A resource companion to "mindfulness: connecting with the real you" book

My book "Mindfulness: connecting with the real you" uses metaphors from movies, novels, scientific experiments, magic shows, etc. to illustrate main points. The table below presents the links to the publicly available videos for each of the chapters.

Chapter	Links
1. Balancing the bicycle of life	Paheli clip (5min) (44MB) illustrating mindfulness as balancing between bookkeeping and berry-picking. (English subtitles - SRT file) "My life is ruined" scene from the movie Queen "The backwards brain bicycle" from "Smarter every day" channel by Destin Sandlin "Smarter every day challenge: Learn the backwards brain bike" by Mike Boyd
2. Listening to the mental shotgun	Listening with "It's possible" vs "It's impossible" - A clip from "12 angry men".
3. Stepping out of the train of thought	"How do you know you will live to be forty?" scene from Hindi film "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara" (2011) (English: You don't live twice) Rowboat scene argument between Maria and Captain in Hollywood film "The sound of music" (1965) Drum lesson from the Hollywood film The Visitor (2007) where the Professor is told "not to think" while drumming.
4. Recognizing wasteful thoughts	"What if she starts taking drugs?" How thought moves from school admission to drug addiction in a flash of a second - Hindi film - Hindi Medium (2017) (0:32-0:39) Dutch film "All about nothing" written and directed by Paul Smit and Robert van den Broek (2013). "What if you lose?" A question posed to Prof. John Nash in the movie "A beautiful mind" (2001) may be familiar to many of us.   Nash learns to recognize and ignore wasteful thoughts in "A beautiful mind". Nash's "diet of the mind" from "A beautiful mind".
5. Watching the dance of necessities	"You are a slave to the prison for your mind", Morpheus explains Neo in "The Matrix" (1999). "What is real?" Morpheus shows the residual self-image to Neo in "The Matrix". "What is reality?" Episode 1 of The brain with David Eagleman, A PBS documentary (2016).  "Ian Waterman" in The brain with David Eagleman, PBS documentary (2016). Afterglow, A short film written and directed by Kaushal Oza (2014). Shawn Farquhar in "Penn and Teller: Fool Us" show, 2014.
6. Investigating the shooting game	Gabbar Singh "How many guys were there?" dialogue from Sholay (1975). Kannada film "Samskara" (1970) with subtitles, directed by Pattabhirama Reddy.
7. Searching for the real hero	Amitabh Bachchan talking to mirror in the Hindi film "Amar Akbar Anthony" (1977) Ink drops in glycerine experiment as a metaphor for understanding implicit and explicit order, video from NewScientist (2011) David Bohm explains the implicate order through ink-drop in glycerine experiment in this video "The nature of things" produced by CBC Canadian Radio, 26 May 1979. (12:31-18:00) Derek Muller's Veritasium video "Is this what quantum mechanics looks like?" (2016) "Dual walkers" site from a team researchers based in Paris who study wave-particle duality through dancing droplets. "Turing machine with wave memory" video from Emmanuel Fort et. al., 2016 You can watch Princess Leila hologram from Star Wars in this video - "A new hope" (2:27) Truman is surprised by a light bulb comes crashing from the sky.  Truman talks to the creator - the "The Truman show ending scene" where he asks the question, "Who am I?" "That's one for free" Truman talks to the mirror
8. Dying to self-image every moment	Eckhart Tolle talks about the film "Groundhog day" from his interview "Conversations on compassion" by Dr. James Doty of Stanford.  "Groundhog day...again", Phil realizes for the first time that he is in a time loop. Bengali film "Ghare Baire" (English: The home and the world" with English subtitles. Nikhil's dialogue with his sister-in-law is at 1:36:18. "Kamla" Hindi film (1984) with subtitles, written by Vijay Tendulkar, directed by Jagmohan Mudhra. The dialogue between Kamla and Sarita is at 1:13:54. The dialogue between Sarita and her uncle is at 1:54:25.
9.  Question and Answers

Advance praise for “Mindfulness: Connecting with the real you”

I really appreciate these wellwishers who graciously agreed to take a look and write an endorsement for my book, “Mindfulness: Connecting with the real you” which is releasing tomorrow (Amazon link). In the top row, Thulasiraj Ravilla, Radhika Herzberger and Swami Chidananda. Bottom row, Ravi Venkatesan, Mukunda Rao, and Vipul Mathur. The one whose picture is missing is Fr Lancy Prabhu. Here is what they say:

Thulasiraj Ravilla, executive director, LAICO and operations director, Aravind Eye Care System

It’s a delightfully engaging and easy-to-read book on a really complex subject. It isn’t a spiritual book and yet at the core of spirituality is being conscious of who we really are. This book trains us to become mindful so that we don’t unknowingly deviate from things that really matter it. This book is a must-read for living a regret-free life.  

Radhika Herzberger, writer, educator and scholar of Sanskrit and Indology

Vinay Dabholkar’s Mindfulness: Connecting with the Real You is a ground-breaking approach to mindfulness. The book offers a practice that stills the mind and discerns the present—breath, music, skies, nature as well as our wayward thoughts and the surrounding garbage on the street. For Dabholkar mindfulness is a search for what is real, for truth rather than profit. In order to uncover deeper facets of the mind, the book adopts a layered structure, moving from the simple to the complex, and illustrating each with wide-ranging examples drawn from popular cinema and books by scientists and spiritual masters. In the process, the author seeks to untangle the rigid, deluded and trigger-happy tendencies of our minds. Based on the premise that self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, Vinay Dabholkar’s book holds out the promise of a new approach to the humanities.

Swami Chidananda, spiritual teacher, Vedanta scholar and founder, FOWAI Forum 

This is valuable writing that presents in a delightful manner many serious aspects of the challenging theme of mindfulness. It can bring tremendous clarity to the reader about the much-talked-about subject. It is intellectually stimulating as it draws from great minds in a spectrum of disciplines like psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and physics. It makes for enjoyable reading as illustrations are taken from movies of Hollywood and Bollywood, among other sources. We encounter in its pages mystics of India, thinkers of Western universities and life experimenters from everywhere. Above all, the deep insights and significant remarks by the author himself make this book a very precious addition to anybody’s collection of reading material that deepens one’s understanding of life. It can cause a major shift in one’s outlooks and facilitate a fundamental transformation.

Ravi Ventakesan, Business Leader, Philanthropist, Author

Mindfulness is a crucial practice in reaching our potential as human beings. Vinay’s book is very readable and makes the concept and the practice of mindfulness accessible.

Mukunda Rao, Author

It is not by sitting in meditation but by being mindfully aware in your to day-to-day living that you grow in self-knowledge and learn to creatively negotiate the problems of living. Vinay Dabholkar’s Mindfulness brings home this wonderful, cleansing truth most effectively.

Vipul Mathur, CEO, Mufti, coach, trainer, and writer

This book makes much-needed mindfulness accessible and achievable. Vinay, with his unvarnished narration, probing questions and heartening Bollywood stories break the far-fetched concept into a simple idea that can be adopted easily in daily life.

Fr Lancy Prabhu, former head of department, inter-religious studies, St Xavier’s College, Mumbai

Replete with numerous attention-grabbing stories, analogies, metaphors and anecdotes, drawn from diverse sources including especially movies, the book brings into relief the many typical problematic patterns our mind gets trapped in, resulting in misery. More significantly, the book clarifies the process of Mindfulness, at whose heart lies Investigation, or present-moment spirit of learning, that brings understanding and freedom to ‘see things as they are’ especially the ‘real you’. An appealing and challenging book for our times to many, especially the young.

Image sources: aravind.org, alchetron.com, sadhanamandira.com, linkedin.com, twitter.com, afaqs.com

Career-chat with Ravi Aranke: Career as surfing a wave vs climbing a ladder

My classmate and friend Ravi Aranke and I quit our jobs around the same time in 2006. But between the two of us, Ravi has been far more adventurous in his experiments with his career. So, as we near and cross the age of fifty, it creates a wonderful opportunity to look back and see if there are any lessons we learned. Ravi now works as a Senior Director, Technical Support at Cloudera, a leading cloud platform company and is based out of Silicon Valley in California. When Ravi visited Bangalore a month ago, I grabbed the opportunity to have a chat with him. In this interview, Ravi presents his view of a career journey as surfing a wave rather than climbing a ladder. You can listen to the interview here (14MB).

Here are salient points from the interview:

0:00   Introductions

1:15   Brief sketch of Ravi’s career:  Spanning Japan, Singapore in software development and support, Sun Microsystems, RedHat, linear progression till 2006, from individual contributor to senior management. Sun Microsystems, Dotcom bubble, euphoric, Bust, layoffs, a period of introspection, slowly started the feeling, “if you don’t do it now, when will you do it?”, urge to do something different.

3:45 Were you sure as to what you don’t want to do rather than what you want to do? Yes. I was looking at some of the start-up success stories, there was some ego involved, “If I am working hard, I should be working hard for myself.” In hindsight, it was more of self-discovery and spending time doing what I enjoy.

4:45 What happened after you quit your job? I was gravitating towards reading certain books, spending time on investing related things, talking to those people. This was telling that I enjoy these other things more than building the company. Fortunately, I had saved some money. Internet was becoming a thing by that time. Videos on YouTube – 2007-08.

6:25 What was the day for Ravi at that point in time? I started seeing that availability and analyzing data would be a big thing in the future. This hunch came around 2006-07. If I learn these techniques, I will make money in stock markets. Idea of trading system, investing system.

8:13 Were you building skills? Yes, building skills, talent, assets in data science, building models.

9:50 What did the asset involve? Write code, acquire data, regression testing. Had to get back to programming.

12:12 Doing projects together with your kids? One of the best outcomes. Got a lot of time with kids. Google cloud in 2009.

15:25 Motivation to move to a small town. Could I build a small company in a small town? Broadband was a challenge. Now it would be easier. Suddenly I realized I doubled my time.

18:45 After 7 years, what triggered you to consider going back to a job? We made a 5-year plan. Son decided to pursue an undergraduate in the US.

20:30 How difficult was to get back to the corporate world? Wave of big data. New wave brings new companies, demand outstrip supply. Worked in my favor.

22:33 What does it mean to look at a career as surfing a wave? Needs a lot of preparation and some amount of luck. Building up for a wave to come. Not looking to go anywhere. Just enjoy.

25:30 Did you realize getting somewhere was not important? Yes. Buffett’s internal yardstick.

28:09 Is financial security an important aspect? Yes, absolutely, especially if you have a family. You need to get your burn rate down. Moving to small-town helped.

30:15 Anything else? Consider it more like adventure sport. Be prepared that ride would be rough sometimes.

"Managing technological innovation" course at IIT Bombay Oct 10-21

Currently, I am teaching 4 classes (Oct 10, 14, 17, 21) in "Managing Technological Innovation" course being taught by Prof. Anand Kusre at IIT Bombay. This course is being offered at Desai Sethi Center for Entrepreneurship.  

The classes are:

Oct 10 (class slides): Creating a challenge book, Iterative thinking, Framing a challenge through metaphors 

Oct 14 (class slides): Rapid prototyping, feels-like, looks-like and works-like prototypes, before-and-after storyboard 

Oct 17 (class slides): Taking big technological bets, technology sandbox, Lego mindstorm - building a sandbox collaboratively

Oct 21 (class slides): Building a margin of safety, pre-mortem, cognitive biases and investigating cognitive illusions

Oct 20: Based on the first 3 classes, students have to submit the following assignment by Oct 20 (Sunday):

What to submit: A pdf document with the following:

1. Class-1 (10-Oct) exercise:

   1.1 List of challenge areas - one each for pain-wave-waste

   1.2 Shortlist them using PIC framework - Passion, Impact, chance of progress

   1.3 Identify a metaphor

   1.4 Frame a challenge statement - one line only

2. Class-2 (14-Oct) exercise:

   2.1 A before-and-after storyboard of an idea

   2.2 A paper model of the idea

3. Class-3 (17-Oct) exercise:

  3.1 Design of low-cost working prototype

  3.2 Cost of the prototype

  3.3 Outcome of your 1-hour effort towards working prototype

3 tips on being mindful in the corporate world: An Edgar Schein perspective

I have been a fan of Prof Edgar Schein, an expert on organizational culture. However, I was surprised to hear Schein emphasize mindfulness in an interview at Google. By the time of this interview in 2016, Schein would have been 87 years old, active as a researcher, teacher and consultant way more than half a century. What is mindfulness according to Schein? What is the role, according to him, mindfulness can play in a competitive corporate world? Let’s explore in this article.

Let’s begin with taking a look at what Schein means by mindfulness. According to Schein, mindfulness is not some kind of meditation process. Mindfulness is situational awareness of how culture inside of us and around us is dominating our thinking. The point Schein is emphasizing here is that the culture is inside us in the form of accumulated learning from family, school, corporate world, etc.

Here are 3 tips Schein offers on being mindful in a corporate world obsessed with measurement and winning.

Be curious about deeper reality: Situational awareness would mean being curious about what’s going on as we observe things, communicate with people and make decisions. Schein suggests a couple of questions that might help in this process. One, what’s the deeper reality? For example, in a meeting, can I become aware of the fact that I am trying to win an argument rather than focusing on the point of discussion, whenever that happens? The second question Schein suggests us to ask is, “What else is going on?”

Be relational vs transactional: In a fast-paced world, we need to make decisions quickly. That leads to interactions which are transactional – e.g. telling what to do and expect the other person to just follow. In some situations, this may be meaningful. However, in many situations, this doesn’t work. This becomes even tougher when the job is to fire people. Schein uses the example from the movie “Up in the air” to point out that firing people by hiring an agency to do it over a video call is transactional. A more humane approach would be for the manager to sit face to face and discuss options together openly.

Focus on process vs content: According to Schein, mindfulness involves paying more attention to the process of thinking as compared to the content of thought. Mostly our attention is grabbed by the content – the ideas, judgments, decisions, etc. And we are unaware of the process that fuels thinking. Many times the process is driven by anxieties and aspirations. Anxiety could be about losing out in one’s career or it could be about not winning. Situational awareness means being aware of this process, anxieties-aspirations driving the thinking as much as the content.

Schein points out that being mindful doesn’t guarantee corporate success. If your boss values only winning, you may be stuck. Of course, being mindful of one’s own anxieties about being stuck and how that is being reflected in everything one does may open up newer possibilities.

Why be mindful if it doesn’t increase the chance of success in the corporate world? I don’t think this aspect is discussed in the interview. I feel that being mindful in order to succeed is taking one away from mindfulness already. This is because every action now is driven by an aspiration to succeed or anxiety about failure.

Hope you get to explore the tips Schein offers and experiment with being mindful for its own sake rather than in order to achieve something. I thought Karen May, Google VP People Development has done an excellent job as an interviewer. Hope you listen to the interview which may have much more in store for you.

Image source: youtube.com

Interview link: “Edgar Schein: Humber leadership” | Talks at Google

My 3 takeaways from Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big”

A few months back my friend RamP recommended Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big”. At that time, I was struggling to convey the importance of “fail fast, fail often” principle to the students in my course on innovation at IIMB. The book helped me in showcasing to students how successful people like Scott Adams have a long list of failures and they are not shy of presenting it. But the book doesn’t stop at flaunting failures; it goes deeper than that. It presents some of the key challenges we face in our creative journey and suggests some practical approaches in tackling them. And it does so in a witty style. Here are my 3 takeaways from the book:

Fail often in order to succeed: “You want to be steeped to your eyebrow in failure,” Scott says, “It’s a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.” That’s quite an insight. In chapter 4 titled “Some of my many failures in summary form”, Scott presents 22 failures and the lessons he learned from them. Chapter 5 is dedicated to “My absolutely favorite spectacular failure”. I would buy this book just for these two chapters. When I present my failure resume in the class, students comment that my failures weren’t that bad. When I tell them the Nassim Taleb quote, “Learn to fail with comfort, pleasure, and pride,” they feel if you are failing comfortably that means you are not trying hard. Perhaps it is not easy to understand that for an idea with big upside, the cost and downside of experimentation doesn’t have to be high. In my failure to communicate this point lies an opportunity for me to improve my presentation in the future.

Goals are for losers, system for winners: “If your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal – if you reach it at all – feeling as if you were short of your goal,” Scott adds, “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” He suggests that one should treat the system as primary rather than the goal. How is system different from goal? He says that running a marathon is a goal while exercising daily is a system. If you do something every day, Scott calls it a system and if you are waiting to achieve it someday in future, it is a goal. My take is that both have a place but the question is where do you place emphasis? Scott suggests that system should be primary and I feel the same.

Maximize personal energy: How does Scott approach the problem of multiple priorities? He says he focuses on only one metric – “my energy”. Scott says, “The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I don’t need another reason.” In fact, Scott goes on step further. His Dilbert comic creating process is divided into two stages to maximize the energy-generating ideas and drawing the final art. He has observed that his creative energy is at its best during morning time. So he tries to get new Dilbert ideas at that time. And he draws the final art in the afternoon which is less creative. Shopping drains his energy, so he minimizes shopping. Everyone is different and hence one should pay attention to things that give and drain energy.

I enjoyed the book and strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to preserve or develop the creative part within oneself. I find all the three suggestions valuable, keeping a failure resume, focusing on the system rather than goals and paying attention to the sources of energy. Hope you get to experiment with them.

image source: amazon.in
Nassim Taleb quote is from his interview by Alleb Webb in McKinsey Quarterly, December 2008 issue.

Could “Create a margin of safety” be the toughest of the 8 steps to innovation to master?

Café Coffee Day founder V. G. Siddhartha’s unfortunate demise coincided with my class on “Margin of safety” in “Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation” course at IIM Bangalore. “Create a margin of safety” is the 8^th step of the "8-steps to innovation" book I co-authored. Siddhartha allegedly committed suicide by jumping into the Netravati river near Mangalore. We would never know the exact reasons why Siddhartha took such an extreme step. Given the debt situation of Café Coffee Day group, could it be possible that Siddhartha lost track of margin of safety? And, if a seasoned businessman like Siddhartha can overlook margin of safety, could it be the toughest step to master?

When I discussed this question with my friend and co-author of “8 steps to innovation”, Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan, he suggested I read the book “Failing to succeed: The story of India’s first e-commerce company” by K. Vaitheeswaran. It turned out to be a textbook case demonstrating how difficult it might be to internalize the principle of “margin of safety”. Let’s look at a few anecdotes from the book which illustrate this point. But before we look at it, let’s note that we are looking at a venture story when it hit a downward spiral. The Indiaplaza story contains several ups and many things that the founders should be proud of. Moreover, innovators and especially entrepreneurs should be indebted to K. Vaitheeswaran for the candid narration of his experience. It is so rare in the Indian context.

June 2009:  "A jewellery vendor from Delhi came to our office with a few thugs and abused me with choice expletives in front of all staff members and threatened to beat me up physically if I did not pay up the dues within two days."

"An apparel vendor from Surat came to the office accompanied by a local policeman. The policeman threatened to arrest me if we didn’t settle the dues in one week."

August 2012: "I had stopped drawing my salary from August 2012, and worse, I had made the mistake of using my personal credit cards to spend for the company. Every day private collectors visited our home on behalf of credit card companies and loudly demanded money to embarrass and shame me in front of my neighbours and family. Then I decided to withdraw my Provident Fund (PF) because we desperately needed money."

December 2012: "The last week of December was terrible. On 31 December 2012, New Year’s Eve, a group of drunk people banged on our apartment door loudly and in front of my neighbours, family and some friends abused me for non-payment of dues. I was falling into bouts of depression and my health was taking a severe beating."

April 2013:  "When this deal (a potential acquisition) fell through, the creditors became furious. In a few days, our office was swarming with creditors in person. An electronics merchant, during the conversation in our office, pulled out a dagger and placed it on the table. The managing director of a big publishing and distribution house from Delhi met me in Bengaluru and said that he would ‘throw babies in front my car’ when I was driving."

August 2013: "I was standing inside the Ulsoor police station on Cambridge Road in Bangalore. I waited to be interrogated by the inspector on a complaint filed personally against me by a merchant."

8 December 2013: "I had quit and I was not coming back. I had nothing to show for my efforts over fourteen years except for several court cases against me, social media abuse, being avoided like the plague by people I knew and being branded a failure."

At one point the author says, “Whenever I read about people taking their own lives due to financial troubles, I confess, I can understand and sympathize with a moment of madness.”

Building a “margin of safety” involves asking two questions: “What kind of catastrophic risk is there? And, can I live with it?” From the anecdotes above it looks as if the worst-case scenario was not difficult to imagine in 2009 itself. And yet no major action was taken to protect oneself against such a situation. Hence, I am beginning to wonder if creating a margin of safety could be the toughest of the 8 steps to innovation to master.