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I have always shunned the idea of hiring people only from the top institutions at my workplace. The reason for that was my observation; that there were people from many relatively not so top institutions ending up top performers at the organization compared to their peers from top ones. This was not an one off observation, I had been observing this year on year that recruits from top institutions and not so top institutions were many at times on par with each other and there were few exceptions on either sides.

My school was a very competitive place to study, scoring in the 90s out 100 just meant that you are in the 50th percentile. It was getting increasingly tough as grades went higher and people were merely looking to outscore each other without gaining deep understanding of the subjects studied. Parent’s pressure on the ranking meant students had no choice but to play in the rat race getting stressed out and not learning much except scoring marks. There was a shuffle of groups happened after grade 8 and that was a breather in my school life, the competition eased out and it was so easy to be at the 75th percentile. This sudden ease of pressure made me learn subjects like science and maths with greater depth in understanding without worrying about optimizing learning only from the exam point of view. I could see that depth of understanding eventually helping me at my college and work place and I feel the positive effects of that even now. Had I been in the ultra competitive environment, I would have given up on learning.

I stumbled on the talk by Malcolm Gladwell which had rekindled my memories while I kept nodding at many his points in the talk.

Top institutions always gets the brightest of the minds, there is no doubt in that. But increasingly these institutions are getting competitive that people in the lower percentile in these places may face too daunting a task to accomplish something even though they were the best among their their peers in the country. It will favour the ‘smart gets more smarter’ culture. So as mentioned in the talk it will be better if we recruit the toppers from multiple other institutions rather than focussing on getting talent from top institutions. This may apply to organizations which forms A-teams as well.

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Success transforms people a lot, it makes people feel that they are successful only because of their intelligence. By attributing success to their intelligence, people over the course of time regard themselves way too higher than their peers. This makes them feel that they are superior and sometimes not so appreciative of the knowledge and work of the new comers or the relatively inexperienced ones.

I observed that success was largely due to being at the right place at the right time and from then on it was a matter of hanging on to it. Just like a discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind, success is also an accident meeting a well prepared mind. Some studies on IQ shows that intelligence is very much overrated. A person with an IQ of 110 can possibly do any job and excel at it with some deliberate practice and discipline. On an average, one in every four individuals have an IQ of 110, which means out of four people one person is capable of doing any work and excel in it like any other top performer in that field.

Below is a ted talk which talks about how humans perceive themselves to be superior when they have more wealth compared to others.

The talk also mentions that people do not do it knowingly. If we give those nudges and pushes at the right time to make people understand that they were at the right place at the right time to be at this level, then people will stay humble throughout their successful journey. Wealth is very easy to measure, so any individual looking at their wealth could easily know what their worth is. Knowledge and skill is not so easily measurable and hence people can get into a wrong sense of accomplishment and success. If that wrong sense of success gets into the head, it will lead us into a learning stage called “Expert Beginner” as mentioned in this blog [Expert Beginner]. In short “Expert Beginners” are the ones who have learnt something and before progressing to become competent they stop learning looking at the rapid progress and success they had in their new initiative. Growth stagnates from there on.

We just need to remind ourselves that a successful career may be just because of being at the right place at the right time and there is lot more to learn and lot more to do than to feel entitled and be on top.

Two things define you – Your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything

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Michael Crichton in his novel Timeline sets the tone for a science fiction by illustrating the difference between the years 1999 to 1899. Definitely people would have laughed if we had mentioned in 1899 that we could cure typhoid by pills, send photographs through air, go halfway across the world in less than a day. It has been more than 10 years since I read that book and now I see that there is a drastic difference in the technology available between 1999 and now. My mobile phone now has far more computing power, memory and screen resolution than the desktop computer I had in 1999.

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Technology advances at such a pace that now we can consider a new generation is available within a few years. Which means that if I am doing something one way now, a few years later I have to change my opinion and find a another way that can make my life easy. What I regard as impractical and expensive now may turn out to be economical and practical. A very simple example is how a smart phone has changed the way I push my day, many recent advancements have gotten into the phone that I hardly need my computer other than programming or creating content. I was thinking it was expensive and impractical to own such a phone few years ago, but that changed completely after I had started using one and the amount of time I was able to save as a result of that.

Many of the advancements in technology are not disruptive, so people don’t easily notice that something new can help them ease their work. Also we tend to stick into our comfort zone and resort to micro optimisations than look outside of that zone frequently for new. One such thing is the level of automation that can go into software development irrespective of the platform/language/tools used. Gone are the days when the automation tools were unreliable, fragile, way too many false positives or needs too much time & effort investment. Ways to automate repetitive tasks have increased in number a great deal. Name the technology and platform, you get the appropriate tools to do that. Most of us who would have evaluated automation at some point of time and would have discarded options as expensive or infeasible but failed to revisit the decision in the next 6-12 months. This will lead to a preconceived notion that we have to live with lots of manual work while in reality it is not, often an external person would be needed to point us to the possibilities the new changing world is to offer. 

The things that are positively impacted by technology are throughput and cycle times. We should have a strong mechanism to periodically question the throughput and cycle times and keep looking for alternatives. Inputs could come from anywhere, any domain, any technology. I recently happened to watch Bret Victor’s talk, it can be found here. He says that when people were not certain on how to do something then they come up with many ways of doing things, but when they find something works then they stick to it without looking for further alternatives.

If we use only tried and tested methods, then may be we would still be using only horse and bullock carts.

Image courtesy of [olovedog] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.