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Hello Friends,

My friend has various social media apps installed on her phone. We’ve been noticing a pattern after we have a phone conversation (on the regular phone app, not the Whatsapp call or anything else).

We speak on a range of topics, and once we hang up, she sends me a screenshot on Facebook, and Instagram, where she gets an ad advertising a course on a subject we’ve spoken out or memes pertaining to the exact words or topics discussed.

We’ve noticed this a number of times.

This is where “Artificial Intelligence” has already been successfully implemented. Personalised targeted marketing. The smart phone with its various apps is such a ubiquitous part of our lives, that it is hard to imagine a life without it.

What we can control circle of influence is becoming smaller and smaller everyday in the usage of techs.

Interestingly, I don’t face the same scenario as my friend. I rarely get ads or such targeted marketing, because except Instagram and Whatsapp, I don’t have social media apps installed on my phone. I get access to Instagram only 10 minutes a day, and the rest of the day it is hard blocked for me.

My privacy settings are custom set for each app on my phone. (Call it taking it a bit too far, but my data privacy background tells me to take as many precautions as I can, even when I surrender to these mighty forces). I disable the microphone and camera settings on each of these apps manually, and also disable the Allow App to Track settings on my iPhone, which prevents the apps from tracking my activity outside of the app.

If you’ve got some cool tricks on your phone that helps you to preserve your privacy, do let me know.

Meanwhile, this week, we’ll explore ‘pivot or persevere’ dilemma and how it impacts our life and work.

Enjoy the read! Siri🌱🌀

P.S. Send me a picture of the book you're reading now. I'd love recommendations on my next read.

Exploring Pivot or Persevere Dilemma

The Pivot or Persevere Dilemma

The ‘pivot or persevere dilemma’ is something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time in multiple areas of my work and life. This dilemma can come up in the context of your career, business, life, project, goal, relationship and it reaches a point where

• progress seems rather slow or stalled, and in some cases reversed
• path ahead seems vague, unclear, blocked or expensive
• others seem to be having better success than you doing the ‘same thing’ (scrolling on LinkedIn on a boring afternoon, and immediately your ‘content life’ seems to be a ‘stalled one’ while your peers are moving ahead)
• when you have a sense of missing out on trends and changes in the world (like new technology, new status symbols, changing beliefs)

The key question that arises out of this dilemma is:

The core tension in this question reminds me of the story “Three Feet from Gold” that’s been retold a million times by motivational speakers and business coaches. In this book “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill talks about a man named R.U.Darby.

Three Feet from Gold

Darby and his Uncle headed out to Colorado to dig for gold. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to tap in a vein of gold, they decided to quit. They sold their equipment and their claim for the now defunct gold mine to a junkman for pennies on the dollar they had paid for and headed back home.

The junkman instead of cashing in on the equipment and selling off the mine, had the foresight to bring an engineer to survey the gold mine. The engineer determined that the digs failed, because of a fault line, which had cut off the gold vein. He calculated that if there was still gold in the ground, they would find it if they dug a few more meters below where the previous miners had ended their work.

The junkman and the engineer dug from the last spot, and just three feet in, they struck gold.

This is typically narrated by motivational speakers and influencers on social media to illustrate “do not quit, keep going and you might strike gold.”

his is seen as the result of pperseverance
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But the key question to ask here is, if the previous miners had known that three feet in, they would have found gold, would they have given up? The answer is no, absolutely not. They had bet their life savings and had taken debts to finance this dig.

The problem is when they started digging, they did not know at what point they would find gold. It was an uncertain path, and they gave up, when they couldn’t bear the uncertainty anymore, and the dig showed zero gold.

We don’t know if we are three feet from gold, or no gold.

Hindsight is Self-Deception

This is what makes the pivot or persevere dilemma harder to resolve. In hindsight, these are the most easiest dilemmas to resolve because the outcome has come to pass, and it is easy to rationalise the decision, which may have been a gamble that has paid off.

“Ah, if I had not taken that year’s break, then I might not have had the chance to explore so many different things.”

“If I hadn’t gone to that party, I would not have met my wonderful partner, who I’ve been happily married for 25 years.”
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The Reality is Complex

The reality is complex and uncertain. It is hard to know whether pivot or persevere is the right option for us, because we don’t know what will give us the outcome we are looking for. At those cross roads, here a few questions to reflect on:

1. Am I in this for the outcome or the journey? What calls to me strongly?
2. What is the emotional space underlying this dilemma? Have I processed it?
3. What are my most important needs right now and how does resolving this dilemma serve them?
4. What is the smallest experiment that I can try in both persevere and pivot?
5. Do I have to decide my direction right now?

Siri’s Picks

This is the book I’ve been reading this week, and it is about what the author calls as “upstream” efforts. It is a modern spin on systems thinking, and how to build, reshape and find out what can we do to change the systems in our life, work and society to get the results we want.

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See you next Sunday! Bye for now.

Siri 🌱🌀

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