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.

Pains of switching over to a Macbook

At work, we had decided to migrate from Windows machines to Macbooks. The excitement and supposed 'coolness' of using a Mac notwithstanding, there was anxiety considering that the Apple ecosystem is a platform I've never been exposed to.

The first day I started setting up the machine, the pain in the transition was evident at multiple levels. I spent a good 30 minutes 'searching' for the Hard Disk and eventually found it by googling for help. My day On Windows machines used to start on the desktop and all activity was driven through 'My-Computer' icon or the Win-E shortcut. Don't believe me on how this query stumps first-time users? Check this Google snapshot on what's searched for most:

Having 'found' the hard disk, the next obstacle was in moving files. For a new user it was frustrating that there is no straightforward way to 'cut-paste'. Googling led me to Apple's discussion forum with several threads on the matter and many experts providing 'easy' ways to copy-paste and cut-paste files! Here is another screen grab showing that this is the top search query for Mac users.

The biggest handicap for Windows users on Mac is the absence of keys like Win, Ctrl, Alt, or the universal SOS combination Ctrl+Alt+Del ! Earlier, when I used to switch between Windows machines of Dell or Lenovo, a minor irritant used to be the changes in location of the Pg-up/Pg-down and other secondary keys. However, a radical change in keystrokes was something that went right against my muscle memory of many years. I'm still getting used to Mac's all powerful 'Cmd' key and the secondary 'ctrl' & 'option' keys, but I guess it will take a while for my fingers to learn that.

These irritants notwithstanding, there were some pleasant surprises that are to-good-to-be-true on Windows machines, for instance the lightning fast 'Spotlight search'. But more about these in a follow-on post. For now, I'm looking at immersing myself in the experience and getting used to the Mac shortcuts and ways of working, for the intent is not to survive but to leverage a lot of the platform's productivity hacks. 

I strongly believe that the first 2 to 3 weeks is a golden period of any transition since it keeps your mind open to explore and learn at an exponential pace. Post this, the learning curve drops steeply and one just gets used to the ways of working learnt by then, even if its inefficient or inconvenient. Surprisingly, I've found this to be true, not just for a new platform, but for new devices or even a new physical location.