The Journey Within

I like to watch river flows. I like to watch how the water goes around the bend. I like to see how it effortlessly navigates around the rocks, whether they’re big or small. Water always seem to know how to flow. It knows that hitting the rocks head on will do it no good, so it finds the path of least resistance and go around it. Let’s face it. In the real world, the shortest distance between 2 points is not a straight line, it’s the distance of the path of least resistance. It is this path of least resistance that allows water to get from one end to the other end effortlessly.

I find that I’m always looking for this path of least resistance. During my days in my day job, my preferred problem solving method is through the path of least resistance. This is the path that less people will fight against. Some call it a compromise. Some label it win-win. I think it’s just the best way.

When coming up with processes or procedures, I also look for the path of least resistance. Let’s take something simple like filing. When a document requires filing, do you know where to file? Do you need to think of where to file? I have a ready home for things I need to file. This is my path of least resistance. It avoids the mental effort to even think of where to file. I just file it.

Looking to do something on a regular basis but never got round doing it? It’s because you haven’t found your path to least resistance yet. Say you want to exercise everyday, but you just can’t seem to do it. There’s always some excuse like no time or too much effort. These all are resistance. You’ll need to find a path round these resistances. I found out that the path of least resistance to practise my Tai Chi is in the morning.

It’s actually relatively easier to find the path of least resistance if I’m the only stakeholder. It gets more difficult as more people are involved. If I add just one more person into the equation, it will become that much more complicated. When I’m doing push hands with another person, when I can’t find this path of least resistance, I will create tension within myself as well, and hence creating my own resistance. If I don’t look for this path of least resistance, I myself become the resistance.

This seems to be key in our actions.

We can ignore this path of least resistance, but when faced with them head on, if you don’t use this path, you will create tension in you too. This is normally forgotten. You will think that it’s the other person who’s wrong. It’s the other person who’s giving this head butt. It’s the other person who erected a brick wall in front of you so that you cannot pass. More often than not, you are also guilty of erecting this brick wall.

So what if the other person builds a fortress around him? Just go around him. Let go of your own resistance.

The cliche that “communication is a two way process” still rings true. You can’t feel resistance from another person if you yourself do not create this resistance within yourself.

Let go of your own resistance. You might find it a lot easier to navigate the journey within yourself. You’ll also find it easier to then use this new path to create a new way of doing things. Actually, there is nothing new in this. The only thing new here, is you experiencing the power of letting go your own resistance. Stop fighting it. Start moving round the cracks.

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“Think outside the box!” This has become a business mantra. It’s so abused that I wonder if the people chanting them knows what box are they talking about! Do they realise what does the box mean? How does the box relate to thinking? Hey, it’s just a box, whether you’re thinking inside it or outside it. So what’s so special about this box?

I think people have forgotten what this box represents. Nobody journeys within the box anymore. We are all just too eager to think outside the box, only to realise that we have never actually understood what the box is. We don’t take our time to understand the behaviour of the box, what is the box made of, what can the box carry… We sometimes don’t even know the size of the box!

The box is meant to define the edges of a problem. When we are trying to solve a problem, we’ll need to know exactly what problem it is that we’re trying to solve! It sounds obvious but that’s where the box comes in. Let’s say I have an email problem. Now, an “email” is actually not a problem. So you’ll have to be a bit more specific than that. So I say, I receive a lot of emails. Good. It’s more specific, but again, that’s still not a problem. Receiving a lot of emails do not qualify it to be a problem. Everybody receives emails. So what is your problem? Let’s say, I can’t cope with the daily emails I received. Now, this statement has defined the problem a bit more. It has given some edges to the box. We have the problem words “can’t cope” and we have a time dimension to the problem as well (daily). Let’s face it. If time is not an issue, we don’t actually have much problems in this world…

Although “cope” may still be a bit vague, it is sufficient for it to become a problem to me. This is how the box is defined. This is only when you can think outside the box, or if you choose to, even tear up the box. Make daily emails a non-issue. For example, you can remove your email address altogether. Life as a virtual hermit does give a sense of peacefulness.

From that extreme, you can choose to delete your emails as you get them. Be as ruthless with them as possible. Report more emails to be spam if it’s the newsletters you can’t seem to unsubscribe. You can always politely unsubscribe them first. You can filter your emails to go straight to a black hole folder. For the really important stuff, you can do them first, or assign an action label to them e.g. Review, Read, Reply, Call someone etc and do them later (at some pre-defined time slot that you set aside daily).

All these thinking can only happen AFTER you’ve defined the box. It can only happen only when you see the box, or make the box visible. An email problem can be a very large box like “I can’t seem to get rid of the million of emails in my current inbox”, or “I think it’s because I procrastinate whenever an email comes to my inbox”. In this case, you’ve actually defined 2 problems – 1 about your current state of affairs, the second one is how to deal with all emails in future, as they come in.

See how important it is to define the box?

So, whenever someone ask you to think outside the box, spend a few minutes to think inside the box first. Venture into the box. Try to see the box. Define the box. Appreciate why the box exists in the first place. Search the box. Examine the box. Understand the box. The box may be bigger than you think. The material may be more flexible than you think.

Only then you can “think outside the box” (whatever that means…)

You can stretch the box. Deform the box. Make the box smaller. It’s all a matter of perception. Then, “thinking outside the box” is just a by-product of your thought process. There is actually no box.

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I know the mantra. We should all work smart. I mean, who doesn’t want to work smart? Who doesn’t want to work shorter hours, be less stress, work more effectively, be more productive, etc. It sounds like it’s the only way to work! Working hard is just stupid. There should be just one type of work, and that is work smart. And yet, we all still work harder than ever… Continue reading »

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I was frantically scratching the walls that engulfed me, trying to crawl myself out of the self-made abyss. The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make sense. My life’s training so far has been to analyse things. Weigh the pros and cons. Make decisions based on that. And yet, in this matter (and probably many matters to come), analysis seems to be the antithesis to my well being. So I did what my heart told me to do.

I quit my day job.

It’s not that the day job is bad. It’s not that I don’t realise the economy is bad. It’s not that I don’t realise everyone else is losing their job and I’m voluntarily losing mine. All these reasons made it more difficult for me to make this decision.

There seems to be something I need to do, but I don’t what that is yet. The day job is not fun anymore, it’s just to pass the day and earn a living. A lot of what is said here strikes a chord with me as well.

I don’t know where this will take me, and I wouldn’t advise this to you as well (yet!). All I can say is this – I am learning. I am learning how to uncomplicate my life. I’m learning why less is more. I’m learning if I can work less and make more profits. Basically, I’m learning the meaning of “less”.

I guess “learning less everyday” does sum it up.

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Do you write an email to your colleague who’s sitting right next to you? Would you rather email a person to negotiate a deal? How many times do you play email tennis until you decide to pick up the phone to call the person?

I’m an office bound worker, and my work requires me to deal with emails on a regular basis. It can take up at least 20% of my time just to clear my emails, more if I get a lot of email farts. I’ve adopted a Getting Things Done (GTD) system to process my emails, which many have written about e.g. this article on Inbox Zero: What’s the action here?.

So I’ll not venture into GTD on emails today, but will talk about putting into context the conversation that’s being done through emails.

I find it amusing and sometimes rather annoyed by someone who had to email a person who’s sitting just 2 tables away. I’m also annoyed if an issue takes more than 3 emails to resolve but still no meeting/phone call to discuss. So I’m taking this chance to rant, and hopefully there’s some light at the end of the rant.

Email tennis (3-email rule)

This is one where 2 people (normally just 2 but it can be more), who bounces the email through and fro, with a rally time that will put Wimbledon to shame. Wimbledon has a start and an end, email tennis do not seem to have an end. It depends on whose ego dissolves first.

Instead of playing email tennis, adopt a 3-email rule - if it can’t be resolved by the third email (one initiation email, one reply, and one confirmation email), call the person, and follow up with an email noting down what you’ve agreed upon. This will save a lot of email estate on your inbox, and will probably save a lot of headaches too, not to mention the amount of cursing at the screen, which makes us look like an idiot swearing at the computer screen.

Just talk to your neighbour

Promoting neighbourhood friendliness seems like a thing of the past, but it does and still exist. Always talk to the person next to you, around you, on the same floor, anyone whose path meets yours. Please do not email the person next to you. It’s silly, unless you’ve got something to hide, which makes it sillier because emails are not private. You must have heard of some scandal where an email is leaked right? So, please, talk to your neighbour.

Dealing with strangers

For people I don’t know, or have never come across, I would give them a call first to introduce myself before starting an email conversation with the person. This at least places a voice to the email. I would also try to meet the person if possible, so that I can place a face to the name I’ve spoken to. We may not have the luxury to do this all the time, but for people who you need to work closely, it’s essential to meet the person at least once.

Dealing with friend-of-friend

It’ll be good if your friend/colleague provide an introductory email, just to say something to the effect that “Hi John, this is Shang Lee. He’s no expert in emails, but he can help you in this matter.” You may then follow up the introductory email with another email to say “thanks, how may I help” or better still, give John your number so that he can call you or you can initiate the call if it’s important to you.

Why should I call him?

DO NOT rationalise on this question. There’s never an answer. Once you put this thought into your mind, the conversation will never start. Your mind is made up of better things, so don’t poison it with this question. Just make the phone call.

Write as if you’re talking to that person

I’m always perplexed by people who uses language to seem more “professional”. I just do not understand what does that mean. If nobody understands your email, you’ll end up looking like a professional who’s trying too hard to be like a professional, whatever that means. Keep your email simple, in a simple language. Write it as if you’re talking to the person, which is why a phone call will set the tone of your conversational emails with that person.

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Ever wish you have a gadget that could just blend away the blunders that you’ve made? To be able to start over? To be given a second chance?

Sometimes, you get a second chance, sometimes, you don’t. In either case, you’ll still need to create a mental blender to shred up the blunder you’ve made, in order to move on. Maybe this blender should be part of the office supplies. Maybe we can create a ritual around the trusty old blender.

Imagine writing down your mistake, acknowledging it in front of everyone. Then ceremoniously shred the paper containing your blunder in front of everyone. You could also include a one minute silence to honour the ritual, with everyone around vowing never to repeat your blunder, and never to use your mistake against you from now on.

If you haven’t already guessed it, I recently made a blunder at work, and losing sleep over it. I’m dumping my thoughts here and hope to move forward, since that’s the only direction that time flows – forward. And now is the only time I wish time flies!

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I’m watching Friends, and laughing as though I haven’t seen the episode before (the one where Chandler is moving in with Monica). Friends are just such a mind relaxant. Kudos to the people who made it such a joy. And then my wife made a comment…

“You must be really stressed…”

I think she’s right, as usual.

I’m still reading the biography on Maria Montessori, and then I came across this line…

“Fatigue arises when mental activity and motor activity are forced to act separately.”

It sounds like it could be lifted off a Tai Chi textbook, and yet I found it in a biography about a woman and her research on children’s education.

In Tai Chi, we’ve been told to focus the mind on the action. Where the mind leads, the body should follow, all in unison. I guess that’s where the “flow” comes from. Athletes talk about this flow as well, when everything seems to connect. It’s when you’re “in the zone”.

So what happens when you’re not in the zone? Maria Montessori tells us, it’s fatigue. You get tired when mind and body are not aligned, when you’re doing what the mind is fighting against. She sees it in kids, where they’re being told to do what the adults think they should do, but the child is living in a child’s world, not understanding the adult’s definition of their world.

I guess I am feeling tired. I didn’t seem to feel it, until I laughed too loudly, at the silliest jokes. No offense to Friends, but I think it’s time to align my mind and body. How am I going to do that? I think the body’s going to tell the mind, which will in turn tell the body what to do. Sounds a bit loopy… ah… now I see where the word “loopy” comes from – going in loops (circles)… Another word for Wordie.

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I recently lent my copy of the Blue Ocean Strategy to an entrepreneur, who created a blue ocean strategy himself without realising it! I’m envious of the action he took for the theory that I only found out through books, my main hideout. I don’t want to be a two-legged bookshelf. Fortunately, I’m also practising the Blue Ocean Strategy.

I first blogged about the blue ocean strategy and how it applied to a business like hairdressing. My dad actually pointed out a different view on using the blue ocean strategy, on personal life!

The Blue Ocean Strategy proposes companies to not fight head-to-head with competition, but to create a whole new market that leaves the question of competition irrelevant, until later of course, when the “competitors” see how good your business is doing. So how can this strategy be used in a personal life?

There are plenty of battles that are fought, some big, some small, some literal, some not so obvious. But we are constantly in battle – what meal should I have tonight, where should I go this weekend, should I be working in this area, am I spending enough time with my family, should I be watching my health, should I be blogging now, should I be reading this blog?

We unconciously set up rules to fight these battles. Rules like, “I only have so much money this month, so I can only spend on this, this and this” or “I need to get a bigger Christmas present for my brother since he’s helped me much this year”.

So how do we fight these battles using Blue Ocean Strategy?

I draw a recent experience deciding whether to go visit my parents who are 300km away. I haven’t seen them for close to 2 months and thought it’s time to go back. The hesitation came from the bad traffic at immigration, due to a recent tightening of security. Each car is expected to wait between 2 to 3 hours, before the 300km journey even begins! I believe the time could be better spent elsewhere. Then I decided that instead of going during rush hour, I would go just after lunch, before the traffic begins to pile up in the evening.

It was the smoothest ride I had traveling back to visit my parents. I chose not to fight the “competition” and used the pocket of time with least resistance. I didn’t create a blue ocean, merely identifying it and capitalising on it.

Have you swam in your own personal blue ocean strategy lately?

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Deadlines. Bad project management. Bad combination. This is the time when you start to wonder why things don’t work the way they’re suppose to work, and a lot of the times, you realise that history finds its way to invade the present rather than stay in the past, just like our QWERTY keyboard.

So what happens when things don’t work? You start to enhance them, change them, but still based on the old paradigm, based on the existing infrastructure, until there comes a tipping point when you find that the existing infrastructure just can’t take any more patch jobs. It’s art when it’s a patched quilt. It’s torture when it’s a patched system.

Yet we still patch them, over and over again. Each additional patch will have to be remembered somehow because any new patch will need to take into account how the old patch work. Most of the times, to reduce time devising such a patch, we do a “copy and paste”, then add a few more lines of code to that. Then we estimate the time to do just that, and test the other systems so that this new code didn’t affect how the old ones work.

And here lies the thing that’s bothering me. If the system takes 5 man months to change, it takes 5 man months to change. If a process for a group of people takes 5 days, and you need it yesterday, it’s perfectly acceptable to expect this group of people to deliver it the next day.

Technology seems to have a higher status than humans. Technology can throw up their hands and say “I can’t do it in time” and we’ll accept such a thing. When humans do that, we are weak, not efficient, not effective, not productive, not loyal, not motivated, not… <fill in your own self-help jargon>.

Why have we been relegated to such a status? Why do we discriminate against our own kind? Why do we idolise technology instead?

I fear we may be less trusting than I’ve previously thought. We don’t trust the decision made by anyone else except ourselves. If someone said “it’s a 5-day job”, you would compare and see if it really takes 5 days. After a while, the level of distrust will escalate because if I say 5 day, you’d tell me to do it in a day, I’ll say 10 days so that you might discount it to 5. The distrust works both ways. If you don’t trust my estimate, I don’t trust your decision and I don’t give you a true estimate, and you will never trust my estimate etc…

How do we go round this conundrum? I think someone has to start. I’ve been known to trust people too easily, but sometimes, you just have to do it to see where it goes. Maybe later, I’ll be more cynical and pessimistic that I’ll start withdrawing myself into a clamshell. At least I’m moulding a pearl in it, to come out when my layers of defense have hardened.

A pearl can be bought and sold. Trust can’t. You just have to give to receive.

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I recently attended a “leadership” course, where you’re asked to play games in a group setting to demonstrate your leadership, or the lack of it, in a controlled environment. We navigated a small island with a “hot-from-the-oven” navigation skills and a 20-years-old topographical map.

I actually enjoyed the navigation part as it brought me out to the great outdoors. Disappointed in a way because the great outdoors had too much man-made structures that reminded me of the great indoors…

Anyway, at the end of the session, we had to provide feedback to one another about how each of us fared in our leadership abilities. I wrote down my feedback for others quite quickly but when giving it to the actual person, there was actually some fear. I only wrote down what I intend to say to the person because as the instructor said, feedback comes from the heart. It’s something you want others to hear, both the good and bad.

I still wanted to say what I wrote, without a doubt, but I was surprised by the fear when actually delivering it. Then I read a book about teaching (by Parker Palmer) which made me realised what’s going on.

When giving feedback, we need to ask ourselves if the other person can take what we are trying to say. We need to ask ourselves if our relationship with the other person is strong enough for both of us to be comfortable to share what will be said. I believe the answer to this question is a resounding no, after a 3-hours trip on an island.

It takes time to build that level of trust.

The push hands class that I go to regularly is trying to build that level of trust. Every time we push with each other, we are trying to learn about one another based on each other’s feedback. The feedback comes slowly as time passes, as we learn more about our opponents and more importantly, more about ourselves. Slowly, we began to share our experiences and tell each other where did we go wrong and how to improve. We then experiment with different techniques or try to work out a good strategy to avoid or make the best out of a bad position.

Truth seems to have the connotation of always being painful. I think if we link with one another with trust first, the truth will be less painful and more fruitful. We need to trust our teachers first before we can learn from our teachers. This is where real learning begins, and then our teachers will seem to appear out of nowhere, and in abundance.

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