Key learnings from the book

• You can become POLITICALLY SAVVY by practice, not just by reading. But reading tells you what to practice. More than reading, watching others will help the most.
• BE AWARE of your surroundings, perceptive of what people are thinking, wanting and speak for the group, talk to people to know whats going on.
• PREPARE - Don’t try out fancy strategies if you will not get the buy in, have a strong defense if you know their will be opposition, get buy in ahead of time. Have several approaches in your repertoire to respond in variety of situations. Knowledge, statistics, jargon, being articulate can all come in handy.
• ALIGN your goals with those of people above you
• POWER comes from creating a perception of power, that does not mean picking up fights, but winning most of the times you do pick up fights (learn from others).
• LEARN by observing others. Thats the only way you learn. (Thats why always work for a smart, savvy, powerful boss, in a powerful market leading company)
• Being ASSERTIVE is critical in a cut throat business. In fact, AGGRESSIVE is even better – people below them may not like them. Their peers hate them the most. But they have grown.

• Develop POLITICAL INTUTITION - Is someone digging your grave, setting you up for a fall, making themselves look good at your expense, lying, covering their backs, wiggling out of a commitment,
• Don’t stand in the line of POLITICAL fire.
• Don’t assume, but inquire. You will learn more, and more will be correct. Validate your thinking with others.
• “Send them a rose” email when someone shoots from the hip, finds fault with you.
• Learn how to diffuse situations, reply to nasty emails, don’t resort to fights, but don’t come out looking like an idiot either. Close the public conversation by appeasing the person. Behind the back, dig his grave.
• People LIE all the time. Watch out for somebody exaggerating, not speaking up, concealing, dodging, outright falsifying the facts. Watch for body language.
• EMPATHY - understanding and predicting how a person feels in a situation, helps us predict his behavior. Practice regularly on a few people.
• Build the right connections, people who have the inside information. Meet one such person everyday. Don’t waste their time.

• EXPOSE your competitor’s ignorance
• I need to talk slowly and with more power

Standard come back one liners
...or lines that can put down people

• Stop dodging the issue
• Let me finish
• Hello !! This mouth is still talking
  – But thats crap
• Shut your piehole and get the fuck out of here
• Shut up and listen
• Get out of here
• You’re way off the subject, (peer)
• (senior), we have already discussed that…I need to fill you in separately on this…
• Hold on, don’t change the subject. Lets not waste everybody’s time going through this again.
• Calm down, (peer). Count till 10. Go drink some water.
• Theoretical discussion – lets move on..
• Are you feeling alright today ?

STANDARD RESPONSES

• Don’t say – nothing much, same old…
  Say – Life at (company) is very busy man !
  Or say – I am doing what I am good at – (doing xyz)...
  Or say – I am doing what we do at (company name) –
  I am managing the xyz program -

1. Two fundamental streams of philosophy : Understanding Existence and Understanding Knowledge

1. Can rationality always lead us to the right answer ? How can we explain paradoxes ? Limitations of our current knowledge lead to irrational arguments that seem rational.

1. Socrates, the masterly interrogator, founder of moral philosophy, was more concerned with the questions – what is good, what is just. His objective was to improve the life of people and society and not merely a quest of the unknown.
   a) No real long term harm can be done to a person who preserves his Integrity. All material possessions and catastrophes are chance happenings in a fleeting existence.
   b)
   #

#

Randy Pausch has an engineering problem – he has been diagnosed with cancer, and he has a limited time to impart a life worth of education to his children to his three young children. So he writes “The Last Lecture” – a series of lectures given to his students at Carnegie Mellon, which would also become his legacy of knowledge, that some day will be inherited by his children.

Lesson # 1 : (ed : Spend time with the family. You never know how long it will last. And take pictures of little things you do. After 25 years, you will forget it all.)

Lesson # 2 : When you are screwing up, and nobody says anything to you, that means they have given up on you.

Lesson # 3 : How to build your child’s self esteem : Give him things that he cannot do, he works hard until he learns how to do it, and you keep repeating this process.

Lesson # 4 : If you don’t know something, ask. Don’t be shy and vain.

Lesson # 5 : Life (sports, extracurriculars) provides opportunities to learn leadership, resilience

Lesson # 6 : If you really want something very hard, you have to be persistent.

Lesson # 7 : Use a positive vocabulary. Semantics can influence you life. Watch positive and inspirational movies, instead of tragedies.

Lesson # 8 : Not everything needs to be fixed.

Don’t complain, work harder.

Don’t obsess over what people think.

Don’t obsess over what reward you get.

Watch what people do, not what they say.

Get people’s attention. Don’t be a back bencher. Be the first to raise the hand. Its OK to be told no.

Immortalize great moments by distinct music and smell. This will help you reminisce the past.

Do something special in your life. Some great achievement. Something that your parents can be proud of, your children can look up to you for, your community celebrates, and you personally can cherish.

Material possessions can never make up for the love and time spent with the children.

Very nicely written book. But there is no eye opening information. You can breeze through this book in 15 minutes in Barnes and Noble and you will get the key points the author is trying to make. Don’t need to buy it.