I read recently that "Intelligence without courage won’t take you far. Sometimes, it’s smarter to think less and act more." This is an amazing take on every thing execution. We can plan, we can design we can be smart about dissecting issues and options but if we don't act we park our smartness by the wayside and show our Vulnerability Of Inaction(VOI) Which has an inherent, COI(Cost of Inaction) which in the end= No ROI (Return on Investment)

The realities of inaction across various scenarios:

• Your concept/idea/product/service grows stale and loses market share

• Competitive environment out manoeuvres you because you don't start or evolve depending on your stage of business or life

• Sales soften and RGU(Revenue Generating Units), trend down

• Your growth rate slows then plateaus and then declines

• Investors become more outspoken because they have you cornered

• Employee morale becomes problematic and they start to leave

In my mind there is a new KPI that we need. ROI(Risk of Inaction) that calculates or tries to compute how our return on investment (the old ROI) will be affected by inaction. If saiths + traditional businesses do one thing next quarter it would be best to add this to the list. You cant fix what you cant measure. For the right outcomes the right measurement is key.

Outcomes

Expecting better outcomes when you never broke a sweat. For real? Nothing in life happens with out an input, the same is true for better outcomes. If you continue to do nothing, you will continue to get nothing. Or if you continue to do the same thing, hoping, praying expecting things will changes besides actually doing the work, you have it all backwards.

Some times it's beyond our control because we are not trained in the business of outcome management or input management.

I ran a poll asking people if they feel they have the right frame work for getting the right outcomes.

The most common response I got from 700 respondents from all walks of life was this:

"I keep getting myself into the same situations expecting better outcomes"

This was as shocking as it was not. For us to learn how to do some thing, we spend time learning it or being exposed to it. Be it language, be it learning how to cook, be it a hobby. But for our life's biggest choices, or work related items where we invest the bulk of our living hours we do not and are not trained to align our input to our expectations so we can impact our outcomes and we classically keep finding our selves making the same mistakes and ending up in the same situations.

When there are unknowns, uncertainty, what you are not expecting, do you have insights that lead to better decision-making and better outcomes? Do you even know what to look for? Do you have a frame work to qualify where to invest your time? Or things that matter?

Heres a simple idea for those who do not want to spend time doing the same stuff and get a birds eye view into the "why" of their outcomes. It starts with some thing extremely simple, a framework if you will.

This weekend, make a conscious effort to plan your coming work + personal week. Whilst it may be presumptuous for me to assume that you have a calendar for your work or personal life, lets take the weekend to make sure you slot in the things you know today and add the ones that show up un announced so you can track what/where you invested your time.

Once you catalogue all your meetings + personal time allocation this coming week the week of Oct 11th, that Saturday the 16th of October sit down and see what you did, in every 30 min time block across the week and ask your self, "If I didn't do this, would my life be any different or worse" Cross out all the ones that had no impact. Do the same for your personal life. The following week do this again, and keep doing this over a 3 week period. At the end of the 3 weeks list all the things that had no impact or added no marginal utility to your outcomes. Those are the things you need to stop doing, because you have identified to your self that those are the tasks, things, actions you keep taking that have no impact but you have up until this point never removed your self from the situation to evaluate why you end up with the same outcomes. Congrats you have just learnt a very simple frame work to identify what is holding you back.

Because we are all lazy heres a cheat sheet to help you get started.

One New Thing

This news letter started off as a conduit to park excess mental cycles, energy & ideas, what ever you may call it. At the core of every thing is the belief that if we share and build community we will all be richer for it. So the top questions people ask me are, how do you?

1. Make time to write this

2. Come up with the ideas that you share

3. Consistently talk about outcomes

4. Whats your process and how much time does it take you to write one newsletter a week

1) Making time is the easy bit, the truth is, when I wrote the first one, it was just because I wanted to engage with a difference audience compared to my blog which is very tech/enterprise specific. My dear friend Faisal Khan (a top Quora Contributor) said that to be effective you need to have not more than 10 sections or headings/thematic areas. So I started writing and settled on 8. The ideas was to share practical advice to get you to your end state of transformation, be it business, digital, personal life or entrepreneurship but Faster. 29 Weeks into it, it energises me so I continue to make time. The audience has grown, as have the questions, the key for me is the fact that if this adds one basis point of change to any ones outcomes I will continue to make time. This is not a commercial endeavour plus the audience keeps getting younger and younger, encouraging me even more at the prospect of people driving value.

2)Coming up with the ideas is completely un structured. I read a lot and I read across areas that interest me. I rely on super low tech, a text editor that keeps getting stuff pasted back into it and a growing list of bookmarks and interesting books and content where ever I may find them online. The kicker now is that I get asked over a few dozen questions weekly so that gives me directionality on the areas of interest of both the audience and what could actually add some utility to their outcomes. Besides that the core construct are items that interest me, experiments Ive done, in business and in life, things that I observe and reflect on. Ideas and thoughts that challenge the status quo. More so inexpensive things people can do today vs things that need VC funding to change outcomes.

3)Consistently talking about outcomes. You cant preach what you do not do. I am a stickler for consistency. I feel that if we focus hard enough on any problem, we can typically impact our outcomes. Thus every week based on themes, ideas, books, tweets, content that I consume I try my best to link it to outcomes. Because if this was wasting my time, it would add no value to my life which would be a bad outcome and I wouldn't do it. The kicker is, for me to write any thing, there is a fair bit of research which actually helps me learn too. So it's an outcome driven by selfish intent, i.e to learn.

4)Whats your process and how much time does it take you to write one a week? The deadline is the process. There is no real process, sadly, the framework is that weeks mind map. I start with a central idea, I look at the key message that has been developing in my mind through the week. On a good week I was writing these in advance and scheduling over the weekend. Last few weeks have been a struggle. I have been spending "back seat of the car hours" between engagements to make up on time and get ideas going. My favourite tool is MyMind to add snippets to and then search and build a working thesis/agenda for that weeks newsletter. Every news letter must have some actionable insights, some thing new or different, encouragement, historical relevance and scale oriented outcomes and frameworks. On average it takes me 1.5 hours to actually get it done if I am focused and can commit the time in one go. When I am piecing it together it is done in 30 minute sprints and takes about 3 hours. When all the sections are done, I give it one read, do what ever corrections I can see in that instance and time and ship it. I am all about shipping vs worrying that people will judge me for a missed comma or a re pasted line. The idea is to get this across the goal post every week, most weeks on time and with consistency.

Boring stuff that Scales

Pakwans or Chefs of local ethnic cuisine do an incredible job daily. I wondered if some one had ever tried to codify their recipes besides generational hand me downs. Is there a data base to make biryani for 800 people or zarda for 200. Or even an ingredient list for at-scale catering and/or modernising classic south east asian cuisine or the cuisine of the nawabs and mughals with post partition flare which is all things Pakistani.

A chance encounter got me to this.

What originally got me interested in this question was the Netflix series, Raja, Rasoi aur Anya Kahaniyan. Where is the data set for our traditional local, regional cuisine, where are our certified recipes, where is our "Pakistani Branding". You could ask, How do we get to Pakistani Recipes when the content you are sharing is Indian? Therein lies the opportunity to scale

1. Codify the Pakistani recipes

2. Make them available to every one, with simple in pantry cooking cheat sheets for western markets to cook the easy ones, give links to packaged products with detailed video explainers so they can buy and try the more fancy ones by creating demand

3. Build Context around them so the origin story makes people want to try them

4. Build a certification or ratings body or some thing that authenticates truly made in Pakistan Cuisine vs poor western imitations

5. Build an export oriented business around the business of local cuisine like one builds micro services

6. Promote, and own the cultural subtleties by getting the right market share online. Its virgin SEO territory at the moment.

7. Instead of copying western or eastern 5 min video fads ala facebook, go deeper and build out a community around shared values and authentic new experiences. Merch drops ala Pakistani food style, for the dopamine generation world wide.

8. Get inspiration from how the Thai Government has made it a multi billion dollar export business. I wrote a detailed blog post on this here.

What you should be watching

Instead of worrying too much about the extreme left and right, we should focus more on the extreme center, says writer Tariq Ali. Ali, who argues that governments from both sides of politics in a number of nations including the UK, the US and Australia have pursued neoliberal agendas, manifested in policies such as foreign wars, privatisation, austerity measures and an increasing assault on civil liberties. An alternate view(circa 2015), well articulated and a third notion for us to use as a filter to view the current geo political scenarios around us. At about 9mins in, the view on Pakistan and Nigeria is simply brilliant as it is accurate.

Monetise your time

Passion can be your profession only if it can be monetised. Otherwise, sensible to follow passion and profession separately. When you cant find an intersection to monetising them, both suffer together, your work and your passion.

What it really means is to not get disheartened, rather than sticking to bad ideas. Cutting the cord on bad ideas is monetisation of your time.

So if you have been at it, say your passion is to paint bird houses and you are the worlds best at it, yet in 1 year of doing so, you cant make ends meet, it is safe to assume it is a hobby. Whilst you may be passionate about it and it doesn't make money you just need to figure out how to use the components of your passion and re deploy them.(If/where possible).

Maybe there is no market for painted bird houses, but if panting them a certain way makes you an expert in it, perhaps it's the painting skill applied to a different problem-set for monetisation can enhance the sales outcomes. You will be close to part of your passion, but not drowning in debt. So no one is stopping you from salvaging what you know and aspire to do and re-deploy it.

We must be self aware to know

1. When to cut our losses

2. When to pivot and extract value

3. When to re-define the problem for better outcomes

4. When to fail fast and live to try an other day

Monetisation is as much about making money on day one as it is about having the above 4 skills to make sure you give your self a framework to succeed when things don't work out on the first attempt.

Made in: Pakistan

Sub 5000 PKR Phone. This can be the gateway drug to :

1. Education

2. Financial Inclusion

3. Learning (across domains like healthcare + agri)

4. Awareness (for human rights, personal rights)

5. Commerce (first time consumers)

Only if it doesn't become the Gateway drug to :

1. TikTok (ala mindless social media content)

2. Fake News

3. Poor M-commerce experiences

4. Tool for Manipulation (Govt & Politics)

5. Taking time away from education + health outcomes

One Last Thing (That is fascinating)

I came across an incredible website that focuses on, words that do not translate from one language to an other. It is fascinating to explore the underbelly of meaning and make sense of it. I started with the easy choice, Urdu. This is an incredible website with engaging content. It is as simple to use as it is different. Some one decided to dedicate time to build this ,the outcome is that every one else is richer for the experience. Worth taking for a test drive and explore the meaning of words from other languages to get insights into how people may use them for their outcomes.