Your help could cripple someone, for life

A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a

small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still. 

The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon, thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled. 

The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened; in fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shriveled wings, incapable of flight. 

What the man – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were nature’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.

Sometimes, a little extra effort is precisely what prepares us for the next obstacle to be faced. Anyone who refuses to make that effort, or gets the wrong sort of help, is left unprepared to fight the next battle and never manages to fly off to their destiny.

- from "The Lesson of the Butterfly" by Paulo Coelho

A powerful story, indeed. 

Often, we come across situations, where jumping in to help someone or clearing obstacles to avoid discomfort seems to be the right thing to do. It could be with kids facing some of their initial & normal developmental challenges, friends facing some minor failures, or colleagues struggling with learning the ropes to accomplish something new.

What we don't realise is that going through these struggles and facing up to some initial failures is a critical step to developing one's emotional intelligence. As a society, we obsess on Intelligence Quotient (IQ) - academic abilities, comprehension, skills and standing in the top 1 percentile. However, what determines success at the workplace and overall in life is one's Emotional Quotient (EQ) - ability to express & control emotions, empathize and mental toughness to face challenges.

Its painful to see gifted people throw away their talents, just because they couldn't face up to a life event, their first failure, since they have always had someone coming along 'to cut open the cocoon and provide wrong help, all along'.  This cripples them for life, bestowing them with low emotional intelligence.

So, the next time you get the urge to help your child, friend or colleague, remember this. Nature has a way of getting each person ready for the long haul, and often its through a little struggle and some emotional labour. Often the best help you can do is to empathize & be around, but just watch and let the person grow stronger wings, by themselves.

Developing new habits & finding time for your hobbies

"I bought the diet book, but ate my usual foods."

"I filled the prescription, but didn't take the meds."

"I took the course... well, I watched the videos... but I didn't do the exercises in writing."

Merely looking at something almost never causes change. Tourism is fun, but rarely transformative.

If it was easy, you would have already achieved the change you seek.

Change comes from new habits, from acting as if, from experiencing the inevitable discomfort of becoming.


I came across the above interesting post from Seth Godin. How often do we fret over inability to adopt a new schedule or do simple things on a more regular basis? It could be hitting the gym, reading books, practicing a hobby, or a simple thing like remembering to take medicines when you fall sick. Adding tasks to a to-do list or putting up stick-it notes doesn't seal it - you end up looking at it a bit more frequently, but may not get down to do it repeatedly.

From my personal experience, one effective way to achieve this is to fit the aspirational task into your daily habits/sequence of rituals. For instance, setting aside 30 minutes everyday after dinner, to read a book before you hit the bed. If you have a long commute to office, create a library of all those audio podcasts/ted-talks that you always wanted to catch up on.

There are enough undefined/adhoc times in our limited daily schedule, that you could carve out to accommodate that elusive task you aspire to make a habit. Couple of months back, S Kumar, a friend had posted a nice article on the same topic. Do check out his article on "How I found time and got certified in 54 diverse online courses".

Cab Booking for the masses?

My vacation last month involved extensive travel across Tamil Nadu. It was perfect timing to catch up on eclectic events - the annual "Chithirai festival" in Madurai, similar annual festivities in my ancestral place near Karaikudi, and what better time to chill out in Ooty to beat the sweltering Indian Summer. More details on the festivities in a later post.

Here, I wanted to talk logistics - my experiences with radio cab booking during my travel. Accustomed to using Uber, Ola and the likes in Hyderabad or in my business trips to the metros, I've never looked for options or modalities beyond them. Don't we love their availability round the clock and the convenience of  2-tap booking on their apps? The booking-scheduling-tracking lifecycle works seamlessly.

However, when I instinctively took to cab booking, this time in the tier-2 cities and towns like Madurai, Thanjavur, Karaikudi, it brought forth some teething logistics issues. Cab providers such as Ola, Savaari, NTL Taxi provide coverage, and the issue is more to do with the booking channel & modalities than with the anything else. 

The data network is patchy at best in several parts of these cities, so much that getting a continuous 2G signal is a luxury. There were several instances where the app doesn't refresh or shows cab availability with a huge lag. I often lost connection after booking a cab, and couldn't track status or even cancel the booking. Once, I ended up accidentally booking a cab in Coimbatore, while I was looking for local commute within Madurai! I had travelled back from Coimbatore and the map didn't refresh until I made the booking. 

Apart from network issues, its also the adaptability of all segments of users to this channel. I know of family and relatives back at home who are loathe to using an app for booking, but are quite comfortable with calls or SMS. 

That got me thinking whether radio cabs through apps is a universal solution for India. We have so many segments of users with varying levels of tech adoption. The problem of non-uniform/poor connectivity & logistics infrastructure will take a while to get ironed out. Wouldn't it make sense to have a secondary system also enabled?

What about a SMS-based booking system for cabs? User sends SMS to a designated number with the requested cab type (SUV, Sedan, hatchback), time and current location pincode. Cab company sends back a confirmation SMS or incase of non-availability, mentioning alternate cab types available / asking user to choose alternate time. To get user's exact location within the area, driver calls the user (this anyway happens even in metros for app-booking, since the GPS location shown on map is at best approximate). All status updates are pushed subsequently by cab company through SMS, and users can enquire status/cancel request through a simple SMS.

This avoids the need for archaic telephone booking and the need to staff operators who coordinate manually. A SMS-based system can well be automated and perhaps even be integrated at the backend with the app-based systems. This would score as an inclusive approach, given the demands of a developing country like ours.

Blogging.. getting the content & posting rhythm right

I had resumed blogging around last year, after a long lull. Over the past year, I've published around 65 posts, thanks to an initial spurt of 20 posts from my North-East solo backpacking trip in April '15. I had subsequently set myself a target of roughly one post a week, which I've pushed myself hard to follow, for the past 8 months. 

And, last month I missed the rhythm and for about 45 days now, I haven't published anything. I've noticed that every post takes about 2 hours to write, edit, look up references and add links before hitting the 'publish' button. This is significant, considering that I sit down to write a post after I've fully deconstructed the topic and points mentally, and have pretty much written it first, in my head! 

Over the past month, I've scribbled a dozen ideas and even have unfinished drafts of a couple of posts. My realization was that the killer in this process was the 2-hour time to publish each post. Just as I thought about this, I came across this nice post from Mark Suster. I'm quoting a few portions of the article that resonates well with my situation here:

....I know that if I obsess over any individual post I would simply never write.... We often feel inspired to cover a topic and we sit at our keyboards until the idea is on the screen. Some days we nail it, others we think “meh” but in either case we hit publish and move on.

....“You’ll fail simply because you’re too smart. You’ve gotten to where you are by being a perfectionist. You will only want to write fully researched pieces. You’ll want too many people to read and comment on your posts before you hit publish. You’ll want to write long, thoughtful posts that make you sound academic. When you start you will publish 5 long posts filled with industry jargon and buzzwords and the process will kill you. By month three you will have stopped out of exhaustion.”

....“If I could give you one piece of advice it would be this. Take a topic, deconstruct it into individual parts and make each bullet point a post. Each topic should have 10 ideas and if you have 3 topics then you’ll have 30 posts ready to write before you even start. Keep each under 750 words, use no jargon, and at the end of writing each post hit publish. Publish or perish. You can always revise it later but frankly you’re better off moving to the next post. 70% of what you write will just be ok, 25% will suck and 5% will be inspired.”

I'm trying to cap the publishing time for every post to 30 minutes or less, and get done with posting it. There would be the occasional, longer ones fed by thoughts & drafts growing over time, but those would be exceptions. So, I will experiment with shorter posts, a tad 'un-edited' and with lesser research & references. But I guess that will keep the flow going.

PS: Its 25 minutes and am hitting the 'publish' button now!