change – Bilal Hafeez

How To Think About Change

I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently, especially with my transition from corporate life to start-up life. While I’m comfortable with change most the time, I do occasionally need some words of support. For that, I find there’s no-one better than Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, who lived 2,500 years ago. He wrote:

“life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like”

How To Stop Worrying

It seems so natural to us, that we often forget than we can stop worrying. As is often the case, Dale Carnegie seems to have worked it out in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Here are some of the highlights from the 1948 classic : Continue reading “How To Stop Worrying”

Don’t Iterate, Be Bold

“We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” says Peter Thiel. He co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, Palantir* and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel is perhaps one of most original thinkers to come out of Silicon Valley. In his book “Zero to One”, he outlines his take on the world. Continue reading “Don’t Iterate, Be Bold”

Revolutionise Corporate Performance

I recently stumbled across a fascinating talk by the excellent Margaret Heffernan called “Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work”. She cited a study that showed that top-performing teams were those where each person spoke for an equal amount of time and were good at reading each other’s social cues. What did not matter was the individual intelligence of each team member. It was the quality of interactions, not the quality of the individuals that mattered. This turns the focus of companies on hiring and retaining stars on its head. Continue reading “Revolutionise Corporate Performance”

Ready For Change?

Each of us look at the same world in very different ways. The same can be said of change, some loathe it, some embrace it.

Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, who lived 2,500 years ago said:

“life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like”

and

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve”.

This is echoed by a more contemporary sage, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is quoted as saying

“strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength”.

He also had more mundane wisdom such as

“It’s simple, if it jiggles, it’s fat”.

Bilal