How People Work

These thinking points that hit home for me as I was listening to more Tony Robbins stuff.  Damn, he’s good.

• If you’re critical of others, you’re probably critical of yourself. If you’re critical of yourself, you’re probably critical of others. Instead of being critical, try being curious. Why am I acting this way? Why is that person acting that way? What needs to change in order for me to think differently?
• Externally do you think you exude a net positive vibe? Internally, do you perceive your life in a net positive way? If not, you might be doing a certain level of destruction to youself and others.
• What are the metaphors you live your life by? Metaphors can sometimes be too powerful and cause too narrow-minded of focus. If you believe that life is a challenge. Then you’ll seek out experiences that are hard that you want to overcome. This may cloud you from appreciating experiences where there is not challenge. How about just eating a nice mean with friends? Is this not what life is about?
  • What are your meanings of “life”, “success”, “relationships”, and other words and how does this impact how you live life and perceive the world?
• Why do people do what they do? Well we all have values and beliefs that influence the decisions we make and how we behave, but where did these come from? What were the references or sources of your values and your beliefs? Are there more references out there in the world you want to seek to strengthen or test them? Or are there more references out there that you have to be open-minded to in order to complement your values and beliefs with new ones.
• Contextually, success is the consistent improvement of the quality of your life. You define the quality and you make the consistency happen. Make little improvements that turn into big improvements.

I’m a “T” in the Myers Briggs … a “Thinker” not a “Feeler”. So in general, I’m very weak on being empathetic towards others and managing my emotions.

Our diversity leader at Intuit let me borrow some Tony Robbins CDs (the guru of self-help) and I just wanted to share one point that made sense to me. And that’s…

See your emotions as signals. Both negative and positive emotions are clues that you can do something about. Especially negative emotions like disappointment, frustration, etc.

So what do you do about negative emotions?

Well, as ironic as it sounds, try appreciating the fact that this emotion exists to begin with. Appreciate the fact that you’re in the know … that there’s something wrong here, an opportunity. Then, try to get to the root cause, what kind of emotion am I feeling? Tony asserts that there are 10 types of emotions. There are so many words for emotions out there and he claims that they should boil down to one of these 10:

1. Uncomfortable
2. Fear
3. Hurt
4. Anger
5. Frustration
6. Disappointment
7. Guilty
8. Inadequate
9. Overloaded (or depressed)
10. Lonely

The bottom line is that with all of them … it usually comes down to … you can do something about it by either changing your perceptions (how you put meaning on things) or processes (how you behave).

Wrapping up with a simple example. Let’s say you’re feeling frustration. Your work is difficult and you don’t feel very efficient. You keep trying but you feel like you’re going nowhere. Start by appreciating that you have an emotional clue. The frustration is a message to you that something needs to be done here. Usually the reason why people get frustrated is because they do things over and over again, expecting a different result. The trick is to change what you’re doing, so that you can experience a different outcome. You may have to do this several times to get the outcome you want. With this mindset, hopefully you can get yourself out of ruts sooner.

Somewhat of a dull post, but every time I do a myers briggs 1:1 sesh, I seem to keep recreating the agenda.

Agenda for 1 on 1 Myers Briggs self assessment:

1. What do you want out of our hour together?
2. <Take the online test without looking at the score just yet>
   • Guide the right mindset by saying … try to answer to the best of your ability — no right or wrong answers. Try answering the questions according to what YOU prefer, not what your parents prefer, not your friends prefer, not what you learned growing up, but what feels more comfortable you. So try not to pick choices that are things that were learned or things that are interesting for you to learn now. Choose things that seem to have always been pretty true for you … looking back also into college & childhood.
3. What is this assessment? What’s it do?
   • 16 types … high-level sorting of people
   • Finger print analogy
   • Left hand / right hand analogy
4. What’s the history behind this test?
   • Jung -> Myers -> most popular self-assessment in the world& therefore most widely misinterpreted
   • Commonly thought of as a 2D model (e.g. extroverts versus introverts). But when you study combinations of the personality dimensions, it becomes a 3D model of understanding people.
5. What are the benefits of taking it?
   • Understanding of a few basic, but important human psychological traits
   • Learning about your natural personality preferences and your blindspots
   • Learning a common language to have richer discussions about people
   • Leveraging your preferences to improve your relationships, career direction, and overall happiness
   • Insight into how you might progress in your lifelong development
6. Self-Assessment portion
   • We run through 4 dimensions of personality using a picture book and you self-assess your preference for each. You share stories along the way that come top of mind to you as we read several type descriptions
7. Validation — figuring out your best-fit type by comparing your self-assessment with your test results
8. Discuss what it means to have this type!
   • Reading your type profile & talking about it
9. Looping back to what you want out of this test
10. Sharing the other threads that we could explore next time
    • Advanced type dynamics … learning about your “approach” to life, potential developmental areas, and biggest blindspots
    • Implications on your relationships
    • Implications on your career direction
11. Next Steps
    • The next 2-3 weeks is all about “acceptance”. You’ll have thoughts around, wait, am I really an introvert? or am I an extorvert. This is a healthy debate that you will have with yourself.

I don’t even know how I came across this article. All I know is that I was doing a mad internet search and downloaded all this stuff. This document happened to be one of them and I just happened to double-click through them today.

The concepts in this doc are solid. A great refresher for those who want to tweak their mindset to create change in this world.

Never the Same: How to create transformational experiences.

My reactions in the next post.  Cheers.

I got asked about my experience in my current job for some book. If you don’t already know, I’m wrapping up my two years in Intuit’s Rotational Development Program. Somehow, in the past year, they decided to change the word “rotational” to “leadership”. We’re far from being the kind of leader that has a gabillion people working for us. This picture is NOT what we’re learning to become. This goofy picture I found on one of Wharton’s websites and EVERY post needs a picture.
1) What are the benefits of a leadership development program?

The main benefit to me has been accelerated learning:

• About myself (my strengths and weaknesses, passion, brand, direction in life)
• Around how to do jobs & ask good questions in core business functions at Intuit
• Around the basics of collaborative leadership

… all through exposure to very different jobs that require different ways of thinking (programming, marketing, product management, and strategy) and coaching from leaders & peers.

2) Has the program been meeting your expectations?

My expectations have been exceeded in the area of learning and development. For example, I never imagined that so many leaders at the company would share stories about their life journey with me (~40+ so far)… which I think have been the most rewarding insights.

3) Why did you choose a leadership program?

I enjoy taking “point person” roles inside and outside of work and value the impact you can have as the driver. Some of my personal goals seem to only be achieveable by leading teams, so I wanted to be able to make this a key learning area.

Of course there are downsides to a leadership development program (most of which I don’t mind):

• Not being an expert on something early on … focusing on breadth
• Lots of change – Changing jobs frequently, steep learning curve every time
• Having the pressure of high expectations from others

What do you think of this high-level observation that I’ve been having at work?

When you’re in the act of learning, you’re not adding value. When you’re in the act of adding value, you’re not learning.  They feel like mutually exclusive things. True, sometimes the line blurs so quickly between the two like when you learn  something immediately after adding some value … this is less interesting to talk about right now.

So this graph just tries to capture what I think is the trend that happens over time … ignore for now points not on the blue line (e.g. not be doing either).  That if you’re spending most of your time learning, you’re probably not adding as much value.  This feels a bit like college for me — a ton of class without much doing much other than homework.  Whereas if you’re adding a ton of value, you might be learning a bit less — like if you’re giving back through a community service event.

I’ve felt like in my strategy rotation, I’ve learned a ton about the lending market, made a lot of process mistakes … but haven’t added much value. In my programming rotation, on the other hand, I felt like I didn’t really learn as much about programming, but instead coded up a scalable, automated testing application that’s still adding value. In marketing, I feel like it was more balanced where I’ve done a decent amount of both.

So what? Well, if I’m in a scenario where I’m not adding that much value, then I just ask myself if I’m at least learning … then it’s ok.  And the contrary is true also.  But ideally hitting a good balance between the two is solid.

As I was reading Good to Great by Jim Collins, I internalized something he said about the first step in running a business … figure out who’s going to be on your team first … who’s on the bus and who’s off the bus. Then, determine the goals, strategy, direction, or what have you. This way, if you have the right people upfront, everyone will be further motivated by who’s on the bus and not so dependent on where the bus is going. Some people might not even care where the bus is going because the people on the bus so worth being with! He mentioned that some CEOs (like the Wells Fargo one) just hired outstanding people whenever and wherever they found them, often without any specific job in mind.

1) the right people 2) the right direction

This made me think of the recurring CPT group vision, to run some sort of restaurant or business with friends. Or sometimes we aspire to buy houses all on the same block, haha. Every so often, someone will say, okay all we have to do is think of an idea. So this is when I recognized that, maybe we need to step back and figure out … who’s going on the bus, first. Or at least who’s going to be in the first batch of people to board? Who’s really interested in something like this?

But does it have to be in this order? What if we get the idea first? If that happened, I could see it working out fine. In the non-ideal case, the idea could force choosing the wrong people because we’d naturally ask … who do we need to make this idea successful? We may forget to balance that with the question who do we want on the bus? So worst case, you’d have a low energy group who’s just waiting to get to the destination … and not enjoying the journey together.

so figure out the who before the what.

Once again, recruiting at Berkeley was fun … I think this is my 4th season doing it. And only now do I feel like I’m doing it well. But I haven’t gotten much feedback on my trial & error approach, so here it is. And comments, of course, appreciated.

Overall, my mind is working towards … “how do I help this person?” Maybe help him/her figure out the best next step for their career, educate them on what we offer, etc. While balancing … “how can I be effective with my time with this candidate and help Intuit acquire strong candidates?”

General Tips:

• Make the candidate feel comfortable. Be friendly, smile …
• Get to know the candidate first & be good listeners.
• Seek to understand before you sell.
• When in doubt, share your experience or stories. Lessens the amount of canned answers … makes it more real.
• Be mindful of how well you’re managing your time(mentioned above). Ideally, spending the most time with the candidates best-fit for Intuit or kids you feel like need the most help
• Know what a best-fit candidate looks like. Get in touch with HR or the hiring manager for this.
• Know the competition. At a high level, you should be able to give a compare & contrast of Intuit jobs and jobs at other companies.

I think my flow looks like this:

1. Be proactive
   • If people look like their idling around and I’m not helping someone already, I’ll proactively talk to a candidate leading with something like, Hi, can I help you find something? What’s your major?
2. Introduce myself or others
   • Was this through a transition or a pass-along? If so, I’ll try to understand what’s been “covered” with the previous discussion. If not, I just ask the open-ended question … what can I help you with?
3. Listen briefly …
   • Can you get a sense for who should this person be talking to? If so, warm transfer.
4. Assess them quickly — “Great, before I help you with that, I need to get to know you a little bit”
   • Major. Graduation date. (so important, otherwise you might realize later that you were just blabbering to a freshmen for 5 minutes)
   • So do you know what you want to do after college? Are you considering other options? This is to check how hard-wired they are to their “plan”. So it helps weed out people who are EE folks who know they want to do EE and just EE.
   • What other jobs are you looking into. Clues you into how to sell Intuit if it comes to it.
5. Ask them where they want to take the conversation — Hurray, at this point, Intuit should have SOME job match for them. If not, you gotta gracefully let them go.
   • Now the flood gates are open and it gets tricky now. I realized that the value I could bring to the table is limited to about 4 things, all of which take time: describing the company and the RDP program, giving my perspective on the RDP program, highlighting a few key things on their resume through a voice over, or helping with overall career searching advice, or — especially comparing and contrasting jobs (e.g. pros and cons of RDP vs consulting). So be picky on which areas you think you should deep dive in. Sometimes, it makes sense to ask the candidate — So I can help you broadly with these 4 things … do you still want to do X? or how about we try Y and then go to X after?
6. Sell, if a strong candidate. What’s a strong candidate? Ask HR or the hiring manager.
   • Notice how selling is more of a last step. One of the worst things a recruiter can do is sell you on the wrong things … this means the recruiter is talking fervently while the candidate is thinking in their head, get me out of this please; this guy is telling me stuff I don’t care about.
   • Tell them that you think they’re a good candidate for the next step … and briefly why. Of course point out that you’re not the decision maker, but you’d could be their point person. Now this candidate is feeling pretty good about themself and they have a point person … wow! How often does this happen at career fairs?
   • Revisit what other options they’re considering, ask them if they want you to give a high-level assessment of the two options … pros and cons of each, being objective. This is where you leave a deeper impression of this person is looking out for me by being honest.
7. Close on a good note.
   • Explain the process or next steps.
   • Give contact info. Business cards work well here. Set rules of engagement — how it’s totally fine to email about anything, even overall career advice if we got into those discussions. Surprisingly, I offer this to most and only get like 3-4 email responses. But I think it’s a great gesture.
   • Pat yourself on the back!

So I’ve hit the two year mark with my job at .

It seems like others around me are going through some positive job transitions & some soul searchin’ to figure out what they really want to do. For example, I’m glad for Rosie on her new job and pending move to the city.

A few observations that seem obvious that I think we could nod our heads to:

1. After college, most people land into jobs that aren’t necessarily what they want to do long-term, but we do it anyways: for the “experience”, it seems like a good next step, it puts me on the fast track (my reason for choosing Intuit), etc.
   
2. If you’re busy at the job, you may not have time to pick up your head to say … wait, do I really enjoy this? Where am I going with this? Instead, the instant gratification or short-term goals like bonuses or the next promotion could prevent you from thinking more long-term for your career.
3. If you’re not THAT busy at your job and have a strong support group (I feel lucky to fit in this category), you may have a lot of time to explore and reflect! I think it’s been good for me to slow down … and ask myself a few key questions.

What’s really important to me? What’s not important?

What do I like doing? What don’t I like doing?

What am I good at? What am I not good at?

I think figuring this out helps in a few big ways.

1. You can see if your lifestyle is aligned to who you are.
2. You can communicate to others who you are, so that they know what to do with you!

I like to tell people who are interviewing for jobs, to reveal some of these answers and rely on the interviewers to help you determine if you’d be a good fit for the job. So if you get interviewed 3 times, you get 3 perspectives on whether or not you’d be a good fit. Instead of saying stuff that you think they want to hear like “I’m a team player, work hard” … fluff that everyone says, tell them about you. I really like how Caroline put a “words about me” section at the top of her resume. She used the following words:

Diligent, enjoy coming up with new concepts and design, positive, happy, caring, very particular when it comes to design

So sure, this may hurt you if you’re just looking for just any job … but this could save you from being in the wrong job for several years.

Wanna get started? Here’s a simple powerpoint deck where you can start filling this out for yourself. It should just take a few minutes and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Put all those thoughts swimming in your head throughout your entire lifetime on this on “paper”! This way you can articulate to people who you are and what you like doing — how well can you do that today? Think of this as your version 1 document that you’re going to continue to refine & refine.

Who Are You.ppt

Yea, the doc looks pretty low tech huh. I wonder if someone out there could make it look more energizing for people to get started.

I’ve been mentioning to some people that I went to a “happiness” seminar over the weekend when asked about my weekend. Pretty funny responses from about 8 people… in general, I’ve received some sarcastic responses — not too surprised though.

A seminar on happiness? Who puts something like that on? So are you “happy” now?

In trying to find out where the sarcasm is coming from, I ran it by Tony, who thinks that most people probably won’t admit that they’re not happy — it appears weak — who needs a course on it. In terms of figuring out who really is or isn’t, obviously onlythe individual can only validate & define this for themselves. Someone could appear to be the happiest person, yet feel empty inside and not tell others.

Generally, I think a common, but flawed way of thinking about happiness is that it’s a net positive thing. Add up all that makes you happy in life and subtract it with all that you’re not happy with … and that’s how happy you are. Where does all the neutral time factor in? We probably spend the most time in the neutral time.

Is it possible to think of happiness as a content-free, ongoing state of being? I’d like to think so.

So my response has been … “Yea I’m pretty happy … and I’m working on it”… I’m working on it? Did I just say that? Is it something you can work on?

After thinking about it briefly, my guess is that happiness is a mindset thing. I definitely have some old views that I’m in the process of correcting, and I think it takes practice. It may seem that mindset changes could happen with a flip of a switch … but I think the “flip of the switch” sensation we feel is more of an “a-ha” moment, where a new way of thinking makes more sense than the old way. It takes practice to ingrain that new thinking into our everyday behaviors. So does that mean happiness takes practice? Is it a skill? If so, who’s good at it?