Why I returned by iPad

Why I Returned My iPad

via HBR.org by Peter Bregman on 6/15/10

 

A little more than a week after buying the iPad, I returned it to Apple. The problem wasn't the iPad exactly, though it has some flaws. The problem was me.

I like technology, but I'm not an early adopter. I waited for the second-generation iPod, the second-generation iPhone, and the second-generation MacBook Air.

But the iPad was different. So sleek. So cool. So transformational. And, I figured, since it's so similar to the iPhone, most of the kinks would already be worked out.

So at 4 PM on the day the 3G iPad was released, for the first time in my life, I waited in line for two hours to make a purchase.

I set up my iPad in the store because I wanted to make sure I could start using it the very moment I bought it. And use it I did. I carried it with me everywhere; it's so small and thin and light, why not bring it along?

I did my email on it, of course. But I also wrote articles using Pages. I watched episodes ofWeeds on Netflix. I checked the news, the weather, and the traffic. And, of course, I proudly showed it to, well, anyone who indicated the least bit of interest. (That could be a whole post in itself. We proudly show off new purchases as though simply possessing them is some form of accomplishment. Why? I didn't create the iPad. I just bought one.)

It didn't take long for me to encounter the dark side of this revolutionary device: it's too good.

It's too easy. Too accessible. Both too fast and too long-lasting. Certainly there are some kinks, but nothing monumental. For the most part, it does everything I could want. Which, as it turns out, is a problem.

Sure I might want to watch an episode of Weeds before going to sleep. But should I? It really is hard to stop after just one episode. And two hours later, I'm entertained and tired, but am I really better off? Or would it have been better to get seven hours of sleep instead of five?

The brilliance of the iPad is that it's the anytime-anywhere computer. On the subway. In the hall waiting for the elevator. In a car on the way to the airport. Any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.

The iPhone can do roughly the same thing, but not exactly. Who wants to watch a movie in bed on an iPhone?

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming.

But something — more than just sleep, though that's critical too — is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.

Boredom.

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that's where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They're the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

To lose those moments, to replace them with tasks and efficiency, is a mistake. What's worse is that we don't just lose them. We actively throw them away.

"That's not a problem with the iPad," my brother Anthony — who I feel compelled to mention is currently producing a movie called My Idiot Brother — pointed out. "It's a problem with you. Just don't use it as much."

Guilty as charged. It is a problem with me. I can't not use it if it's there. And, unfortunately, it's always there. So I returned it. Problem solved.

But it did teach me something about the value of boredom. And I'm far more conscious now of using those extra moments, the in-between time, the walking and riding and waiting time, to let my mind wander.

Around the same time I returned my iPad, I noticed that my eight-year-old daughter Isabelle was unbelievably busy from the moment she got home from school to the moment she went to bed. Bathing, reading, playing guitar, eating dinner, doing homework, she was non-stop until I rushed her off to bed. Once in bed she would try to talk to me but, worried about how little sleep she was getting, I would shush her, urging her to go to sleep.

We have a new ritual now, and it really has become my favorite part of the day. I put her to bed 15 minutes earlier than before. She crawls into bed and, instead of shushing her, I lie next to her and we just talk. She talks about things that happened that day, things she's worried about, things she's curious or thinking about. I listen and ask her questions. We laugh together. And our minds just wander.

Naseeruddin and his son

Last month , I was in Delhi . My nephew ( 6 years old ) visited me . He bought one story book which he asked me to read for him ... 

I picked one of Naseeruddin story believing that it would have some jokes .. But it turn another but interesting way ..... Jotting down the story in brief

 Once , Naseeruddin and his son were passing through a city with their donkey. Naseeruddin was walking  , while his son sat on the donkey . As they passed by a group of people, on of  them  said "Look, how selfish this boy is!  He is riding on the donkey, while  his poor father is walking."

 The boy felt  embarrassed
 and the two reversed the arrangement.  Now the people  remarked, " What a cruel father he is! The little boy is walking and he is riding on the donkey."

Soon, they came across another group of people . Again , they heard a remark , "What a cruel father he is ! His Little boy is walking and he is riding on the donkey "

The remark upset Naseeruddin . He decided that both of t hem would ride on the donkey . Soon , the donkey started walking with both the father and the son on his back .

As they both rode , they passed by another group of people . One of them said , " Look at them , how cruel they are ! Both of them are riding on the donkey."

Hearing this , Naseeruddin suggested his son both of them should walk . The child agreed , and the three started walking.

Soon , they came across another group of people , and heard the remark , : look at these fools . Both of them are walking and neither is riding on the donkey."

Hearing this , Naseeruddin advised his son not to listen to people and follow his heart to do the right thing . Thereafter , the father and the son never bothered what the people said , and did what they felt right. 

Tips for Advancing your career

Author ::  Wael Bahaa-El-Din 

You own your career and have the best interest in being successful.  Everyone should be the primary force behind planning their own career and putting enough thought towards reaching their goals.  Your managers can and should help and guide you in planning but they cannot be responsible for it.

Six areas that will help advance and plan your career are:

1.       Creating the Vision and Establishing Long-Term Goals

2.       Planning and Execution

3.       Your Skill Set

4.       Attitude and Character at the Workplace

5.       Selecting Your Assignments

6.       The Importance of Your Environment

 Here are some thoughts on each one of these areas:

Creating a Vision and Establishing Long-term Goals

Developing a vision for yourself will help you determine a clear destination and direction. A Personal Vision will also assist you in avoiding detours from your overall career goals which will get you to your destination faster.  It will help you make decisions about projects, jobs, and skills that will assist you in achieving your goals.  Here are tips to help with the long-term planning and the achievement of your goals:

·         Set Goals Aligned to Your Division - Seek to understand the hard customer or engineering issues facing your Division and align your goals with solutions to those issues. Addressing things that are of upmost importance to your team and larger group will get more visibility and  advance your career faster.

• Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) - Create a long term goal to develop expertise in a critical area that you are passionate about.  Experts in key areas get the best assignments, enjoy their work more than others, and advance quickly in their careers.
• Be Patient and Work On It! - People become passionate about areas that they understand in great depth.  It takes time to reach this level of depth.  Grow expertise gradually.  Every day counts! Improve your skills, execution of plans, and character (Attitude, Beliefs, and Values) incrementally to reach your goals - selecting the best projects and environment to aid in your growth.
• Monitor Your Progress - Your long-term plan needs short milestones to monitor your success against your goals.
• Enjoy the Journey - It is very rewarding to plan a challenging goal and to reach it.

Planning and Execution

Once you have a vision, a plan, and short-term milestones, you need to passionately drive for results.  The short-term work items in your plan should go beyond the work goals and should include improving your skills.  Solid execution means delivering reliably, creatively, and at very high quality..  Developing your own standard of excellence helps significantly in developing your credibility and reputation.  Here are more tips to help you in planning and execution:

• The Secret Sauce: Enjoy What You Do - in the long-term, execution is not just about hard and creative high-quality work.  To be successful, one needs to:

• Enjoy and be passionate about your work.
• Maintain balance in work, life, family, and other areas competing for time and attention.

• Prioritize and Focus - Always keep a prioritized list of things you need to do and focus on the most important items.
• Plan for all Possible Scenarios - People who do successful planning for a large product or even a small meeting have one thing in common. They can think and visualize the different scenarios that might happen during the execution in great detail (this usually needs going over these scenarios in detail with persistence and patience).
• Deliver - Delivering on your commitments and making things happen is a very enjoyable but difficult process. Many people have great ideas but they can’t get them implemented because of lack of discipline, detailed planning, and/or follow-up. This negatively impacts their careers.
• Have a Reputation for Getting Things Done - This will make it easier for you to get the most important and visible assignments and all the resources to do them.
• Produce High Quality Work – Better than expected quality, product, or results gets attention and sets you up for more challenging assignments in the future.
• Shine Through Challenges - Execution is considered outstanding when it meets a challenging schedule or creatively solves a historically challenging problem.
• Monitor and Continuously Re-Evaluate Your Goals - As part of monitoring execution, it is good to revise your goals periodically to adjust your long-term goals.

Your Skill Set

Advancing your technical, communication, people, and leadership skills is essential to getting interesting assignments and advancing your career.  Some skills can take years to develop.  Therefore, people who put off the improvement of their skills are impacting the type of assignments that are given or can select.  Here are tips about some of the skills you need:

• Technical Skills - Work on advancing your technical skills with every project and assignment (e.g, development, planning, strategy, debugging, testing technologies, performance analysis, customer scenarios, customer requirements, quality, architecture and understanding the ecosystem) to reach your overall goals.  Technical skills about high quality engineering is particularly important -- developing the right products for our customers and building our products in the right way.
• Communication Skills – Sharpen your communication and presentation skills to increase visibility of your ideas and your impact on others.  The most important characteristic for leadership is good communication.
• People Skills – These are essential skills for individual contributors as well as leads.  This includes team-work, listening skills, sensitivity to others, emotional intelligence, social skills, … For managers, people skills include connecting to their teams, recruiting great talents, and developing people over time.
• Leadership skills – These skills are essential for leads and managers.  There are many good books to read in this area, as well as courses offered by the Management Development Group.  A golden rule in leading a team is “Love them and lead them”. Also, you need to have distinguishing technical and/or personality attributes for people to follow you (you can’t depend on authority alone). You also need to be way ahead of your group in thinking of vision, strategy, and direction to lead your group well.
• Training – Make sure you read books and journals and expand your knowledge by attending relevant talks, seminars, courses, and conferences.  Take advantage of the frequent and wide-ranging internal seminars and research presentations as well as external talks (e.g.. webcasts from strong university programs).
• Incremental Progress - Expand your skills and expertise incrementally.  It is amazing to see the difference in skills and progress achieved over several years as a result of the accumulation of persistent small improvements every day.

Attitude and Values at the Workplace

Acquiring the right attitude, values and beliefs will give you energy and commitment to continue being productive. Attitude and beliefs develop as you gain confidence in your abilities and believe in your work.  Here are some tips to improve your attitude and beliefs:                   

• Seek Traits of Successful People - There are excellent books in this area.  Reading will help in pointing out what attitudes you need for success, understand the negative habits that are impacting you and others (so you can get rid of them), and recognizing why people around you are succeeding or failing.  In a way, books will help you understand actions and reactions of yourself and others.  Some important characteristics are passion, responsiveness, energy, discipline, patience, persistence, endurance, cooperation, modesty, expressing gratitude, taking risks, being proactive and appreciation of others. As you understand your strengths, polish them for long term success..
• Practice Makes Perfect - There are so many attitudes and beliefs that are helpful for success and it is not easy to acquire new ones. Only months and often years of persistence and practice can impact your character – but it’s worth it!
• Discover Your Weakness - Some very skilled and experienced people don’t realize their full potential because of weaknesses in their character (no respect/appreciation for others, arrogance, lack of maturity, childish behavior, uncontrolled temper, negative attitude, selfishness, intolerance, insensitivity,. etc).  Realizing one’s weaknesses is the first step towards improving one’s character.  If these people knew the opportunities they miss, they would have planned major changes to their behavior.

Selecting Your Assignments

A great project is the most important method to improve your planning, execution, skills, and character.  Selecting the projects you work on is important in reaching your short and long-term goals and in gaining the confidence and skills to do bigger and more important projects.  If you have great ideas, you might be able to suggest a project to work on based on these ideas.  Realize however, you may not get some exciting projects until you prove you are reliable and have the skills to see a complete project through.   Here are some tips about project selection:

• Be Realistic - Some people fail in their projects because of the gap between what is required by a given project and the skills, character, execution, and planning capabilities they possess.  Therefore, you need to understand your capabilities and be honest with others and yourself about what you can do.
• Evaluate Project Visibility and Importance - You need to determine how visible and important the project is that you are about to work on. Visible and important projects make a greater impact on your career.  Interesting projects that have bad business plans are likely to be cancelled.
• Does This Assignment Help You Grow? - You need to determine how the project will help your skills and your ability to work on interesting future projects.
• Follow Through – Important: If you start a mission, take it to completion.
• Take Ownership - As your experience improves, getting ownership of an important project is essential for progress and success.
• Innovation – You need to have an exciting vision and innovative ideas to energize yourself and your teams.  It is essential for the group’s long-term success.

The Importance of Your Environment

Finally, some comments about the environment that you are working in:

• Right Place, Right Time - It is very important to be in the right team and have supporting management to reach your goals and achieve your maximum potential. You need to select a team that will challenge you, help you learn, and give you opportunities to grow.
• Know What to Avoid - Avoid teams that have political infighting or have severe management problems.  Working in these teams will only waste your time and energy.
• Choose an Encouraging Environment - Appreciation and gratitude expressed from the managers and the team members to each other creates a very healthy and productive environment.
• Communicate With Your Manager - Communicate closely with your manager about your progress, your challenges, your career, your expectations, etc.  This removes any possible misunderstanding about your deliverables.  Frequent one-on-ones are the best method for tracking and revising short-term and long-term milestones and goals.  There should be few surprises at review time.
• Get Your Manager’s Support – Let your manager know what support you need from him/her to reach your goals.

Tell your 3 weakness -- Same old question

I heard this question first time when I was preparing for campus recruitment .. I remember I was so surprised that why other people want to know my weakness  , he should be worried about his own weakness and my skill set  ....... Any how , Lot of people came up with lot of answers where weakness was actually a strength :) .. I also made one answer but no one asked me in any of my interviews .. :)

I got into other part of india for work. On the first day , I was asked to meet Big shot. At the end of meeting  , he asked me "dude tell me ur 3 weakness " and after a gap " Dont give me crap by telling your weakness which are indirect strengths"   .. I had no answer and asked for time  .. He smiled and asked me to come back when I figured out . Both of us never talked on this topic again. But .. I am sure , by now , he must be knowing my weakness more than me ....

Time passes by ... Recently , 2-3 friend  got  interview calls from management institute.  We discussed what should they write  about weakness which are actually strength in their essays . Similarly in interview training , It's being suggested to have some questions ready acting as ice breaker or time filler .. ".... Weakness " fits in those questions' suit.

Issue is ....Could there be something which sounds bad in society but actually could be good for you ... It is quite interesting  .....

Selfishness :  This words fills with the image of greedy and mean person .We all want to be called "Nice guy" and for this we start doing stuff for others at the cost of our own priorities .We say that "Can't say  NO" .. This could be good for sometime but  in a long run this will no work..   We can not keep whole world happy .. If we try then we will certainly landup in disappointment and burdening ourself too much ..We need to setup a boundary some where .

 Self development is a selfish act because you are working on making your life happy . But the thing is that by focusing on helping yourself first you can become stronger and help others in a better way too.

Laziness:  Human is lazy by nature .. This is the reason why there are so many machines / gadgets / new inventions / services in the market .  Being Lazy is good if you focusing your energy on your priorities and dropping low priority stuff . Dropping / Delegating low priority stuff will give your more bandwidth and give relaxation to work more on high priority stuff. Being Lazy may help in discovering  new innovative methods to work thing faster and efficient.

Ruthlessness: Being ruthless , in a bit , could be helpful . You need to take some hard decisions and cut off the stuff which are not in your priorities . Being ruthless will give you time and energy to focus on your topmost priorities . Some of the examples could be skipping some social engagements for your exams / goals or dropping your fav dish  for loosing weight etc . Being Ruthless is not always fun, but you have to be the boss of your life. You have to make the decisions and say NO both to yourself and to others , if necessary.

Any way , Don't answer above three if some one ask your weakness in interview .. You better know why :) . Moreover , Don't make an assumption  that I exhibit all three features :) . I may or may not !

PS : Selfishness becomes real issue when it brings up other emotions like jealousy and envy .  Ruthlessness is hard but one should avoid hurting other people dreams and heart for the sake of being a ruthless person :) . One should have valid reasons for being selfish and ruthless for an act..

Top 50 CEO

HBR just released Top 50 CEO

http://hbr.org/2010/01/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-world/sb1

Interestingly , 70% has no MBA degree .. Could not figure out Why ??? 

May be couple of companies are IT , which are still run by their college drop out founders   OR couple of companies  run by family OR some companies are quite old when MBA may not be very important and CEO grew with in the company OR ????  .. .... Do drop your comments if you got some other reason.

BTW , I am happy Steve Jobs is number 1  ..  Mukesh Ambani is also at @5