The happiness in being proven wrong

For the last few days I have been reading Adam Grant’s book Think Again. One of the topics is about accepting that your pre-conceived notion could be wrong and how because of it you actually grow even more. It can be extremely liberating.

That made me think how often haveI been proven wrong and accepted it in public.

One big one was Sugar and sugar substitutes. I have written extensively in multiple posts on how my father had mentioned about sugar being a poison almost 20 years back but it took me so long to give it up almost completely. Over the last few years I did try some sugar substitutes but I have now realized after reading a lot of studies, that they are equally bad in a different way.

But I also now happily share, how rectifying my liking for sugar has helped me on a daily basis.

The above was a personal realization. Another one, a few years back was on the professional front.

One of my sales person was following up on an account for almost 8-9 months. Even though our typical lead time can be between 3-6 months, anything which crosses about 8-9 months is a very suspect case.

In this there were buyers who were changing which made me even more skeptical of the whole deal. But this sales person kept after them through all the changes and brought in the order.

The reason for me to feel happy was not that he had picked up an order because of the size of the order – the order value was not anything great. The fact that this was a completely new logo that we were acquiring, was made it feel good. If I had removed this sales person from doing this deal , because I thought it would not happen, we wouldn’t have acquired this logo.

I felt happy to be proven wrong. There have been other times also when I have been proven wrong and learned a valuable lesson, but we will keep it for another day.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Saying goodbye to 2021

learning, Learning, mindset

It’s already 2022 in Australia. In India we have about 3.5 hours to go before we ring in the new year. I was having a few perspectives as we do the countdown.

While things started of quite well in January this year, by the time it was April we got hit with the second wave of COVID-19. It was lethal. In India, with such a huge population, the complete infrastructure of the health system was taken by surprise. The speed with which it infected people was amazing.

A lot of us, lost some near and dear ones during this phase and it was a very painful period. I am generally a very optimistic person, but if you read my posts of that time, you may see a person trying to fight the depressive times and sometimes not being optimistic.

But after June things changed almost like a V and we had a lot of positive things happening.

This year has thrown up a lot of learnings for me and my team. While we have generally been locked in for a major part of the year, we have also learnt to appreciate what we have available to us in spite of all these challenges.

We have also been working on how in the changed environment with changed dynamics of human interaction we still do business.

I think all of us will come out stronger to handle the future better.

To all the readers and followers of this blog Wish you a Healthy and Happy New Year 2022.

Look forward to being of service in the new year with some more value adds.

Carpe Diem!!!

Learning from these posts

education, experiences, learning, mindset

Joe Polish had this wonderful statement which he’s made multiple times in his podcast ilovemarketing.com. There’s 3 ways to imbibe a learning or training –

First is by taking a course, attending a seminar etc.

Second is by practicing what you read, heard etc. By actually putting your training into practice, you are able to see both the positives and negatives and also based on that you formulate your own enhancements to what you learnt

Last and most effective is when you are able to teach the same thing to someone else. That’s because then you prepare to answer questions from the people who are attending the training. But the bigger benefit comes when you get to see where the questions are coming from….something that you had not even envisaged. That firmly establishes your learning forever.

I have written more than 400 posts now which cover 3 primary areas viz. Marketing, Human Potential, Financial Independence. These posts are an outcome of what I have personally experienced and what I have learnt by spending on books and trainings.

Some of you may read these posts for intellectual entertainment, but if you want to benefit, then you will need to practice on the ideas that I list. But if you want some of them to stick then not only practice but also teach the ideas you find worthwhile.

My endeavor is to see if I can help even one person improve their life because of what I write, then this daily writing would have achieved its purpose.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Using reverse psychology in our daily life

mindset, possibility thinking, psychology, Sales

When we are in school we are taught to follow a rule book and solve problems in a given manner. If you don’t solve it that way the teacher may actually deduct marks. There are benefits of this system, because it helps the teacher grade her students on a fixed set of parameters. It’s not good for the students because when they do go out in the real world they find moving targets with no method to directly use.

Since we get so used to being spoon fed through the school system, we are not able to think different possibilities.

One method which I use is to let people experience the challenge of the straight jacketed way of solving a problem. If I try telling people the challenges in their solution then they resist my ideas. So I tell them how I would go about it and then I ask them.

I ask them of how they think they would like to solve the problem. Once they tell me the solution and if I don’t think it might be a workable solution, I ask them to proceed with solving the problem their way. But I put a low risk milestone. Only if the low risk milestone can be realized, are they allowed to move ahead otherwise they have to find another way.

This way they don’t feel that I don’t listen to their ideas and I am also ‘not betting the whole farm’. In addition if their solution works then, I have learnt a new way to solve the problem. On the other hand if it doesn’t work, I can then tell them the reason why doing it my way has its benefits and they get to learn from me.

As we grow older, we get more and more fixated with our ideas and resist ideas from others. So if you try to push something , it doesn’t work . On the other hand you let them try their idea with a low risk outcome and then show the problems , they may be more willing to listen to your ideas.

Professional negotiators have a complete arsenal of these kind of techniques to get people to come to a win – win solution. Sales is another specialized negotiation. In yesterday’s post I had written about how you could use the same concepts.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!