Mind Cook

If you get on someone’s nerves and fail to resolve it in a short period of time, the closure after that becomes close to pointless. You might mistaken that a simple sorry after a few weeks will suffice but more often than not that is just an icebreaker.

When the awkward situation takes time, we will form our own judgement of what actually happens and decide whether we want to forgive or move on shortly after. This is how a healthy mindset works.

If you berate someone in public for something they did, then accept an apology years later, you have already forgiven this person long before, but just tied your own ego to the apology. And if you don’t accept the apology regardless, you have decided you will be grudgeful anyway. This is an example of a typical troll on the internet.

Make a closure as soon as you realise your mistake. Beyond that repair is not up to you but up to the other persons internal resolution mechanism.

Sometimes we have learned the wrong thing for a long time and implemented it accordingly. We might be rushing for another event or just a little hasty to get the job done so we don’t stop and correct the mistake immediately. Doing so will likely extend the issues for a much longer period.

In manufacturing items, the later you discover the mistake, the worse the impact is. This is because the amount of time required to make something needs to be taken into account to be restarted. Also, things are either often made in bulk or many suppliers need to be coordinated.

This is the same in the digital world, especially if something already goes live. Once real people are involved it is so much harder to fix and also involves having reputations tarnished.

Everyone makes mistakes and it is somewhat inevitable. Just don’t make the mistake much bigger by delaying the fix.

You rock up and you don’t have everything prepared. Just some fresh enthusiasm and a healthy attitude. When you are about to start you see other people do things differently. Do you leave?

Unless you are confined by some strict safety codes, find a way. It could be as easy as spending a little bit of money to get what you need to be normal. Or why be normal? Be awesome and inspiring. Find other ways that may not have been tried and participate.

Conforming is the safest route and also the most numbing. Live a little and try it your way anyway.

It is a core need for people to feel they have done something of value in their life. Even if it’s insignificant and even if the effort was minuscule, people do generally crave adulation.

A train driver this morning spent 2 minutes on the intercom reiterating how he influenced the decision to prioritise our train. He was trying so hard to emphasise his efforts that he was beginning to sound desperate. No one else really seemed to bother. It is a micro decision and action for his own well being.

So how can we make use of this? It basically means that emotional decisions are extremely important. If we learn this, we can influence many even if the logic is defied. When opposing views are strong focjs on what emotions something entails and less on logic.

We should not underestimate how important it is to just get started. Even if you are not someone to complete something, having the basic foundations does wonders.

You could receive help from people you did not expect. You might suddenly have more time on your hands. Or it could be as simple as suddenly receiving inspiration on a particular task. These are so much more difficult to achieve out of nothing.

This is not quite the law of attraction, but more about setting the first stake in the group to mark your journey. This point has so much possibility, but first it should be started.

No, it’s not about falling in love with someone at work. It is about taking a small subset of the work experience and overemphasising it’s importance.

For example say you work at a big company X. If we focus on just the fact that you are working at X, we will possibly not be able to fulfill our potential. This is because you could just be a tiny insignificant part of X, so being part of it might not even mean anything to them.

This is quite common with associating working overseas. It is nice to say you have got a job in a foreign country to everyone you know. Yet the job you are doing might be way less fulfilling than what you could be doing in your home country.

We must try not to oversimplify our position less be at risk of not delivering our greatest potential.

If you are given a piece of information on purpose, the first thing you tend to do is work out why this was sent to you. Sometimes the reason is blatantly obvious. What if it is not?

The first thing you respond to will reveal your motivations and how you perceive the information in your mind. If you are not ready to reveal this, it is best to wait or find out the real purpose of sending this in a more direct way. Very often you can’t get a good idea of what is intended, and sometimes this is done on purpose.

This is actually how viral messages work. The message content is vague and not intended for a particular audience. Everyone attaches their own meaning and soon it means something else other than what was intended.

We can therefore make use of this to get people talking. Or we can be at the receiving end and move the message in the intended direction.

Everyone of us has slightly different needs to fulfil. It could be as simple as a cup of coffee to get you going for the whole day. Often it is just symbolic more than functional. Yet there are times when there is some other internal wiring that gets messed up.

Overlooking these needs tends to come and bite you later on. It can be put off for a short period of time but an unfulfilled need will accumulate and can compromise our delicate internal ecosystem.

As they say prevention is much better than cure. Try to understand yourself better to ensure you are getting what you need. It will be different for anyone else.

When you are struggling to get something started because you are unsure it could be worthwhile to try doing twice of it. The idea is not to overwork but to overcome any inhibitions.

The irony of motivations is that you often need to get moving to get started. Yet the first impetus is hard to come by because we like to wait for something else to happen before taking action.

Doing things once propels you forward. Doing things twice hopefully doubles that.

I have been reading Peter Thiel about how these days we are being indefinitely optimistic. This means we are positive about the future but are wishy-washy about it. Perhaps we really should challenge this in our daily lives.

By being indefinite, we keep playing the jack of all trades. We don’t put our eggs in one basket because we don’t believe that the basket will take us there for sure. We learn everything at school in case we want to do different things in life. Could we improve on that?

If we were to instead be laser focused on something and take things through, we might actually be able to carve our own future better. Most of us just wait for someone else (a company or a customer) to determine out next step. The result is we become reactive and lose the initiative to really push ourselves.

Spreading the risks will likely yield a meager but positive result. It is called playing safe. Doubling down on what we truly believe in – that’s what makes the difference.