Psycho...

One of the first things you lose in corporate life is Innocence. I keep telling the new kids on the block. Shape up, don’t be so stupid, lose your innocence, don’t get screwed, protect your backside. I lost my innocence little by little. So will you. Losing innocence is not necessarily a bad thing. You will lose it, you will get tougher, you will realise that not what everybody says is true. You figure things like what they say versus what they mean; you learn to take instructions over emails and ask people to be specific. There is lot of innocence to be lost.

I lost a lot over the years. Also I have learnt to deal with issues differently. There are so many things that upset you or are potential hazards. Most of the time they are hazards that you have to live with. Shit that you can’t avoid. You just have to be patient and wait out the storm. These things are best dealt with, with your tummy to the ground. These are tough things for your egot o swallow or really hit your self-esteem in the short run. But over the long run it doesn't matter. I have learnt over a period of time to think smartly. Here – this round is yours, it doesn't matter. Here another round is also given to you. You save your blows for the main game. In many cases you just don’t bother about the main game at all. Who cares about the main game? Most the things if sufficiently ignored, just goes away. The challenge is in knowing what to attack and what to ignore.

You learn to deal with a  lot of issues by placing a simple stone on your chest. People will get tramples over… ignore. People will get a raw deal…. Ignore. You can’t change everything. You can’t run with a load of everyone on your back. You cant protect every weak guy. Two things – number one – the weak guy will have to learn to defend himself. The same way I did. I was screwed, smashed and hammered … I got hit, got up and learned to dodge. Better you learn faster than later. Second – if you try and protect too many people you will get exposed yourself and in all probability you will drown and take a few more with you. Simple smarts tell you when to pick which fight.

But yes, it requires you to be cool about things when shit hits the roof. In extreme stress, shut down. Take an objective call. Take a fair call. And be cool about it. I am amazed at how much I can just shut off. Simply shut down that part of the heart which is hurting. Screw you. Stop the brain from thinking too much about what you have lost and focus on what you can salvage. It’s the instinct to survive, the instinct to play the longer run rather than being foolhardy.  Short term bravery can cause serious long term damage. Staying in, grafting slowly, pushing the right envelope is an acquired skill set. Amongst all this the trick is not to lose your moral compass. It’s easy to do so and I see people around me do it all the time. Selfishly sacrificing people, or even killing people for a sport, they do it all the time. that’s wrong. Sure, life teaches you to be smart but the way I see it, I may be guilty of inaction, but surely I am guilty of proactive killing. That’s a wrong thing. I don’t like that and I don’t ever endorse it.

It’s a fine line. because eth greatest pleasure you get is when you are taking revenge. Its  a human instinct. But controlling that instinct is as important as anything else. Its also makes good sense. You gain more from reconciliation than from revenge. Potential upside is better than certain doom.

Whats et me off thinking in this way was an article I read. There are a lot of calls to be taken in one’s life. Some involving sacrifing the happiness of a few to securing that of many. Is that a right thing to do. Are you allowed to play God. We play God to our kids all the time. we take their calls for them,. We push them into situations that we think is best for them. But in offices are you allowed to do that? This is a big question.

There is no easy answer. Yes I am supposed to do that. If someone in my team is not proving to be a good worker, it sis my job to get him or her out of the way of those whose passion it is to perform. Ten years back I would have said otherwise. I would have recommended pulling along dead wood. But again the culture, the circumstances all matter. If you are too quick to pull dead wood off the system, this puts a high human cost on the rest. They all would need to run at all times. They will not trust each other. They will constantly look over the shoulder and you lose out on various other efficiencies. It’s a very complicated call. But the only basic truth is – yes, tough calls need to be taken and they can be taken by putting a stone on your heart.

When Jispa was only a day or two old, we had to pierce her ears for the earrings. Whose job is it to hold her tight? When she needs an injection, whose job is it to hold her again. These are similar situations where being tougher is part of the job. Parenting, along with leading  team through a sea full of sharks calls for tough calls. Emotional calls being tempered by practical day to day calls. Cutting an arm to save a soul. Current human misery versus POROBABLE future benefit.

I have had to fire people due to recessions. I have done it twice and both times I remember having to let go of good guys. I did it but I hated doing it. I try and avoid such situations and hence I always like smaller leaner teams. You share the rewards and you derisk downturns.

Bottom line – I grew up. Not that I like it or as if I had an option. But I grew up.

Here is the article I read. It’s funny how close we are to psychopaths at times. Running life is a test in morals and psycho behavior….. read on

The famous "trolley problem" was a psychological experiment developed by Philippa Foot that involved a railway trolley headed toward five people who can't get out of the way. These people will die unless you, the subject of this experiment, decide to divert the trolley onto another track. That decision comes with a cost. There is another person stuck on that track as well, and that person will die. What do you do?

Well, most people have little difficulty making the "utilitarian" choice of choosing to kill one person instead of five. However, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson proposed a variation to the trolley problem, and the results of this test are quite different.

Thomson's variation is this: "You are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a certain death. But his considerable girth will block the trolley, saving five lives. Should you push him?"

This question was taken up by the Cambridge psychologist Dr. Kevin Dutton in recent book on psychopaths called The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. So how do people with psychopathic tendencies differ from normal people when taking this test and what does it mean? The results may surprise you.

According to Dutton (citing the Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene, who observed psychopaths and normal people dealing with this dilemma), the variation of the trolley problem involves a "personal moral dilemma" that "hammers on the door of the brain's emotion center, known as the amygdala." While this dilemma makes normal people "circumspect and jittery," and 90 percent refuse to push the stranger off the bridge, Dutton writes that psychopaths, "without batting an eye, are perfectly happy to chuck the fat guy over the side, if that's how the cookie crumbles."

In other words, if you, assuming you are a "normal" reader, are hooked up to an fMRI machine, your amygdala would "light up like a pinball machine" when presented with the "personal" version of the trolley dilemma. However, if Dutton performed the same test on a psychopath, he writes, "I would see only darkness." The same would be the case if you showed a psychopath images of famine victims: their brains "merely pull down the emotional window blinds and implement a neural curfew."

Dutton says there is a benefit to this lack of emotion expressed in psychopaths if they are -- as crazy as this might seem -- in positions of leadership. Here's one example, the facts of which have been disputed by historians, but which nonetheless serves as an illustration of the trolley problem on a grand scale.

In his book The Ultra Secret, F. W. Winterbotham argued Winston Churchill knew that the Germans would be bombing Coventry in 1940, but decided not to alert air defenses because it would have compromised Ultra, the British intelligence system that would later be credited with making D-Day a success.

While historians have disputed that Churchill knew the actual target of the raid was Coventry, this "what-if" history certainly makes for an interesting psychopath test:

Would you let 568 civilians perish in the raid on Coventry if that meant many more British soldiers and civilians would ultimately be saved? What would your brain scan look like when the German bombers flew to their targets unmolested? That's the kind of question that isn't asked in presidential debates, but maybe it should.