is DEFINITELY better to say that you don’t have a referral (if you don’t) rather than giving a wrong referral. After all nobody will have all the answers to everything 
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By Rajesh Setty on Tue 13 Jun 2006, 7:20 AM - 2 Comments
It was an ACG event and Kimberley Wiefling was presenting an interesting workshop. I had seen the teamwork exercise that she conducted two times before but this time the learning was crystal clear. The exercise was simple and you can do that in your office too. It works like magic.
Get about 12 people and split them into two teams of six. Make this six people stand in front of the other six and get all of them to put their hands forward. All the 24 hands should be aligned with open palms and thumbs up. Now place a long thin pole on their hands. Ensure that everyone of the hands is touching the pole. The objective and the conditions are:
a) lower the pole to the ground as a team
b) ensure that throughout the process no one disconnects their hand to the pole.
c) If anyone disconnects from the pole, the person exits from the team.Now, watch the magic. Instead of the pole coming down, it starts going up (in most cases.) You can let people strategize, plan and execute how many ever times they want but the results are the same. The pole won’t come down.
Now, what might be the problem? The answer is simple again. Look at the agenda of the team (a) and the agenda of the individual (b) and you will see the problem. The agenda of the team is to bring the pole down. However, the individual agenda (to not get out of the game) is to ensure that the person does not disconnect from the pole. Seems like a conflicting agenda? You bet! Every person will first ensure that he or she is always connected to the pole – this means that he or she is silently pushing the pole UP when the team agenda is to get the pole DOWN.
The game is just fine. It makes a point. This can happen in real-life. Observe your own team agenda and see if it conflicts with the team members’ individual agendas. If there is a conflict, there will be a problem and the team goes down. Personally, your goal should be to ensure that in all the teams that you belong to, agendas are aligned. That will ensure that you spend less time in non-productive stuff!
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By Rajesh Setty on Sun 11 Jun 2006, 1:57 PM - 4 Comments
You can do this exercise very easily. Bring along ten of your friends and/or your co-workers for a quick ten-minute meeting. Ask them one of the following questions:
* What makes a great leader?
* What makes a great manager?
* What do you look for in a friend?
* What makes a great husband?
* What are the characteristics of a great team?
* What is an ideal vacation?
* What makes a great movie?
Each person gets about three minutes to write his or her response. Collect all the responses and remove the duplicates. The list will be daunting. Whatever was your question – the responses will show one thing clearly – it will be hard to satisfy everyone – all the time.
Agreed. You need to be nice. You want great relationships with everyone. Of course, you also know that it is an ideal condition. When you start becoming realistic and look at dealing with people in general – you will see that there is only one thing in common – “everyone is different.” Trying to please everyone is hard work. Even if you succeed, I don’t know whether the returns from that warrants all the sacrifices you need to make along the way.
Now I want to make my final point. Just remembering that your success does not lie in pleasing everyone will give you some freedom. If you bought into this argument, the tricky part is also to remember that you should not expect everyone around you to please you. The same rules apply both ways, don’t they?
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By Rajesh Setty on Fri 09 Jun 2006, 1:22 AM - Leave Comment
For those who are new to this blog – I stay in Sunnyvale, california (West Coast)
The other day I was sending an email to a friend in the East Coast at 10pm and I got a response back immediately. After that we used email like an IM (Instant messenger) and exchanged a few ideas. When I thought that this was going for a long time, I had to write to my friend:
<snip>
You east coast folks should stop competing with silicon valley people in the Workohalics departments. That is our pride, self-esteem and identity. Please don’t try to steal this away from us
<snip>
With the pace of changes that are happening across the world, the people, especially those in the IT world are working very hard. (On a side note, I think this is an appropriate time to increase investments in one’s own growth rather than using all the energy to win the current rat race. That’s a topic for another day.) I was a victim to this a couple of years ago. I worked almost four full years without a day’s vacation – most of the times I would work on weekends too. Looking back and if given a chance I would re-live those four years very differently. John Lennon said it beautifully – “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” There is no use breaking my head on it now because that time is gone forever and whatever I do, there is no way to re-live those four years. However, what I do in the future is definitely in my hands. Because four years from now, if I look back at today, I don’t want to regret for what I am doing today.
Stopping to smell the roses may not give you financial returns. Some might even view it as an opportunity cost. Some people say that everyone in their company is working so hard that if they don’t, they won’t fit in there. Some more people say that even to stay where they are they have to keep running. The general feeling is that they don’t have time to stop and smell the roses. My friend used to jokingly say that “If you run for two hours every single day for the next twelve years, you might extend your life by two more years. But something doesn’t seem right there as you spent those two extended years just running 
”
Imagine you are in a running race with two rules:
1. You have to run this race until you reach an end point.
2. They move the end point to a different location as soon as you get closer to the end point.
Does this seem ridiculous? If you said yes, is there a possibility of you doing this in your life without paying a lot of attention to the details?
Stopping to smell the roses is your personal reward for celebrating life. It is one kind of reward where you either use it or lose it as it is directly connected to time.
Action Items:
1. What could you do this weekend to stop and smell the roses?
2. What accountability structures will you put in place to ensure that you WILL stop to smell the roses?
3. How can you ensure that someone close to you is stopping to smell the roses?
PS: Please don’t look at the time stamp for this post – I am still in Silicon Valley, remember 
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By Rajesh Setty on Wed 07 Jun 2006, 12:00 AM - 5 Comments
When someone that you like is not close to you, you work so hard to get close to them. You get close to them and things are going fine. After some time they disappear from your life. Not literally. You just start taking them for granted. Don’t believe this? Here are some questions to ask yourself:
* When was the last time you told ten of your closest friends that they mean a lot to you?
* When was the last time you truly appreciated your spouse?
* When was the last time you told your children that they are the best things to happen to you?
* When was the last time you contacted your favorite teacher from school/college?
* When was the last time you talked to your old boss (the one you shaped your career)?
* When was the last time you told someone at work that they made your day?
Unfortunately many of us make the same mistake – take people that are close to us for granted. They are already close why give them more attention? We go after things that we don’t have.
Wanting what we have is common sense (may be that’s why it’s so uncommon.) Eternally going after something that we don’t have at the cost of losing what we have is blindspot. Hopefully God Will give us the wisdom to know the difference between the two – today and everyday.
One final question:
How would you feel when someone close to you takes you for granted?
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By Rajesh Setty on Sat 03 Jun 2006, 7:51 PM - 1 Comment
Be it in winning or be it in losting, timing plays an important role. One of the reasons why you should not try to duplicate somebody’s success. While you may be able to copy the actions by this successful person, you can be certain that you can’t recreate the timing of those actions.
The other events to watch out for is when you are wildly successful in something (too good to be true) or you fail miserably (too bad to be true) that’s a sign that timing has played – positively in the former case and negatively in the latter case.
For those of us living in the Silicon Valley for a while, we got to witness the importance of timing in a glaring fashion between 1997 to 2000. It was a wild ride dubbed as the “dot com boom”. Almost every company with or without a reasonable business model was making money. The circumstances were clearly a demonstration of the old saying “the rising tide lifts all.”
The point I want to make here though is different. For those people who succeeded in that frenzy, some of them succeeded because they were smart and some of them succeeded just because they existed at that point in time. For those that succeeded because of their merit won’t have a problem although they may get carried away a bit. However, those that got success because they “existed” during those times should clearly understand the value of “timing”. Some of them didn’t. And that was ONE of the reasons for a lot of failures in the valley in the post “dot-com boom”. Some of these people thought that for most part their success was because of their merit and got involved or started other ventures. They failed once – did not get the message (or thought they were just unlucky this time) and went and got involved in another venture. Six years later, now, I am sure many of them have realized the truth (although they don’t feel good about it) and have moved on. If they only had realized the value of “timing” a bit earlier, the pain would have been reduced.
When I bring this up in my talks, there is typically an argument stating that I am stretching this to an extreme. May be I am. But the point I am making is that when you succeed splendidly or when you fail miserably, please take note of what role “timing” has played in those events. This will help you to determine whether to try and replicate (or not replicate in case of failure) the actions to repeat the success or just learn from what happened.
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Note: For other articles in the same series, please see my Squidoo Lens on the same topic
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
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By Rajesh Setty on Sat 03 Jun 2006, 8:08 AM - Leave Comment
You can wish that office politics was not there or it just disappears one day from your office. The chances of that happening are the same as you winning a lottery. Office politics won’t affect you if you are not on the wrong end of it.
The key is to learn to deal with office politics even when you are not on the wrong end of it. So, if you do end up in the middle of something you are very well prepared.
Many people that I talk to go about saying why office politics is not good and how their company – they debate, argue and try to prove that the office politics should be eradicated. What they fail to observe is that their own line of thinking and arguments will make no difference to the situation whatsoever. So, rather than dreaming about a new world where there is no office politics, spend the same time strategizing how you willd deal with office politics. The latter has a better return on investment of your time
Each situation is different. Rather than offering tips or techniques, here are some ideas to consider while you craft your own plan:
1. Observe conversations (read: Observe rumors)
Everything starts with a conversation. I also said “observe” and not “participate”. Observing and participating are very different. Sometimes you may have to participate in an conversation to observe but it is not always necessary. Ignorance is definitely not a bliss here.
2. Build personal relationships
Very rarely will you be on the wrong end of office politics if you have strong personal relationships with people that matter. They say business and personal relationships are different. You can subscribe to that view and suffer or not worry about semantics and build personal relationships to flourish. The choice is yours.
3. Contribute
If you are contributing in a meaningful way day-in and day-out, chances are that you are valuable to the organization and your team. So, most people won’t want to bother you. There is a small sub-set of people who may not like this and these are people whose positions are threatened because of your endless “contributions”. There is no easy way to deal with them because they are not wanting to compete on merit – most often “entitlement” is what’s on their mind.
4. Watch your blind spots
You should move ahead in your careers but you should not step on anyone else on your way to the top. You should not do this intentionally and you should not do this un-intentionally. The former is easy but the latter requires that you constantly watch who is on your blind-spot. Also, make sure that you are not treading in other people’s
blind spots
Of course, the above is not a complete list. But should give you a good start to start thinking on this seriously.
Have a good weekend.
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Note:
For other articles in the same series, please see my Squidoo Lens on the same topic
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
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By Rajesh Setty on Fri 02 Jun 2006, 4:44 PM - Leave Comment
When you do what you are extremely passionate about, you don’t feel like it is “work.” When I am getting ready for a trip, people ask me “Is this for business or pleasure?” and that totally confuses me. I can answer something and escape from the question but the fact that the question was posed makes me think that both these items “business” and “pleasure” can’t exist together. We all know that that is not true. In fact, this question won’t arise if you are passionate about what you do.
The price that someone will pay for what you do will typically depend on the “current needs” at that point in time and the availability of skilled people to meet those “current needs.” If what you do is not taking care of any “current needs” you might as well not expect a premium for what you do. However, if you just focus on taking care of the “current needs” even when you are not passionate about what is required to take care of them, you will generally feel tired at the end of that exercise.
The solution: Constantly be on the lookout of the intersection point where your passion and the current world needs. When you find it, latch on to it as if your life depends on it. The trick though is to remember that there is not “lifetime contract” associated with this. Both parameters might change. You may say that your passions won’t change. Well, even if it is true, the “current world needs” obviously change – forcing you to lookout for another intersection point. As long as you are willing and ready to make the change when required, you will have fun doing whatever you will do. The bonus is that since you don’t feel like this is “work” you are not stressed out and people around you will thank you for that.
Have a great weekend.
–
Note:
For other articles in the same series, please see my Squidoo Lens on the same topic
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
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