Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Human Machine
Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
To my
Horses,
Dragon,
Tiger.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Xavier Niel is the most respected french entrepreneur. He owes his reputation to his
approachable attitude as well as the intense and singular pace of his actions. Not only he
is the founder and majority shareholders (is not solde owner) of Iliad, 42, Station F and
Kima Ventures, he is also an intense character who personally answers, in record time, to
more than a thousand emails every single day. Although his implicit management style
can be somewhat challenging for the people working with him, he gives them his trust in
daring decisions for them to push the boundaries towards ambitious goals and thrive
alongside him.
I am one of those lucky fellows, as part of Kima Ventures and Max, two of his Venture
Capital initiatives bound to invest in the best french founders in tech, worldwide.
A little bit of history
Back in 2014, I reached out to Xavier to ask him if he was willing to invest in Captain
Train. I had supported the company since 2011 and while they were struggling to raise a
new round of funding, I was convinced that Xavier would understand the opportunity.
He ended up investing in Captain Train, making a 10x return in less than two years after
that. From there we started to discuss dealflow opportunities over email. And one day, he
asked for a meeting, in his very own way...
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
We ended up meeting in March, 2015. A couple of weeks later, he asked me if I wanted to
join Kima Ventures.
From Pressure to Pleasure
When I arrived on September 1st, 2015, the intensity of my agenda abruptly changed.
Suddenly, I had tons of new friends asking for meetings, hundreds of opportunities to
review and a couple of new deals to make every single week. The portfolio was
composed of roughly 400 companies and we had to figure out a way to step-up our game
as the venture capital arm of the most active business angel in the world.
I had secretly wanted this job since 2013, and now that I was there, I had to be up to the
task and beyond. I didn't want to fail. But as a husband and a father of three children, I
couldn't fail my family neither. I assumed that if Xavier was able to deal with his intense
agenda, I had no excuse. From there I started to implement incremental improvements
which pilled up with incredible compounded effects. It didn't only change my way of
dealing with my organisation, it also transformed my mindset, enjoying my quest to
improve my learning and execution curve week after week.
How I came up with Human Machine
In 2017, When The Family asked me to talk about my organisational methods to future
startup employees, I came up with "Human Machine", A title reflecting a way to balance
the fact that I was building a strong organisation while having a joyful life, that the two
were linked to each others and highly compatible.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
It took me a while to write this kind-of-book, probably because I didn't want it to be similar
to the others about productivity and self-development. I was looking for a format that was
feeling right, less fixed or steady and more evolutive.
The importance of versioning this book is that, like each one of us, it will never be perfect,
it won't fit to everyone and it must be patiently crafted over time. I hope that time will
prove me right. In the meantime, don't hesitate to send your feedbacks :)
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Introduction
I see all those kids, and they remind me of my own childhood. They followed some education,
learnt everything through principles, examples or life events, they’ve been put into boxes to
shape their characters and their future. They mimic the world they live in and deal as shown or
required by their parents, friends, superiors.
Along the way, those kids have noticed that humanity was full of paradoxes, unfairness and
complexities. They probably started to ask themselves why but were shut-down in their attempt
to understand the world with a different, new perspective and were more or less forced to
comply with the rules just like their peers. Nobody ever really gave them real, thoughtful
explanations, a lens of clear understanding, a way to deal with those things and their relative
degree of rationalities.
Why is this person better than me at doing something?
How do I figure this one thing I master better than everyone else?
Why do I struggle to thrive and how can change this dynamic?
Is there a way to do things differently, to succeed, and be happy?
All those questions are legitimate. We have been and we are still those kids. We didn’t find a
way through all the intricacies of the world. Instead, our search for meaning has been often
muted and we had to follow a certain order of things to find ourselves lost in our inability to truly
adapt and evolve as human beings.
It hurts but it’s true. I have always been wondering why and how we have let this happen?
Philosophy was never in the early programs, kindness and forgiveness have been merely taught
as core principles to follow, without reflection on what it actually means and implies. Awareness
was annihilated and singularities have been treated as commodities, making some of us, as
grown-up kids, lost in society, unable to find our true-self or without a meaning for what we do
with our life.
If only someone had shown us earlier the value of asking why, of embracing ignorance, our
natural curiosity for any matters would have been nurtured. If we had been told about the value
of shared trust and honesty, we would have developed more often and more consistently truly
genuine relationships with people. If we had been supported while facing the intricacies coming
from difficulties, efforts and failures, our life balance would have been preserved instead of
being pushed to the limits where daemons and neurosis rise up.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
But we are here, we are breathing and we are aware of the imperfections that have paved our
way this whole time. And it’s not too late to gain a sense of control, to make small changes one
step at a time, to overcome our fear of achievement.
It’s demanding to be good parent, a real friend, an accomplished person. Destruction takes
seconds, construction takes ages. Resistance is easy, action requires efforts. We are, as
human beings, in a never-ending growing process with an omnipresent risk of slipping away and
it’s our own responsibility to unlock the matter that will help us thrive as a person, find a balance
and improve our life.
Of course it’s hard to know where and how to start, or what to expect even though we deeply
feel and know that we must go after this next best version of ourselves. It’s very easy to explain
the course of actions afterwards but it’s undoubtedly hard to generate universal and applicable
principles from them. Rules only precedes others that come aside, on top, following or in
replacement.
No real understanding nor action come without being truly open-minded. It’s where it all starts,
it’s the first principle of all,​ ​the one key without which you can’t open the other doors. It’s the
beginning of all future iterations that hopefully will help you thrive as a person.
Open-mindedness is about our willingness to listen to other people and consider new ideas,
suggestions, and opinions. Looking backward, think about those times when you were wrong
and acknowledged it. Looking forward, when you face an argument, try to put aside what you
believed were true or obvious to focus on the point of view from the other side as potentially a
legitimate opinion if not the entire truth.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
I have written this book in the honest people's favour who are open to change and progress in
their life. But that doesn’t mean you should put too much pressure on yourself, life is giving you
enough and open-mindedness is a process of reflection that requires patience.
Notice for honest readers:
It is only your decision to go forward and read the following chapters. I wouldn’t advise you to
put too much effort into it, it’s a willingful journey, nobody is forcing you. Just don’t skip parts,
don’t apply fast reading methods, it’s short enough to be read thoroughly.
If you don’t feel like it’s the right moment, put a reminder to give it another try in a couple weeks,
and see how it goes.
I really hope you’ll enjoy this reading :)
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Prelude
Put the pressure down
The promise of all the resources about self-help or self-development is to allow us to better
know ourselves towards finding our next best version as happy human beings. Unfortunately for
the majority of us, we never manage to become this person. There are simple reasons for this
commonly known failure.
The habits of the most successful people, the best recipes from the most ​renowned​ chefs, the
miracle methods to lose weight, to sleep better or to become more productive, they are all great
stories to tell. They sound obvious, brilliant, yet so simple. Therefore we project ourselves like in
a movie, our hope that everything can change for the better tomorrow is at its all high, just like
our apparent motivation. Nothing could stop us from achieving greatness. We get ourselves
transported into an imaginary future in which we accomplish extraordinary things. It does feel
like when people play the lottery and imagine what they could do with all that money if they win.
It’s a candid illusion.
Then we face the truth, like a boomerang. It’s not the right time, we don’t have all the
ingredients, it’s not really something for us, we have better things to do, we don’t see the results
of our actions, it’s too painful, too difficult or it simply doesn’t work. There is an endless list of
excuses to explain our lack of accomplishments, but they really bring us no further forward at
the end of the day. Even worst, they trigger our natural defense mechanism where emotions
follow one another until we accept our fate. Denial, culpability, anger, rejection, unhappiness,
and then silent acceptance. We are just waiting for the next projection of our imaginary
super-self.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Psychologists have demonstrated that the most powerful personal transformations usually come
from traumatic, impactful events, which is not something we should wish for. We can’t just let
things go until we hit bottom or that something significant enough happen in our life. Fatalism or
waiting for an epiphany isn’t the best way to lead any self development or transformation.
On another related note, we need to get rid of all the speeches about operating hard changes or
making big bold moves that will transform our life for good. It’s a complete trumpery, another
future disenchantment that we can only suffer from.
The reality about self-development is honestly less brutal and a lot more hopeful in my opinion,
so let me make it easy for you: Your situation isn’t binary, there is no such things as a super-self
or a self-loser, it’s not a fierce battle between burgers versus quinoa, yoga versus nap, or netflix
versus book, productivity versus procrastination. There is nothing absolute into finding
happiness, it’s all about finding and maintaining the right balance while we keep moving forward
with our life.
In order to do that, we are going to put aside the boomerang of your incredible imaginary self, to
get rid of all signs of culpability about all the things that we haven’t done yet or the unproductive
things that we are probably going to do today (chatting, watching a movie, attending a boring
meeting…). No one has ever accomplished extraordinary things overnight. The human being is
a machine, singular, paradoxal and complex for sure, but for whom each achievement or
accomplishment is just the compound result, more or less organized, of pretty simple things. But
before we get to those things, let’s set a couple a rules between us.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Commit with trust and patience.
There is no losers, just bad or overwhelmed teachers.
There is no quitters, just incompetent or mistrained managers.
People who are already up on the ladder, who have knowledge and experience on certain
matters, whose responsibility is to show the way and be an example for their peers, they must
take the ownership for those who fail under and around them. This is my responsibility towards
you as well.
The conditions are obviously not ideal, we don’t have a mutual agreement, I haven’t chosen the
readers and you can’t initially assess the value of this book besides what you have heard about
it. There is not active interactivity between us but believe me when I say that I deeply and
honestly care about having an impact on what’s coming next in your life. I don’t care about the
number of words that this book carries along, I just want it to be substantial, authentic and
actionable.
My intention is to help you find your way toward the next best version of yourself and it all starts
from you with commitment, through trust and patience. No efforts, just attention and good
intentions as a start. Again, ​Trust and patience.
Trust because the best understandings of all things start with the initial intention to believe in
them. You can’t be defiant of what I am about to reveal. You’ll reflect on a number of assertions
and arguments afterwards and you probably won’t agree with everything, but in the meantime I
really need you to maximize your natural receptiveness.
Patience because you need to activate tolerance. Actions with sustainable consequences take
time, you’ll have to content yourself with small victories before you can really enjoy notable
changes in your life.
Shall we give it a try? :)
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Equilibrium & growth
Self-development is a generic term, just like artificial intelligence in tech or diet in nutrition. The
issue with any universal concept is that it kills the inherent substance of the core subject it’s
supposed to be attached to. Popularization is great for democratization but disastrous for true
meanings. We lose consciousness and understanding of the matters we are supposed to be
aware of.
We shall get back to the heart of what we are truly looking for in our life if we want to be able to
move forward. And it certainly doesn’t have to be complex or complicated. We are all searching
for a fulfilling sensation in who we are and what we are doing, it’s as simple as that. What we
need in order to experience this feeling of realisation is to get into a state of relative equilibrium,
and a movement of growth, both those constants being synchronized, each one of them fueling
the other and moving together with compounded effects.
Finding an equilibrium is not about getting into a steady or perfect state, it’s just impossible, it’s
about balancing in one way or another while understanding where we stand and feeling in
control of what’s happening in our life. This is what allows us to be in peace with ourselves as
an imperfect human being and also more importantly to initiate this movement of growth.
It’s like when you’re in the park with your kids or having a good time with your friends even
though you know that you have other things to do as well, related to your home or your work for
instance. You can’t do everything at the same time, and you are probably late or behind
schedule for some of them. Like right now, while you are reading this book, you could probably
tackle a couple of things that are long due in your to-do list. Relax, you will handle them
eventually, just don’t rush into it.
We need to accept who we are and where we stand right now, with all the things that are going
right but more importantly with everything that are falling apart because we can’t solve
everything at once and we won’t. This is where our equilibrium starts and don’t worry it will grow
on you as things get slightly better within days, weeks, months or even years.
Imperfections are part of us, it’s about being aware of them that matter. It’s not because we
have rules and obligations that we perfectly comply with them. I shall empty my inbox two times
a week, take meetings only from 2pm to 5.30pm and be reading a good book before going to
bed instead of watching TV Series. Yet you can’t imagine how many times I break those rules in
a given week. But because I have them, I know where I stand when I slip from my schedule, it
allows me to keep a relative sense of control and find a healthy balance that fits with my
inspirations. Awareness is key.
As for growth, it’s in our nature. Since our childhood, we have been programmed to learn,
execute and progress and there is no reason why we should stop when becoming adults.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
There isn’t a better satisfaction than reaching out to something that feels right and good to us.
Every smart move that we make contribute to this feeling of realisation. It’s in every decision and
action that we take: holding a door, smiling at someone, helping out, cleaning up, or simply
doing something that we are supposed to do. And for each move that we make, it’s either a
reinforcement of what we already know, a learning/discovery or a change/adaptation in
something that’s not at the right place.
The pressure is down, you are committed with trust and patience, and you understand that you
are not asked to accomplish something extraordinary or impossible, it’s just about finding a
balanced state and keeping the movement going.
Now we can start addressing all the blockers and enablers that will allow you to thrive as a
person.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Key Takeaways:​ You are about to operate some changes in your life, with open-mindedness,
commitment and understanding of what you are going after. It is not going to be brutal or
sudden, it’s going to be subtle, to take time and therefore will require that you don’t put too
much pressure on yourself. Commit with good intentions, accept your imperfections and the
state of where the things currently are. From there you’ll find a relative equilibrium that will grow
on you as your move forward.
-
I understand and find true everything that I have read so far1
I understand the importance to read this book thoroughly
I understand that the goal of this book is to help me find the next best version of myself
I understand that unnecessary pressure won’t do me any help
I understand that improvements are always incremental, that nothing happens overnight
I understand that i must commit with trust, patience and tolerance towards my honest-self
I understand the two notions of Equilibrium and Growth (as a forward movement)
I understand that every move contributes to the next one with compounded effects
1
​If not, is it because I didn’t focus, didn’t understand or disagree? Please don’t hesitate to send
me an email if necessary, I will be happy to answer you. jean@humanmachine.com
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Better humans
The power of not knowing
Did you ever notice as a child and then consequently as an adult that people are more easily
willing to say “I know” or “I understand” in any given situation than the contrary, even if it’s not
true? It’s because the default answer to any given question is yes, more than no. Yes is what
apparently make things go smooth and easy, so we tend to genuinely acknowledge (or ignore or
escape...) instead of figuring out if the answer should be different. It’s a vicious circle that tends
to takeover our consciousness and judgement, anihiling our power of ignorance that allows us
to move forward, of making deliberate choices and of saying potentially no.
How the human being works as a machine to learn is universal. Without understanding the
basics of what we are trying to achieve, we can’t fully succeed. It’s the lens that provides us with
clarity of vision. Moreover, understanding fuels our natural curiosity on how things work, it
provides a very satisfying feeling of fulfilment. This is where starts every process of doing and
achieving things the right way.
When we lack understanding, we either pretend, ignore or make the effort to start a process of
learning. Pretending or ignoring is often the consequence of our incredible ability to judge
people and things. It’s a fast, easy and tempting process for the mind. Whatever interactions we
have in our life, we shall ask ourselves if we fully understand the nature of a situation. If we
don’t, we must reflect on what would allow us to improve our understanding instead of acting
with a set of information that is at best incomplete but more often inaccurate.
However, be careful not to take the notion of understanding as an absolute matter. I’ll cover in
the following chapters the process of actions and decisions and you will notice that we can
rarely deal with a full and accurate set of information to decide whether or not we should take
one path or another. It’s about being clear about our level of understanding in order to deal with
the part of uncertainty that will remain while we step forward and make calls-to-action.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
When I joined the team of Pascal Mercier, my first mentor, in summer 2011, I really struggled in
following some rules in the way things were done and I was afraid to speak freely and to say it.
It threatened our collaboration as I was struggling to initiate the right relationship with him. After
a couple of months, he understood and told me that I shouldn’t be afraid to say that I don’t
know, don’t understand or don’t feel comfortable about something, that acknowledging my
ignorance or incomprehension was actually a mark of strength that demonstrated awareness
and honesty, that there was no weakness in asking why and how some people think or things
work. This day, it hit me as an obvious lesson that I never forgot.
People sometimes fear to show their peers that they ignore or don’t understand something.
Vulnerability sounds to them like a flaw instead of an opportunity to improve communication and
understanding between each others. Those who lack curiosity and refuse to admit that they
don’t know or understand a situation, will more likely fail to succeed compared to anyone else
with a different mindset.
We are always judged by people at some point whether we like it or not, just as we are also
always hard on ourselves. But this should never be a reason to quit and fake it in front of the
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
wall of ignorance. You should ask people to offer your their hands. People value honesty and
are willing to help, often more than you think. Acknowledging our lack of understanding or
ignorance is a sign of maturity, it allows us to face our true self, something we should never be
afraid of. Fear will never help you make a move, it will always stop you, and frequently at times
when you should actually be moving forward.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Reasoning our emotions
Around the notion of understanding, there is a whole process of receiving and treating
information. We don’t pay much attention about the flow in our mind but one philosopher,
Baruch Spinoza, passed his entire existence linking the reason to the emotions and it’s pretty
revealing on how we behave as human beings and how we can improve the way we interact
through the events in our life. It’s part of the foundations that allow us to make the most out of
our interactions with the world in general.
Our mind functions with two gears, one automatic and one manual. You will often hear people
talk about system 1 and system 2. It’s explained in details in the book Thinking, fast and slow.
The automatic gear or system 1 is our intuitive, emotional, simple mode of thinking, it’s how we
initially process everything. It’s triggered by our experience, knowledge or feeling. Everything
that relies to a pattern of recognition or sounds obvious to us will be identified as true by our
system 1. And this is the tricky part of our machine as we might sometimes pass the test of our
own system while failing at being actually right about something. Let’s take for instance the milk
and white association. You ask people what color is the milk, they say white, then you ask them
what do we drink in the morning with cereals and they will naturally answer milk, from what
cheese is made, what do babies drink, what do baby animals drink. They will keep saying Milk,
And then you ask what does a cow drink, most of the people will spontaneously answer milk…
While it’s water of course. They’ve been tricked by their own mind, system 1 is autonomously
running, while the system 2 which is supposed to help them resonate is shutdown, the full
mental bandwidth being already used.
The manual gear or system 2, however, is a more deliberate, reasoned, complex mode of
thinking. It’s how we can provide a second opinion or second thought and solve more effortful
operations. Part of the job of our conscious mind is to help control our unconscious in order to
improve the quality of our reflex, of our intuition, of our mindset in general. The system 2 is the
training center of our system 1 and the more we link them together, the better we behave and
react to certain events. Anger, susceptibility, sadness, impatience, intolerance and so forth are
automatic feelings that can be tweaked through an appropriate, thoughtful and patient action of
our manual gear.
This being said and understood, let’s see how it relies to our reason and our emotions together
and why it’s so important to successfully master this loop.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
A+B = Open Mindedness, C+D = Understanding, E+F = Willingness
Emotions are the first ever reaction to any particular event, whether it makes us laugh,
uncomfortable, cry, scream… It’s our most primitive reaction. From there comes an association
to feelings, we are able to interpret how we feel, whether it’s sad, happy, disappointed… and
finally comes the most complex part that requires our full intention, it’s our reason, the process
of explaining how we feel but most importantly why. This is where starts the process of aligning
our emotions to our reason. Dealing with our reason in an appropriate way is all about putting
together open-mindedness, understanding and willingness.
Open-mindedness is our ability to start a clean thoughtful process by acknowledging that we
might be wrong about something and that we are open to discover something new or another
truth about a given situation. The best way to put ourselves in a state of open-mindedness is to
think about past events where we remembered being wrong and in which we valued the new
perspective gained from this lost argument. It helps us find the state of mind in which you were
at the time.
Then, we must start a process of understanding. Being open just allows you to release your
good faith and unlock all the barriers of your cerebral cortex. Now you must process the
information. In any given situation, there is a rationale and an irrational part, the latter being the
natural extent of our feelings and emotions, linked to particular events. In both cases, our job is
to successfully explain, in a very simple and straightforward way why and how the flow of the
events took a particular path. From there we must reflect on what would it take to generate
another output, the best possible one. It came come from our own actions and the way we
handle a situation or on the contrary from someone else and therefore how we can invite this
person to change her behaviour.
Now comes willingness, our ability not only to understand a situation but to drive change
whether it’s in its actual form regarding which actions to take or how we feel about something. In
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
the latter, we are reversing the process from our reason to our emotions to control ourselves,
keep our head clear and find a balance in the way the feel about any given situation. And there
is no limit in our ability to reflect on things in order to change how we process them. The more
balanced and in control we feel the better we are able to deal with any situation.
I was attending a meeting with an entrepreneur and an advisor. At one point during the meeting,
the advisor told the entrepreneurs that he should run his company in a certain way. My
immediate emotion was anger, i was feeling mad at this person. ​Phase A & B.​ The reason is
that she was pushing the entrepreneur into one direction without reflecting properly on the
current situation of the company nor explaining why it should be operating this way rather than
another. I quickly understood that I had to calm my nerves if I wanted to bring a constructive
approach and flip the table. This person wasn’t ill-intentioned, she was just throwing things from
her strong belief or past experience. It wasn’t misconduct, just clumsiness. I knew I should
remain calm if I wanted this situation to evolve. I was in phase C & D. So i did calm my emotions
and resynched them with my reason. From there I explained calmly but firmly that this remark
was unsolicited and needed thorough explanations so that the entrepreneur could understand
why and how the advisor was approaching this issue and whether or not it would make sense
for him to follow this advice. Phase E & F.
The example above is about stepping back and settle down in order to react appropriately to a
certain situation. The goal is simply to generate the best possible outcome, which is very
straightforward. However, when it comes to drive more substantial changes in our life, finding
the motivation to act requires to understand, enable and repeat the triggers and conditions that
drove out past improvements.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Triggers & conditions
We are nothing short of being the masters when it comes to resist to efforts and changes.
People even wrote entire books about all the reasons why we don’t do things, like the War of
art, a succession of pages on how resistance applies to everything we do. Well, as much as this
is true, there is always a way to actually move forward. The people who succeed have all found
consciously or not the triggers, motives or reasons to do things.
It can vary in terms of nature and intensity but there is always one, it can be the fear of failing,
the will to please, the search for pleasure, the need of balance, the competitiveness, the non
acceptance of weakness, the struggle with authority, or even self-motivation to learn and
progress. Here are three examples that i like to take and that were triggered for different
reasons.
I smoked one pack a day for about 10 years, and then I discovered this book “The easy way to
stop smoking” by Allen Carr. I had heard that it worked incredibly well so I read and it did ! Forty
eight hours after, I had quit without missing a puff of that crap. One thing that resonated with me
was what he called the “Nicotine Monster”, this beast inside you that is winning and beating you
up from the inside, always asking for one more cigarette. I’ve always had an issue with
authority, it makes me feel like i’m unwindly trapped into something. Therefore the
personification of the act of smoking appealed to me immediately, i was feeling ridiculously
trapped and it didn’t take me long to just stop.
On another note, I had a two days personal reflection training with a coach in 2017. At the end
of the two days, this person advised me to read a book, the spinoza problem. He told me that i
would probably like it and that it would be great to talk about it when we meet again the next
time. I’ve probably read less than a dozen book in my entire life, i’ve never been an avid reader,
and i’m not proud of it don’t get me wrong, but it just never hit me. Anyway, i didn’t want to
disappoint him, i wanted him to be proud, just like I want my family, my friends, or my boss to be
proud of me. So i bought the book and started reading it. It helped me reflect on a lot of things
but also fuel one of my weaknesses: lack of patience. Reading forces my patience and it’s good
for me. Also, because i found something valuable into this book, i started to like the action of
reading. From this day on, i’ve been reading close to three or four books every single month.
Finally, about how i became highly productive in almost everything i do. In 2015, I joined Kima
Ventures, the venture capital arm fo Xavier Niel, France most respected entrepreneurs. It was a
dream come true to have the chance to work closely with him. Very quickly, my inbox, my
agenda and my dealflow were all overwhelming. My organisation had taken the control over me,
it was the authority ;) As I couldn’t take it anymore and strongly wanted to make an impression
on my boss so we could envision an ambitious future together, I decided to take the control
back and from there started the transformation of my organisation. I had always been efficient
and synthetic, but now with a neat organisation and clear rules, i had become super productive.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
In those cases, two major things appear, my reluctance to authority and my search for pride
from others. There are always one or several triggers that drive the major shifts that happen in
our lives and they are always linked to certain conditions. When I stopped smoking, it was an
opportunity that i took and through the reading i came to realize how stupid i was. When i went
to this coach, i willingly wanted to reach another step in my personal journey and i was
struggling to find how and through this process a couple of things unlocked but my major
learning came from starting to read. When I joined Kima Ventures, i was forced into the change
of pace and it forced me to drive that change in order to cope with the events.
You should always look back and detect both the conditions and the triggers of what you
achieved in your life. Sometimes you’ll be able to mimic the events in order to make things
happen, sometimes they will come to you accidentally, just be ready and open to it.
At a minor level, triggers become tweaks that we can use to trap our weaknesses and fight
against the small resistances of our daily life. But i’ll get back to that later.
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Key Takeaways:​ I like the idea of us becoming better humans as time goes by. And I hope that
you do too. To openly acknowledge our lacks and gaps allows us to get into a thoughtful
process of understanding. From there we are able to gain a sense of control over our emotions
through reflection and reasoning. It gives us the necessary mindset to act accordingly in most
situations in which we would have rushed or missed the mark otherwise. The final step into
becoming a better person is to drive sustainable progress either by replicating the right
conditions or by being open to the opportunities, in which we can trigger the right changes in our
lives.
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I understand the importance of making deliberate choices
I understand the power of not knowing and acknowledging it
I understand the link between reason and emotion
I understand clearly Open-mindedness, Understanding and Willingness
I understand that reflection is key towards a better behaviour
I understand that every change happens in certain conditions with clear triggers
I understand that conditions and triggers can be repeated to drive change
What appears to be mechanical needs to be supported by the right mindset. You can’t become
a better human without becoming a better person.
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Better persons
Positive honesty by default
I know, this sounds ridiculously obvious. Your parents told you that already, your religion taught
you this as well (if you are a believer) and you’ve probably been the witness of karma. But this is
far more important than you have probably acknowledged it until today and that’s why i wanted
to insist on how being nice and honest play a major role in the future that lies ahead of you.
Positive Honesty is a magic combo where positivity is a mindset to win by default because your
attitude will make you thrive as a human being and honesty is a driver of long term performance
as it’s the most noble and lasting way to approach and do things in general.
Let’s start with a simple mechanism, smiling, something that you can easily practice without too
much effort. You will probably tell yourself that you are already smiling most of the time, and
that’s probably true, but try to smile when you are concentrating on something, when you are in
a business meeting, when the events are not naturally putting you in this state. Studies show
that people who constantly smile, even with a stick in their mouth in order to force them to do
so, over-perform in any given task compared to people who don’t. It’s a two ways system. If we
feel happy, we produce endorphins and a signal to our facial muscles, triggering a smile. The
opposite is true. If we activate our facial muscles and smile, we send a signal to our brain,
stimulating our reward system and therefore producing endorphins. Endorphins help reduce
stress and is a natural booster of activity and efficiency.
If you couple that with honesty, it helps you balance a relative state of euphoria with clarity of
vision. As endorphin reduces stress, it also maximizes optimism. The issue with this state of
flow that helps you cope with any situation, it’s that it partly disables your ability to honestly
question and analyse clearly a given situation. The same mechanism appears with anger. Our
relatively extreme feelings annihilate our reasoning. That is why it’s fundamental to make sure
that our optimism is balanced with clairvoyance and honesty as it’s how we keep our feet down
to earth while having our head up high. Whenever you are thinking or acting, ask yourself if you
release enough positive energy and remember that smiling is a natural enabler. At the same
time, make sure that you are fully aware of the totality, reality, and complexity of the situation
you are in.
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Positive, honest thinking will have three impacts in your life: It is an enabler of possibilities, your
mind being in peace, it will allow you to see things with a more open perspective. The second
effect is that it paints a pattern of eagerness in situations and spreads to people in those
situations. Finally, positivity is glowing, people see it from the outside, it’s a magnet that attracts
opportunities (with its fair dose of noise as well, of course).
On the contrary, negativity partly disables your ability to see things clearly or with a broad view.
It’s also a tenser of situations, and a blocker of external opportunities at best, and spreads like a
plague at worst. Why would anyone nurture a negative attitude?
Here is an example that we have all faced. You went to a restaurant and that day the waiter was
in a bad mood. Maybe he had an argument with a friend, his colleague was sick and left him
with too much work to do, or some uneducated customers gave him a really hard time. When
the waiter came to you, he wasn’t very pleasant, you might argue that it’s not a way to treat
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customers and that’s true. But what if instead of hitting him back you were behaving with an
opposite attitude, being patient, smiling at him and talking nicely? the natural reaction that will
be triggered most of the time is that your smile will translate to his own behaviour as people
mimic what they like, the probability that he smiles back at you and treat you greatly will be
higher. Of course, you’ll have to bear with him and the current situation, maybe accept that he’s
in a rush, but your mutual understanding of the situation will allow you to enjoy your meal. The
opposite is true, if you don’t acknowledge the difficulty of the situation for him and treat him
badly, you’ll have a bad experience and ultimately this is not what you want. You’d better leave
the place instead. It’s your power of understanding, and your ability to reason your emotion that
will allow you to assess any given situation and act accordingly with a positive honest mindset to
make the most out of a situation and generate the best potential output.
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Clear up you mind
As systems 1 and 2 go, our mental bandwidth is limited and constraint. However, we can stretch
them a little by working on our cognitive abilities through meditation and brain exercises.
Meditation and brain exercises are either relaxing or fun, they come with their dose of
gamification and neat user experience that we are now used to on our smartphones. They don’t
even require to take a lot of time, less than 5 to 10 minutes per session is enough to start
meditate or train your brain, it’s one of those steps that are easy to take when we are in search
for improvements in our life. As usual, the most difficult part of recurring events is to form a
habit, but I’ll get back to that later.
To train your brain, you can try apps such as Luminosity, Peak or Elevate. To meditate, I
especially like Headspace, it comes with different categories such as Productivity, Health and of
course Foundation. Meditation is one of the way to fuel our open-mindedness, patience and
tolerance, it can be a great enabler. You should give it a try or get back to it if you had tried but
given up in the past.
To develop the abilities of your mind don’t prevent you from managing how much information
you are putting into it. Most people don’t realize how easily we can overwhelm ourselves by
storing too much information without processing them, and it doesn’t matter whether they are
active or pending tasks, as long as it’s in our mind, it’s using bandwidth. In order to sort this out,
think of your mind as a box with three compartments. The routines, the active actions and the
scheduled tasks. Each one of those boxes has its function.
Routines are everything that you do on a pretty much regular basis and that you know is coming
at some point. The goal of routines is to avoid too much overwhelming about certain tasks by
knowing when they will be performed. For me, it’s going down my inbox to reach zero emails
two times a week on wednesday and sunday, it’s achieving whatever actions that is in my to-do
list called zero every sunday night, it’s going through our deal-flow every monday. It’s not
because routines exist that they must be absolutely respected at all times but whenever we slip,
we must get right back to a state where the routines end up being dealt with. With routines
come automatisms, the things that we have decided to deal with in a systematic way, like not
answering the phone unless the call is programmed, replying to messages only in the evening,
having a simple wardrobe to avoid too much thinking when we dress up in the morning, never
drink alcohol during the week, etcetera.
Then, there are the active actions, it’s everything that is either quick to deal with and put behind
or immediate (as urgent or forced). Whenever i can do something that takes few minutes only, I
just do it right away. If it takes more than few minutes or if i lack time, it goes into my todo list
called Zero to be dealt with later. If it’s something urgent, I either treat it right away, or put it in a
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list called Forward, in order to treat it later during the day or first things in the morning the next
day, at the same time as other important matters.
Those Zero and Forward lists are the scheduled actions which are all the tasks or things i have
thought about that came my way and that I have decided to treat another time. I admit that I also
have a list called “one day” which looks more like a bucket list of things that I should probably do
one day… But no comment on that ;)
All those tasks, whether we talk about the routines, the active actions or the scheduled ones
need to be properly classified so that our brain is only concentrated on one thing at a time, often
the active tasks, because we know that the two other categories are handled by the way we
have organized them.
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Our mind is a calculator which limits are quickly reached, therefore you must pay attention to
what you put into those lists and routines. If you send your boyfriend or girlfriend to the grocery
store and ask them to buy cucumber, potatoes, carrots, butter, yogurts, parmesan, biscuits,
bread and water, there is a high probability that one of the item will be lost along the way or that
the person will struggle to recompose the list in her mind. Up to seven, our memory works just
fine, above that number, It starts to rumble. However, if you put them into categories and that on
top of that you limit each category to 3 items, it will be way easier for the person to remember
them. Tell her milky products: yogurts, parmesan, milk, then vegetables: carrot, cucumber,
potatoes, then others: biscuits, bread and water. Even though the last list is not accurate,
because the person knows that 3 items are on that list, she will remember the three items in
each of the 3 lists.
Be careful, don’t have too many lists and don’t put too many things into them, i try to limit them
to 7 items. If they’re full it either means that they are not dealt with, which means that we are
probably disorganized or that we are unable to delegate or simply say no. In both cases, it’s bad
because it overwhelms our mind and therefore our ability to move forward in a peaceful and
efficient way.
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Find yourself
Do you remember that day when your parents told you that you could succeed in everything in
life as long as you loved what you were doing? Most of us took this the wrong way by assuming
that what we love we do it well. Unfortunately it’s a wrong statement. I love to cook but i’ll never
be a great cook, I love to draw but my son asks me why he’s better than me when it comes to
painting (that tells a lot), I love to dance but I’m wondering why I can’t move like that guy which
movements seem to be plugged straight to the instruments… We don’t necessarily do well what
we’d love to, but we tend to love what we do well, and this is a big difference in the way we
approach things.
I’ve always been an introvert. My sister even told me once that I was ignoring my asperger
disorder. The truth is that i’m probably on the edge of it… Being shy made me an observer, a
listener, someone who learns more about people that they actually understand about
themselves sometimes. It fuels empathy and altruism. As I grew up, I’ve learnt to appreciate the
other traits that define me as a person and noticed how paradoxal some of them were: Even
though I’m an introvert, i’m a good salesman, but it’s because i understand people well that i
can sell well. It’s all connected. I’m also good at synthesising (maybe because i don’t like to talk
much), I am efficient (Probably a result of my laziness), I lack patience and tolerance but at the
same time i like to contemplate things (which makes me slow) and I do tons of mistakes and
typo errors.
I’ve been lucky in the way events turned for me. I’ve always been a bit of a duffer, i repeated
grades in high school and then again at university, I’ve started a lot of things but finished only
few. When i was 25, as i was trying to build a career as an investment banker in a small ipo and
fundraising boutique, lehman brothers collapsed and the financial crisis hit hard. I hadn’t even
started my professional career per se that i was screwed… So I figured I should probably launch
my own boutique, at least to own my fate in this industry. From there I navigated, understanding
what I was good at and pushing every opportunity I had to thrive where my talents were needed.
Eventually, I joined the dream partner for a dream job, as one of xavier niel’s trusted guy to
invest in startups. And the lesson here is pretty obvious: we don't necessarily do well what we
seem to like or love. We actually excel at misguiding ourselves through mis-reasoned feelings,
thinking that finding what we love will help us find what to do. It’s actually the opposite, we’ll
always end up loving what we do incredibly well. That’s why we shall reverse-engineer
ourselves to list our talents and soft skills, to find where and how we can put them at work.
What a great product marketer, salesman, customer success, carpenter, plumber, electrician,
look like? It’s not much about what they know, it’s about the talents that they have and that
allowed them to thrive into learning what they now know and making them great at what they
do. What does it take to be a great doer, manager or leader? Do we have what it takes, are we
comfortable into moving up the ladder or shall we preserve our talents and express them
horizontally in a different position, at a different scale or even in a different company. To define
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who we are and where we can thrive as an individual, we must reflect on our personality. Tests
are a great way to begin this journey of understanding our abilities, the Myers–Briggs Type
Indicator being the most common one. Don’t hesitate to repeat those test several time and
every six months as our answers tend to change. It will allow you to put the right words in front
of your talents and abilities and from there to navigate into the intricacies of your career.
From there you should define what kind of role and career you should aim for. But in the
meantime, i’d like you to do another type of exercise, what i call the enabling paradoxes. In the
studies of the systems 1 and 2, people have demonstrated that we shall preferably start by
talking about the cons of a situation rather than the pros as the latters are naturally decreasing
our ability to list the formers. Finding the flaws that define our characters and temper allows us
to identify our strengths and qualities. Life is not about flat attributes that pile up to define who
we are but about the tension brought by the paradoxes of our character.
I am a lazy, shy, intolerant, impatient, messy, easily bored, unwilling to face authority kind of
person. All those flaws could be used against me, my productivity, my relationship with others.
But, in fact, they also trigger incredible abilities.
Being lazy means that I always look for a shorter and simpler way to do things, it’s what drive
efficiency and search for productivity in my life. Being shy means that i’m an introvert, i listen
more than i talk, i look at signals, i observe. It helps me develop my empathy, my sense of
others, my ability to understand situations where people would naturally jump into short-sighted
conclusions. Being kind of intolerant makes me demanding, with myself and others, it’s a search
for excellence. Being impatient drives performance as i like things to be achieved quickly. Being
messy means that the more I have, the less it’s organized, therefore i put everything behind me
whenever i can and i try not to store, keep or accumulate things otherwise i know it will be
untidy. Being easily bored makes me focus on the instant quality of events, i maximize the
moments i live in, and i don’t bother myself with things i don’t like.
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The overall goal of listing all your flaws is to know yourself better and acknowledge where you
are vulnerable. Then you shall use those vulnerabilities to express their paradoxical benefits
that will help you thrive as a good person. The more you can make a good use of them, the
better you will accept them and avoid to reject or deny their existence.
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Key Takeaways:​ It doesn’t take much time and efforts to drive progress and meaningful
changes in our life. It all starts with having a positive and honest mindset in every thought we
develop and every action we take. From there we simply deploy positive inputs towards
attracting positive attitudes and delivering positive outcomes. But that is only possible with a
clear way of doing things through the right routines, rules and organisation in general. And it can
only serves our self development if it’s in connection with things we do well and that we deeply
appreciate. That’s why it’s important to reflect on our set of attributes to determine their positive
and negative outputs and how we can benefit from them in the career that we decide to pursue.
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I understand the balance between positivity and honesty
I understand the value of a clear mind
I understand the difference between routines, active actions, and scheduled tasks
I understand that I can’t pile up infinite list of items
I understand the value of loving what I do well, and not the opposite
I understand the notion of paradoxical tensions of character
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Mindset to Action
Going through our days is an amazing thing that we have been often used to endure, rather
than to master. The first reason is probably our education. Authority at home has ruled over
arguments, debates and constructive conflicts in most families. The relationship between kids
and parents has remained top-down over the years, a situation in which parents give order and
show direction with actually very few inputs or opinions from their children most of the time.
Same goes with school. In an attempt to keep things order in classes of twenty to thirty kids,
consensus and compromises are predominant. We ask children not to get into arguments as
they haven’t learnt yet how to deal with them in a constructive, ordered and quiet manner. Yet,
we don’t teach them how to. Instead, they are forced into situations in which they don’t get to
decide and whenever a choice must be made, they learn to give up things in exchange of others
so compromises can be quickly reached. As this was not enough, school provides strong and
defining standards that can be frustrating, breaking and unfulfilling for many kids. In an absolute
educational aberration, conformity pushes kids to embrace slow, limited and unfulfilling actions
instead of nurturing their qualities so they can find a suitable place in this world.
Kids are singular individuals growing up at very different pace, and moreover in different
directions, whether they develop their motricity, their understanding of situation or their
communication skills for instance. In early classes, most schools develop standard programs for
all the children to fit within a group as a whole. It’s how society has learnt to work and progress,
in bulk. In order to limit the proportion of lost sheep, we keep a slow pace and develop courses
that everyone should be able to follow. We even tend to slightly lower the level of difficulty. It’s
certainly not a bad thing at a young age but it persists over the years, pushing the kids not only
to annihilate their singularities but also to follow a standard flow that encourages an average
and slow progression. This naturally follows us as we get into university or business school and
even more when we jump into the business world.
Mechanically, we just follow the path that has been ours for the couple of decades that
preceded the beginning of our career. Standardization seems like the right way of doing things,
finding consensus and looking for compromise look like the best and normal way to handle any
kind of situation. When it comes to efficiency, performance or making things happen, it’s easy to
notice that long assignments and slow realisation usually win over quick decisions and actions.
What some people don’t realize, it’s how impactful this lack of accountability is for our mindset
and sense of accomplishment, something that by default should be rewarding and supports our
self development. It’s truly devastating for the individuals that we are.
We just go through our days instead of mastering them, we encourage inertia instead of driving
movement and moreover we don’t experience the satisfaction of stimulating our brain, our
emotion, our ability to take actions and make things move. Our fear of failing, of showing our
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vulnerabilities, of not being up to the tasks we have been assigned to, of being less effective
than our colleagues, all those things are holding us back.
It’s time to gain a better control of our fate,
to surround yourself with the right people,
to take fulfilling decisions.
The most challenging way is to let our mindset be the cause of our actions. It’s difficult because
it requires a fair does of self-discipline into overcoming our resistances, something that most of
us are not naturally ready for nor capable of. Another way if to go throughout mechanical
adaptations, to find the techniques, methods and ways around ourselves in order to drive the
changes we want to make. This is how I deal with myself and how I anticipate you will succeed
into finding a better balance in your life.
That is the goal of the second part of this book: Action.
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Going through the days
Perimeter of time and actions
The agenda is a mechanical way to regain control over the events. It’s way too difficult to
acknowledge our fundamental need to accept our imperfections and vulnerability, to simply
become another person that knows when to accept, decline or comment decisions and actions,
to be genuinely responsible of how we organize our day. It requires too much effort at once to
change gears and we all know that those kind of heavy moves never really work.
That is why we must take action through small steps and define automatic ways to achieve a
better balance in how we manage our life and our days. What you don’t realize yet is that the
more you take control of the events of your life and the more it spreads to others, attracting
more opportunities, talents and serendipity in general. People who manage their life well
magnetize attention as they appear to be able to achieve so much more in so little time.
In reality, it’s just that they are in control of their perimeter of time and actions. If you ask them,
they will be able to tell you explicitly why and how their agenda is organized in a certain way,
whether it’s implicit through a natural order that they manage to keep or explicit through clear
rules that they respect as much as possible.
You’re not an exception. If you want to gain a better control over your life, you need to build a
perimeter of time and actions.
Your agenda is a perimeter that contains minutes. And it’s divided in three areas: work, private
and intimate. Each of those boxes have two conditions: how much time you put into them and
what constraints do they have.
Let’s start with the private box, it’s the most simple one, this is the time you pass with your
friends. Define how many get together you would like to organize or go to in a given week or
month. Set rules and constraints like not going out the first three days of the week, not drinking
alcohol beside friday and saturday night or not going to bed after midnight weekdays nights out
as much as possible.
As for your intimate box, this is family time. You should always account for 120% of the time
you’ve set for this perimeter as you know that you will happen to be late sometimes or might
struggle not to make exceptions with some events in your work environment. In my case for
instance, I always try to be home by 7.30pm to be with the kids before they go to bed. I shall
leave my smartphone aside until 9pm as well. I try to always respect those conditions and
make sure that intimacy always goes before and beyond work and private events when it’s
possible.
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Let’s get to the work perimeter. It’s usually the part that takes most of our day, that looks
endless, full of time and opportunities and that we end up struggling with for no real reason
rather than disorganization. First, ask yourself how much time you need, every week to
complete your work. Don’t be pessimistic or optimistic, many people manage to achieve a lot of
things in very little time, it’s just about deciding how much time you want to pass on those things
and you will adjust them afterwards so they can fit within your schedule. Yes, it’s that simple
really. For me, it all starts at 9am and ends at 7pm, it’s about 10 hours per day. You add to this
two slots of 5 additional hours that I usually put on wednesday and sunday. In total, I work
approximately 60 hours a week. When i’m on holidays, I tend to keep roughly 2 hours per day,
which account for a total of 15h per week. This is my perimeter of time to action at work. Once
you’ve defined yours, whether it’s 30, 50 or 80 hours a week, you must work towards being at
80% capacity at all times. The reason is that unexpected events always occur in professional
environments, and they tend to overstep on our private and most importantly intimate life. You
need space in your agenda to place those exceptions. In your mind, 80% sounds pretty close to
100%, but it you think about it in absolute value, the number is actually pretty huge. In my 60
hours work week, it accounts for 12 hours which is more than 2 hours per working day to
manage exceptions. And i’ll get to that later but for each phase of my day, I also make time for a
buffer in case unexpected things happen.
Defining how much time you pass at work and how much time you save for intimacy and private
events doesn’t prevent you from overpassing the limits, from accepting unexpected things, from
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not doing exactly what you’ve planned. It’s not about building a blameless organisation. Lawyers
and Investment Bankers for instance are constantly pushed over the boundaries when it comes
to deliver their work. But you must put theoretical limits, otherwise you always keep moving with
the flow without developing a sense of where you stand in the perimeter that you have defined.
You lose sight and control of your agenda and therefore on your life.
In practice
1) Identify your zones of constraints and duties, whether they are deliberate or forced, in
regards with your family or your work environment. Mark them on your agenda in order to
design the theoretical boundaries of your professional, private and intimate periods. Starting
to work at 8.30, home by 7.30pm, inbox-zero time starting every wednesday at 10pm and
sunday at 6pm for instance. Don’t forget to move incrementally by applying those constraints
partially at first in order to get accustomed to them.
2) Depending on your preferences, needs & requirements, put strict rules in order to find a
certain health balance, in terms of sleep, nights-out, food, quiet times. For instance, no
screen after 11pm, no alcohol during the week, no meat at dinner, home by 7.30pm, no
phone between 8pm and 9pm. Put those rules in a list, start with one, be consistent about it
and then apply a new one.
3) Make sure that you don’t feel frustrated or guilty whenever a rule isn’t perfectly set or
applied, remember that you’re in an unstable and imperfect equilibrium, this perimeter is
bound to provide you with serenity and a sense of control, not with rules that feel like a
burden to carry.
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Work phases
Once we have determined how much time we approximately want to dedicate to each part of
our life, we must organize our work day to reach a certain level of accomplishment. The best
way to do that is to divide it in three phases: ​productive, interactive and inductive slots​, each
one of them having its own function.
The productive phase is basically when it’s yourself against time and actions, this moment when
you need to reply emails, write a report, prepare something. For me it’s going down my inbox,
my todo list, the dealflow. It’s a time when you need to concentrate to maximise your
productivity. We are prone to distraction, whether we talk about notifications or solicitations from
others. Besides meditation that can help you get prepared for this phase, don’t let external
elements disturb you in what you are doing, it is essential to understand that most things, even
the apparently urgent ones, can wait minutes if not hours. It’s not a question of life and death.
You must push your environment to be more patient and to foresee their sollicitation. You’re
certainly at their service, but just not whenever they want. And if anything critical shall surface,
analyze when and how it should reach to you. For instance, thanks to ifttt.com you can trigger
notifications in case of specific recipient or keywords in an email. Let your colleagues know
when not to disturb you. At the office, my notifications on my mac are always off, on my phone
as well and only my wife and my boss are in favorites in order for me to receive their texts,
emails and calls at any moment during the day. The rest of the time, my phone is in night mode,
which allows it to receive notifications without turning on the screen. Once every 45 minutes, I
look at the screen, see if there is any emergency and then go back to work. This productive
phase should happen when you are the most alert, for me it’s in the morning and it can last up
to 3 hours, after that i’m less efficient, less focused and need to get into another phase.
The interactive phase is when you meet with people. There are three kinds of interactions with
them: open discussions, opportunities and collaborations.
Open discussions are when you meet with colleagues over lunch or coffee and discuss various
matters without no specific agendas. You should not get rid of those get together because you
never know what can come from those interactions even though some of them appear to be
unproductive. However, you shall limit their duration otherwise people always find a way to keep
the conversation going. Those talks should come after intensive productive phases (during
lunch for instance) or between long meetings, the lack of pressure put your mind at ease during
those moments.
Before or during lunch for instance, I often go talk with the team about various matters, asking
questions about certain events, figuring out how they feel about a person or a deal, telling them
about things I have found especially exciting.
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Opportunities are when the conversation topic requires attention through reflection, it puts your
system 2 to a real test so you can’t afford to have those meetings after a long day or when your
mind is preoccupied, try to have those discussions when you are the most assertive.
It's when you meet with a new client who is expressing specific needs, when you’re discussing
about something important with someone that you have not totally figured out yet, when you
must make a great first impression.
Finally, the collaborative interactions are when you work on something you know well,
something for which you don’t need to put too much of an effort into your system 2 to make it
work. It's discussing about the progress on a project or a task for instance.
Interactive phases can’t last too long as they require attention about the situation, what other
people say, how to react… Make sure you plan a buffer between those events, could be 10 or
15 minutes, just to go over your emails and other notifications, see if everything is running
smoothly before jumping into the next interaction. Pause for a minute, breathe, have a glass of
water, walk around the room, get ready for the next meeting. It is proved that between two
intensive tasks, people who had a real break tend to over-perform those who didn’t.
Between interactive and productive periods lies inductive phases, moments during which you
don’t produce anything, you don’t interact with anyone, you are just in reading mode, looking at
information, analyzing situations, reflecting. It’s a moment when you put your mind at ease, it’s a
way to let the pressure down and open yourself to reflection, like when you walk in nature and
thoughts naturally come to you, in a clear, simple, obvious way. Inductive phases are important
as they either precede or follow more intensive moments. Keep a notebook close by in order to
write down thoughts and learnings as they come without taking the risk of losing them. They are
very important moments to find balance in your activities. It’s like reading before sleeping
instead of watching tv series, walking without your phone instead of checking social media
feeds, listening to someone without speaking or having an intention to reply. It’s an automatic,
natural control valve.
Either around lunch after a long day, I take 30 minutes to an hour to think, read, rest with no
attention of pulling off something useful or productive, to me it's a state of active meditation.
You must figure out the best moments of your day for each of those phases and make sure that
you successfully organize your agenda around them. For instance, i take no meetings in the
morning, start my meetings at 2pm in the afternoon with a last one at 5pm. I tend to always
have about thirty minutes before lunch and one hour before going back home in the evening for
my inductive phase or clean-up pending tasks. This is how my agenda is organized on a daily
basis. Also, i take no meetings on wednesday in order to leave room for last minute
appointments or important things to do.
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In practice
1) Define your needs in terms of production, interaction and induction. Adapt those slots in
regards with your work parameter (60 hours for me per week), your constraints and
preferences.
2) Start by locking-up the interactive slots and see how it goes from there. We often book
too many meetings that are either not so useful or too long. It’s a great self-restraining
exercice and a way to put to the test your ability to control your environment. From there
you can put around the productive and inductive phases.
3) Be careful not to deport the problem by extending the due dates of tasks or putting
meetings like three weeks ahead. I do not book meetings beyond two weeks, it’s a way
for me to make sure that I am always in control. Do the same if you can.
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Getting there: Commit and fix limits
You’ve probably decided to put in practice some of the past advices but here is the thing… Your
restraining-self is telling you that it’s far more easily said than done. I know this feeling, i’ve been
there myself, thinking that i couldn’t force my environment to adapt to my agenda or my rules
and that many things were preventing me to do so. Believe me, everything that helped me
structure my organisation also contributed to increase the quality of my relationships, of my
work, of my life in general. I told you before and i must insist on that, people value positive
honesty, that’s what matters most. So, stop making excuses.
People never yelled at me for saying no to an investment opportunity, on the contrary they value
my quick, polite decisions, even though it’s short and direct. It’s the same when a colleague
comes to you for a break and you tell them that you are not available and prefer to concentrate
on your two hours work slot. They won’t really appreciate your honesty at first, but they will
definitely understand it if you explain it to them clearly, with a genuine smile. If someone is
asking you something but you are already onto another task, it’s ok to answer that you’ll do it
later as you are focused on something else. People need to be heard and understood, they
need to trust that what they’re asking is processed, correctly and on time. That’s it. Positive
honesty.
You’re not going to change your entire agenda right away, that will never work, the change
would be too brutal, you have to take small steps and secure each one of them before taking
another. The easier step that people can do is when they are already in control. During the
productive phase, try to put your phone in night mode and mute all notifications. Block two or
three slots during the week, of two to three hours here and there during which you won’t take
any meetings. You’ll expand those phases later on when you’ll feel comfortable. Also block a
couple of slots of thirty minutes each to do nothing. Read or think, nothing else, and certainly no
screens, you’ll get back to your old habits too quickly otherwise. You might be tempted to keep
your notifications on or your phone not too far away from you. Don’t, otherwise you will never
understand the value of staying off the grid, you won’t realize that things keep running even
when you’re not around for an hour.
As for your intimate life, be home early two times a week as a start and expand from there. Just
make moves, small ones, incrementally. They must feel good, fulfilling, you must feel that you
are in control again. If this is not what you feel, stop what you are doing, try something else until
it ends up working. There are dozens of potential moves so don’t get stuck in one that doesn’t
feel right to you. Once it’s working, block those slots in your agenda or make sure they become
habits. It takes roughly 60 days to build a habit and only a couple of weeks to kill it.
You also must remember the difference between time control and action control. Time control is
how much time you dedicate to something while action control is what need to be done
regardless how much time you pass on it. You can either work on a presentation for a certain
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period of time and get back to it another time or decide to work until to reach the completion of
an action. You should always fix limits to control your environment. In the past, I was replying
with long form text when I was saying no to an opportunity, now it’s only one sentence, because
that’s how I manage to deal with so much dealflow. My meetings with entrepreneurs used to last
one hour. I figured that it was probably too much and that 30 minutes meetings were largely
enough for us to have a first good interaction. You’re the master of time, and time is the master
of your productivity, so save it and use it wisely.
This structure of organisation would be useless without putting into it some business basics.
This is what the next chapter is about :)
In practice
1) Start small, lock habits and grow from there. It’s ok to aim not too high at first. You need
the satisfaction of having succeeded to find the courage to keep moving forward.
Motivation comes from shocks or past successes, it doesn’t rise up out of the blue.
2) Some efforts will feel natural, some others will require that you force yourself into
achieving them. It’s only after you successfully run a couple of experiments that you will
understand the value of your actions and gain confidence into pushing those efforts
forward.
3) If you can’t feel your progress, then measure them. Record how much time you pass in
meetings, reading stories to your kids, reading books. Every checkpoint or achievement
can be measured in a way.
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Key Takeaways:​ It’s impossible to gain a better control of our agenda without becoming our
own master of time and actions. The only way to do that is to set perimeters for our work, private
and intimate life. It is composed of rules in terms of time, actions, restrictions. From there we
can better organise our agenda and especially our work phases. They can be distinguished in
three phases: The productive one that allows us to get things done, the interactive one during
which we collaborate and exchange, and the inductive one in order to either reflect or be in
reading and listening mode. Those perimeters and phases can’t be designed and developed
efficiently overnight, it is critical to take our time when it comes to change the way we go
through our days. One step after another, we shall set or adapt our agenda in order to reach a
great level of awareness and control.
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Business Basics
There is a course that is never taught in business schools, universities or even when we join a
company, it’s how to behave in basic business situations and how the foundations of any
organization should be built.
Be explicit
We tend to overestimate the power of implicit behaviours and underestimate the value of explicit
rules. It’s one the most common and devastating flaw that feeds wrongful behaviours in
collaborative environment.
The most simple example is the onboarding of new employees. In most companies, they
receive a couple of guidelines on their first days, meet up with a bunch of people in their direct
and indirect circles of actions and from there are asked to accommodate themselves and find
their way through the organisation. It’s like the ​gamebooks​, but in real life. The output from such
a misguided welcoming process is variable and uncertain, which is the opposite effect of what
anyone with a basic sense of cohesion would like to achieve.
A normal company would make sure to accommodate its new employees with a clear user
guide, compelling and personal profiles (through a myers briggs test for instance) about the
people they will be working with and a no bullshit presentation about the of vision, focus and
value of the company. Unfortunately, it’s rarely the case. The reason for this mistake is the
predominance of implicit behaviour over explicit rules in the rest of our relationships. People
send signals instead of stating facts, they play roles they fancy instead of finding the one that
fits with their psyche, they deploy defence mechanism through ambiguous behaviour instead of
showing their true and vulnerable face to their peers. They mimic this attitude in their
professional environment and vice versa.
The truth is that what is implicit is by nature unclear and open to interpretation which naturally
leads to misunderstanding and ultimately to breaking everything in the pyramid that allows great
teams to function: trust, constructive arguments, commitment, accountability and alignment
towards results. On the contrary, explicit rules drive the transmitter to clearly express her
thoughts, expectations and guidelines while it requires from the receiver to clearly express her
understanding, need for clarification or disagreement. Implicit rules only work in one to one
interactions in which people understand each other perfectly and know when to be explicit.
With explicit behaviours come the power to disagree and say no.
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In practice
1) One way to avoid as much as possible anything that is implicit and/or could me
misinterpreted is to write down things, whether we talk about the action plan following a
meeting or even a feedback regarding a person.
2) It is not because we are explicit that people necessarily understand or agree with our
comments. As a rule of thumb, we shall apply robust logic in thinking and writing. In
order to do that, I advise you to read The Pyramid Principle from Barbara Minto.
3) Explicit communication goes both ways, do not hesitate to ask someone for clarification
or to repeat what someone has said to make sure that you’re synchronized on the form
and substance.
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Default no
At school, quick consensus and compromises always won over arguments in order to avoid
disorder and distractions. At home, no was associated to a word used by parents unilaterally
towards their children but at the same time it was not the expected answer to requests
formulated from grown-ups to their kids. We live in a society where saying yes is associated to
positivity and no to negativity, while truly it’s simply a deliberate and most of the time authorized
choice between moving forward or staying steal, triggering following consequences.
Let’s face it, each one of us has been or is struggling with it, we let ourselves trapped into the
trivial good and bad short-sighted approach of saying no. We tend to delay rather than pass or
make the time for something. We find excuses instead of telling the truth. We argue lacking time
while doing nothing in the meantime. We let go things hoping that they will vanish overtime
instead of replying with a frank answer. We say yes to attend useless or unproductive meetings
rather than politely declining or formatting those meetings so that they can be useful. We fake
good reasons to cancel commitments instead of just saying that we are not up to it because we
prefer to do something else instead. We pretend the bus was late instead of admitting we
overslept, and this list goes on and on...
The issue with this behaviour of avoiding a clear no is not only that we don’t frankly say what we
have in mind, letting ourselves express our feelings, it’s that we pile up false, pending or junk
decisions and actions. We misguide ourselves, annihilate our freedom and ability to make a
deliberate choice at a time when we can. Finally, we impose ourselves with the double penalties
of finding excuses because we feel guilty to say no and feeling bad because we know that we
are not being honest… it’s a painful paradox that we carry on our shoulders every single day.
As from today, free yourself from that stupid burden, because saying no is actually great. It
means that you are in control again. It allows you to stay focus on a clean path instead of
bumping into obstructing objects on the way that you take as obligations at worst, and cover
with excuses at best. It also protects your environment from the bad choices you might make.
However, saying no is always taken as a rejection, therefore you need to soften the impression
that will last from the interaction. It’s all about finding honest positivity in the way you say it. Use
soft words such as “unfortunately”, or “let’s agree with disagree here but…” or a simple “sorry”
or a smiley. It’s about delivering the message so that people don’t take it too personally. Also,
and this is not a minor parameter, a proper no is always quickly delivered, you should not let too
much time pass between a request or a question and your negative answer to it, people will
value your reactivity before all. That’s how I deal with saying no to entrepreneur a dozen time
every single day, they usually thank me for the prompt answer while many people in my industry
tend to wait too long or don’t even answer.
Say no, say it fast, say it nicely.
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In practice
1) Start by delivering quick answers to people with honest positivity. Everytime you are
about to say no to a request, do not wait, do it right away. If you feel uncertain, just say
it, so that people don’t misinterpret your uncertainty.
2) A no will always trigger a displeasing emotion, but reasons usually trigger bad feelings
as it makes it more personal. Everytime you deliver a negative answer, be brief, don’t no
emphasize too much around it because people at best will try to argue with you,
probably in a nice way, but at worst it will give them all the reason of the world not to like
you.
3) A no can be a final answer but it can also be temporary or based on current facts. Do not
hesitate to mention clearly if you expect to consider this matter another time or through
different conditions or not.
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Keep growing up
The more you gain responsibilities and progress in your professional life and the more you need
to improve and control your organisation as more and more opportunities and duties are coming
your way, attached to the functions of not only doing things, but also managing projects and
potentially leading people.
It doesn’t hit us as an obvious necessity to optimize our agenda during the early days of our
career. We are full of energy, the constraints of our personal life are limited and we are focused
on making a great impression by working hard and late to move up the ladder. We don’t realize
the dangerous limits of pushing ourselves beyond capacity, it feels like our full power gauge will
never run out of electricity. The truth is that we eventually discover that we all reach our limits
and that we pile up bad habits by pushing too hard instead of mastering our perimeter of
actions.
On top of having more things to do, more emails to answer, more interactions to deal with, we
cope with more opportunities to filter and more teamwork to handle through collaboration,
management and leadership. As the field of responsibilities and possibilities is growing larger,
we shall not fall behind our zone of competency and quality work. Therefore we must improve
our productivity and overall management of all things, whether we talk about execution,
management or leadership.
Execution is both about making choices and delivering in time and quality. Put yourself in a
growth mindset​, where you never settle before productivity and achievements. We are always in
an ongoing process of learnings and improvements. Take the necessary step to learn from
others and find the right resources that will help you thrive as an engaged and performing
individual. We shall never feel (or just temporarily) overwhelmed by the quantity of work that lies
ahead of us.
Regarding management and collaboration, we can’t allow ourselves to be either under or over
delegating and managing, we absolutely must find the right balance between trusting our
collaborators enough and yet setting the necessary checkpoints and principles for the team to
achieve with guidance and confidence. Remember the importance of explicit communication.
Finally, when it comes to leadership but also to opening ourselves to opportunities, it’s important
that we don’t lose ourselves in appearances, ego-driven decisions and the false impressions
that looking good, inspiring and dominating prevail on authenticity, open-mindedness and
respect. Opportunities must be filtered through our framework. As for leadership, it is about
showing the way with confidence, empowering the people that will become our proxies on the
field and being an example for them.
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In practice
1) As time passes, we usually have more and more things to do. Time is a finite and we are
the master on how we organize it. Beside organizing your agenda in order to be
productive, grow up as well by learning and filtering opportunities accordingly.
2) We always fall short at some point in our organisation or way of doing things, out of our
competency zone. It’s just because we must learn and grow-up. Take the necessary
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time and steps to get out of this red zone by learning from your mistakes and what you
understand you don’t know.
3) We can’t master everything, as you grow up, do not try to master absolutely everything.
Some things should not fall into our zone of actions and should be delegated, learn to
find ways into working at what you do best and on the other way around. We must
temper our weaknesses and emphasize our strengths.
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Dealing with opportunities
opportunities grow within our field of duties and sollicitations. But we can't accept them all and
as time goes by, we must filter them out through the right choice-making framework.
Note that they can either be ​necessary, opportunistic or wanted​. Sometimes all three. For
every opportunity that comes our way, we must figure out whether it fits or not within our
personal or professional agenda, its immediate and foreseeable benefits or potentials as well as
its current and future power or influence.
To avoid any confusion, note that an agenda has nothing to do with being purely transactional
or too much ego driven in the way we assess sollicitations and opportunities. Those are two
traps that many people tend to fall into. It's about knowing what we are looking for as a
professional as much as a human being, and it should be balanced between pleasure,
responsibilities and simple open-mindedness. For instance, the pleasure to connect with
genuine individual is part of our personal journey, the will to meet with people from new
industries to open ourselves to new perspectives can be part of our professional one.
Benefits or potentials follow the same path as we are either receiving, providing or sharing when
going through those opportunities. Receiving is a benefit that we take from an interaction like
asking a friend to connect us with someone in their network. Providing is our ability to give
whether the favor will be returned or not in the future, it’s what people call nurturing their karma
or taking a pay-it-forward action, like helping someone in their search for a job. Sharing is when
parties benefit both from the same interaction, the most obvious example is sharing a moment
with a friend. Those benefits must be driven by both purpose, generosity and need for
achievement, of course not on an equal basis but with a fair dose for each of those attributes.
Power and influence are subtle yet fundamental notions, that mixed up with our flattered ego,
can tend to blind us. Every time we are solicited by or in an interaction with someone, we tend
to assess her social value whether it is immediately visible or in a foreseeable future. We are
naturally attracted by people who follow a path of success or have already succeeded in the
past. It is not a shocking truth, it is a trait that we must both acknowledge and accept. However,
we should control this behaviour first by learning to assess and detect early on the people who
have the attributes to succeed in a near future and with whom we would like to build a trustful
relationship and second we shall never be blinded by the aura of a person just because she is
successful. The best relationships are honest, caring and authentic.
Exceptionally, we sometimes must accept opportunities and sollicitations from people we don’t
value the characters but that we know could be useful or because it’s in our duties, that’s how
politics work for instance. At the same time, we shall take more casual opportunities, knowing
that most of them will often end-up nowhere but also that extraordinary encounters can come
from them, that is how I got to meet with one of the best entrepreneur I know and who is
nowadays a true friend. Don’t assess opportunities like a bag of random candies, cherry pick the
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best, avoid the bestsellers if you don’t like them and try a couple a new ones. Diversity always
wins.
In practice
1) Whether or not you have a lot of opportunities, you shall assess them, at least to get a
sense of understanding in the way you’re dealing with them naturally.
2) Opportunities are complex, we must therefore assess them through an inductive way, all
four factors at the same time and not one after the other.
3) Opportunities are tightly linked to the time we make for them, make sure that both fit. If
you happen to have time, take more of them. If you’re running behind your agenda, take
less, opportunities are an easy variables to adjust.
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Decision and action principles
The word “decision” comes from old french decider from latin decidere that literally means “to
cut off," from de- "off" (see de-) + caedere "to cut". That tells a lot about the function of taking
decisions and actions. We talked about the crucial importance of mastering our agenda, making
deliberate and thoughtful choices, and overall keeping our head clear of everything that
unnecessarily keep our mind busy and prevent us to see clearly. Making decisions and moving
forward is one very important piece of the puzzle as it doesn’t only drive operational but also
strategic moves, with the right velocity.
Whatever comes to your mind, you need to put it somewhere, whether it’s in the bin, in a list or
just in action immediately. Every decision or action you’ll have to take is composed of four
elements: Substance, Intensity, Impact, Reversibility.
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The substance of a decision is how much information we have about something in order to
decide. Sometimes we have enough, most of the time we don’t. But in any case, it should not
prevent us to move forward if we believe to have enough because the necessary effort for a
marginal gain of substance is rarely worth it, first because if the information wasn’t previously
available to us it probably means that it wasn’t available to others who would have had to take
this same decision and secondly because while moving forward we will access new and more
information that will affect the course of the events, therefore making some of the previous
information less important if not irrelevant. That’s why we should just make sure that we have
accessed to most part of the available substance in order to make a move, to take a decision.
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Whatever the action we are about to perform, we must think about its impact. It’s of high
importance in business to measure not only the intensity of a decision but where it can lead us.
If you are saying something bad in public about a competitor for instance, even though the
intensity is very low, the impact is potentially high as it could unleash a lot more than a simple
reaction from them. When you are creating a new business unit within a company, it’s not how
much effort that you are putting into it that only counts, it’s what you can get from it compared to
the current perimeter of your business and the long term strategy that you are envisioning for
the future. Looking at the impact first can sometimes help you decide whether you should look
into the intensity of moving forward or if it’s not even worth it.
The intensity of a decision is how much effort is required to perform an action. Saying no to a
solicitation has no intensity whatsoever while developing a new business unit within a company
is of high intensity. Whenever you experience a situation where the magnitude of what’s
necessary to move forward seems really high, look how you can slice it into pieces in order to
clearly see it and potentially better handle it. We don’t eat a whole pizza, we cut it. It looks the
same but it is tranched and at least we can put it in our mouth and stop whenever we are not
hungry anymore. The same apply to decisions. our mind can’t correctly perform what can’t be
clearly envisioned. Furthermore, it allows us to measure quick progress and adapt in all
situations instead of going all the way through in a wrong direction and potentially end up stuck
in front of a wall that now seems impossible to jump across.
Substance, intensity and impact are worth nothing without the assessment of reversibility. It’s
subtle and yet of the higher importance to reflect on the potential reversibility of a decision. We
have all realized when arguing with someone how hard it was to take back words we wish we
wouldn’t have said. It was of low intensity, it did impact the person but moreover it was
irreversible, it’s just repairable. On the contrary, launching a new business unit can be of high
intensity but it’s reversible and sometimes with very limited impacts.
Once you’ve acknowledged the composition of the decision making process, you need to put it
into actions, figure out how to move forward. Assess substance, impact, intensity and
reversibility in this order. For every parameter there is an action to perform.
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In practice
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
1) If you have enough substance, you move towards assessing the impact. If you don’t
have enough substance in your opinion, you identify who and how you could get enough
in a relatively short period of time, it’s all about not breaking the equilibrium between
efforts and benefits.
2) Once you have enough substance, you check the impact of an action. If the impact is too
low, you must ask yourself if it’s worth it, and then move to the intensity required to
perform the action. If the intensity is high while the impact is low, it’s probably a mistake,
you should not do it.
3) If the intensity of an action is important and the impact is potentially important as well,
you must move forward if it’s something for which you have the authority, otherwise, you
shall ask your superior in order to decide whether or not it’s a priority as it will require
resources. If the intensity is low on the contrary, just move to the bottom of the ladder
and assess the reversibility.
4) Either it’s in your responsibilities and then move forward or it is not and you must ask, it’s
like in a restaurant, a waiter can’t offer a coffee to a customer unless the owner
authorizes him to do so, otherwise he must ask for permission. And that’s why it’s
important to assess the substance, impact and intensity first in order to defend your case
towards the person in charge of making the final call.
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Meeting Dilemma
When it comes to team and organisation, we usually face the time killing power of attending
meetings. I’m not saying that meetings are a complete waste of time, but they shall definitely be
organised in regards to the reason of their existence.
Meetings can be defined as people getting together in order to exchange as active participants,
on a specific matter. An active participant is someone who needs to attend the meeting because
her input, during the event, matter to reach the goals defined in the agenda. A passive
participant, on the contrary, is a person who shouldn’t need to attend a meeting whether or not
she’s implicated in the matter, as long as she can access its synthetic minutes afterwards. In
some of our portfolio companies, passive participants are tagged in the minutes of meetings
they didn’t need to attend. It allows them to stay in the loop of something that is in a close or
within an area of what they are doing, while avoiding distraction. Be careful not to mix up the
two attributes, someone can be passive and still have an opinion to share in the minutes of the
meetings, that doesn’t mean the person needed to attend.
Seven
As said in the chapter “clear up your mind”, beyond seven items, our memory struggles and our
mind loses clairvoyance. This number can also be applied in teamwork. It’s proven that a team
loses efficiency if there are more than seven people including the manager, it is also true in
meetings. Meetings rooms should be limited to seven seats maximum.
Sometimes people organize meetings mostly to report and answer questions, not to collaborate
really. At best, people listen a long discourse, at worst they don’t even make the effort to listen
to a boring teller. One to many interactions shouldn’t require meetings, on the contrary, it should
be asked to the speaker to send a short vocal or written note with a support if needed, and from
there people could comment and ask questions. It allows an asynchronous flow or information
that will better fit with everyone’s agenda and on top of that it forces the speaker to keep her
demonstration short while keeping a record for everyone of everything that is said about a given
subject.
Organisation
This being said, meetings must sometimes be organized either to talk about opportunities (open
sessions) or work on a ongoing project (collaborative sessions). In those two cases, here are
the requirements to successfully run them.
People must be respectful. The first rule to respect is not to use a phone or a laptop during a
gathering, it should be forbidden, it’s a lack of respect and a clear sign of disengagement.
People are allowed to have a piece of paper and a pen. The only person authorised to have a
laptop is the one recording the minutes.
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The second rule is to respect people’s time. Meetings start on time and the people who come
late are not authorized to join after 5 minutes. If some companies do it what couldn’t you? In
some venture capital firms, the partners must put ten dollars in a charity pot per minute for being
late. It’s a strict rule that forces good behaviour within the organisation. I would advise that every
person who is late, besides being kicked out, must be annotated in the minutes. Accountability
matters.
The third rule is to force a timing policy where before each meeting, we agree on the time that is
necessary to cover the subject. Have a default duration of 30 minutes instead of 1 hour, and
take it from there. Time must be a constraints when it comes to business meetings, not a
recreation. It must certainly feel pressuring at the beginning, but it’s no more than a rule and just
like some people tend to be more efficient than others, time-constrained meetings invite people
to structure their thoughts in order to get things done in time and in order. Try it out within your
organisation. Some people won’t like it at first, but they will end up understand its value
afterwards. One way to deal with cutting in half your meetings is to limit the speaking time per
person, let’s say two minutes per individual on any given subject for instance.
Now about the core principles to successfully run meetings. It’s about setting the goal, the
participants and the actions:
We shall never accept nor get into a meeting without a clear purpose, it’s complicated enough to
have people collaborate together at once. People must understand where we are going to as a
group, whether the exact destination is clear or is bound to be figured out along the way. Once a
goal is set, one must add participants.
We must only add active participants and make sure that the passive ones can access the
minutes of the meeting afterwards. The specialty in large organisations is to have meetings with
two many participants in which half of the people do not necessarily need to be here but have
been invited and attend in order to protect their ego. Ego must be used as a driver and an
enabler, not a blocker or destroyer. A participant must be assigned the task to take the minutes
of the meetings. This person is in charge afterwards to dispatch everyone’s actions with clear
objective and timing to both active and passive participants.
Small actions and short timing always win over large assignments and extended deadlines. At
any moment, think of ways to simplify your work by cutting it in smaller pieces.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Politics
I understand that in large organisation where egos rule the group dynamics, we often face the
obligation to invite people who would otherwise feel left aside or bypassed. But remember that
you have the choice to be in control of the meetings you’ve scheduled and it’s your
responsibility to become an example for others, to show them that ruling meetings differently
means that you are after efficiency and not useless courtoisy. Stop making excuses and
apologizing, it’s your role to explain people why and how the things that you do are organized in
a certain way.
In practice
1) Invite people to work asynchronously to maximize efficiency. Meetings should be limited
in numbers, time and participants. The active ones should be prevent, the passive ones
should be focusing on something else and access to the minutes afterwards.
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2) A meeting is the composition of a clear agenda, a list of relevant participants and
dispatched actions after the meetings with clear items and timing associated to them.
3) Do not let politics or disorganized people rule the world around you. Besides emergency,
make sure that you help the organisation thrive through better practices, even though it’s
difficult and painful at the beginning.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Key Takeaways:​ In business, simple rules always apply if we want to make a great use of our
time and get the most out of our actions. We must first and foremost make sure to build the
most comprehensive bridge of communication with people by being explicit in the way we
express our feelings and decisions. From there we must learn to say no and drive our own path
of achievements and growth by dealing with opportunities and duties, by learning how to take
actions and decisions the right way, as well as by organizing our interactions with people in
efficient meetings.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Running our Machine
While business basics most of the time relate to our interactions with people and all the
complexities and intricacies that come with them, running our machine is much more about our
own ability to deal with ourselves and find self-efficiency.
Dealing with pressure
It’s incredible how people are subject to putting on themselves a lot of pressure and how
annihilating it can be when not coped with properly. If burning out is a consequence, handling
badly and misunderstanding how to deal with pressure is certainly a devastating cause.
Let’s step back for a minute and investigate on this blocker. If you think about those moments
when you felt under pressure, the symptoms were pretty much the followings: you felt alone in
the corner of a room looking at the world moving forward while you were feeling kind of stuck.
you felt hurt and full of shame by the impression, the feeling or even the fact that you had failed
or were failing. And finally you felt powerless, like there was no visible or foreseeable solutions
to the situation you were in, lost in a zone with no decent exit doors.
Alone, shameful, powerless. Those consecutive and compounded feelings can be controlled
through various actions in order to fight back the pressure we put on ourselves. It’s certainly not
something easy to do but most people are capable of overcoming this annihilator or blocker.
We tend to be endlessly and effortlessly capable to drag ourselves down while going back up
requires much more effort. The first thing to do whenever we feel under pressure is to remember
that it’s nothing else than a blocker that prevents us from moving forward. As things are piling
up we should also remember that it’s never too late to release that pressure, even if we have
been holding it for a long time or if it appears that the consequences of releasing it will be
disastrous. The reality is that the world is not playing against us, we are mainly putting this on
yourself. Let’s get to it, one symptom after another.
To fight loneliness​, we must talk about it, with honesty, either to the people we love and trust
or just to the people who can be able to genuinely listen to us, whether they are psychologists or
even random stranger on the internet (be careful with that though, not sure that’s such a great
first idea). Pressure is before all an inflated balloon stuck in our throat that we must learn to take
out with self-honesty.
To fight the pain and the shame​, we must loosen our attitude. We are flawed, we are ordinary,
we are trying to deal with our life into finding some equilibrium. Failures, irreversible fatalities
and unfairness rule the world in an unpredictable order. However, if some people manage to
deal with the issues they’ve been hit by or thrown into, why couldn’t we ? We must stop caring
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so much about what people think of our state or failures and move along with our life. The more
we care, the more it affects us. We must let go, imagine that we are starting all over again from
scratch, cut the pain and the shame by releasing what is holding us. You spent too much
money, cut the credit card. You have too many meetings, cut half of them. You feel bad at
home, go walk outside. We shall never stay in a vicious circle that prevents us from moving
forward. We shall just do that one thing in an attempt to move forward and break free from our
ridiculous chains of pain and shame.
What about this feeling of being powerless?​ There are so much things to do that we don’t
know where to start. We feel that we are stuck in a situation and it’s impossible to win over this
state. As long as we can think, communicate and do things, everything is possible. Again, other
people are succeeding in ten times worst situations, why not us? To feel in power again, we can
do two actions: simply get rid of things, cleaning whatever we can in order to put our mind at
ease and restart with a cleaner slate and/or do one little thing to start with and then move to the
next one, with patience and resilience. When we want to practice running again, the wrong
behaviour would be to put our shoes on and go for a long distance. The next day we have
hardened muscles and aren’t able to run for days and the memory of our efforts will be so bad
that we might likely giving up. Whatever we do, we always must develop progressive efforts and
move forward with actions that are doable, repeatable and that can grow as we progress.
The reason why talking about pressure is so important is because too many people tend to mix
up being pressured with being accountable. The goal of better handling our meetings, our inbox,
our decisions is not to increase our workload in a given day even though productivity and
efficiency matter in an organisation and in life in general, it’s to help us control our actions in
order to find time for everything else without feeling that we are running behind it or out of time.
Don’t get me wrong when I praise the value of efficiency and performance, we have been pulled
down for years by mediocrity and the art of going with the flow, so of course the first efforts
necessary to change our average behaviour are slightly difficult and take time.
In practice
1) Talk honestly with your closed ones or people outside your inner professional and
personal circles, whenever you feel pressured or unable to do something or move
forward.
2) Get rid of everything that is superficial or holding you down. No one can progress in a
cluttered environment and nothing prevents us from cleaning up our own mess.
3) Take one step at a time and move progressively in order to drive sustainable change
and habits, otherwise you will never be able to succeed and will only put more shame on
yourself.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Power of intensity
Intensity is something that we naturally experience in activities sometimes but that we rarely
consider to apply on how we plan and do things. The power of intensity is that the more we do
something of a given nature with a defined intensity and the better we can perform this thing, up
to a degree where the notion of effort disappears until we stop and regain consciousness of
everything that we have just achieved. Intensity must be applied to our work environment to
increase our productivity and efficiency. Let’s take a couple of examples:
Applied to inbox management
I receive approximately 400 emails a day, some people like Xavier Niel about 1200 onwards just
to give you an idea. He manages to answer to every single one of them, by himself, pretty
efficiently. I used to handle my emails as they came but not anymore except from my list of
preferred recipients or regarding urgent matters.
I go through my inbox approximately twice a day, in a linear way and I apply the following rules:
if an email can be read and treated in less than 30 seconds, I shall handle it. If it seems that it
will take longer then I leave it in my inbox and go to the next email. After I am done dealing with
the quick ones, I am looking at the number of emails in my inbox, it has obviously highly
decreased which provides a satisfactory feeling. It gives me strength to now deal with the longer
emails. I go through those ones and either I reply straight away and archive or I put them in my
“zero” or “do it” folders, the latter meaning that I need to deal with it asap, the former meaning
that I will get back to it on wednesday or sunday evening. Usually the ones that go into the zero
or do it folders are the ones that I am struggling to give an immediate answer either because I
need to think them through or because I need to gather more information before I can actually
answer. Then on wednesday or sunday evening, I completely clean my inbox until I reach zero
emails.
For most of us, inbox zero seems now like the way emails should be handled but for those who
still manage their emails like they manage their text messages, here is how inbox management
is done: your inbox should contain no emails once in a while. For me, it’s once a week for
instance. Leaving emails in your inbox is like leaving a pending thought or action in your mind, it
creates confusion and attention disorder, while the contrary creates the exact opposite effects:
clarity and focus. Whenever you treat an email, you either respond and archive, forward and
archive, snooze for later, archive, delete, or put it in a list with a limited number of items that will
be treated within a week tops.
Applied to tasks
During productive phases, we mainly do two things, our inbox or our tasks. Tasks, just like
emails, must be dealt with methodology. We shall be efficient in the way we do things and
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therefore start by dealing with the many small tasks that have piled up and that are easy to do.
Then we can move forward to the longer ones that require more time and increased attention.
Whenever we start something, we shall be either time or goal constraints. The latter is when we
start something that we know we shall finish before jumping into something else. For me, it’s for
instance writing a blog post, going through my dealflow or cleaning up my zero-list on
wednesday evening (I don’t go to bed before I am done with it). As for the time-sensitive
matters, it’s when we know we won’t be able to finish throughout one single session or when the
intensity required to achieve the tasks will be too demanding at once. For me it’s when I have to
make a presentation or when I am reading for instance, I always define how long I am going to
pass on a given task of this nature and stick to it.
In practice
1) Whether you’re dealing with your inbox or to-do list, make sure not to treat them linearly
but depending on their intensity, otherwise your mind keeps jumping from one frequence
to another and reach a sense of flow that allows to go throughout the day.
2) Put clean-up times in your agenda in order to make sure that you don’t pile up too many
tasks or emails that you will eventually struggle to deal with.
3) For each action, decide whether it’s constrained by completion or time and make sure
you apply the same rules depending on the type of actions.
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Asynchronization & Distractions
Dealing with distractions
The one thing that kills productivity when we perform tasks is distraction. It can come from
thoughts we poorly managed to keep quiet (and it happens, to all of us), or from external
drivers.
In regards with the thoughts that come to us and that we struggle to put away in order to stay
efficient, there are only two ways to handle this situation: you can either clean house and do this
thing that keeps your mind busy and prevents you from being efficient or you can use a third
helper like listening to music, finding another place to work, walking while working, whatever
that will keep one part of your mind busy while you work with the other. The last option, but it
requires a little bit of experience and practice, is meditation.
As for dealing with external drivers, it’s pretty easy to handle them actually as you are the
master of dealing with them. Set rules for people not to disturb you while you are working, it
could be a sign, a little flag on your desk or the fact that you have your headphones on your
ears. As for any other form of distraction which are mostly notifications, put your computer and
your phone in night mode, deactivate the notifications and go check them out once every 30, 45,
60 minutes or more depending on your line of work.
Of course, it’s your responsibility to have only few applications and tabs open and not to yield to
the social media temptation. Many applications exist in that field to help you deal with that. And
whenever you open your social media feeds, do it in a timely manner otherwise you’ll find
yourself lost into infinite scrolling and procrastination.
Asynchronous processing
With similar benefits as the power of intensity, dealing with our life in an asynchronous manner
is a way the take the control back of our actions. Asynchronicity is the art of processing things
whenever we want instead of whenever they come.
Let’s take a step back and just analyze the things that truly require immediate attention: your
preferred list of contact (boss, spouse, close friends), customer matters, crisis, system failures,
hazardous events or things that we didn’t manage on time and that absolutely require closure.
Aside those things and others, if our line of job doesn’t require to react in real time, we must
assess whether the opportunity to be reactive is truly valuable and useful or if we can and
should delay our reaction. It allows us to be better organized for sure but also to better reflect on
our actions.
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The best way to process information asynchronously is to push our environment to deal with it.
This is why I explicitly never answer the phone unless a call has been scheduled and most of
my chatting applications are muted to avoid distractions and force asynchronous interactions.
In practice
1) Do not let people, notifications or anything else that is not urgent disturb you while you
work. You have no excuse not to focus. Kill the notifications and let people know when
it’s a good time to come see you.
2) Do not process immediately what can be processed asynchronously, make sure you
deal with the 20% of immediate/urgent matters on time and manage the remaining 80%
in a timely manner.
3) Don’t hesitate to set strict rule like not answering phone calls, uninstall facebook,
instagram, snap, you name it… work in a quiet environment out of the office...etc
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Tweaking Weaknesses
It’s possible to debate for hours whether it’s possible or not to change people. I tend to believe
that flaws and qualities are part of our characters and are somewhat absolute. And it’s their
paradoxical tensions that are the source of our singularity. However, when it comes to strengths
and weaknesses, the formers can be trained to improve our performance and how we do things
while the latter can be tempered, tweaked and tricked in order to decrease their influences and
impacts on our behaviours and actions.
One way to do a quick and relevant assessment of yourself is to take the ​Assess First​ test. It is
highly relevant and pretty fast to complete. From there you will be able to understand which
weaknesses to address.
The best mentors will always tell you to focus on your strengths because they are the driver of
your performance. It’s true, and all the best managers will make sure to take the best out of
everyone to increase the whole value of the organisation instead of fighting against the weak
points of each individual. However, one shouldn’t omit that our weaknesses exist and happen to
express themselves in certain situations. They can even become the causes of disastrous
events, putting down everything we have built so far. Therefore we must deal with them by
understanding first and see afterwards how to deal with them depending on their nature and the
circumstances.
The tests that you will take to detect your strengths will also help you understand your
weaknesses. There are three ways to deal with your flaws, you can temper them, silent them
through delegation for instance or tweak them. Depending on their nature, you can act
accordingly, let’s take some examples, i’ll take mine as i know them pretty well…
I can be intolerant, impatient or distracted. Those three flaws are related to my character. I don’t
want to change them as they are also the drivers of my search for excellence, efficiency and
thinking. But i must acknowledge their existence and their potentially bad impact to temper them
when it’s necessary (this is when your reason helps managing your feelings and consequent
actions). For my intolerance, i reflect on my own failure to build empathy towards others. For my
impatience, meditation, reading and breathing help. Against distraction, i focus on one thing at a
time and have let my family know about that so they don’t get crazy when it seems that i’m not
listening while i’m just lost in some thoughts.
I can also be messy, home loving. For those kind of flaws, i simply use tweaks against them. For
instance, when it comes to deal with mess, I have a no paper policy. Whenever i receive a bill, a
business card or anything on paper, i take a picture and throw it right away so it doesn’t stack
up in a bag or a drawer. As for my tendency to stay home instead of going out, I just force
myself to go out with no second guess and from there enjoy the moment. That’s an easy one.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Finally I can lack attention to details in certain situations or will stay at the surface on others. I
have acknowledged that and i know that i can’t fully go against it. Also those flaws allow me to
see the bigger pictures on certain things and it matters a lot in my industry. I see who i can trust
either to deal with something while being careful about the details or dig into a subject
accordingly, so it’s not about me doing or looking in details but identifying the persons who can
do it. The people I work with at Kima Ventures always point out great details that I wouldn’t have
seen and the best CEOs i work with whenever i point something that doesn’t feel right find a
way to figure out thoroughly the in and out of the situation.
Find, understand and classify your weaknesses. Detect the ones you need to temper, those that
you can tweak and finally the ones that require an outsider not to have to cope with them
directly.
In practice
1) Detect your flaws and weaknesses, make sure you do it very honestly. Take a test on
Assess First​. Try to get back and understand their origin of your weaknesses as a
thoughtful introspection always helps better accept who we are, it mitigates our own
feeling of guilt.
2) Then classify your weaknesses as part of your temper, of bad habits or lacks.
3) Finally, figure out whether it should be tempered, trapped/tweaked or be delegated. Do
not try to treat them all, just like anything, move step by step, thoroughly.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
The power of routines & habits
People forget about the importance and the power of routines and habits. Maybe because we
talk so much about them. Yet, it remains one of the pillar of our life. Routines allow us to form
habits and vice versa habits are formed within routines. The difference between the two
elements is simple: one is linked to time, the other to action. They are the when and what of the
thing we do on a regular basis.
The first time i got to understand the power of habits is when i had my first kid. Suddenly, my life
was subject to the needs of my son. He was waking me up during the night or early the morning
and there was no option other than taking care of him. Later on, we had to wake up early
enough so our kids could be ready to go to school. I found this to be very structuring and when i
finally coped with difficulties at work because i had too many emails, too many meetings or
sollicitations, i remembered how incredible it had been for me to get into those routines in my
personal life and therefore i started to structure my professional environment. Dealflow on
monday, no meetings on wednesday, productive phase in the morning...etc all of these are
routines and they help me form habits.
Retrospectively, I have been very lucky. Because i have an authority problem and feel in need
for people to be proud of me, I had to introduce those routines and habits in my life not to
become the slave of my agenda nor to disappoint the people I care about. I have been forced by
the events, and I’m deeply grateful for that. But what about you, what would it take to start
having those routines and form habits?
Well, first you shall find what motivates you to achieve things in your life and see how you can
apply that to the new things that you want to strive for, you will need those lever to sustain your
efforts when it becomes more challenging. Second, you need to start with something easy and
that doesn’t require too much time. You can’t put too much pressure on yourself, you first need
to build the satisfaction of your first accomplishments. Third, find something with consequences
that can be satisfying and quickly measured. Losing weight requires too much effort in my
opinion, start a new activity as well, go with something easier like waking up at the same time
every day or making coffee first thing in the morning for your loved one, or doing pushups for
five minutes before going to bed, something like that, you get the idea.
What you need in order to start forming a habit is of course a routine, therefore you need to set
a trigger or have a reminder that won’t be disturbed by external causes, at least not for your first
habits. And finally you need to find a benefit in your action, a reward and preferably something
with immediate effects as you are developing your first sets of habits.
You need to keep in mind that whenever you slip, you shall not blame yourself but instead get
back to it. If you want, you can keep track of your habits on a small paper or excel sheet. For
bigger habits, just like for big decisions or actions, find a way to cut them in smaller pieces that
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will be easier to deal with. And finally but we are going to see that in the next chapter,
compounded effects come from forming those habits and even though you can only measure
that on the mid term, you will be amazed by the results.
In practice
1) Find what motivates you to achieve things. If you don’t have a driving force, you will
paddle in vain and won’t find rewards.
2) Start with a small routine that you know you can cope with. Make sure to track and
measure the progress. It usually takes a couple of months to build a habit and only a
couple of weeks to break it.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
3) Reward yourself either through the satisfaction of having achieved something or with
something else. A pause can be a reward, a gift, or even the congratulations from
someone.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Long Term Actions
One of the essence of life is our capacity to project our short term actions in the long term like
the notion of time was disappearing into one single perspective of our existence. In an attempt
to prepare your mind to this, I didn’t want to go over this subject before in the book. Now i think
you might be ready.
In a company, we talk about Vision, Focus and Values. The vision is the long term purpose of
the organisation, the focus is the next milestone to reach in order to progress throughout the
vision and the values, or behaviours, are the principles through which people perform every
action and decision within the organisation.
Some people will tell you it’s Karma. And it is. But just like the notion of habits, it has been
overused and it’s now lost in the things that don’t even reach to us as meaningful anymore. To
put it into other words, the world is colluding towards the future you are pursuing and all the
elements that you’ve been putting together in order to get there. And there are two ways to
envision the future, conscious and voluntary or unconscious and involuntary. The former
maximizes your chance to reach the best possible output while the latter is like playing a game
without understand the goal nor the rules.
There are three things that drive our ability to find the right balance in life. First, you must
understand the underlying principles behind success and happiness and this is not an easy task
ask you can quickly dive and get lost into the intricacies of too much philosophy and spirituality.
Second, you must challenge yourself towards change and growth as this is the only way to
reflect on the actions of our life and become the next best version of ourselves. Finally, you
need to foster the art of luck and understand the value of the compounded effects of our actions
and decisions in life.
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Success & Happiness
This is a tough one as there isn’t a universal recipe towards happiness. However I like to believe
that it’s easier than it seems to feel happy and successful. It has really nothing to do with getting
into a complex reflection on your life or a deep dive into your past, at least not as a starting
point. It’s about nurturing the right attitude.
Presence and Enjoyment
There are two ways of dealing with the present moment, it’s either to get through it or find an
escape by thinking about a better past, a better future or where the grass is greener. You will
find that projections are always disappointing, for a single simple reason: we never really get
there. Our imagination has a powerful instant effect but it doesn’t last and only builds up
frustration and discomfort if we count on it to drive our life. Just look at the effect of some drugs
on people, how devastating it is. Besides the physical addiction, it’s the search for something
else than the present moment.
Get rid of the fear of living the moment, don’t look at the past with nostalgia or in the future with
hope. It’s not that the past isn’t something great to remember or that the future is not exciting,
but it shouldn’t drive your impressions of the present moment. Like anything in life, we always
better cope with something that we accept to live with than something that we tend to silent or
put aside.
Learn to live the moment and grab the parts that you enjoy, it will mechanically and through
hormonal reaction helps your mind simply find peace and happiness.
Gratitude and Tolerance
Then come Gratitude and Tolerance. Whenever you live the moment, you will find positive or
negative feelings and energies hit you with various magnitude. Someone holding the door for
you will make you feel good while someone taking a parking spot right in front of you will
probably piss you off.
It’s not that you must hold your feelings in order to have a positive attitude at all time, but you
must emphasize the positive actions and feelings of your life to increase the effect in your mind.
As for negative impressions and behaviours that drive anger, frustration and negative thoughts,
you must activate tolerance in order to calm down your emotions and reflect on a situation.
Remember that people with positive honesty always win on the long run.
No one has ever become happy from holding anger, being irritated or feeding negative
thoughts.
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Positivity & Engagement
Once your notions of time and mindset are in place by enjoying the moment and by reflecting as
it should be on the things that are happening in your life, you are able to drive positivity and
engagement towards success.
Success had nothing to do about how much money you get or everything you own. Success is
about finding and trying to maintain a struggle-free fulfilling balance in your life.
Positivity and Engagement are both a cause and a consequence that drive success, positivity
being an hormonal driver of performance and engagement a root cause for resilience and
therefore achievement. Note that it’s only possible if you have found something in which you
thrive and in order to do that, I invite you to get back where we talk about loving what we do
well, and not the other way around.
In practice
1) Enjoy the present moment. Don’t hide yourself in the past or project yourself in an
imaginary future too often, i will harm your ability to live your present life and be happy.
2) At any moment you will live positive or negative moments. Emphasize with gratitude the
positive aspects of your life without getting into some sort of extreme positivity, aka
utopia. Make sure you build tolerance towards the negative aspects of your life in order
to temper them.
3) Finally, keep in mind that a positive and engaged movement always provide better
consequences than the opposite. Everything you do should be driven by those two
attributes.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Criticism & Growth
One of the worst enemy of human being is misplaced ego. It annihilates everything that allows
us to grow, thrive and become a better version of ourselves.
The best example we can think of if this person at the office who turns red whenever she is
criticized, tells excuses instead of explaining the reasons of her failures and mistakes, hides
herself behind false/made-up things and achievements. These people pass more time lying to
themselves and others as well as saving the appearances rather than learning and growing to
become a better person. You are maybe this person, maybe not… I would say that two third of
the people who are like this and who have been offered this book or have bought it will never go
through this chapter anyway while telling people that they have read it and that it was good, or
not, or whatever sounds better.
The ego trap is a liability that we must get rid of as much as possible if we want our cerebral
cortex to properly work and process information as it should and not as our ego would like it to
be. One can’t succeed nor be truly happy without letting her ego aside and grow with
clairvoyance and open-mindedness. Take a moment and realize if the following statements are
true: I ignore the feedbacks that I don’t like instead of presuming they are true by default. I tend
to surround myself with people I can dominate or that I feel comfortable with instead of learning
from others and surround myself with people smarter than me. I feel uncomfortable whenever I
lose control of something. I talk a lot about what I have done and achieved instead of where I
struggle with and need to learn. I wonder more about what people thinks of me than the actual
results of my actions. I have talked about things that I have actually failed to do, many times and
for which I found a way to save the day.
Don’t ask those questions yourself, ask someone else to be brutally honest with you about
whether those statements are partly true or not.
Criticism acceptance and reassessment are what allow us to move forward with a growth
mindset and not a fixed one. You can have strong conviction but you should be careful about
your certainties, they block everything that come their way to confirm, deny or amend our
thinking or what we believed where facts while they only were a mere view of something, from a
narrowed perspective.
In practice
1) Do not make excuses, you are not perfect in many ways.
2) Ask people for brutally honest feedbacks.
3) Own, accept and reflect on criticism.
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The art of luck & compounded effects
Is there any such thing as luck? It’s difficult to determine the volatile hazardous nature of
something that we struggle to explain through a simple mechanism. However, as we can attest
that some people are generally lucky, life’s events find themselves linked to each others in
some mysterious ways over the course of actions throughout time and circumstances.
I like to believe that there this is no random nor organized order in the way things are
happening. It’s all about maximizing the probability of making great things happen. If you stay
home, nothing will happen for you outside, if you deploy negative thoughts it’s unlikely that great
things are going to happen neither, just like if you are not committed in your work, i don’t see
how you could expect any reward. If on the contrary you deploy lasting positive thoughts and
energy in pretty much everything you do, what is the probability that great things happen to
you? The odds are probably much higher than for any other person. The reason is that on an
infinite line of fortunate events, the two broad parameters that come into play are the actions
that you are responsible for, which i call endogenous factors and on the other side all the
external or exogenous factors that colluding and connecting with the endogenous factors will
generate those fortunate events.
The resulting dynamic is a ripple effect with more and more positive energy and colluding
events coming as a result of the previous ones. Succeeding at doing something or overcoming
a difficulty will bring great outputs that will trigger a chain of potential additional possibilities. And
because you are already in the zone of those events, it’s getting easier to make them happen.
The most obvious example of it in our life is when thriving in a professional environment. People
identifies outliers, those who make a difference. From there they are called when opportunities
rise up around them.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Corporate Environment
I had to write a chapter about it, because most of us are evolving in corporate environments and
we all know the intricacies that prevent us to thrive there with the right velocity and excellence.
Some of the people who will read the following parts will suffocate from witnessing their own
experience while the others will cry from transposing themselves into those situation. Either way
things must change, whether it’s within the organisation in which you are currently operating or
by taking actions in order to change environment. Make a dent, or make a move, there is no
steady position that will make you happy at that point. As for the managers and leaders who are
actually reading this, there must be a part of them who is open to change, protecting their
backyard and playing the corporate games can’t be thriving. One can’t deny that those
intricacies are real in their environment, reject their negative effects, resign from doing anything
to change.
But hopefully if you went that far into reading this little book, you are not ready to settle,
whatever your position within the organisation, you want to be a driver for change, for yourself
and by extent to others.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
The problem: Intricacies & Desolation
The aberration of most corporate environment is how so many knots have been formed
everywhere within the organisation and yet for some reasons it’s still running, generating
revenues and profits. It’s probably because most organisations around them are also growing
this way that it limits the impacts of a mediocre execution. But we all know that unsustainable
environments end up failing on the long run. Unfortunately the long run isn’t something human
beings are fighting for by default. Otherwise we would respect mother nature a lot more than we
poorly do.
Corporate environments are simply defined by the way they are organised in terms of hierarchy,
rules of decisions and communication principles. Please don’t cry just right now, I haven’t even
started, but you know exactly what I am talking about. Most organisations suffer from hierarchy
insanity where managers develop in-house monarchies, where politics rule before performance.
From there the way decisions are made has become a farce where people are tight to what they
are told to do and can’t express their good will or creativity as it could appear as an attempt to
move up the ladder and take more responsibilities, something that the current people in place
can’t allow to happen, obviously.
They way hierarchy works and how decisions are made create a closed environment of
communication full of complications and ambiguities in which control runs over collaboration.
People are being very careful with dominant individuals whom they can’t be honest with, taking
the risk of being put aside, locked or smashed. Those dominants take advantage of their
situation to keep their own monarchy in place, making people fearful and silent over their power.
Down the ladder, sub-managers mimic to control their own environment.
Everyone knows deep inside how wrong this is and the coffee machine has more stories to tell
than all the shrinks united within an entire city, but no one moves, people just comply and go
with the flow, saving what they can, doing what they are asked to do and waiting for their short
evening and weekend break to enjoy the steady but apparently stable paycheck that they
receive at the end of each month for enduring their job. It’s like the monarchs can’t be taken
away because everytime someone attempts to change the controlled order of things, she is
being shut down as an example for the other to remember that the monarch is indestructible
and irreplaceable; People develop a stockholm syndrome, they become attached to their
torturer. This is all ambiguous and let’s say it, totally fucked up.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
The solution: Rise & Raise
By now you know that you want to change the way things are, as a doer, a manager or a leader.
You also know that the lower you are in the the ladder, the more people at the top will try to
crush you down in an attempt to save their position and basically destroy you. That’s how
insanely mad the situation is. That is why you must work towards building the right environment
around your to win with patience.
The way to do this is to take in reverse the toxic environment you are in. You must be the driver
that people wants to follow inside the organisation, it’s mix of behavioural change on your side
and strategic move toward your colleagues and others.
First, you need to switch ambiguity and the fear to express your thoughts by positive honesty
(sounds familiar ?) through a clear and direct approach. No more complications in the way you
express and do things. Of course, not everyone will like that, but for the people with their mind
and heart at the right place, they will take you as an example seeing you thrive through this
approach.
From there, they will be willing to follow you but a painful consequence should follow: Your
manager will deliberately shut you down and bring back the right dose of threats and fear in the
room to put everyone back at their place. And people will follow this strong authoritarian arm
rather than the outsider. If you can still operate in this environment, you should show the rest of
your team and colleagues that this approach didn’t work on you and that you are thriving even
more. From there they will see the light, they will start to see a potential leader in you, someone
they want to follow the steps. Colleagues will rally your cause, you will team up and together
you’ll build a much more exciting and peaceful environment.
This is the bottom up approach that allows doer to rise up within an organisation.
From the point of view of a leader or manager in a company, the approach is slightly different as
you don’t need to rise up yourself and drag people with you alongside the change you are
operating as an individual for the well-being of the team. You’re already in a position of power
as a manager and leader, therefore you shall instead raise the people around you to embrace a
new way of doing things, with more trust and honesty. This is when resources like the book “5
dysfunctions of a team” and the following episode “overcoming the 5 dysfunctions” can allow
you to methodically drive the right transformation without your organisation to make long lasting
moves and not short-sighted decisions.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Never Settle
I know that it’s a lot more complicated on a daily basis than it looks because the dominants are
really strong at flipping the table and taking people down whenever they feel threatened. But
your corporate environment is no different than your personal environment. No one likes the
drama that sometimes come from our family environment and no one has ever highly valued
destructive relationships. Eventually we are all hoping to find a better balance, to be able to
communicate without pretending or having to hide behind false appearances, to love and be
loved by people we respect and with whom we can exchange freely without fear.
What you are looking for in your corporate environment shouldn’t be any different than your
personal one. You can’t settle before a broken situation, or someone who’re letting or driving
you down. the more you wait the more you’ll pay for price and you know it already, by the time
you will end this situation, you will regret not to have acted before.
Find excitement in the challenge of changing the status quo, of being in control and taking the
opportunity to drive structural change that will not only help you out but also the people around
that you care about.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
Conclusion
Whenever I write about a subject on my blog, it’s usually to reflect on a recent experience, it’s a
way for me to make myself publicly accountable towards others on a specific subject.
Human Machine is different, it’s the result of introspecting on the changes and hopefully
progress that have paved my path over the past few years.
It was difficult for me just to write about it from time to time in a structured way, I felt that if I
wasn’t making a bigger move, I would fall short on my expectations to deliver the right message.
I made a first attempt to write this book in November 2017 after I badly broke my right foot while
playing squash. At the time, during approximately eight weeks, I managed to write every
morning for a couple of hours, about half of it. Unfortunately, and for no good reasons, I broke
my writing habits during winter. When I flew to the United States in April 2018, I decided that I
had to finish this book.
Unfortunately I wasn’t happy with my first draft, and after several attempts, i realized that I was
feeling more comfortable writing in english than in french. So I threw away my entire work and
started again from scratch. For 28 days straight, I managed two schedules, early morning and
late evening dealing with Europe, and all day writing and dealing with my schedule in the United
States. It was intense but very rewarding as I managed to finish the first draft in time.
Then I contracted with an independent designer (Basia Tran) and an independent editor
(Ameesha Green). It took me another three months to review the book entirely before Ameesha
was able to review it. This is so hard to review something that you’ve done, especially for me
who likes to do things and pass to the next quickly. It was a good exercise of resilience.
Now about Human Machine itself. There are three things of primordial importance that I would
like to emphasize for you to reflect on this reading and the consequent actions that will follow:
The first one is that we are not perfect and that the concept of human machine is the balance of
dealing with our imperfections while gaining a sense of control in our decisions and actions. You
could probably read one of this book that tells you how to have a perfect day or read the
interview of a young investment banker managing her life by the minute in a perfect flow of
happiness and fulfillment. That’s literally ludicrous. The more constrained and controlled is your
environment and the more sophisticated, transactional and cold you become. That is a simple
mechanic. We become who are, we are what we do. The concept of human machine is not
about building an absolute organisation, it’s about taking the full ownership of your life and
relative control on your destiny.
Human Machine - Organised like a Machine, Living like a Human.
In order to do that, and this is my second point, you need to design simple mechanics that allow
you to regain control over the events of your life. It’s not about fighting towards perfection at all
costs, it’s about finding a balance you love. We are not wired to make tremendous changes in
our life at a very fast pace as much as it’s very difficult to overcome our own resistances to do
something as a consequence of a proper thinking process. It’s a lot easier to build simple
mechanical actions, coupled with positive honesty. The compounded effects of all those small
actions are tremendous and this is what you are after: small steps, thoroughly put together, one
after the other, with patience and a bit of resilience.
Finally, I know that this book isn’t perfect at all, that despite my genuine ambition to write
something meaningful, powerful and that will help a lot of people find their equilibrium, it falls
short in many aspects. But I also think that it reflects the principle of human machine as well, it’s
a work in progress. That’s why I will publish updates you can track in an attempt not to reach
perfection but to improve it overtime.