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Leadership 101: The Ma-Po Tofu Method

Ma-Po Tofu is a special Sichuanese dish. It's really unique in that it uses numbing peppers to prep your mouth for some hellishly spicy and incredible flavors.

The point of this blog is: Sometimes, you need to numb yourself to some things to get the real flavor of an experience. And that's the Ma Po Tofu Method to enjoy your work:

  1. Think about all the things at your workplace that aren't mission-critical that annoy you -- be it a co-worker/a certain team, the office space, a support team that doesn't do enough, a product that could worked better, or something else altogether.
  2. Apply a 'numbing pepper' to that thought, by reduce your expectations to a bare minimum, if not zero from those things/people, thereby numbing yourself to most annoyances. (The trick here is to know what to expect, and then expect much worse)
  3. Enjoy the rest of your work-day and work-life.

Simple.