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When you are at the beginning of your career, you really work hard and for all that effort the “real value” that you add may not be that significant.

This may not be a problem as people know that you are just “starting.”

As you learn and become better at your job, it takes less effort to “do” your job and you can start creating more value with less effort. In other words you start becoming “efficient.”

Yes, when you start getting comfortable with your job you may get bored and get another job. That’s a possibility. However, in the new job, you are “new” so again it takes a bit of effort to create value demanded by the job.

In an ideal scenario, as your career progresses, the effort required to deliver value should keep dropping or the value delivered for the same effort should keep going up.

However, there is a small catch.

With your experience, the expectation of the value that you will create is also going up. Unless you build enough “power”, you will very soon notice that you have to work “extra hard” to match the expectations of the job. Nobody will be happy if you created the value that is created by a novice when you have are a veteran. It won’t even be called an accomplishment.

The more knowledge you acquire, the more you realize that you need to acquire more knowledge. However, without leverage (higher output for lower input) there is no time for you to acquire the knowledge. So for the benefit of your organization and for your own benefit, you need to watch the effort-value curve.

So the big questions are:

1. Where are you today on this curve?

2. What can you do to move to a better place on this curve?

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Note 1: For links to the other 192 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself (PDF, Free)

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 6, 2008. This is a photographic manifesto featuring 15 of my mini sagas (stories in exactly 50 words). Here is the link:

ChangeThis Manifesto: Mini Sagas - Bite Sized Lessons for Life and Business (PDF, Free)

I mean really really get in their shoes. Well, not literally!

Get In Their Shoes

At a basic level, getting into someone’s shoes is to think “how the other person may be thinking.” If you really want to get into their shoes, you need to find out the “worldview” of the person. What is their outlook and approach to life? Then we come down to the specifics of how they might be thinking about this particular topic in discussion.

I was exposed to this early in my life (sort of accidentally) although I didn’t know the terminology at that time. I was in my tenth year of school and it was a statewide exam and I was competing with 400,000 other students. It was a lot of hard work and I was happy that I was ranked 20th for the state.

While it was delightful, I always felt that there must be a better way to this. You study the whole year and you get graded based on a paper that write in less than three hours. There must be a better way and I thought I need to figure this out before the next public exam two years later.

So it started when I asked one of my teachers what was his approach when he was on of the examiners grading the papers. It was wonderful to get his perspective on “what he thought was important.” I followed up with the “why” question and also got his perspective on “why he thought something was important.”

Obviously there was a gap between “what I thought was important” and “what the examiner thought was important”. This baffled me at first and then my quest continued. I would keep asking every teacher about his or her perspective on what “really matters” when they look at a paper to grade. Remember that they have six minutes to grade a paper and usually students write about 40-50 pages in the three hours. So there is no way anyone can read everything. If “what matters” to the examiner is not there in the paper, chances that the paper gets a better grade are slim.

Now, the ultimate test is to see whether what I did worked. The results show that. I secured 2nd Rank for the state (out of 160,000 students). It was definitely not because I was smarter than 158,998 of them. I think I spent a bit more time trying to “get in the shoes” of the examiner. What really convinced me was that I didn’t work as hard as I had to for my earlier public exam.

I admit that I don’t try my best to apply this lesson in everything I do. But whenever I have put in an effort in this direction, the payback has been pretty good.

Have a wonderful weekend.

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Note 1: For links to the other 191 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself (PDF, Free)

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 6, 2008. This is a photographic manifesto featuring 15 of my mini sagas (stories in exactly 50 words). Here is the link:

ChangeThis Manifesto: Mini Sagas - Bite Sized Lessons for Life and Business (PDF, Free)

Come to think of it, saying “Thank You” just once more in a day in your life costs you almost NOTHING. However, for the recipient of that thank you, it is invaluable.

Imagine when someone genuinely thanks you for something - isn’t that a good feeling? Does it not feel like they handed out a gift to you despite the fact that to give the gift it costs them almost NOTHING?

We all know that long after we are gone, people remember us by how we made them feel and not what we give them.

A genuine “Thank You” is powerful. It can make someone’s day.

We can only watch people’s actions. What goes on their minds and what is going on in their life, we don’t know.

A “Thank You” might just do one or more of the following:

* make their day a little bit better than what it is now

* enhance their self-esteem

* provide them with a boost of energy

* make them feel good about themselves

* feel energized

I can go on with the list but in summary, a genuine “Thank You” can only have a positive effect on the recipient.

Go ahead and give that gift. Just one more time in a day and you will make someone’s day.

==========

Note 1: For links to the other 190 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 6, 2008. Here is the link:

ChangeThis Manifesto: Mini Sagas - Bite Sized Wisdom for Life and Business

My teacher told me that moods are the most under-rated characteristics. I agree.

Typically people set themselves a big hurdle to be in a great mood. They need only one small thing to go wrong to get into a rotten mood.

Recently I was talking to a close friend who told me that he was in a bad mood because one of his employees slipped on something. The fact that this happened sometime during the day and he was discussing this late in the evening, I know for sure that he must have played this song over and over and over in his mind and suffered a bit.

After a few minutes of discussion, of course, he realized that being in a bad mood has ZERO positive effect on anyone. It is basically squandering your precious resources - time and energy. Those that could have been easily deployed on other productive tasks.

I am not saying that all of us should become saints and be immune to any mood swings. Even those that think logically will see that alternative to being in a good mood is always costly.

Fine, something got messed up. Agreed. It’s a bad thing. But how will it really help to get into a rotten mood and punish yourself for that? You are already at a loss because something bad happened. Why do you want to get into a deeper loss by losing your cool?

I know what you must be thinking - “It’s easy to say. But hard to put into practice”. And, I will say - “You bet!”

Have a great Tuesday!

==========

Note 1: For links to the other 189 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 6, 2008. Here is the link:

ChangeThis Manifesto: Mini Sagas - Bite Sized Wisdom for Life and Business

Think about any reasonably successful person and you will see that his or her career path will be plastered with a series of successes and failures. While the media and the outside world may only paint a picture of what his or her successes are, the person will know clearly how the career was a roller coaster ride - up, down, up, up, down and up and so on.

When you plot this typical graph, you will see spikes on both sides of baseline.

However, you can make a difference by consciously working on disproportionately shifting the baseline to your advantage. In simple terms, you can do it by disproportionately investing in yourself over a long-period of time. The components that can disproportionately shift the baseline to your advantage are different for different people. For me (I think) these components are:

* A strong personal brand

* Solid long-term relationships

* High Leverage Thinking

* Access to powerful mentors and teachers

* Continuos learning

* Strong spiritual foundation

Baseline in my definition is the powerbase that a person requires to have to make a  valuable contribution to the marketplace with the current reality. Every year, the person’s capacity increases - shifting the baseline. For example, experience will shift the baseline to the next level - it has to. There is (generally) a difference between what a person with one year experience can produce as compared to what a person with two years of experience can produce. The graph below factors in the “standard shift” in the baseline for a typical person. This means that year over year if you increase your capacity that you are expected to increase anyway, the graph does not show any change in the baseline. That is what is expected of you from the marketplace - so there is no special consideration.

And a few others that are personal to me. I will aggressively disproportionately invest my time, energy, money and other resources in all of the above

For you, they may be different. You and your mentors and teachers can figure out what those are for you and start investing heavily in developing them.

As the baseline shifts, your swing to success and failures won’t matter much as they are operating out of the new baseline that you have created for your own case.

As your baseline deviates from the standard baseline in the marketplace, you start gaining competitive advantage that is hard to beat easily.

Any model that results from careful long-term investment and growth strategy will always have an advantage over the models created based on “short-term” and “fly by night” strategies.

All the best and have a great weekend.

============

Note 1: For links to the other 188 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

If you want to be an amateur graffiti creator, you don’t require a lot of skills. You can pretty much get away with anything. Of course, there are professionals here too. I am not talking about those 1% of the people - 99% of the people that engage in graffiti are doing this for a purpose that is not noble.

Photo Courtesy: Sean Hawkey (via Flickr)

Now, the question is do you engage in graffiti?

If you go to a blog and make a comment that is not relevant to the conversation, you are engaging in graffiti

If you write a review for a book on Amazon and not say anything of material value, you are engaging in graffiti

If you join a conversation and talk nonsense, you are engaging in graffiti

If you join a discussion group and engage in a fight with others for no reason, you are engaging in graffiti

Just graffiti and spray painters cause a lot of harm to the owners to the building, engaging in introducing noise anywhere will cause a lot of harm to others who are engaged in that community, website, blog or company.

============

Note 1: For links to the other 187 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Today it is ranked #40. I am overwhelmed by the support for this. Thank you. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

Distinguishing oneself is not easy for anyone and it is not a one-time thing. If you are distinguishing yourself by the kind of expertise you have and if that expertise is in demand, soon others will follow suit and commoditize. If you are distinguishing yourself by writing a book and the theme of the book is gaining traction, soon others will follow suit and there will be many books on the same topic.

Distinguishing yourself is a lifetime project and as you succeed in this project, the standards for continued success get higher. That is part of the deal. You just have to get used to it.
Whatever it is that you are offering to the world, if it is unique enough the marketplace won’t know that such an offer exists. In fact, let your offer better be unique otherwise you will be in a rat race right out of the gate. Since your offer is unique and the marketplace does not know that such an offer exists, it is your responsibility to raise awareness of the need for an offer such as the one you are offering.

In other words, you make a bold promise and have enough accomplishments to prove that you have the structure to fulfill that promise. That is the first step. In parallel, you engage in activities that will help the marketplace see that there is a need for listening to your promise.

Yesterday I was at North Carolina and while coming back, I picked up the airline magazine. I found an advertisement from Charlotte-Douglas International Airport (actually there were many advertisements from the airport) that talked about their Business Valet and Curbside Valet parking services. This is not available in all the airports. Charlotte-Douglas knows that and wants to ensure that “we know” that such a service exists. So when there is a need, it is in our awareness that we can use their valet service.

That was a simple example. You can extend this to yourself by asking the question:

What activities should I be engaged in to increase the awareness for the need for my offers to the marketplace?

All the best!

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Note 1: For links to the other 186 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Today it is ranked #40. I am overwhelmed by the support for this. Thank you. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

Yesterday I was speaking a conference and one of the topics I was going to address was “Networking”.

During the informal get-together, several people approached me and exchanged cards. Three of them though gave their card and quickly explained what they do and ran away to give their cards to someone else. They didn’t seem to be really interested in who I was or whether I was interested in receiving their cards.

“Pushworking” is a term I coined for the practice of simply pushing your way to announce something whether the other person is interested or not.

Too many people engage in the art of pushworking while assuming that they are engaged in networking. If you are one of them, you lose twice. First, you won’t really get the benefit of networking and second, you may leave an impression with the other person that you are not someone that should take seriously.

The metric for networking is not the quantity of cards that you collect or give out but the assessments you create in other people that “you can be a positive possibility in their futures”

Stop Pushworking and Start Networking!

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Note 1: For links to the other 185 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Today it is ranked #41. I am overwhelmed by the support for this. Thank you. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

This concept is courtesy of my insightful friend Ravi Char of Musings on Information Security. Thank you Ravi.

There is a saying “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression“. While this still holds good, I think time has come to update the saying to one or more of the following:

1. Without a good zeroth impression, you may not even get a chance to make a first impression

2. A stellar first impression rescue you from a stupid zeroth impression

So what is a zeroth impression?

Zeroth Impression is an assessment people can make of you without even talking to you. How can they do that? Simply by researching and listening to the gossip on and off the web. To start with, one can simply search on your name on one or more of the following:
1. Google
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Technorati
5. Google Blogsearch
6. Squidoo

and find out “what you said” or “what has been said about you” (especially from people that the reader trusts) in the past. Combine this with what people are saying about you offline, one can make a reasonable assessment about “who you are” and that is your Zeroth Impression.

Whether you want it or not, you now have a responsibility to pay attention to your Zeroth impression. If you are doing bad in this department, you may already by losing opportunities to make your first impression. If you do get lucky and make a first impression, remember that people are already watching you with a lens that has been formed based on your Zeroth Impression.

Cut it whatever way you like - you don’t have a choice but to pay attention to your Zeroth Impression.

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Note 1: For links to the other 184 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Today it is ranked #44. I am overwhelmed by the support for this. Thank you. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

Last week I was talking to a potential investor about a potential opportunity to invest. After the first sentence, the investor said “Raj, I don’t need to hear more about it. That space is not interesting for us.”

We talked about other companies and one of the companies was of deep interest and we ended up talking for at least half an hour on that one company.

Because of the long-term relationship we had developed, this person was interested in hearing about more than one idea. Fortunately, the idea number 4 made its way through to him.

Of course, this is not common. If I didn’t have a prior relationship with this person, there was no way I could have pitched him several ideas. In real life, most of the time, we get one chance to get our idea across. That idea has to pass through that recipient’s “filter” of what he thinks is a good idea. If it does not, then chances are that you are wasting your time.

In the above example, it was clear to me that I had not done my home work. If I had done my home work, I would not have discussed the first three ideas with him. Discussing those three ideas was clearly a waste of his time and my time too.

In this fast moving world, people don’t have a lot of time to listen to things that are not relevant to them. So they put up filters to avoid more input. What may be gold for you may be junk for them. This may mean that they may not get to hear some “really good” ideas but that’s a price they are willing to pay for the convenience.

Really, what they are missing (”really cool ideas”) should not be your problem. Your objective is to get across your ideas. Understanding the recipient’s filters is a key step in helping you achieve this objective.

How can you understand the other person’s filter?

For starters, you can do one or more of the following:

* reading their blog
* talking to people that know this person
* reading his or her bio
* asking the person directly

or simply speaking
* investing time in learning about the other person’s interests from any credible source.

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Note 1: For the other 183 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Today it is ranked #55. I am overwhelmed by the support for this. Thank you. For those who have read it, I request you to forward the link to others who may benefit from it. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists

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