James' World 2

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My Indian immigrant parents instilled in me an incredible and intense work ethic. I watched them put in long hours, with a relentless commitment to achieving their dreams. My father always said, “Keep your head down, work hard, and work some more, and you will be recognized.”

And yet, his advice to only work hard hasn’t always served me well at work.

Early in my career, I presented my company’s brand forecast at monthly senior leadership meetings. I spent hours and hours preparing and over-preparing, working into the early hours of the morning. The actual presentations were never more than 10 minutes long. On one occasion, overloaded on caffeine and sleep deprivation, I completely blanked when the vice president asked me a question, and I stood there frozen in front of the senior leadership team.

I was working hard, but not on the right things. I struggled with being over-prepared and striving for perfection. Without much coaching or guidance from my bosses, I wasted hours on details that didn’t matter,

on pulling and analyzing the wrong data sets, and on answering the wrong questions. Some might argue that these are simple mistakes we make in the course of our careers, and mistakes can help us learn and be better leaders. Yet research shows that contrary to what so many of us have been taught, the errors we make need to be close to the right answer in order to be educational. This is what helps us to learn and improve our memory to retain the correct information — and then ultimately do things differently.

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Marina Koren wrote in  The Atlantic that, “My mornings are the messiest part of my day. I do not rise and shine. Instead, I hit snooze on the alarm and throw the covers over my head.” This, Koren goes on, causes her distress because “it never seems to be the case with other people’s morning routine.” Koren is referencing the deluge of morning-routine media and advice, including The Cut’s “ How I Get It Done” column,  The New York Times’  Sunday Routine specials, roundups in news outlets ranging from  CNN to  Vogue, #routine  Instagram posts, and the endless  instruction from self-improvement podcasters.

Morning routines are having a moment. And it’s easy to feel that if you don’t have one, you should. Or else you’ll fall behind, or worse, be miserable. But, as is usually the case with these things, the truth is a bit more complicated and a lot more freeing. 

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Routine

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But extracting wax from our ear canals is precisely why most of us buy Q-tips in the first place. The humble Q-tip was so perfectly designed for this purpose that it turned into a generic word for a product.

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Yet, somehow, we use it for the very thing it specifically warns us not to do.

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The origins of this strange consumer phenomenon can be traced to Leo Gerstenzang, an immigrant from Poland.

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In 1923, Gerstenzang supposedly thought he could improve upon his wife Ziuta’s method of wrapping a wad of cotton around a toothpick to clean their newborn daughter Betty’s eyes, ears, belly button, and other sensitive areas during bathing.

Gerstenzang started a company that year to develop and manufacture the first ready-made sterilized cotton swabs for baby care. Over the next couple of years, he worked to design a machine that could produce swabs “untouched by human hands.”

“Baby Betty Gays” was the original working name for the swabs because daughter Betty laughed when her parents tickled her with them, according to her 2017 paid obituary. By the time Gerstenzang put out one of the first newspaper advertisements for his invention in 1925 it was shortened to “Baby Gays.”

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Soon, Gerstenzang changed the brand name to “Q-Tips Baby Gays.” By the mid-1930s, “Baby Gays” was dropped from the name.

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There are competing histories to where the “Q-tips” addition came from. According to a spokesperson for Unilever, (UL) the consumer goods conglomerate that bought Q-tips in 1987, the “Q” stands for “quality” and “tips” describes the cotton swab at the end of the stick (the first swabs were single-sided sold in sliding tin boxes).

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A Q-tips advertisement from 1945. Q-tips were originally designed for baby care.

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