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!

Fitness tracking and how I chose my device

Over the past year, I've been tracking the world of fitness trackers and the rapid launch of new products in this space. Monitoring the steps taken, miles run or any other form of physical activity is growing in interest, not just for fitness enthusiasts but for anyone conscious about health. Even for those oblivious of this space, the 'coolness' factor of owning a new gadget could be tempting. 

This has turned into an interesting space with high competition. There are smart watches looking to offer value-added features to tap this segment, while the new fitness tracker companies have been graduating up with smarter sensors and smart watch displays. Smart phones aren't laggards here, with many apps being launched to leverage the inbuilt capabilities of phones (GPS, sensors) to double them up as activity trackers. Almost every hardware maker has thrown their hat into the ring and entered this market.

I've been looking at trying out a fitness device and my broad asks were as follows:

• Should be a nimble device that could be worn most of the day
• Battery to last a couple of days, at the least
• Must track steps, distance, stairs claimbed and calories spent
• Provide a decent interface to review metrics and importantly, allow raw data export
• Some good-to-have features would be time display, GPS, sleep tracking and idle time alerts

This ruled out mobile phone apps, while a full-fledged smart watch looked like an overkill, atleast as a first device. Amongst fitness trackers, after checking out Fitbit, Jawbone, Misfit and Garmin, I settled on Fitbit which has an impressive lineup of products, seemed to have a relatively higher score on accuracy and flaunts an impressive dashboard.

Fitbit line-up of Trackers. Source: Amazon

'Fitbit One' seemed to suit the needs by ticking off all the key asks, however this device had to be clipped on to clothing as opposed to being worn on the wrist, and this increased the risk of misplacing it.  'Flex' lacked an altimeter, while 'Surge' appeared too bulky to be worn through the day. I zeroed in on the Charge HR, which seemed to offer the right balance amongst all options. 

Its been a week now since I got my Fitbit Charge HR and have been experimenting with it. Expect a review on this soon.

Water, water, everywhere...

Drop a frog into a vessel of water and heat the vessel slowly. As the water turns lukewarm, the frog moves around enthusiastically, enjoying the swim and unaware of the lurking danger. As the water turns warmer, the frog's natural instincts to escape are dimmed and hence it moves about frantically. As the water comes to a simmer, it gets hugely uncomfortable, but the frog just doesn't jump out. Finally, as the water hits boiling point, the frog, having lost its instinctive, emergency response just gets boiled, and turns up dead.

The "boiling frog syndrome" is a popular experiment in behavioural psychology. Now, lets look at one of its many parallels in the human realm.

Not too long ago, we had access to free and clean water, all that we needed and more than that. Over time, we started running into acute shortages, but these were random and very uncommon. 

Fast forward few years and water shortages became a regularity, albeit at few times of the year, such as the summer and only in certain geographical areas.

Enter the current times and scarcity of clean water is a daily issue, through the year. Most natural water sources and underground water levels have dried up, and we regularly pay to secure partial supply. This isn't too different across the world and the water-abundant regions are now the exceptions. 

The surprising part in all this is that, we have become inured to the rapid depletion of this natural resource, and for some strange reason this doesn't sound as alarming as it should be. Apart from the occasional news stories, NGO research reports or apocalyptic movies, this issue doesn't seem to merit much attention. Just as was the case with the frog, when this reaches a boiling point, it might be too late for any response.

Are emails killing your credibility with your users?

After salvaging my work inbox from clutter, I set out to get my personal gmail inbox in order. Only this time the challenge was bigger: with over 25,000 unread emails.

Over the past 10 years, my inbox had fallen into partial neglect and slow decay. With a lot of spam and newsletters flowing in, I missed to do a cleanup.  Though I have been picking up most personal conversations and notifications, given this high noise-to-signal ratio, I had been missing out on some. If you haven't heard back on an email you sent me long ago, you now know why!

When I started cleaning, I couldn't fathom what could possibly cause 25,000 emails over a few years. How much I wish that gmail offered a simple tool that showed a categorical breakup of top sender/type of email, with a simple visual like the one below, that I put together indicatively?

I was horrified to find that every digital interaction online had each produced a stream of 'newsletters'. You buy something on an ecommerce/travel site (Flipkart, Makemytrip...), they send you daily emails on anything that they sell. You install an Android app (Zomato, Tripadvisor...), they spam you. You register for a new service online (Stumbleupon, Flipboard...), they flood you with offers. You register for a conference or download articles, they notify about every event or file that they add. This included websites that I had not directly given my email address, as well.

This apart, there were the set of 'genuine' spam emails sent from dubious entities offering retirement benefits to those promising 'secret offshore funds'. But these were easier of the lot. Its straightforward to clear them and after a few times of classifying them as spam, the gmail spam filter takes over.

I took about 2 weeks to painstakingly clear the newsletters and unsubscribe to all of them. Companies have created this credibility crisis by wilfully pushing daily mailers to unsuspecting consumers, which is not too different from continuous cold-calling your prospects every single day. Most of them don't even bother to check email preferences when they sign you up. What's worse is that for some the unsubscribe process is not straightforward, or just doesn't work. You eventually have to mark these as spam to avoid having them show up, something that I didn't want to do in the first place. Few mailers sure include an 'unsubscribe' link in the email, but they are carefully buried deep inside that one needs to search (see highlight in image below)! 

Given a choice, I would love to hear back from most of the websites, but at a much lesser frequency AND on areas/categories of my interest. Surprisingly, even when you unsubscribe, most websites just have a binary option of 'subscribe/unsubscribe', and don't bother checking if they can retain users by bringing down frequency or categories of notification. There were a handful of professional sites like the McKinsey Quarterly that not only check preferences while you sign up for the first time, but also have helpful options to stay connected sans the clutter. I guess most users would find something like the below page relevant, appealing.. and honest.