Lessons for a father - Repetitive Actions. Same Result. Good.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results: Albert Einstein.

I have never been a part of an argument that suggested that Einstein was not a smart man. The debate, generally, revolves around the degree of smartness. People, usually, do not find the quote that I used to begin this post hard to accept either. Same action does result in the same outcome (more often than not). The question, therefore, to ask is this: What if the intention is to get the same result?

Consider the following scenario. Our son is usually done for the day by 8 pm or so. There are no exceptions as far as the day of the week is concerned. We try and put him to sleep thereafter. Now, and as all new parents would know, there are a lot of ways of putting a child to sleep. Given the day, some might work and the others, may be even previously successful ones, might not. How easy and efficient life would become if there was one proven technique that would put all children to sleep in a jiffy? All parents would, undoubtedly, subscribe to the technique and follow it till kingdom come.

Just like the time of sleep is becoming a routine for our child, wouldn't it be great if how he slept (technique) and how long he slept for (duration; hopefully lasting more than 10 hours at night) became a habit as well?  Alas though! We are left with our daily permutations and combinations with the hope that one method would work.

All is not lost though. It seems that children, even at that small an age, can be trained to follow a routine. It remains a matter of learning for us and then implementing what we learn (we will keep you posted with our progress). This "learn and implement" act should come easily to us. We do that at work all the time. We learn new ways of solving problems/ reaching goals and try to utilize this newfound knowledge in our professional lives.

In fact, if we think about it, every piece of success usually has a semblance of repetition to it. It is just called by another name - Practice. We practice our craft and get better at it in time. Be it sport, technology, medicine or leadership, we realize quite early what would and would not work. We try and stick to things that work and with intentional repetition get good at it. I would be surprised if the good leaders in the world, no matter what their vocation of choice, did not grind their teams through repetitive tasks.

So here is a theory. Bring a group of people together. Get their buy-in on a vision.Create a definition of success. Start towards the goal as a group of individuals with individual strengths. Break the path to success into smaller goals and keep listing out things that work (group discussions, after hours bonding, openness, diversity being a few examples). Keep working towards the goal but try and repeat things that work as much as possible. Soon enough, if the theory holds, you will have something that we all crave for - a team.