Category: book

When I was a child my mother would often remind of a saying “If walls were made of glass, you’d see what families do for real”She meant that we change our behaviour based on the fact that “nobody is watching us”, that if people were watching us it would show all the bad things we do or we would stop doing them because of that kind of transparency.

In the internet era this is so true. Everything is made of glass, each and every word you write can become something that will be available to everyone in the world.

This means that what we write and say is important and thus we should do our best to say it like the whole world is reading that email to our boss or our coworker. 

It’ll change everything. You’ll see that if you think about “having more people reading what you write” it’ll change the tone, the message.

Everything will be different. 
Part is because we tend to protect ourselves from backfire, and that’s what we should avoid.

Having glass walls doesn’t mean you should lie, fake emotions or intentions. No. You have to be true to what you think, but expose it more kindly, with more thought and empathy so that if it “leaks out” it’ll still be fine.

I think it could be summarized with: Be honest, be kind.
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How many times did you felt like this isn’t the right way to manage a project, to let people work with you, to talk, to express your opinion, to discuss complex topic?

There is no shortcut, no way around, and it’s the same old song: We can’t change the world. 
It’s absurdly hard to change the behavior of the people around us.
We can try but they’ll get difensive, they’ll start protecting their own positions.

So what to do? Lead the way.
Be impeccable, show _your_ way of doing things, your way of approaching a problem, your way of sharing bad news.

Lead the way and do it at your maximum. Don’t try it, do it. Do it like if you are on television and everyone is watching you, do it like if this is the way of your life.

Because, afterall, if you believe in your preachings, then why not practice them as much as possible? Do it in the places you can, express them, show the way to the people that can embrace a different course of action.

It’s only by leading, by showing the way, that you can encourage people to do the same.
Think about when you’re in a course and the teacher asks “What’s the reason for this?” and it’s not a clear answer, right? Maybe we’re talking about politics, the universe, money, whatever.

You feel like you got a good answer, but you’re afraid.
You’re afraid to be wrong, to be shamed in public, to be that stupid guy that says stupid things.
So what do you do?
You wait until someone puts one hand up to share an answer and after that many hands come up too.

That single person _enabled_ everyone to do the same. He/Her gave you the courage to do the same.

Be that one, be the one that puts the hand up first.
Take the leap, lead the way.

Listening is such a hard thing to do. It’s underestimated how beneficial it is for everyone and at the same time we are rarely able to do it right.

Why? Because true listening starts with setting aside ego, leaving it out of the room so that you can listen freely and with no prejudice.

If you really want to listen to something the first rule would be to not talk.

If you need to talk the only way to continue listening is by asking question that dig deeper into the topic.
Avoid questions whose goal is to expose the limits of the presentation of your collegue or the errors.
Instead, ask question about the subject, if something isn’t quite clear, ask why is that, what’s the difference.

But the less you talk, the more you listen.
Then if the goal of this entire discussion is for you to learn something or to show that you understood the problem, or even that it’s clear what was your mistake, then repeat with your own words what has been said to you.

Much like a summary or a movie trailer, try to list all the information you grasped. 
This will produce two effects:
* It’ll allow you to be sure of what you learned and check if you listened and understood
* It’ll allow the other person to see that you were actively listening, you were participating.

Too often we listen only to say “I got it”. Which shows only our ego, our “I’m the best” type of behaviour.

To show if you truly grasped a concept there’s no better way than repeating it and this will always make the other person happy if you can put it using your own words in a truly sincere way.

A nice concept I discovered is how we do learn.

Did you ever go to a friend to give him/her some great advice in the hope that it’ll change his/her life only to find out they won’t listen?

It’s frustrating. You feel powerless.
Well, this happens for many reasons.

• We might not be in the mood.
• We might not like how you’re saying it
• We might not understand it
• We might hate showing vulnerabilities.

And even though you remove all these roadblocks, the message might not get through and that’s because of _timing_.

Timing is everything, as it is in shopping, in life. You wouldn’t try to go to the bathroom if you don’t need to, you wouldn’t try to sell things to a poor man, you would wait until you have the conditions to do it.

Learning works the same way. You need to have the appropriate timing and context otherwise you’re wasting your time.

How to get the right timing varies from person to person but we all do have one thing in common: The tide.

There are some moments in life when we are more open to change, to new information. Those moments are when we all are riding the Tide. We’re on the top of it.

That’s when we should give advice, share information. If the person is on the lower part of the Tide then leave them alone. Nobody would ever hear your advices. Wait for the tide to get back up, because it’ll get there eventually.

Your team just screwed it up.
They made something entirely different, or left a gigantic bug.

You’re the higher in command aside from your boss, then you have a chain of people under you, and the last person in the chain made the mistake.

Whenever I think about this a story comes to mind. It’s a story of a small company making videogames on facebook. They somewhat became famous and got a big money cashflow, so they hired a new junior developer.

The work there was very fast, and one day the junior developer did delete the entire production database. Destroying months, if not years of work.

Who’s to blame then? What would you do?
The company blamed it on the junior developer and fired it.

Seems legit right? You break everything, you should pay for it.
But if you think about it, who did gave that power to the junior developer? Maybe his superior, without explaining enough to be careful.
And who _didn’t_ put in place regular backups? Maybe his superior.
And why the backups weren’t put in place? Maybe because the boss didn’t want them to spend time on such topics because they had a business to run and they’d lose money.

So, who’s to blame?
Whenever such big mistake comes out it’s easy to point directly to the final error. But what _led_ there, was a chain of command.
The reason why your boss gets more money than you is that he/she have more responsibilities, and is holds true also for your superior.

Is the junior guy responsible? Yes, but also are his superior and the boss. All of them are and all of them should pay _based on their responsibilities_.
The more you have, the more it’s your fault.

Therefore in most of the cases the answer to “Who’s to blame” should be “Me”.