Good Morning edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com,
I’m writing to you from a belatedly rain-blessed Bengaluru, where after the driest August in decades, a continuous 10-hour overnight spell of rain through Thursday night reduced our rain deficit from 42% to 8%. And there’s more rain forecast for September.
For the privileged, rain is often an indulgence or inconvenience. But for India’s farmers, it is life itself. So here’s wishing the late rains make up for what we missed in August.
Today’s edition took shape over lunch at a restaurant in Indiranagar this week. I was meeting Dhruv Saxena, the co-founder of design and product consulting firm, Obvious. Dhruv was a few weeks shy of finishing his three-month paternity leave, and the break from work had turned him more reflective and philosophical.
We were meeting at Infinitea, the reliable and friendly restaurant and tea room run by Gaurav Saria. As we were discussing our respective experiences around entrepreneurship, ambition, and self-belief, Dhruv said something that struck a chord with me.
He said that spending nearly three months away from work had allowed him the distance to truly observe himself and his own work. Dhruv has been practicing mindfulness and meditation for a while, so his ability to “see” himself from a vantage point has sharpened.
“There have been times when I’ve been in conversations with people and I find myself saying things that I don’t truly believe. And I tell myself, ‘Hey, that doesn’t sound like you’,” he said.
Saying things that sound like yourself doesn’t sound like much of a First Principle, you will think.
But conversations are how we innovate, deliberate, negotiate, and yes, decide on things. If we can find a way to have conversations that are truer to ourselves, then we can’t but arrive at better decisions in the process too.
Dhruv’s observation stayed with me because I use a “sibling” version of it myself. One of my longest running principles has been “write like you speak”.
That advice is usually given to writers, because it leads to clearer prose. But over the years I’ve come to realize that writing like you speak means much more.
Whether it's “speaking like you think” in a conversation, or “writing like you speak” in an email, the common thread is being yourself and being self-aware about it.
The feedback loop that exists in both cases allows us to observe ourselves. The moment you feel, “That doesn’t sound like me”, it’s a powerful signal for you to think again about what you’re about to do. It may not be a classic First Principle, but it has helped me communicate my thinking and decisions far more effectively over the years.
On that self-reflective note, here’s the latest conversation I had for the First Principles podcast. On Monday, I met M N Srinivasu, the consciously low-key and behind-the-scenes co-founder of payments giant Billdesk, in Hyderabad. Over a nearly hour-and-a-half conversation interrupted only by the constant refills of coffee brought to him by office staffers, we spoke at length about the slow-burn, contrarian, and consensual way in which Vasu and his two co-founders build and run Billdesk. Here’s a snippet:
BillDesk’s MN Srinivasu on building quietly and sustainably | Episode 25, 31 August, 2023
The co-founder of BillDesk on not handling person-to-person payments, disincentivising chasing glory metrics, coaching the first 100 employees, and being “managed upward” by his reportees.
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