You can have your cake and eat it too

I am currently in the middle of reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholos Taleb. The author talks about how a few unpredictable high impact events that underlie our lives. Just when you are convinced of the unpredictable nature of life, he advises not to stop predicting! Off course it all makes sense when he elaborates further and asks to continue forming opinion about future events that will affect your personal life on a smaller scale but avoiding unnecessary dependence on large impact predictions based on economic and social theoretic models.

This got me thinking (I know, always a bad sign...) about some other things that seem contradictory at first but seem to make sense once you delve deeper. Why is this important? Every pithy saying that I have ever heard makes sense only within a certain context and we can learn far more by examining the "flip" side and understanding how seemingly opposite viewpoints can co-exist.

You must have heard about Perfection being the enemy of Good Enough. If you haven't, just ask the folks who preach product strategy. Contrast this with my personal favorite advise to my kids: Almost Done is Not Done. Clearly achieving perfection is impossible for us mortals in quite a few cases; which means you have to be pragmatic in your decision making and not wait until eternity before you disclose your work to others. At the same time, you cannot make that an excuse to be sloppy or start watching Hannah Montana when your homework is almost done.

Being proactive is considered a good trait. In fact that is a crucial factor behind the success enjoyed by Spigit. We have built the leading social innovation product that pioneered several new concepts that now define this market. A lot of that success can be attributed to our proactive efforts. I built the product by combining my past experience with my intuition about what might work. In more scientific terms, I kept making S*** up and some of it stuck. When I look back at my experience in the last three years, it strikes me that equal share of our success came from reacting quickly and effectively to contingencies. It is certainly not good idea to be reactionary, but it is great to be opportunistic (something my co-founder really excels in). In fact that's a key message of the book "The Black Swan". You cannot really predict the next Black Swan event , but you have to be ready to take advantage of one when it happens.

The following stanza in Bhagavad Gita captures it's essence (at least according to me)

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोस्त्वऽकर्मणि॥

Here's a loose translation: You have the right to your actions, but never to its result. Don't be attached to the fruits of your labor but at the same time don't let that detachment lead you to inaction.

Does that mean you should not have goals, stop being ambitious, cease to strive for excellence? What happened to "keeping your eye on the prize"? Even if you ignore or disagree with the deeper message about "detachment", there is still something to be said about focusing on execution without getting distracted by visions of glory that might follow. If a basketball player focuses completely on making that last second shot that will win the championship, he is more likely make it than if he is already thinking about the post-win celebration. A football receiver must first concentrate on catching the ball before he sprints to the end zone (that just about completes my quota of sports analogies for this year).

I will leave you with one last thought before I let you escape this prison of co-existing contradictions. Please remember that you can have your cake and eat it too, but you cannot eat your cake and have it too!

Acknowledgment: Cartoon illustrated by Milind Ranade who happens to be a good cook in addition to being a filmmaker and a cartoonist.