Hard Work

During my recent discussion in one of my learning behavior session with fresh graduates, this term "Hard work" intrigued me.

I heard myself asking a question "what do you mean by Hardwork?"

While I did not have the answer at that point in time when I asked this question, I still let this question hang in the air to explore what comes up.

"Putting more efforts on the task" came the answer. I was not completely satisfied with the answer so I explored more, and asked another question.

"There is a boy who is very consistently and daily spending 2 rigorous hours in practicing cricket, is he working hard?"

answer came "yes".  I further increased complexity and asked "There is another boy who is spending 6 hours with similar rigor daily, is he working hard?"

There was a silence for few seconds, however answer came

"yes.  he is also hardworking, but in case you can achieve the same thing by putting 2 hours then why spend 6 hours?"

That lead to another question "is it possible that both are working hard but for different objectives?" answer was obviously yes.

This enabled me to develop an understanding that while we say hard  work it may not have much meaning unless we have an objective associated with it.

With objective of seeking more clarity, I asked

What would you do differently when  somebody says you need to really do lot of Hardwork?

Assuming that I have an objective of learning something and today I am spending 2 hours on that activity, when someone says "you need to really need to do lot of hardwork", how does that impact on my activity? Should I increase my efforts by another 30 mins or 3 Hrs? How do I quantify to my increase of effort? And how do I validate?

This got the class thinking along with me, it was interesting to see my awareness increasing along with class,  after few minutes of thinking came the answer.

"We need to know how much effort is required to achieve an objective, and thereafter see how much efforts do we need to spend"

This answers included estimation and planning as well as part of the Hardwork and it made lot of sense.

This left me with last question of "How do I validate my Hardwork?" after some thinking came the answer that

"we need to set small achievement targets (milestones in corporate world), and see if we are able to meet those targets or do we need to make some tweaking to our efforts?"

This felt complete, but now I have started looking Hard Work in a very different light, to me now

Hardwork means "first define an objective for which you are working, have tentative estimates for the work and plan around it, also set smaller achievement targets, to allows us to tweak our efforts"

Excellent post of transferring car ownership in BLR

http://nirajlive.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/4-wheeler-ownership-transfer-in-bangalore-karnatka/

Why some people are better performers? (Part -I)

I was trying to find a title for this blog for quite sometime, that discusses dealing with emotions, finally this title came up, which looked more appropriate.

So, here we are, to discuss why some people are better performers? Is it a better technical understanding? are these people born with luck? is it hard work? or is it their polished communication? is it their smartness? is it because they studied in better schools or graduated from better institute?

In my opinion what makes people perform better is how they act in different situations, and how they approach certain activities.

These people are usually very connected to themselves, and are usually away from certain (let’s call them unhealthy) emotions/feelings and also they are usually full of healthy emotions. In this post I will primarily talk about the unhealthy emotion while in the second post I will talk about the impact of healthy emotions.

Unhealthy emotions like, Ego, Insecurity, dishonesty, selfishness, distrust, revenge, violence,  anger, depression, fear usually leads to death spiral where once one get involved into these emotions, one emotion would lead to another, hence person would continue down the path of not being able to perform up to ones potential.

Let us study these emotions in little detail, lot of these emotions are driven from key emotions of fear and anger.

Take an example of dishonesty, why would people lie? In my opinion most people lie due to fear, child would usually lie due the fear of getting scolded, people would usually lie due to the fear of getting reprimanded, or out of the fear of not getting something they badly wanted.

Insecurity is also a result of fear, fear of loosing job, fear of loosing the loved ones, most prevalent insecurity is about your loved ones, for ones spouse, for ones parents children are very possessive/insecure about their parents. Insecurity in peers are due to the perception the it will increase competition.

Selfishness is due fear as well as ego, fear of letting someone else being equal to oneself, fear of letting one of the possessions being taken away, ego of feeling pride to keeping the object of substance, ego of keeping the rare information, ego of feeling important.

Revenge, violence, depression is due to anger, anger of not getting what one wanted, anger when aggravated leads to revenge or violence, potential for a angry person to think rationally is nil. Depression is usually an anger about oneself where person first feels angry, then regret on getting aggravated it becomes depression.

Now think about a person going thru these emotions, it will be very difficult (since there is nothing impossible so avoiding impossible word here) for an individual to perform to the potential because the energy is getting drained by these emotions. Individual is always busy (unknowingly) about how to avenge someone, or what should be done to save himself, or how to get more and more (either money, business, people etc..).

In order to perform at the best all the time it is important to be away from these emotions, and always busy in analyzing how best to do what is being done, how can it be done better. Please note that I am not referring to control these emotions, instead I am referring to not be in these emotions. I have seen in my experience that most people when they are at their peak of performance are not in most of these emotions and completely focused on the objective in hand, hence they are able to perform much better than other people.

Science: Blessing or Disguise

I remember this being the topic of essay in my childhood time, and also remember being very positive about science being blessing to Humans. However thinking it again, is it really true?

Nature is always balanced in its own ways, for every good there is a bad, for every construction there is a destruction. As humans over a period of several 1000’s years we have evolved and developed ourselves, there has been lot of inventions, there has been lot of discovery to understand ourselves and so on so forth, but what is the cost? what did we loose? or did we loose anything?

Looking the common issues that are being faced by all like Global warming, decrease in good productive soil on earth, diminishing human values, increase of unit families. I can keep writing down the issues and I feel they strongly relate to the inventions/evolutions we have had in past several years.

We could argue that there is a misuse of the inventions and with proper use we could control the after effect, but for one that will be corrective measure, second I do not believe that when things are available so publicly there use/misuse can be controlled.

Just reminds me a dialog from blockbuster movie “MATRIX” Human species share a common characteristic with virus. Similar to Virus human’s consume all the resources around them and when all the resources are consumed they (human as well as virus) move on to find more resources to consume.

How to control emotions: anger, frustration, agony?

Anger is the base emotion. Frustration and Agony are the derived emotions from Anger. So I will talk about Anger and probably rest will be covered automatically. Question is why does one become angry? From my experience almost in all the situations one becomes angry only when we have expectations which are not met. These expectations can be from colleague, relative, friend, or even with oneself. So the simple way to control the Anger is not to have expectations.

Come on… it is impractical to not have expectations from anyone.

Well next best thing that can be done is FORGIVE. One has to understand that everyone is human and it is possible to make mistakes. So if we are able to forgive people for their mistakes then Anger can be avoided.

Forgiving others is important however it is even more important to forgive oneself, if an individual is not able to forgive himself then also he becomes angry, irritating.

How to deal with “I”?

Most important step to remove “I” is to become aware about it. Most people are not aware about it and hence are not able to work on it.

There is a difference between Ego and Self respect, usually people consider a attack on self respect while it may just be hitting individuals Ego. Best judge also is own self, as far as we are truthful to ourselves.

One of the ways to deal with “I” is to remove it and replace it with “we” or “us”. What it means is that keep one self away from emotions like ego and proud. I remember a small incident someone told. There was a person went to saint and asked “Sir, I want to be Happy. What should I do?” saint looked at him smiled and said remove “I” and “want” and the only thing remain will be happiness.

One important aspect to look at dealing with “I'” is that if you are hurt because of some else is using too much of “I” centric statements, then there are good chances that the reason you are hurt is because there is a strong “I” in you.

What if??

Very often we face this question under different context.

What if I invest in stock? What if project delivery does not go successful? What if my wife is not in a good mood? What if my daughter does not pass this year? What if I do not get salary raise? What if interview does not go good? on…. and on…. and on.

I wondered what is the best approach to deal with these what if’s and if there is a common approach to deal with so many fears or unknowns in the life.

Then I started questioning do one really need to worry about these what ifs. Can we anticipate things in advance? Is it really possible to perceive what is coming in future and work accordingly.

Answer I got from within for most of the questions is that we really do not know and can not anticipate future (unless one really has good connections with God). Then what do we do? Should we not plan at all? Again answer coming from within is balance.

I guess BALANCE is the keyword here. Again question comes in how do I know if I am striking the right balance?

Well there is no mathematical formula here and no one can tell upfront if the decision that is being made is right or wrong (in most of the complex situation).

I feel everyone makes a right decision given the context, information available, and a perception about the decision that is being made. 

To give an example an individual killing another individual on war front considered to be ok. Similarly judge sentencing someone to death considered (most of the time) ok. While same act performed in other conditions is considered as murder. 

Coming back to the point of how would one deal with different "What ifs" faced.

First of all I feel that every act/decision is pure and there is nothing right or wrong associated with it. We are humans and should accept that everyone of us can make decisions which may not be perceived correct with certain people.

Our conscious will most of the time tell us what should be done and what should not be, and in my little experience I have been satisfied with the whatever I have done as per conscious.

"What ifs" are important and would provide you a direction to move on, however we should be careful in not getting too much into "what ifs" and act faster. 

There is no rule to say we should deliberate “x” amount of time or answer “y” amount of “what if” questions before making a decision.

The moment you start getting a feel from within that it is getting too much deliberation or too much of question answer,  probably is the right time to make a decision and move on.

I would also like to highlight that when we re-evaluate decisions based on retrospective view, that particular point in time may not be the best time to evaluate the decision.

Let me take an example to explain, if you tell your child (one who does not like studying) to study and if that child starts evaluating the decision of education almost immediately after that class or grade, s/he may not realize the importance of education at point in time, but later in life s/he would realize the importance of education. 

Similarly if one starts evaluating a decision of leaving the job and starting on their own venture then  immediately after venture is unsuccessful (considering the worst case) probably is not the right time. Because the learning that one would carry from venture establishment would last life long would probably benefit much more that just continuing in the job. 

So bottom line is that be confident about yourself and trust your inner instinct. For me it has been 100% but for the sake of keeping buffer i would say 98% it would prove to be the the chosen (I intentionally avoided using “right” or “correct” as word and used “chosen” instead) way.

Comments are welcome.