I have spent every waking moment of my life trying to be better as a human and do better as a professional. I have read self-help books, listened to thousands of hours of podcasts, been coached, bought self-improvement courses, chakra cleansed, past life regressed, meditated, NLP’ed, detoxed, journaled, and even completed two MBA degrees!
All of this has led me to one big realization – outer mastery comes only from inner mastery. i.e. we can perform to world-class standards only through monk-like self-management.
That’s the root idea behind Performonks – a word I have coined – being monk-like inside helps us perform better outside.
Adopting a Performonks mindset is the key to a fulfilling and satisfying life in general. But there are two specific situations that I am interested in – high-judgment decisions and self-management.
(1) How do we refine our judgment?
High-judgment decisions: questions like where to play, how to win, which career to pursue, who to hire, or who to fire are tricky because they have no right or wrong answers and no neat data sets that help us decide. Yet they have life-changing consequences for our businesses and our careers.
(2) How do we self-manage?
Self-management: 1% of life is what happens to us and 99% is how we respond. As we grow from managers to leaders, we have to navigate organization politics (it exists, don’t kid yourself), relationships (boss, peer, reporters, loved ones), and chart our career path while also dealing with life’s setbacks. Companies have to deal with competition, recession, and leadership turnover. In all of this, we focus too much on the external and too little on self-management.
The gears and bolts of mental models and the timeless software of stories
High-judgment decisions and self-management come from the richness of lived experiences. We can’t first accumulate a century’s worth of experiences and only then start living our lives.
We have to get on with living and performing. And learning as we go along.
But what if we could learn from other people’s experiences (and mistakes) instead? That’s where mental models and stories come in.
Mental models are the gears and bolts that run the world – Trilemmas, Luck vs. Skill, Resilience, 10,000 hours, Mimetic Desire, Butterfly Effect – these are all timeless and accepted hardware that the world runs on.
Stories are timeless examples of how these gears turn– people, brands, and companies have applied mental models over centuries across different contexts. When we study their stories, we get ideas and insights that we can apply to our reality.
Uncovering and internalizing mental models that govern our world has become an obsession for me. I learn at the cross-section of marketing, business, behavioral science, history, culture, and economics and share what I learn in the form of stories.
Join me.
