Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Fascinating talk by Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation at TED.

Watch it -

I think we often confuse efforts and results. Efforts and results are not always proportional. It’s a different story that we expect they should, but in reality, they are not. Why we confuse them?

When we confuse them, we tend to recognize efforts, and reward results. Instead it should be other way around. We should respect and reward people who are putting efforts, and recognize results if those efforts turn into good results.

We need to understand that results are not always guaranteed. They not only depend on amount of efforts put, but also on many other things, which are most of the times not under control of a person putting efforts. Irrespective of the amount of efforts put, results can go wrong because of bad decisions, bad ideas, bad timing, bad market, or bad luck!

Once again, don’t confuse the efforts and results. Reward efforts and recognize results. Not other way around.

I read a very insightful article on How To Spot a Breakthrough: Tips from Early Amazon Investor Nick Hanauer. It talks about what are the key elements to identify breakthrough ideas. The key elements are value creation and social disruption.

Value Creation:

Value is difficult but possible to quantify – it’s the ratio of benefits to cost, divided by those of the alternatives. Benefits are things like a product’s durability, speed, and appeal; costs are things like price, distribution, and training. The solution should be in some way 10 times better than the existing alternative. No breakthrough idea has ever delivered less.

Social Disruption:

• If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks.
• If people understand it, you’re too late.
• If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

Read on the complete article here for more examples and great stories.

I came across this interesting quote from Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia -

There is no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t do anything. It’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens.

This is a great piece of advice for all us who think we are optimists, and believe that things will improve with time. This advice asks us, are we really being optimistic or are we giving excuses for our inaction?

There might be some cases where we see some people get overwhelming success without taking efforts. But that’s not usual. Typically things will not improve by themselves.

If we want to see the improvement or growth, then we need to act upon it and fight for it. Just being optimistic and sitting idle is not going to help us. We never want to get trapped into such kind of optimism which results in nothing. Let’s wake up and start acting on it.

This is just a quick rant about one thing that I observed at my workplace. It’s about taking vacation or rather about not taking vacation and exploiting the flexibilities that are provided to you at your workplace.

We usually plan long distance trips on Thanksgiving holidays because it’s a long weekend period. Sometimes we don’t find 4 days enough for our vacation, so we need extra day for travel or relaxation. Typically, when we know that we need extra day, we take official leave for that extra day.
But what I observed recently at my workplace was little disappointing.

I observed that there was a set of people who were on vacation for that extra day, but still showed up in the office for few hours to attend some important meetings or line up everything in place before they go on vacation. This was really appreciable of them. It shows dedication, sincerity, loyalty and ownership attributes of those individuals.

On the other hand, there was a set of people who were not on the vacation on that extra day, but had plans to use that day for their extended-long vacation, so they left the office early before noon, without really informing anyone officially. This was terrible behavior. It’s ethically very wrong.

Just because most of the employers have flexible work culture and just because your boss doesn’t question you for every hour, you shouldn’t exploit such situations. If you are sure that you are going to use that extra one day for traveling, then better tell your boss about it upfront and apply for official leave.

The worst situation is when you lie that you are coming back from vacation on so and so date, but you already have plans to come one day late and then on the returning date, you call up your boss and lie again that you will be late or may not show up in the office because your flight is delayed or canceled. Again, this kind of behavior is highly unethical.

Probably, your boss is not going to worry a lot about you not working for a day. Probably you taking off for an extra day will not impact the deadlines much. But this is not about what affects or what doesn’t. It’s about being ethically wrong and exploiting given benefits.

I have a request for you before you decide to do something like this the next time – put yourself in the shoes of your boss, and think about the day when your subordinate is cheating with you using one of these tricks. Think how will you feel on that day. And accordingly decide if you want to exploit this situation or not.

I stumbled upon a great article on “Warren Buffet’s money-making secrets – and how they could work for you”. It’s a very insightful article for all of us especially in this kind of struggling economy.

Here are some of the tips that I liked the most -

When you first make money, you may be tempted to spend it. Don’t. Instead, reinvest the profits.

The average is just that – what everybody else is doing. To be above average, you need to measure yourself by what he calls the Inner Scorecard, judging yourself by your own standards and not the world’s.

Always nail down the specifics of a deal in advance – even with your friends and relatives.

Exercising vigilance over every expense can make your profits – and your paycheck – go much further.

With tenacity and ingenuity, you can win against a more established competitor.

Know when to walk away from a loss, and don’t let anxiety fool you into trying again.

Asking yourself “and then what?” can help you see all of the possible consequences when you’re struggling to make a decision – and can guide you to the smartest choice.

And the most important one -

You’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.

Here is the original article – “Warren Buffett’s 10 Ways To Get Rich”. Read on – it’s very insightful.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Mark Cuban at Blog Maverick writes a great advice based on his experience -

In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is
effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur,
salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early,
staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an
edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I
possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I
could contact a customer was selling time and when customers were
sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to
make my company better.

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how
hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many
hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to
measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting
results. What did i need to do to close this account. What did I need
to do to win this segment of business. What did i need to do to
understand this technology or that business better than anyone. What
did I need to do to find an edge. Where does that edge come from and
how was I going to get there.

The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t.

This is a great advice with a great timing. With this bad economy and downturn ahead, way too many of my friends are talking a lot about layoffs, fear, politics, survival, etc. I'm not saying they are wrong. It's a natural reaction. But I personally don't like to talk about it. As a individual programmer/engineer/entrepreneur, I cannot control this. I had also tweeted back then on my Twitter account-

So let's forget the downturn talk, and focus our energies on our effort to make our goals successful. Because that's the only thing we can control. Wish you all the best!

Few days ago I posted a thought on Twitter –

Actually, the same thought also applies to Marketing and Business Development as well. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For me, as a programmer, I found every new programming language, platform or development tools difficult, until I learn it and then practice it. Once I make my hands dirty on it and learn enough skills to build something real, I get that confidence that I can do this stuff. I may not become master in it, but at least, I'm not scared anymore. I know if I spend more time on it, I can be a master as well.

So once you learn something, then there is some certainty that you can produce some expected result. Of course, you will see some hurdles while you are building it, but eventually you'll get there. Your technology development is rarely dependent on any customer, market situation or financial crisis.

On the contrary side, Sales, Marketing and Business Development are the kinds of skills, which are not certain to produce the same results every-time you apply those skills. I think even though you are a salesman by birth, or you've mastered those skills in your MBA program, it's very hard to predict that you'll close the potential deal the same way you closed the previous deal. But of course, the more you practice those skills, the probability of you closing that deal is more compared to someone less-practiced person closing that deal.

For Sales, your skills are important, but you are also primarily dependent on your customer's buying mindset. And that's a huge variable factor. Same is the case with Marketing and Business Development. They are heavily dependent upon market conditions and financial crisis. And these kind of dependencies make these jobs even more challenging. Of course, technology is a challenging field, but in my opinion, Sales and Marketing fields are more challenging because of their dependencies on other factors.

And those are the skills that we as an programmer, who also wants to become an entrepreneur, should learn and master to improve our chances. Recently, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror also mentioned –

So in a nutshell, for a programmer, it's not enough to master only programming skills. If he also wants to go entrepreneurial route, he also needs to master how to sell himself, his code, and his idea. And these skills can not be learned by sitting in front of the computer or in the cube. We need to go out, talk to more people, try selling our idea, get them excited about what we're doing, and more. It's a work that needs to be done in the battlefield, not in the boardroom.

That's exactly what now I'm going to start doing it. I've spent enough time in the boardroom to code and build my idea. Now it's the time to go out and sell my idea and vision to more people to improve my salesman skills, and also to get more inputs from the real people. And I'm sure it will be very challenging task and I'll learn hell lot of things.

I hope you also believe in this point, and will start selling your ideas, your code to more people. Wish you very all the best!

Few days ago, guys at 37Signals posted a very interesting excerpt from “A Pattern Language” by architect Christopher Alexander. In that excerpt, Christopher Alexander compares the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice.

All those detailed design decisions which can never be worked out in advance on paper, can be made during the building process. And it allows you to see the space in three dimensions as a whole, each step of the way, as more material is added…

The essence of this process is very fundamental indeed. We may understand it best by comparing the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice. The experienced carpenter keeps going. He doesn’t have to keep stopping, because every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter never takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can keep working, confidently, steadily.

The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a joint that requires the shortening of some crucial member – at a stage when it is too late to shorten that member. The fear of these kinds of mistakes forces him to spend hours trying to figure ahead: and it forces him to work as far as possible to exact drawings because they will guarantee that he avoids these kinds of mistakes.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

After reading this, I could easily correlate my current situation with this explanation. As a novice web developer, this is exactly what happens to me. While developing a new feature, or while making changes in the database schema – I don’t understand if this may cause unretractable problems at the later stages. So I take more time and also make changes more cautiously. And that’s why experience in building similar stuff is very important while building an application. Though, I had asked in my previous post if experience is really needed while starting a startup, after going through my current situation, and reading this excerpt, I can say that experience is very important. In short, we can build things in much efficient way.

But we also know that lot of successful startups were founded by young graduates or even school dropouts. And we think that they were also inexperienced but they still did it, and so we can also do it. I think that’s a mistake. In most of the cases, those young graduates or dropouts were hacking stuff since they were kids. They knew how to build the stuff, and that’s why they were in the position to start a startup. But at the same time, not having enough experience doesn’t mean that we should give up starting a startup. We should start acquiring all those abilities that are required to start a startup and to run a company without further dues. If not today, at least tomorrow those abilities will help us to start a startup. So let’s get started with building the stuff – the real stuff!

Have a great weekend ahead!

Blame Token

Once in a while, we land up in a situation when something doesn’t go right as expected. Usually, in such situations the most common behavior which we see is we tend to blame someone else for what went wrong. I think that’s the biggest mistake we generally do.

What’s wrong in blaming someone?

1. It’s ethically wrong:

As we already know, it doesn’t make sense morally. We are putting someone else in a weird situation for which that person was not even responsible.

2. We don’t learn:

We are loosing the great opportunity to learn. I think this is a terrible mistake. When we blame someone, we are also turning down our responsibilities. We are not even attempting to understand what went wrong, what were its causes, and how it can be corrected. I think the only way we can make progress is learning from our mistakes.

3. We undervalue our importance:

We are giving the importance to other person in such situations. When we blame someone else, we are indirectly indicating that if the required thing would have worked good as expected, that person would have been responsible for it, as he is also responsible for its failure.

In short, when something goes wrong, don’t blame someone else, instead learn from it.

Seth Godin writes awesome thoughts on Persistence.

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

Right to the point. And this is not applicable only for Marketers, but also for entrepreneurs, students and rest all.

Persistence is the killer app! Thanks Seth for defining it so well.

My friend asked me to review her resume, and also asked if she needs to include Objective in her resume?

It’s a very commonly asked question. My answer is "Yes". If you are looking for certain specific things, then state it clearly. Why let recruiter keep guessing about what exactly you are looking for?

1 or 2 lines are enough to grab the attention of a recruiter and convey what exactly you are looking for. More importantly, it’s the first line of your resume, and gives you a chance to impress the recruiter by writing a compelling objective.

That brings us to another most commonly asked question – how to make objective of our resume the most compelling one.

Most of the times, I have seen objectives on the following lines only.

A position as a hardware design/layout/verification engineer, in an organization that fosters skill development and enhances analytical insights.

A full time position that helps me gain experience and expertise in the area of Software Development.

The one concern I have with such objectives is, they don’t convey how hiring you will benefit the company. All it tells about how it will benefit the candidate.

Here is how I would write my objective if I am seeking for a job –

Seeking a full time position as a Software Developer in the fields of Internet & Database applications to learn cutting edge technologies and develop awesome products that are aligned with the company’s business interest.

How would you write Objective for your resume? Let me know if you have different opinions or other suggestions. Your inputs will be very helpful for fellow job seekers.

Related Articles:

• How to write an effective cover letter
• How to write an effective resume for job hunting
• Bulleted approach of writing work experience details in your resume

I get lots of requests from people to review their resumes. Unfortunately, I am just not able to review all resumes because of time crunch. Instead of reviewing each resume one by one, and not giving due attention to it, I had compiled a list of suggestions about how to write an effective resume and an effective cover letter based on my experiences and observations.

My sincere apologies to those people whom I didn’t reply with my feedback about their resumes. I strongly request them to visit above links because when I will be reviewing your resumes, I will be looking for those suggestions only.

But recently, I reviewed one resume, and I found one suggestion, which is already mentioned in the above linked articles. The suggestion to write an effective resume is –

Do not write paragraphs under your work experience details.
Try to list down your details in the bulleted points. For a recruiter, bulleted approach is a handy and quick approach to grasp important things from your work experience details than a paragraph approach.

Here is how the resume was written before in a paragraph format –

As a Software Developer and Project Leader, I am leading two applications, which mainly involves understanding the existent systems, identifying enhancement requirements, and performing impact analysis of proposed requirements. I am also responsible for estimating the efforts and assigning it to the development team. I am using VB script, JavaScript technologies with SQL Server 2005 for these applications. I am also responsible for the production support of these applications.

Here is how I suggested changing above paragraph format to a bulleted format –

• Role: Software Developer and Project Leader
• Analyzed client’s existing 2 different applications
• Defined new 2 major and 4 minor enhancement requirements
• Negotiated with client on feature scope, schedule and resources, which resulted in more business to the company
• Managed a development team of 3 members for software development efforts
  • Estimated efforts and defined schedules for different tasks
  • Allocated resources to appropriate tasks
• Developed enhancement requests in VB script and JavaScript with SQL Server 2005
• Supported the time critical production issues

I hope that you will find my bulleted approach effective than the usual paragraph approach.

There are many ways to improve how you write your resume. Things that I have mentioned in above linked articles are not exhaustive ones. If you have suggestions or feedbacks about how to write an effective resume then please write your views in a comment section below. I would highlight those suggestions in future posts for the benefits of readers of this blog.

Recently I made a mistake while scheduling a meeting with my mentor. I was heavily bogged down in the work (as you can see from less posting in the last few weeks) and almost every day always some important issues or meetings were getting popped up on the eleventh hour. Due to my uncertainty of commitment at a particular time, I notified my mentor that I might have to cancel our potential meeting in case there is some other high priority task pops up.

I knew it was unjustifiable, but I just failed in communicating it in a justifiable way. As an obvious outcome, my mentor did not miss this incidence to give me a positive feedback. He replied to me –

In general, canceling a meeting in the last minute means you introduce an "opportunity cost" in the life of other person. Remember that the other person could have met with someone else at that time. Even thinking about canceling a meeting is something that should not be in your mind. As you meet more powerful people, you will realize that this approach can be costly.

I want the very best for you and hence the $.02 above.

I couldn’t argue with this feedback anymore, and I didn’t even consider giving justification for my mistake.

It was a great feedback, so I am sharing with you all so that you also ponder upon respecting other people’s opportunity cost. 

Note: To read more lessons from my mentors, please visit Lessons from Mentor.

As I always say, opportunities are always abundant. Especially in this highly dynamic world, there is always something very exciting, very innovative or very valuable things are going around. And you always want to be a part of it.

For example, you always want to attend conferences like Word Economic Forus – Davos, Demo, The Crunchies, etc.

For early stage startups, you always want to compete in competitions like Y Combinator or TechStars or Android Developer Challenge.

There are always various networking events those are happening in Silicon Valley. There are always experienced entrepreneurs or senior professionals are ready to guide budding entrepreneurs. There is always a new technology invention or innovative idea that you want to start.

There is always something you want to do, and probably you can do.

But the real question in all these scenarios is not if you can or want to do all these things or not. The real question is – if you are really ready to do all these things or not.

I think, if you are not ready with appropriate objectives, then attending networking events or conferences will not make positive differences. You will rather waste your time if you are not sure what you want to achieve from any event or conference.

Similarly, if you are not very clear about what exactly you want to ask help for, then you will waste both of your advisor’s and your time.

If you are not going to continue working on a project that you won in the competition, then it might be waste of your time. Sure, you learned many things, but there might be other important things from your plate that you could have completed and learned as well. Just because there is a competition, and just because you can compete, do you really want to compete?

Sure, you also want to start a startup. But are you really ready to jump in? Are you sure about your financial debt situation? How about your family obligations? And how about your legal immigration issues? Are you really ready to sacrifice your comfort zone and slog day and night?

In all these examples, I’m just trying to discuss one point – if you are really not ready to do what you want to do, then do not jump to start just because you can do. It might be worthwhile to postpone your action and focus on some other important issue. But if you think you are ready, then just go for it. With full throttle speed!