Rule # 7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Image Credit: Hu-Chen on Unsplash
Summary of the rule
We know that suffering is a big part of life, if not the only thing. Regardless of your level of success or fame, the suffering will attend to you.
If suffering in life is inevitable, then what should be one’s strategy to deal with this reality?
Is it the mindless pursuit of pleasure following your whims? Is it lying, cheating, deceiving, and manipulating as long as you are not caught? Is it doing things that give you pleasure now, however fleeting may the pleasure be? After all, compared to the inevitable suffering, a moment’s pleasure may seem quite substantial. Is this the only way to live, or is there another way?
Humans who lived a long time ago, almost at the dawn of intelligence, had developed some sophisticated answers to these questions. They observed things they were doing and embedded their understanding within stories. Some of our spiritual and religious texts may represent such stories, which may have resulted in certain rituals and myths. Modern humans perhaps lack enough understanding to decipher them completely.
One of the running themes in these stories is averting of a deity’s wrath by sacrificing something important or dear at its altar with the premise that “something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present.” Sacrifice.
The concept of Sacrifice is similar to the idea of Work. Both thoughts are unique to humans. Animals neither Work nor Sacrifice, but follow the dictates of their nature. Both Sacrifice and Work is a delay of gratification in the sense that something is done today in an attempt to improve the quality of tomorrow.
Sharing in another related concept. Sharing one’s surplus resources with your neighbors gives you a chance that they may reciprocate in the future. Saving something for tomorrow is sharing with your future self. What you save or share, you may have tomorrow.
These concepts of Sacrifice, Sharing, and Work extended into a social contract, creating organizations that reliably stored the Work of today, for future redemption, mostly in forms of promise. It has led to the evolution of the currency, banking, and other social institutions.
One important question is, “What should be sacrificed?” Imagine giving up a college student party animal life to the necessary discipline of medical school. By sacrificing the student life of partying, a doctor can provide for his family that is a lot to gain over a long period. Hence it can be said that sacrifices are necessary to improve the future, and more considerable sacrifices may be required to improve it to a greater extent.
But one may ask, where is the limit of the principle “sacrifice will improve the future”? What would be the largest of all possible sacrifices to achieve the best possible future? The answer to this is unfortunately not so straight forward and for good reasons. There is no guarantee that significant sacrifices will be rewarded with a better future.
It could be due to several reasons like the structure or instability of the society, or sometimes it could be the faulty template of your values. We must discover and work with our inherent nature, our value system. We must sometimes let a part of us die so that we can evolve and continue. In that sense, the ultimate Sacrifice is to let go of a part of our self.
“We can let our ideas die in our stead”
Karl Popper
Expedience is selfishly focusing on our short-term gains and transferring the Work to some-one else or even to your future self. Expedience is immature and irresponsible.
Meaning is its mature replacement. It emerges when diligence triumphs the impulses. It is the balance between the chaos of transformation and discipline of order.
Relevance for Entrepreneurs and Startups
It is easier said than done. Often that which is meaningful lies behind an unsurmountable mountain, and that which is expedient, well as the word suggests, is expedient.
In an action biased world, sometimes it is easy to get sucked into a whirl of activity, one thing follows the other, the other another and before you know a year has gone by. The choice to do something meaningful is a conscious one, whereas the decision to do the expedient is an inadvertent one. It makes it that much harder.
Before you could decipher what is meaningful, there needs to exist an explicit charter, values, morals, and ethics. Otherwise, each decision will bring uncertainty, the beginning of failure. Many great companies with visionary leadership have stumbled when they lost sight of who they were.
Back in 2012, the newly appointed Nokia CEO Stephen Elop gave a speech to his employees in which he compared their company with a man standing on a burning platform of a mid-ocean oil rig, having to choose between two, ultimately hard choices. Either burn alive on the platform or jump in the icy water where the chances survival seemed bleak.
“While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.”
“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications, and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem.”
Stephen Elop
Had Nokia simply lost sight of what was meaningful and perused what was expedient. Had they fallen complacent in their handset way of thinking and the most expedient was to churn out more handsets, whereas the world order had shifted its focus on the ecosystem. Looking back, it seems obvious, but imagine if you are a world leader in your domain because of one product that has brought you glory so far. How many of you will choose to abandon the product in favor of something experimental?
In my startup, in retrospect (hindsight 20/20!), there have been so many activities that we should have eliminated as they simply did not lend themselves to the meaning we were trying to create through our company. We should have stuck to our core principles, ethics, value system, and when we did not, we had to bear the brunt of it.
We wanted to create a brand for the masses, delivering a premium customer experience through an innovative delivery mechanism. The product was milk-based beverages sold at low prices on refrigerated street carts. We wanted to offer a better overall consumer experience to our customers when compared to our more premium competitors. It was central to our thinking.
The commission workers who operated the carts were either first timer with a cart or a first-timer with a job. The excitement to be a “small businessman” attracted a lot of young folks who saw running our cart as a way to becoming financially independent. And we never had problems of getting people, but needless to say that they were untrained. It was hurting our consumer experience.
To be fair, it was not that we threw these workers directly onto the marketplace to fend for themselves. As a matter of training, we had them accompany the sales leaders for a period so that they can observe firsthand how to operate. We also spent time with each one of them so that they get a sense of the organization and ethos. But, it proved to be insufficient.
When our per cart turnover started taking a hit, we started slicing and dicing the sale data that we had accumulated so far. We also started a campaign to get the customer feedback on their experiences buying at our cart. We noticed that workers who consistently performed better than others were the same as those getting positive consumer feedback. On the other end of the spectrum, some workers did rather poorly, regardless of being in a great sales location. The numbers of the second category were much higher, of course. We attributed it to the lack of training.
However, since this was an entry-level position, people came and went pretty much every week. It left little room to organize training, team building sessions, or anything else as that would have been a herculean task. By doing nothing, we were inadvertently choosing the easier option of replacing the leaving workers with the workers who wanted to get in.
It was quick, easy, and expedient just to replace the people who were leaving. It was hard but meaningful to create a training program so that the average workers would have a better chance of earning better commissions. In turn, we would be able to address the shortfalls of the consumer experience.
When we first realized that the sales were receding on a per cart basis, we expanded to more regions, to newer franchises, without solving the training, development, and consumer experience problems. Soon the sales were declining per cart basis in the new location as well. It was worrying and had to be addressed.
We decided we could not duck the responsibility of developing a comprehensive training & team building program so that we can continuously keep the workforce engaged and committed. We organized weekly pre-work pep sessions, and weekly end-of-day debriefing, where we talked, laughed, tasted the goods.
It was a time-consuming process as the operational fires were as demanding of our attention as the sound of a screaming banshee. It seemed more natural to keep getting new people, but we decided to push through with our initiatives. We tried many things, incentives, programs, and slowly we started to see a slow turnaround, a minor uptick. That was good enough for us to know that we were finally doing things that meant something.
Pursue what is meaningful and not what is expedient.
