May the Growth be with You
#MakingBetterDecisions, #Goals, #focusonwhatmatters, #Wealth, #Careers
“Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information.” — Abbie Hoffman
A few weeks ago, one of my newsletter readers approached me to get guidance on his career. Despite his sincere and hard efforts, he seems to have hit some kind of glass window and was not able to achieve sustained and expectable growth in his career. There could be various reasons for different people facing similar predicaments but in my experience most of these reasons can be addressed by the framework laid out in this article.
“The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements.” — Boris Sidis
I became personally cognizant of this framework during my travails as a runner. For the first several years after I started to run, I believed that I could become a better runner by just running a lot. But I ended up achieving very little in terms of performance improvement. I was getting injured often and hence I could not build and sustain any real momentum. While this went on for years, I also came across a few runners who were going from strength to strength. They were constantly able to take on bigger challenges and improve their performances along the way. I was impressed by their growth and wanted similar progress. Rather randomly but eventually, I did end up learning the secret to their success. Like all things profound, the secret was simple. These constantly improving runners focused on building structural strength along with aerobic (cardiovascular) capability. My training approach focused on aerobic ability only — I was constantly upgrading the engine’s capacity, so to speak, without any regard to the strength of its chassis. When the engine in a car gets upgraded, the chassis also needs to get upgraded to be able to support the higher performance of the engine. Only when structure keeps pace with functional growth, can there be sustained performance improvement. This is the essence of the 2D approach to growth.
In careers, doing your job well and getting good appraisal ratings can elevate your functional game. This is important but not sufficient. This needs appropriate structural support that can be built by things such as building a personal brand, cultivating your professional network, improving communication and presentation skills etc.
In businesses, creating high quality products lends functional dimension whereas marketing, distribution, customer relations etc provide structural strength.
For improving health, fitness and diet support the functional dimension whereas sleep, hobbies, meaningful relationships with family, friends and society at large, etc provide structural support.
“When you’re making video, you’re giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.” — Bill Viola
During my corporate career, I used this framework to good effect in my yearly strategy sessions by organizing our yearly goals and plans around these two dimensions.
This approach is implicit in the financial plans that I create for my clients. It is explicitly employed in my own personal finance strategy. I use this in my running and have started to incorporate it in my diet. This approach creates value in terms of directing and organizing my efforts and in gauging progress which, in turn, generates enthusiasm and motivation in sustaining efforts.
In my experience, most people do a good job on the functional dimension but largely fall behind the structural aspects. This necessarily results in frustration sooner or later because without right structural support, you can go only so far. Performance will inevitably plateau and may even regress.
“Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.” — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Although exceptionally, I came across a few people who were able to garner extraordinary growth by focusing on superior structural strength even with relatively lesser functional strength. These people are virtual alchemists — they seem to create value out of nothing. Herein lies the power of structural dimension. Structure can be a true force multiplier. Although not intuitive, functional dimension holds much lesser potential for extraordinary growth compared to structural dimension. While functional dimension creates value, structural dimension multiplies it. In my mind, Warren Buffet is a perfect example of this. No doubt he possessed above-par functional skills in picking good companies to invest in. But most of his wealth was created due to his structural strength. His wealth was created not so much from a large number of great investment ideas but from sticking to a few good investment ideas for a long period of time and from largely avoiding bad investments.
Bottomline
“Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal — the vision, the structure, the architecture.” — Joshua Bell
Cricket, for that matter any sport, is flooded with highly skilled players but very, very few of them turn out to be great players. This is because most of them focus primarily on sharpening their functional skills like batting, bowling, fielding etc but ignore structural factors like endurance, agility, speed etc. This is true for careers, investments, businesses, even relationships, etc. While functional ability allows you to create value, it’s the structural factors that could make this value extraordinary. Outsized focus on functional factors may lead to additive value whereas outsized focus on structural factors could lead to multiplicative value.
“Hard work” + “Hard Work” << “Hard Work” + “Smart Work”
PS
I faced severe shortage of time in writing this article as I was going to be away for ten days on a Himalayan trek. So, I wrote most of it on Sunday at a football tournament that my son competed in. Unfortunately, his team lost both their matches. The first team was a spectacular team that comprised highly skilled players who were physically quite strong too. The opposing player who spotted my son was a good foot taller than him and I think about three years older too (13 vs 16 years old). The second team they lost to was structurally better than my son’s team but my son’s team was clearly much more skilled. Fittingly for this article, structure triumphed function there too.
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
A bit on my background
I worked in India and the USA with most of my work experience with large global organizations. My last corporate role was the Head of Technology for “Treasury and Trade Management Solutions” for Citigroup South Asia cluster. At Citi, I set up from my Business Unit and grew it from a team size of 1 to over 1900 Citi employees in a span of eight years.
I quit Citi in 2021 to focus exclusively on my interest area of improving decision making. In the last 2 years, I studied this topic closely and developed a training course to systematically improve decision making ability. I’m also an Investment Advisor (RIA) registered with the Securities and the Exchange Board of India (SEBI). As an RIA, I analyze and prepare financial plans to help people achieve their financial goals.
I have done MBA in Strategy and Finance from Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota and B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
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