Randy Komisar is a good guy. He’s a Silicon Valley CEO. Listening to him speak is like being sat down by your down-to-earth uncle, who wants to give you career advice. Komisar is good at giving interesting advice about ‘following your passion’ without sounding trite or overly motivational. A lot of us get stuck on questions like “what is my (one) passion in life?!” Rather than worrying about the right answer to that question, he recommends thinking of your passions as a portfolio of interests. Then just try to match your interests to the opportunities in front of you. As long as you’re moving in the right direction you’re getting there.
(If you only have time to watch one of these, watch the first one).
In this second video, Komisar discusses staying balanced. The balance changes as your priorities change. He talks about money, opportunity and power (the 3 things people always wish they had in the career) don’t always come in the same package. We need to be careful that our career doesn’t take up too much of our lives and sometimes it’s worth it to say, sacrifice money and power in order to increase opportunities.
He also suggests that we should never put ourselves in a situation where we can’t say no, by handcuffing ourselves to too many obligations (i.e. having too many time or money expenses). Keep your eye on the ball (your values) and, as much as possible, give yourself the freedom to make the changes that respect the balance.
Reality check: When Komisar cut back in his life he went from being a full-time CEO to a doing part-time-CEO-temping. He made heaps of money as a CEO and, when he cut back, he made slightly-smaller heaps, but still probably more than you and me and everyone who will ever read this post combined. It’s easier making financial sacrifices when doing so doesn’t mean you’ll have to make any real sacrifices at all.
Still, I think he’s giving us some good advice here.
Information is empowering, but too much can it can also be debilitating. Information Overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year. In this interesting video a few of the world’s leading managers discuss the problem. In Defense of Distraction discusses how our brains are adapting to make the most of the new information-rich environments we live in:
More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi (the brain region for memory and spatial processing)—a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly.
However, for those of us still struggling to keep up, the article suggests meditation:
Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts.”) … attention is a limited resource… our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives.Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
The traits of successful people is a subject that has intrigued us since at least the 1930s. That was the era when Dale Carnegie founded self-improvement industry (which now worth $11 Billion per year in the US alone); it was also in the late 1930s that a group of social scientists quietly began the ambitious Grant study exploring the lives of 268 Harvard-educated men.
Sixty years later (the study still going strong) they have basically given up hope of discovering the secret recipe of greatness which they were after. (They also didn’t achieve their other lofty aim of easing “the disharmony of the world at large.”) However, they have at least identified seven primary factors that predict healthy (physical and psychological) living and aging. They are: getting an education; having a stable marriage; not smoking; employing “mature adaptations;” not abusing alcohol; having some exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.
All of these strike me as surprisingly simple, straight-forward and actionable recommendations –all but the one. Challenging is the concept of “adaptations,” which the study has explored. Adaptations are the defence mechanisms that people use to respond psychologically to challenges in life:
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. […]
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). (The Atlantic article is available here.)
