Last Four Flaws! — Quotidian — 494

(Transcript of video originally posted on 21 Aug 2023)

In 493, we saw these three.. Leaping, Overthinking, and Fixation. What are the other four? He talked about seven different fatal flaws, didn’t he? Mr. Matthew May?! What are those other four? Shall we take a look?

We have seen three. We are going to see four. Four hundred and ninety four is about the four remaining flaws in the set of seven. Shall we start?

The fourth one is Satisficing. We have encountered this word earlier. Quite similar to Satisfying.. But, quite a different meaning. Satisficing means, doing the bare minimum to just cross over that borderline limit.. If you aim for scoring centum, hundred on hundred, that is going to be Satisfying. But, prechecking with the teacher, “What is the minimum I need to pass this test, Madam?” and on hearing that forty is the minimum, to aim to score just forty-one? They are Satisficing. And, Einstein says, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it is just that I stay with problems much longer.” Instead of just throwing your hands up into the air and giving up, instead of just stopping dead on your tracks, instead of deciding to put no more effort, that it is not worth it, .. and so on.. to be at it.. until you reach that ultimate end goal.

What are the typical mistakes that we commit when trapped in the Satisficing Trap? We overcompromise. We let go of some key challenges because we have the “choice” to, anyway. Like we do in exams. We sometimes don’t even prepare for the whole hundred marks.. Forget about getting those hundred! Shortage of time, IPL finals clashing, whatever the reason, we say, .. “Historic analyses of the past ten years question papers say that this particular topic in Organic Chemistry, only takes twelve marks out of hundred.. And, I am going to just ignore.. Because, I am going to aim for eighty-eight! Because, it is already far above the pass mark needed.. Those folks who talk like that? Overcompromising! And, we also Suboptimise. Optimisation is, given my abilities, given the need, and the challenges in front of me, .. what is the best foot I can put forward? What is the right approach I need to adopt.. That is optimisation. Instead, to think about how to get out of a situation without getting hurt too badly, escaping without losing face.. that is Suboptimising.

We have seen this picture before.. There is this problem called the Local Maxima. You are standing at a location and you decide the next step based on the squares around you.. whichever takes you to the next highest position.. If you analyse the gradient in this picture, you may end up.. HERE! And then? What happens? You are stuck in a Local Maxima. You, even though you see the high mountain up there, that you need to reach, you don’t reach that because you are stuck in that Local Maxima, and any step you take.. takes you to a temporarily lower position and that Mount Everest, the highest of all, is beyond reach for you. This is the curse of Satisficing. To think, I have reached a position of comfort.. A maximum point in the locality. In my little kingdom, I am King. To become the Emperor of the whole world, one must first become a slave, and then a common man.. in the whole world. I am not ready to go..! Let me continue to live in my little kingdom.. That mentality? Is another trap. A fatal flaw.

How do you get out of this? You indulge in what we call Synthesis. What is Synthesis? When faced with a challenge, a dilemma, a tough alternative, to say I would go with this option instead of that, .. is Satisficing. But, when faced with a challenge, when asked to choose between this or that, instead of looking at it as Either-Or, to look at it as Both-And.. Imagine a phone that has got amazing battery life, while also being very light-weight.. Think about that! Steve Jobs thought about that! He never said, “Okay, this is good enough.. until the next phone arrives”. He said, “I want this as well as that!” The engineers handed a prototype phone to him once, and said, this is how small it can get. We can’t get it any smaller. But, it was the size of a large pancake! And, Mr. Jobs says, “No way! It has to fit my palm! It is too large!” But the engineers complain, the designer shakes his head.. But, Steve Jobs, walking along the corridor, suddenly drops the phone prototype into the water in an aquarium. Everybody is shocked! And, the phone settles into the bottom of the aquarium, and a few seconds later, .. a large air bubble.. pops and rushes to the surface! “There! You got space! Crunch it further!” says Steve Jobs. That is refusing to Satisfice. Synthesis also expects that you Decompose. When we are faced with a challenge, is it because of this component part that we are challenged? Is it because of that constraint that we are challenged? If you Decompose thus, you will arrive at a position where, you will realise that it is not as etched in stone a constraint as we thought! Perhaps this could be changed, would be the realisation you get. That is Synthesis.

The next challenge, the next trap, is Downgrading. He starts yet again with an Einstein quote. He says, “One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts”. Remember the “tantalising” goals that we have discussed earlier? Stretch goals, that you can barely achieve! Those are the ones you should pick! That is what defined who you are, as a person.

And, what is Downgrading? He led me into a trap, this author. He said, “Here is a puzzle for you. This is a bus. Which side is it going?” I was truly confused. This is a simple picture drawn by a little kid, of a bus. “Which direction is it going? Left to Right? Or Right to Left?” I struggled. Below the picture, there was this line.. Solution — Page 173. I hopped over to that page. Thinking I would find the answer there. But, the author rapped me on my head and said, “Welcome to the Downgrading Flaw. Because, you know what you did just now, you have downgraded yourself. You have told yourself that you can’t really solve this problem. That you can’t put in the effort needed for this sort of a problem. That this doesn’t really cost you much. It is okay if you .. flip and look at the answer”.. That resignation? That is one of the fatal flaws, avoid it! I won’t give you the answer to you yet. Go, think a little more, the author sent me back! Quite an interesting trap!

What exactly are we downgrading then? We refuse to acknowledge that there is no time limit really! Take a look at the Grand Canyon. This wonder of the world, amazing place, has been carved simply by the power of trickling, dripping, moving water! Just water! Yes! But do you know how many millions of years? That is the question. Similarly, go back to the Ramayana. We forget how LARGE the army was. We wonder.. A band of monkeys? They won the war? How is it possible? It is not one monkey! It is a whole tribe of monkeys! I have checked with ChatGPT. I have asked Bard too. Valmiki. Kambar. Each has a different answer to the question of how many monkeys really fought the war. Some say crores. Some others say millions. But, we can kind of deduce from the analogies and similes the authors employ. When the monkey army swept past the jungle, he says, it became an open plain! For, all the trees are torn up, all the fruits plucked away.. The monkey army crossed the river, and it became a river bed.. All the water having been drunk away by the crossing monkeys! That is how large the number is! So, don’t downgrade yourself! There are some hidden constraints that you are assuming, that don’t even exist. Take your time!

What is the escape for this? It is Jumpstarting. And, the author gives the example of a person named Cliff Young. He is 61 years old! He is not even a runner, or an athlete. He is just a potato farmer. Working in his brother’s farm. In Sydney. He doesn’t know how to ride a horse, and so, to round up the cattle, he will run around all day. Somebody signs him up for the Ultramarathon. Not Marathon. But, Ultramarathon. Sydney to Melbourne. 875 kilometers. All the athletes land up, with sponsor tags, and many extra pairs of sneakers. For one pair won’t last the gruelling task. This man comes with an already torn boot, gumboot. And he starts running. All runners know that you can run for eighteen hours but you need to sleep for six hours at least, in between. This man keeps running all the way till midnight. He runs a hundred kilometers in a single day. And, perhaps because of the mistake of somebody, he sets an alarm clock, the clock rings earlier than everybody else, he doesn’t realise it and so he gets up and starts running again, .. This is a real story from 1983. He wins the Championship! Guess what? He wins by a ten hour gap between number one and number two! Such a huge win! Why? Nobody told him what the so-called limitations were in Ultramarathon running. It is sometimes best that one doesn’t know! So, that, is an important lesson! Don’t Downgrade yourself into assumed constraints! Jumpstart!

The next problem is the Not Invented Here syndrome. This is prevalent pandemic in the software world. “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. “— Says Albert Einstein. Not Invented Here is not just for organisations, but also for individuals too. If somebody does something very well, and gives it to you.. if you start thinking, “I didn’t do it.. It is not my idea.. It is not my creation.. and hence, it has to be below par.. low quality”.. you need to stop that train of thought. It is a trap! You end up doing so much reinvention of the wheel.. if you don’t learn to welcome something that somebody has done a great job of.

These three products are from Sony.. But, the problem? The reason you can’t recognise them? That is because they were victims of the Not Invented Here syndrome. That was the ruling video format. Betamax, it was called. This was the ruling camera format. Sony’s own image format. And Sony’s Walkman, we all know. The ruling format for audio. But, when the world standard came, VHS, JPEG, MP3, Sony said, we will not support MP3 in our player because we didn’t invent it here! Along came the iPod.. Steve Jobs.. and you know what happened to the Walkman. So, this Not Invented Here Syndrome is not just for organisations, but for individuals too.

You need to allow people to solve problems for you! Because… tell me how often this has happened to you! Somebody has been racking his brains trying to solve something, he comes along, you take a single look at it, and bingo. You solve it. And they are shellshocked, how you solved it so fast! Why.. My mom does that often with me! She would have struggled a lot, trying to open the jam bottle, and I would open it in a jiffy.. Metaphorically speaking, that again is because you approach a problem from a different point of view. Learn to welcome that point of view. Don’t always start from scratch. Programmers have this very bad habit. When a manager entrusts a developer with a module, telling the person that they have to take care of it from now on, if the person, without bothering about all the good / bad / ugly effort that has gone into it, if they bring it all down, pause it, write everything from scratch, saying they like starting it their way.. Progress will be severely hampered. So, don’t fall into this N.I.H trap!

There is a solution! P.F.E! Proudly Found Elsewhere! Mr. Jony Ive.. Remember the Apple Phone, the Mac Pro, the iPod design? They are nearly identical copies of the original designs by Dieter Rams from Braun. He confessed. He agreed. “I am inspired, I am profoundly deeply motivated by the designs of that Guru, and I used them”, he says. Steve Jobs has gone on record saying, “Hey, good artists copy. Great artists steal! There. I said it. I will do this happily. Again and again. I will copy well. I will take the good aspects of multiple sources. I will leave the bad parts out. I will add my own smart twist to it. That will be my output.” So, proudly find things everywhere, and bring them all together.

And, the last trap is Self-Censoring. Indians, particularly, they seem susceptible to this trap. “Perhaps this is it, for me.. I won’t be able to do this, perhaps.”

Symptoms of this trap? Very often, when somebody asks a question to a group, you silently think about the answer, and then you probably reject it as .. “Hey, I don’t think that will be the answer.. To say this in front of everybody will only make me lose face”.. you tell yourself, and you resign into silence.. And then, nobody knows the answer, and the teacher, or the performer on stage, speaks out the answer, and that’s when you slap yourself on the head and said, “Aw shucks.. Of course I knew the answer. I should have spoken out loud!” Has that happened to you? That is one of the symptoms of Self-Censoring. In the case of Ramayana, Hanuman, until Jambavan identified the hidden latent potential inside Hanuman, was probably self-censoring. We have talked about the Lizard Brain. There are three levels of the brain. The lizard brain, the mammalian brain, and the primate brain. The lizard brain knows only fight or flight. And it keeps telling you, “You won’t be able to do it. Why are you risking it? This is too costly! There might be something that happens irreversibly here!” — It prevents you from birthing that idea. From implementing that little germ that you had as an idea, sometime ago.. Escape from this trap!

Do you remember this scene? How often have we seen this in cricket?! In this case, one is Virat Kohli, the one in front. Ishan Kishan is the other person. Both are good players. And it could probably be Virat Kohli’s mistake, but look at what Ishan Kishan is doing. He is slowing down. While Virat Kohli is running faster. A runout mixup. One has to have run to the other end. They didn’t. Whoever reaches this end first, the other has to walk back to the pavilion. Ishan Kishan is self-censoring. Perhaps this is my mistake, he tells himself. Let me give it up for the captain. The more senior player. What about your current form? The captain himself might have wanted you to play on. Why did you do this?! That is Self-Censoring.

To escape from Self-Censoring, one very beautiful solution is to employ Self-Distancing. Do you remember Malala Yousufzai? There is this interview she is speaking in, and they are asking her, “What did you do.. What did you feel like doing.. You were inside a bus, returning from school. And the Taliban had stopped the bus, and were now enquiring.. asking about the girl who was going to school, without permission, without approval.” And she says, “I felt like taking my shoe off my foot and throwing it at him..” And then, she continues.. “And then, I said, “Malala, if you do that, what is the difference between you and the Taliban? Why don’t you appeal to that person? Why don’t you tell that person how important education is? That person might have a daughter your age! Tell that person, you are learning, you are educating yourself not just for yourself, but for empowering that girl too..! That is what you should tell him, Malala!” I told myself” she tells the interviewer. Did you see that self-distance? Malala, telling Malala about how Malala should speak! That self-distance. If you had watched Mani Ratnam during the Ponniyin Selvan launch, he was sitting back there in the third row, an epitome of silence. Not too much joy, not too much sorrow or regret. Only Mani Ratnam could perhaps know all the mistakes he made. Only Mani Ratnam may know all the amazing flourishes he made, as a director. We are all just consumers. Some show they are putting up, they have invited me, let me hang around — that was the disengaged nonchalance with which he tolerated the show! That is Self-Distancing. That is the best way to escape the Self-Censoring trap.

So, there you go! Seven traps! Daily, multiple times, each of us, fall into more than one trap! I will repeat! Daily, multiple times, each of us, fall into more than one trap! How are we going to escape them? Try those solutions given.

He ends the book with three really beautiful and motivating statements. What appears to be the problem, Isn’t! What appears to be the solution, Isn’t! What appears to be impossible, Isn’t! That is how the book ends! How beautiful!

That brings us to the Closing Thought! We talked about theft. The famous Shampoo Problem. How are we going to prevent the theft of the shampoo. Take the caps out — was the winning answer. But you know what? Marketers can do better than that, can’t they? Look at this company.. It is called the Malmaison hotel! This hotel gives away their shampoos in packages like these! “The best shampoo you will ever steal!” says the cover! Taunting you! Tempting you! Inviting you! Spread the word, and the brand! Isn’t that even better, than brainstorming and framestorming? Think about it! We will meet again, soon! Thank you!