I recently finished reading Grit by Angela Duckworth, and it is easily one of the best books I’ve read recently.

The biggest takeaway for me was that it is this thing called grit, and not talent that determines our success in life, and I loved this equation from the book that explains what this is all about:

 

Chess analogies come easy to me so I’ll take one to explain the equation. About an year or so ago I saw this video embedded below where Danny Rensch puts a blindfold on and tells you what color a square on the board is, and moves the knight from one square to another in his head. Here’s the video below for all of you to understand what I’m talking about. Just watch it for a minute or so even if you are not into Chess to get a sense of what I’m talking about.

When I first saw this I thought well this is impossible for most people. That’s what I really thought – it seemed like some sort of a magic trick.

But then I thought I can at least memorize the co-ordinates and colors because that seems a little more doable, and I’ve in fact blogged about my CAGE even is white method that I came up with to do this and I found that not only was it doable it wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it to be.

So, if you think back to the first part of the equation there’s certain innate talent that you have for anything which was vizualization in this case, and you take that talent and multiply it with effort, and build a skill. Now in tournaments I see many 10 year olds who probably took a tenth of the time I took to learn the color of every square, but it doesn’t matter because you put more effort into it, and achieve the same skill level.

So, that’s the first part of the equation and my analogy. The second part is that the skill is a means to an end, so in my case I wanted to improve this visualization skill to improve my chess results. So, now you have this skill and you further multiply it with effort which is playing tournament games and applying this skill to get to achievement.

When I look at it this way – the equation makes total sense to me!

To take a business analogy – I am sure a lot of you have heard about the feedback sandwich where you provide feedback in the following manner:

1. Positive
2. Constructive
3. Positive

Now I’ve known this method for more than 15 years but knowing is not doing, so in a way it takes very little talent to understand this skill, but it takes effort to practice and internalize it, and then when you use it over and over again it becomes second nature, and your achievement would be to become someone who’s good to providing constructive feedback to their colleagues.

So, while reading this book I made a note that I’ll be deliberate about providing feedback in this manner, and I’ve found that it has greatly helped internalize it because I looked at it in the form of this equation.

The idea above was the one that most resonated with me from this book, but there were several other things that I came across that I had read before that helped form a more integrated view of them in my mind. For example – Angela Duckworth mentions Martin Seligman early on in the book, and I do highly recommend Learned Optimism to anyone interested in positive psychology, and Tal Ben Shahar’s book (my review here) and lectures are a further resource on this as well.

Another interesting idea she mentions is Amy W’s job crafting which I came across earlier this year while reading either Prof. Ben Shahar or Shawn Achor and here’s a very nice video where she explains her idea.

All in all I really loved this book not only for its own idea but also for how it weaves together other ideas in the area of positive psychology and paints a comprehensive picture for you.

I picked up Tal Ben – Shahar’s Happier after finishing reading Shawn Achor’s The Happier Advantage and I really enjoyed this book as well. In my mind, these two books complement each other well, and you should read them both, but the order perhaps doesn’t matter as much.

Positive psychology is a relatively new field, and in the past I’ve also read Martin Seligman’s works, and I feel everyone should familiarize themselves with positive psychology because of course happiness is relevant to everyone, and it is not something we generally think about in our day to day lives.

The name Happier signifies that when you are thinking about happiness you should think of it is as something in a continuum, and not something that can be achieved and be done with.

At the beginning of the book Tal Ben – Shahar draws out a quadrant of four different types of people – the rat racer – someone who thinks that if he gets this job then he will be happy, or if he buys that house then he’ll be happy. Essentially a person who thinks achieving something in the future will make him happier at that time. Then there is the hedonist who’s maximizing pleasure today, the nihilist who has somewhat given up on life, and the truly happy person who is doing something that makes him happy in the moment, and will add to his happiness in the future as well.

Personally, I relate very closely to the rat – racer in all honesty, and this is something I have to work on, and learn to live in the moment, find things that make me happy in the present, have meaning for me, and as a result are fulfilling to me, and also will lead me to have a happier future.

The book goes quite deep into how you can find such things for yourself, and I highly recommend the exercises mentioned there.

The other concept that resonated quite well with me was the concept that for most people they can look at their work in three different ways  – as a job, a career or a calling. A job is something that you do just to earn money today, a career is when you look at it as a slightly longer term thing in terms of progression, money, titles etc. and there again the motivation is extrinsic. Finally, there’s the calling where you are doing something because of internal motivation, and because you truly love doing it. Here again, I’m at the stage where my work is a career, and I must work towards making it a calling.

All in all, I really loved this book, and I highly recommend that you read or at least familiarize with the ideas of positive psychology.

 

What better book to read during a pandemic than one written on the worst pandemic in human history. The Great Mortality is a fascinating history of the bubonic plague that devastated Europe and Asia in the 14th century. Black Death killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe, or about one third of the entire population!

Our modern mind can probably not even comprehend death and misery at this scale, and our current pandemic seems like a walk in the park compared to the Black Death. The book itself deals with this grim subject in a very interesting manner. It lays the foundation by talking about the causes of the plague, its origin, and then traces the plague as it moves from one European city to another.

The author has relied on historical accounts as well as personal diaries, and as a result some passages in the book are deeply moving, and saddening.

The book also tells you a little about life in the Middle Ages in Europe, and you learn about how Astrology was still a prominent part of medicine at the time, and most sailing was sailing from one port to another, not open sea sailing (which is probably how the plague spread).

My favorite parts in the book were those that touched on human nature especially because you can see how nothing has changed in seven hundred years.

For instance, you can see a desperate attempt by some people to give a racist overtone to the current pandemic, and during the Black Death there was strong anti-semitism on display, and large swathes of people blamed Jews for the disease. Mass execution of Jews became common in a lot of countries, and a lot of Jews were persecuted because people convinced themselves that Jews had poisoned wells, and were responsible for deaths.

Another crazy thing is how the demand for notaries increased during this time. A large number of deaths meant that people needed to write their wills, and the orderly transfer of property from the living to the dead became very important, and therefore notaries became high in demand.

Voltaire said that History never repeats itself. Man does. Reading this book made me feel that I understood what he meant for the first time.

Personally, I loved this book, but I do realize it is not for everyone. It is a grim subject in grim times, but what I did like was that it provided perspective, and informed me on how good things are even when they are really bad.