What are you willing to do to fail?

A key life lesson that I learned during my two years in Indicorps was that of how to fail in life. More precisely, on how to fail, and how to get right back up.

This learning was cemented during our final workshop in Indicorps, where we serendipitously had a session based on JK Rowling's Harvard Commencement address entitled 'The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination'. If I hadn't realized it earlier (its really hard to think about the joys of failure while you are actually failing), this address definitely drilled it home.

Today, I came across an article on Ashoka's Tech blog entitled 'When is failure just an answer to a different question?' It takes a different take on failure - about how we're NOT really wired to "recognize good things in unexpected results", based on research on failures in scientific research.

It also lays out key lessons on How To Learn From Failure:

1. Check your assumptions. Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
2. Seek out the ignorant. Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
3. Encourage diversity. If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
4. Beware of failure-blindness. It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it."

One thing I would add to the start of the list: (0.)Recognize, accept and cope with failure. Failing is an emotional stressful time, and you need to step out of self-doubt and stay positive. I know that during my two years (and multiple failures), I wouldn't have kept going without the support of Preeti and Radhika. So yah, find people to help support you through the failure. You WILL get by with a little help from your friends. And then hopefully you'll learn a lot.

There is one obvious question that presents itself, and which Roopal, the executive director of Indicorps, put very well during that session at our closing workshop. If failure is so great, then are we actively trying to put ourselves in situations where we're more likely to fail? It's a tough question, and a tougher thing to do. Good management practices teach us to plan ahead and choose the path of most probable success. To identify risks and how we will mitigate them. To keep our goals SMART (R for realistic).

Life has taught me to learn from failure, and that its a good thing. However, I don't know if I have ever proactively tried to fail - we thought every one of those 20 odd ventures we started would succeed.

Your thoughts?

Not Home, Alone

There’s just so much to write.

To provide the context – in the most densely populated city in the world in the most densely populated country in the world, today I feel very alone.

And I am very conscious of the fact that this is by my choice. I chose to come out here and work part time. Trying to support training of paraprofessionals to deliver healthcare in remote areas where it simply wasn’t available before.

Sure, professionally it’s very satisfying. Its been actually a fantastic year in that regards. Forget about year, its been a fantastic week professionally. More on this later (I sense a Practice Gratitude post coming up).

What’s lacking, and what I realized at the soul shaking indicorps reunion, was that while Indicorps has permanently and profusely (much to the dismay of my parents probably) completely changed the professional track, I have not let the process, the spirit of seva, the zest of the Indicorps community, seep into my personal life.

Because if anything those two years in India have done is make me tough. And taught me to not look at life as a series of ups and downs, but rather a series of points of inflection. I’d like to think that this is one such point, because it begets choice. I get to choose where I go from here. Up or down or the same trajectory. And if next year is anything like this year, it still won’t be a bad thing J

This is the start of the ruminations. More to come

Two Points For Honesty

There are many things that I have pushed back on the to-do list, nay the ULTIMATE to-do list of them all, the 'to-reflect' list.

In many ways, I'm going back to precisely the same behaviors that made me less than who I can become . Actually, I don't know if these behaviors ever went away. In India I was simply trying to do 150% of what I could possibly do, and that let me perform somewhere near my capabilities. It was the incessant people to pay bills to, the incessant stock/inventory to keep, the incessant fires to put out, the incessant incessancy? of Mahendra (God bless his soul for being so perseverant).

It's funny how this thought has even entered my mind. It's not really an internal reflection, but rather a reflection on someone else's mirror. It starts off innocuously - what classes do I take next quarter. Then it boils into, how many classes do I take next quarter? And slowly the heuristics have nothing to do with ourselves - how much is that guy taking (only 3, but the dude never has any free time!). Or, oh my God, that girl is taking 7 classes and running the show here and leading this and leading that, and still manages to look good. BTW, I don't think I still understand the word heuristics fully, but I'm sure our Management& organizations professor will burn it into our psyche forever by the end of 2 more weeks.

Perhaps it is a lack of other heuristics of comparison that forces you into the default one of your work/school peers. It is the ultimate 'crab' mentality: I am only as happy relatively to those around me. And rather than looking for other comparative heuristics, and giving personal weights to it (the logical way), I need to stop comparing altogether. I need to figure out what matters to me (aka priorities) and what am I really capable of (aka competence). And go from there. To realize that, there is only one way. You guessed it. Self-Reflection. It's what Indicorps showed me. It's what Initiatives of Change (formerly MRA) showed off so brilliantly.

I think I started off this quarter with a talk about body, mind and soul. I'm not sure if that is good enough. Or maybe the soul part is a lot more than spirituality. Actually, like heuristics, I don't really understand the meaning of spirituality either.

But Two Points For Honesty, non?