opinions – Page 18 – Abhinav Bhatt

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Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

I was recently roped in as a volunteer to be in charge of a Registrations Desk at an event in which close to 700 people were expected to attend. Being in the organizing team since the very beginning, I was supposed to also take care of the help-desk part at registrations because we had anticipated some anomalies and grievances. To make it interesting, we had kept a goodie box in which there were a number of small items like a customized with name keychain, a small plastic bag, a phone popper, etc. I also had the same items as loose in case some of the attendees who hadn’t registered, showed up at last moment.

Majority of the folks had registered in advance and they got their registrations verification done easily. They received customized goodie boxes and moved on. But to make it more interesting, we also decided to hand over food & drinks coupons to everyone when they came for registrations. Now, somehow the number of coupons I had weren’t enough to cater to 700 folks. To make it furthermore interesting, the event was a 2-day affair and there were different kinds of food coupons: Day 1 Lunch, Day 1 Dinner, Day 1 Drinks (soft), Day 1 Drinks (Liquor), Day 2 Lunch, Day 2 Hi-Tea. And to top everything up, not all had registered for both the days and even the Day 1 dinner. I had to keep referring to an excel sheet and then hand over loose items/goodies which also got over soon. Then there were also some issues with wrong food coupons given to wrong folks. Later, some people came back as their customized goodies had names of someone else.

All in all, despite the event being a major success and nobody getting hurt, the task of handling so many registrations was a major challenge. I had the support of various other volunteers who didn’t break a sweat and we eventually got through but at times, the exercise became a headache for everyone. For some, it would have surely ruined the experience of the event because it was the first thing they encountered. Hopefully, they also realized that we had all just volunteered and nobody had any bad intentions but just the circumstances.

No soup for you — I didn’t have the liberty of becoming the Soup-Nazi to do crowd-control either.

I also recently attended a training called ‘Design Thinking’. The crux of the training is to develop a solution or a service by thinking about the end user in mind. This might sound very easy but it takes a painstaking number of hours to come up with possible permutations and combinations of what end-user will go through and get satisfaction.

Some learnings from all of the above:

Design Thinking is a great concept to have when you have to act in a public facing job. We all know and have faced the humiliation at Bank, Transport Offices, Post Offices and other places in which we have to line up and wait for our turn, sometimes in unbearable conditions, facing atrocious services. Only if, the person who is in charge of designing this can think of themselves as the end user, the process would improve. That is the reason great companies are great because they think of their products/services in the hands of the users and how they are going to perceive it.

Whenever you have to make something for someone, not only consider what you want to deliver, also think about how the user is going to take it. Front-End of every product and every service can make or break an experience.

Featured Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

So I recently watched: Avengers Endgame

Goosebumps!

Rarely it happens that I am this excited to watch a movie. But the hype was spilling over the brim and the wait had become way too much longer. I watched the movie on Tuesday after it had already earned billions of dollars at the BO. And then when you hear, the once dreaded and termed forgettable, Avengers Theme Music… BOOM!

I have in fact watched only 16 of 22 movies (73%) of all the MCU movies. But I have followed them with much more excitement since last 2-3 years. That is also due to the utter disappointment caused by DCEU even if Wonder Woman and Shazam were good. But MCU movies have made a place of their own in terms of sheer entertainment value they have provided. The cameos by Stan the man Lee to top them all.

There have been several very popular videos on how Avengers (or MCU movies) are not much memorable, their video doesn’t have any definite color grading which makes them like a TV movie, or not much emotional connect, or not having much depth and so on. But nobody would have anticipated as to what 22 MCU movies over a period of 12 years would culminate to. Amazing!

This sort of fest-like-hype has not really happened for any movie I know of. When probably the only ‘Universe’ kind of movie franchise, Star Wars had its Episode 1 getting released in the late 90s, the Internet hadn’t flourished that much. So the younger generation (worldwide) had not experienced the hype which generates nowadays due to the bombardment of information from all directions.

I am not going to review the movie because my excitement will overrule my judgement. But I liked it very much. It has everything one could ask for, and more. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of Endgame. I might watch it again in IMAX.

Watch your Watch

Let’s start with my self. If I don’t reach somewhere I am needed or I want to be on time or at least 5 minutes before, my internal system go for a toss. Unless it is totally out of my control like a traffic jam happening 5 KMs ahead, I don’t get late. In fact, the trick is very simple: Start a bit early and respect the clock.

However, many people around me don’t think the way I do. I have tried in all possible ways to make them understand how one should respect other’s time, mostly in vain. So, time and again, I give up and provide them a bit of leeway and act leniently to let it be, only adding to my own grievances. I am still constantly looking for a way to convince others to watch the watch.

Seth Godin wrote something brilliant about respecting time in his blog recently. That if one usually gets late and misses some opportunity, they tend to blame the punctual party. But if one misses a bus, or a train or things which usually start on time, they blame themselves.

You might notice that things that leave on time (commuter trains, airplanes, live TV shows etc) almost never have a crowd of people showing up five or ten minutes late cursing out the system. For those things, the things that are known to leave on time, they manage to show up. That’s because their good intentions are not welcome here.
Seth Godin

I will try to continue to be the things that start and end on time. I’ve got my conviction.

Featured Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Humbleness isn’t Hard

Millennials in India must be familiar with Roadies, the MTV Reality Show in which one has to go through a brutal and rigorous interview process to enter the contest. Needless to say, the show isn’t in sync with my point of view.

I recently came across a Twitter thread by someone who faced a brutal interview in which the interviewer hurled abuses and tried to pressurize the candidate just to test the ability of tolerance and keeping cool.

The candidate eventually got the offer but she declined it and stated her arguments via some tweets that to test someone is fine but to grill someone just to see how they perform is not the best way.

We often hear about the grueling interview processes in which the interviewer tries various techniques to confuse or intimidate or even abuse the interviewer, just to test them. Rarely, that is part of the job (like in Hospitality industry where the clients can really take all their life’s frustrations out on the bellboy who did a minor mistake). But most jobs don’t require that. Even the most popular public facing jobs which deal with people from all walks of life interacting with the employees (like banks or transport department) don’t necessitate regular humiliation.

We need to get rid of this misconception that the interviewee needs to be very strict or abusive. I was given a chance recently to Interview College Grads as well as people of experience of a decade. Although my job isn’t public facing, however, there can be pressures which can end your days badly. I feel that the way to judge a person’s ability to handle pressure cannot be tested in an hour’s interview and that can be seen only over a period of time. In fact, I can prepare myself to be humiliated during an interview and still feel alright. Although, I might not be able to deal with pressure situations for a longer duration of time, say a couple of months because everyone will have a breaking point.

We can still stay humble and welcoming while dealing with new people or those who are seeking something from us. It isn’t that hard.

Needless to say, same goes for my opinion about ragging in educational institutes. What are we trying to prove?

So I recently watched: Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

So I recently watched: Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch is probably a first of its kind Interactive Movie, like a computer game, in which the viewer can choose the actions of the protagonist and some other characters by choosing from 2 options. That choice changes the outcome of the scene and it could lead to a different movie ending if you had chosen something else. It has been made in such a way that based on your choices, it can go from a sad morbid ending, to totally whacky scenes, and to a slightly different sad morbid ending, to something which might not make sense at all.

Although the premise of the movie is not as interesting as other Black Mirror episodes, it is certainly a movie from the future. The mere concept of allowing viewers to choose the actions, couldn’t have been possible with traditional TV or Movie experience. Netflix and other streaming services allow it to work and full credits to Netflix for bringing this up. It might set a trend of more such movies, I hope.

Black Mirror, in general, has always come up with something which makes us rethink the way technology has been moving ahead and how much dependence we have got over it. Bandersnatch uses this concept in a novel way and it even indulges us in making the viewers think about their own choices. As I said, the story of this particular movie isn’t very intriguing but I wonder how much of an effort they must have put behind it. I finished one ending and before I could click to go to credits, it gave me another choice and like a rabbit hole, I kept on going on and on for another 30 minutes. This movie was originally supposed to be 1 hour 30 minutes but you can surely keep it going for some more time. I am sure, others would experience the same curiosity. You may keep exploring more endings on Reddit and you might never give up. If you have time, of course.

Well, the minimal poster I made above represents the choices flowchart.

I wonder if there are actually any books which make the readers do the same. As in, say at page 50, one character has a choice. The author would have written there if the character makes choice A, directly jump to page 78 or if the choice is B, ignore the pages 51 to 81 and start reading 82 onwards. Now, that would be really mind-boggling.

Moral of the story remains the same, in life too, we make choices and most of the times, the outcomes end up being different. Since we cannot change the past, we have to live with it. But there are still some choices, we can go back to. Again, that depends on what you choose at that point in time.

Happy decision making!

Does YouTube parent your kids too?

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/watch-blackmirror

I have a nephew who is just a year old. He doesn’t speak more than baba-mama-gaga yet but what he can do with the prowess of an adult is swiping videos left and right, up and down on YouTube. He can watch hours of non-stop YouTube videos of animated characters if left unattended. I am sure, he will be easily adept at using Tinder too. I know of people whose young kids are easily pacified if given a mobile phone or laptop with YouTube already on. They also know how to ‘skip ad’ after 5 seconds on YouTube. A few years ago, the same thing used to happen with cartoons on TV but on a TV you can’t swipe up and down and click on a fancier video so that didn’t really catch up.

Do you also feel that YouTube works as a third-parent if you may, and works pretty well at it? There is no kid I have seen in recent time who is away from this culture. By kid I mean, children below 5 years of age. Of course, after that age, they are anyways uncontrollable and might also own mobile phones of their own, who knows!

It might come as only an opinion by an outside observer like me who don’t have kids of my own yet (what do I know of how to handle kids!?), but even I can guess that kids nowadays are to be kept busy and quiet when they are given a mobile phone easily, and not by telling stories, playing along, or reading books. (This also works on adults BTW.)

I saw a video (on YouTube of course), about the differences between 2 sets of kids. One set had been given a mobile phone to play with for more than 6 months. Another set had access only to physical games of building blocks and stuff. Then they were both given tasks like walk straight, make a building out of blocks, and some other hand-eye coordination games. The results were both expected and unexpected. Cynics and critics of kids with technology access would have guessed that kids using mobile phones would fare poorly when it came to physical tasks. However, both sets of kids were almost equally good. Surely, the kids who used to play with blocks were able to make a higher building with more blocks as compared to the tech-kids, the tech-kids had developed better hand-eye coordination to solve puzzles and finding things on a chart. Overall, it was inconclusive to say that tech-kids and normal kids were much different. But I would like to side with the cynics on this one. The tested group was very small and I believe that kids who will have such technology-driven pacifiers will be more difficult to please when these things are taken away from them. These kids would lack the power of imagination because they already have worlds they can touch, feel and see. They would have become addicted to them as they would have grown up more and there will be a time when they would find difficult to deal with the real world. Take our own example who have seen days of no Internet to the dial-up modem to broadband and now with smartphones with 4G. How much have we become dependent on technology ourselves that it was beyond fathomable a decade ago! And this change is so sudden that coming generations wouldn’t know how it was just 5-6 years before their birth.

I still feel that books with pictures, physical toys and games, good old storytelling and letting the kids imagine, we can raise our kids much better than YouTube. Nobody has time nowadays to cater to their kids because we ourselves are engrossed in those screens. Again, I don’t have to handle kids personally so maybe YouTube is the way to raise kids. But I request young parents to watch the below video and make your own judgment.

So I recently read: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Imagine you’re working in your office cubicle. There is a looming deadline at hand and whenever you are trying to concentrate, someone laughs hysterically loud from a distant corner. You mutter some abuses under your breath and try to concentrate harder. You try to mentally block the unnecessary noises along with stuffing your fingers into your ears, to added effect. Even now you can hear the printer, someone walking behind, and generally distracting lights but you tell yourself, it is okay and that you can still read the very important document without which finishing work would be difficult. As soon as you reach the second paragraph, a pop-up window shows up and the right-hand corner of the desktop. That can be ignored, for now, you assure yourself. You reach the third paragraph and then your phone lightens up. There is another joke on your family WhatsApp group which is there just for ruining whatever concentration you had built till now. You move on but before you reach the next chapter, notifications galore. Someone visited someplace on the company’s money and want you to see their airport check-ins on Facebook. Or some political upheaval has happened in the capital, your news alert shouts. Or twitter has just lost it’s, what do they say, collective shit, for the 109th time today. And there goes your concentration out of the window and gives up on you.

Has it ever happened to you?

Or as they show in ads, are you fully frustrated with distractions, notifications, social media nonsense, and inability to concentrate for the attention span now almost nonexistent?

If yes, this book is the perfect antidote you need for your addiction to social media, the poison of modern-day life.

Does your office appear like a fair to you where people are just moving incessantly for no reason whatsoever?

Deep Work by Cal Newport tries to do only one thing. It tries to reassure and encourage you that if you really want to do some productive work, which he calls ‘Deep Work’, you have to really boycott everything you think isn’t relevant to the work. The book has several examples of people who really mastered the art of Deep Work and produced astonishing work of literature, science, art, and so on. All they did was to cut themselves off from the material world and concentrate. They trusted their brain to do the knowledge work, they had set out to do and when their brain got free from all the mess around, it produced the desired results and the satisfaction which is often missing from the work. For example,

“Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a shed on the property of the Quarry Farm in New York, where he was spending the summer. Twain’s study was so isolated from the main house that his family took to blowing a horn to attract his attention for meals.”

The book repeats several times, that social networking (and mobile phone), is nothing but a poison which is damaging our culture and innate mindset of humans that we are getting consumed by it and not the other way around. It mostly takes the example of modern knowledge workers, say, people who code, write, think, and create.

It also tries to propagate a beautiful fact which is totally unlike what you have been told till now. We are told to be approachable and we are expected to reply to every message, email, text immediately. Deep Work suggests becoming hard to reach. Not only it would make you better at what you’re currently doing instead of wasting time replying to things which can easily be dealt with later. But it also makes others understand that you treasure your time as equally as money.

Reading this book coincided with my getting fed up with social media and I feel no remorse whatsoever not being a regular on Facebook and Twitter.

You can buy it from here: https://amzn.to/2zs9nRL