Great Coaches for Development of Kids - Winning and Succeeding by trying your best

My son just finished his first year of pee wee tackle football where he was the amongst the smallest and youngest players on the team.  It was kind of scary seeing him go out in first practice with kids that were 20 lbs heavier, 6-8 inches taller and 2 years older, but he persevered and enjoyed the practices and games.  Here is a video where coaches were giving out awards at end of season.

Some parents are a little obsessed with winning and being competitive.  We’ve all seen what happens when the parents get out of hand being hyper competitive.

One of these days I hope to get my kids to absorb more life lessons like John Wooden articulates so well in this Ted Talk.

Some excellent points made.

Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. Never cease trying to be the best you can be -- that's under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control.Then I ran across this simple verse that said, "At God's footstool to confess, a poor soul knelt, and bowed his head. 'I failed!' He cried. The Master said, 'Thou didst thy best, that is success.'"

3:01From those things, and one other perhaps, I coined my own definition of success, which is: peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. I believe that's true. If you make the effort to do the best of which you're capable, to try and improve the situation that exists for you, I think that's success. And I don't think others can judge that.

Are you in an incompatible relationship with your Boss, fixed vs growth mindsets

I’ve enjoyed reading Carol Dweck’s works on mindsets and found this article that explains the fixed vs. growth mindset.  This graphic illustrates the difference in mindsets.

(courtesy of Brain Pickings), we see the the main differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset:

I read the section on relationships and substituted the idea of mate for employee.

 People harboring a fixed mindset held on to the belief that their ideal employee would set them on a pedestal and make them feel perfect.

Do you have a boss like the above?  Or is your boss like this?

those possessing a growth mindset would opt for an employee that would point out their flaws and help them improve as a person.

The mistake I have made is having worked for growth bosses for so long and not realizing when I was working for a fixed mindset boss who all the cared about was being put on a pedestal and make them feel perfect.  That’s why the brown noses and ass kissers were getting rewarded.  Now I get it.  It’s those bosses were fixed mindsets.

The problem is in IT and data centers I think there are many more people who are fixed mindset than growth.  Do you see this battle going on in your organization?

For people with a growth mindset, personal success occurs when they work as hard as they can to be their best, whereas for those with a fixed mindset, success is all about building their superiority over others. For the former, setbacks are motivating and informative input they can use to become better. For the latter, they’re a label and a sentence.

Salman Khan writes on Embracing the Difficulty of Learning, Grow and Share

In a performance oriented society the behavior enforced is people saying how smart they are.  How they are smarter than the rest so they should get promoted and they should get the pay raises.  Those who struggle with difficult tasks are the under performers who should not be praised or rewarded, and the worse should be managed out of the company.  If you struggle to learn, then you are not smart. Wrong.

Salman Khan writes a post based on his experience with his son struggling to learn.  One insight is Salman’s reference to Carol Dweck’s work.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

Fixed mindsets all to often fit a performance oriented approach with set metrics of how people should perform.  Inability to meet performance targets are inexcusable and will be punished.  Can you imagine if Salman used that approach with his son?

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Salman closes with the importance of being aware of the growth mindset and share the concept.

And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth­-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (­­for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right­­) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.

Flaw of Customer Research, customers inability to describe what they want when the don't know

A friend sent me this post by I, Cringely on creating solutions, Age of Supply, not Demand

Here are a few nuggets.

“Demand drove supply in the industrial age,” said Aurel. “You needed more steel to build cars so a new steel mill was built. But today it seems to me that supply is actually driving demand.”

...

“You can’t rely on customers to tell you what to build,” said Aurel. “They don’t know.”

Some people think that money is what is needed to build innovation.  One example is Google going cheap vs. Excite being Sun Servers.

We see this effect over and over. Look at cloud computing, for example. It’s easy to argue that the genesis of cloud was Google’s desire to build its own hardware. Google was nailing motherboards to walls at the same time Excite (Google’s main search competitor at the time) was spending millions on Sun computers in a sleek data center. Google’s direction turned out to be the right one but that wasn’t immediately evident and might well have never happened had not Larry and Sergey been so cheap.

The whole idea of market research is turned on its head now a days.  In the past, companies would spend millions on customer research, and what are you building?  The next instagram.  What customer survey would tell you to build instagram?

Confusing Abstract and Concrete makes it hard to figure out things

I had conversation with a mechanical engineer from the East Coast who worked for years on buildings.  I am an industrial engineer from the West Coast who worked for years on software.  We were chatting about some things I am working on and he was providing feedback.  The conversation was good in that it got me thinking about how different people will look at the same situation, identify different problems, and then take different actions.

This took me down the path of thinking of Abstract vs. Concrete.

The abstract/concrete distinction has a curious status in contemporary philosophy. It is widely agreed that the distinction is of fundamental importance. And yet there is no standard account of how it should be drawn.

Reflecting I can think of so many conversations that confused people because i was explaining abstract ideas and the listener was hearing concrete things.  Part of working on software is you get used to working in abstract, and then shift phases to the concrete when need be.  Part of the challenge of user interfaces is some users favor abstraction others favor concretism.

Going back to the conversation I realized that the user interface we created favors a concretism user, the use of the system by analyst, managers, engineers, and others who consume the data are people who can think in the abstract and understand the value of concrete.

Ironically part of what we were discussing is the process tracking in the pouring of concrete.  Now, I am more confused.  The abstraction of processes to pour concrete vs. the concretism of the concrete pour.