State of Mind

I’m very interested to explore how our brain works. Actually it was all started because i wanted to learn more about me. At the end of day, as many other mediocre mind,i too failed. No one knows what we capable of do and wants to become. The main reason for this stagnant is our state of mind. Our brain is excellent auto-pilot and once some state is set,there is very slim chance to recover from it. Here are some points to prove it.

1. A couple came from India to visit U.S.A,mainly to spent time with their grandson who was 1 year old. They used to tell him “you have to study well, you have to go foreign countries like U.S.A to make lot of money”. Actually India most of grandparents used to tell this to their grandchildren as a soap box. But the context is here(U.S.A) but their State of Mind still not changed.

2. There are more and more research suggest that the state of mind of a debt collectors are some kind of addiction.They want to chase people left and right to collect money even though people say that they have only money to feed kids. After they quit also, most of ex debt collectors continue some jobs which requires some overpower towards to other human or they bully around home with family.The state of mind fixed and hard to overcome with it.

3. It was proven again and again that women wants to get pregnant after middle age, it is very genetically fixed state of mind. At the olden days, the chances for kids dying at young age, lets say less than 15 was higher than now. Since this happen centuries after centuries,the brain of all women’s urge to get pregnant after middle age, just to have a kid after the elder one crosses 10 or so.

It was proven all ways that once mind is set then it is hard to come out. But even though the state of mind is set, how to overcome it?

1. Every thing has a destination and source point. When try to reach a destination,just use to think about destination and forget about source. For example, when i travel from my college to my home town, i just visualize about my home town to forget about my college. Once I reach my home town my state of mind complete to enjoy at my home town.Even my unconscious mind ignores college routines like late morning breakfast etc.

2. The most important thing of our life is how to separate our personal life and professional life. Actually it is not that easy to separate both because of current culture and job security. But we need to do at any cost. Just imagine we are like wearing invisible coat when we work and remove it as soon as we walk out from work place. Most of state of mind fixed based on where and what we work to pay bills and for happy life. But if we don’t know how to separate those two then we are just paying bills but not real happiness.

3. Surviving recession is hard that to, the current one is prolong and tough.Most of the state of mind set to fear. Once we our brain set to fear mode, it is hard to overcome. Instead of simply fearing and set our state of mind as negative energy, just learn how this economy's cycle works, what are the options available to survive at this hard time, and upgrade our-self to next level by learning new skills. This is really important.

How to change other's life?

It is very difficult to change our life but it is even difficult to change others. First of all why one want to do that? Are they Gandhi or Buddha or Jesus? Here is nature play important role, if you take 100 person randomly, the one would be the game changer, not his/her own but others also. There are several motivational speaker, millions of books, private counseling available in market just to deal with this subject. But unfortunately all are primarily to mend money and business. Those things won't work, even though one read several books and attend n number of training may not yield the result.

Listen through Eyes

When ever we speak with others, the eye is the main communicator not his/her mouth and words. The eye speaks differently than the real communication. The game changers or the 1/100 who created by natural to deal with changing other's life should listen the eyes to understand the real issue of others. Sometimes the communication sparks like fire but eyes shows cold, we can't do anything to help them. Sometimes communication drags low but we can see the spark the eye. The matter of fact is, eye can tell you whether the receiver just receiving the communication sake of it or they are serious. The important step for game changers is how to deal with eyes.

Start Change from their interest

One of the big mistake the game changers often do is impose their interest to others. Because we believe that the interest we posses are the proven and that changes our life hence superior but that won't work. If one is not interest to learn certain things there would be definitely a different form the same which might interest to the subject hence we can recommend that to them.

Not aware of that habit

Tiger Woods case is classic example of this, after we believe that we know everything about one and start dealing with change but suddenly some surprises happening from them is no good. The rule of thump is, always expect some surprise from them, the game changers should prepare upfront "what if" scenario. The strategy is, when to exit based on surprises, what is our threshold? our patience are the yard stick here.

After exit never look back

This is one of the main mistake we do after exiting on success or failure, either way once we are not engaging with the change game never look back. They should be in "kind of wish ignore list". There are several reasons behind it, one of the far most is that look back will hurt us if we do serious introspection.

Polished and whisked

I’m still researching on my second series of liquidation, in the mean time here is a new blog about polished, diplomatic communication and straightforward communication patterns.

A friend of mine discussed with me a long time ago that why Americans are so successful at marketing and selling more cars than Germans, but Germans are very good at mechanics and engineering [This discussion happened several years ago, at that time Ford and GM outperforms Benz and BMW at almost all markets in sales]. The friend visited 16 countries and he has more international experience than me, he concluded that Americans always smile and Germans keep stiff face and they are not good at talking and marketing, more than that they are straightforward (plain) talking what they are thinking in the mind. But I was not convinced at all because he was making a generalization statement. One of the great examples of plain communication is Joe Biden, USA’s current vice president who lost all previous bids of USA”s presidency even though he is talented, honest senator with foreign relations and high IQ, EQ and experience.

The following are the main reasons why plain communication fails,

1. Actually we want to hear always good things about us, we don’t want to hear anything negative about us. Most of times plain communication misses the sugar coating.
2. Context wise implied meanings are very hard to understand for common folks, since sometimes plain communication labeled as contradiction.
3. Plain communication sometimes hurt other’s feeling, even though it was not intended. Plain communications sometimes gives not enough explanations and context and full sentences. Hence we often take it seriously. For example, I went to a BMW car shop and salesman said that here cars are little expensive, so you made your mind. This was very plain and he might imply that i can’t buy the car or he is just warning me before hand since I give him a sense that I just came to this country. This required some analytical from our side.
4. Trust or mistrust, once we trust others we can easily communicate very plainly, sometime we thinks that we are in some trust but the communication receiver was not that trust as producer.

I think how to communicate and what to communicate also now become an art, one size doesn’t fit all. But we can communicate freely and plainly with progressive minded friends because they want to progress with our honest feed back or understands the fully about context, but with others we have to use polished and diplomatic way of communication.

Why we prefer shortcuts or short term benefits?

A longtime ago i read from some book that the new young generation of USA school kids wants to make money by fame in other words they want to become a super athletics or movie star or music career. Some of them, very few want to do hard work to become a doctor or engineer, which was very low percent to compare with earlier generation. This is not a USA’s problem, now this culture spreading across globe. I was sitting on the fountain at Aurora Fox valley mall, a kid like 3 years old throw a coin towards fountain, before that he wished that he want to earn 1 million dollar. Every where and every one want to make money but prefer some short cuts. I think we elders are responsible for this attitude of young generation. We want to achieve financial freedom by using our kids are the main reason or we are pushing our kids towards something fancy career like athletics, entrainment industry. There is nothing wrong to dream something bigger and working towards it but going sidetracked and prefer shortcuts are the bigger issues.

In front of kids, we used to prefer always shortcuts, route A is short but speed limit is 25 and route B is little long but speed limit is 50, but we unconsciously select route A. Home cooking takes 1 hour to eat, fast food is 15 mins, we select fast food but home cooking is obviously healthier than fast food. Strip mall shopping takes 3 hours but mall shopping takes 1 hour but little expensive, we select mall shopping since we want to go home early. If we aggregate each and every thing, we unconsciously prefer short cuts. Guess what, who is watching and learning from us? Our kids and we ultimately spoiling their mind. As per my opinion, we do select short cuts because of peer pressure or our brain used to do so or both.

In India, the corruption is epidemic and i don’t want to tell you that people prefer short cuts to attain something since we have mammoth corruption. Actually if we decided to go straightforward also gives good result but time consuming. Based on my experience, the short cut like giving money to achieve something would take 1 day vs straight forward to take 1 week ( of course i’m speaking relative terms). If we plan ahead and prepare for all paper work correctly, everything can be done with out giving any money. I used to go those government places and they obviously ask money to do that, i used to follow all procedures and fight with them to get it without money. First they show mean face and then they used to ask all unnecessary paper works, if you have all, you can get things done but each one took me 3-5 days instead of 30 mins if i prefer to do it by short cuts. All required is precious plan and common sense that what might need to get something done.

Two Mindsets

Thanks to Sukumar for Mindset book recommendation, it is indeed a great book to read. I haven’t completed it yet but it created some stimulus to write this blog. Actually I chose my friendship with some very early and keep in contact as long as I can, meaning I still have friends from 1st grade and 5th grade and 6th grade etc. I keep on watching/contacting 2 of my old friends. One is positive thinker (A), other one is negative thinker (B). This blog is about the real time analysis of these 2 distinct mindsets.

The topic of our discussion was Sachin Tendulkar, a great Indian Cricketer of all time. Positive Thinker always thinks Sachin is going to score 50 runs in any match, Negative Thinker always thinks Sachin is going to duck out. But the reality would be something different. I always stay in between, I used to analysis some factors like who was opponent, who was going to start bowling for Sachin, what was the pitch condition, what was the weather, my recall abilities about Sachin’s performance on the same ground before. Based on my analysis I used to support A or B. If Sachin scores 50 A is happy and we both celebrates the Sachin’s victory, at same time B started dislike the moment and me. If Sachin scores 0 or very low score, me and B start tease A about his performance and A started dislike me and B.

One person’s swing of positive to negative depends on the situations and some intuition. There are several factors involved to change mindset from positive to negative. Since A was always positive thinkers, he is in better shape now, he started a business and quite well off among all of three. The B still not settled in and not that quite good. So I can declare here that positive thinkers always find a good life and career. It seems to me always positive is good and it always bringing good results.

But the disadvantage been always positive is,

• Sometimes they become arrogant after 3 - 4 succession of success. At same time broke after 3 - 4 succession of failure.
• Since they thinking always an outcome of an event should be success, they tend to loose money and money management may be very poor.
• Easy target for cheating and push over.
• They have to learn how to manage unexpected or surprises, other wise they will be in big trouble.

The disadvantage been always negative is,

• They see everything negatively and remember negative events only, for example, they try to forget everything about Bill Clinton did as president but try to remember only his sex scandal.
• Attract towards some ideology organizations, easily buy in something radical views.
• Ego driven and ego can be used to outgrow others.

Selfishness: A Psychological and Culture view

When I was young, i used to listen old stories from grandmother and a cousin of my grandfather. Most of the stories are from their flashbacks and their culture and some bad things happened in their generation. Many stories are how they suffered on the 1889 great Indian drought and followed by killer malaria, diarrhea. These two events created shock waves to their minds and the generation changed how they were before, they were lack of confidence about their next day’s food. They have to be very selfish to survive on those tough times. As per Indian culture, all the religious books and religious thoughts encouraged sharing and selfish less. But later on those sad events are main reason for selfishness. The main reason for India’s population growth is also selfishness, those olden times there were no advanced medicine available, so most of the kids dies less than their 1 year or with in hours of birth or before their teen age. Due to this that time Indians try to give more than 5-10 births, to save at least 1-2 but most of the time 1-2 only not survived.

After the green revolution and advancement in health care, now all are fine and nowadays most of us not try more than 1-2 kids and we have surplus food production also. But due to “old habit never dies”, we are stick with selfishness. Selfishness is a faded thing with generation, the young generation now not that selfishness like older one. The main reason is, they were not through any of “life and death” situation and the distance from 1889 sufferer generation and the level of confidence is higher. There is plenty available for them to share between them also. In other words, live and let live others are the mantra for current generation.

I used to observe now a conflict between generations about how selfishness should one have? Mom and Dad had heated conversation with younger like why you gave your food to XYZ? Why you helped an unknown senior citizen to cross the road and you missed your bus to school? First I thought when people gets older they tend to become selfishness but I was wrong it is the generation and lack of confidence. Kid is confident that she can survive without a one time food and catch up everything she missed the day of teaching. Psychologically who ever not have enough confidence and greedy are main for selfishness. Culturally almost all culture encourage selfish less through religious books and sermons etc.

What is exactly EQ?

It was a bitter cold winter night, the time was almost 3:00AM and we were setting up initial customers in our system but there was an issue with customer data. We had 2 choices A) Go to home sleep and come back morning and discuss with Sales/Marketing team and explain to boss about the delay, manage the outcomes B) Immediately call Marketing Analyst to fix the issue. The war room was filed with highly IQ, techie people, they decided to go with option B, and we called him early morning 3.00 AM to fix an issue. The good news is we fixed the issue and money started flowing but bad news is we about to going to lose a veteran marketing analyst because he was frustrated with late night calls and lost many future millions.

The reason why we choose the option B is, we were lacking Emotional Intelligence. Several researches suggested that “Einstein's superior intellectual ability may have been related to the region of his brain that supports psychological functions. In other words, according to Newsweek science reporter Steven Levy, "When it comes to appreciating the most famous brain of our century, it ain't the meat - it's the emotion."”.

EQ is nothing but using emotional side of brain to understand, sense other’s emotion and perspectives and using common sense to resolve human’s conflicts. In other words, learning how to see world in color is EQ. There are lot of successful products invented because of frustration by an individual and their desire to fix the issue for entire humanity.

Why most of us lacking emotional intelligence, actually left side of brain usually process “What” and right side of brain processes “How”. Our traditional educational system always concentrates on left side of brain since we are all left dominate. We all know “what” is going on but we don’t know “how” to fix/help it. The balance approach of left and right is important to increase EQ. In order to help others, first we need to understand “what” is the problem? And then suspend left brain and start right side “How” to fix it? So if we develop right side of the brain “How” comes quickly.

There are several research papers, books available regarding EQ but as usual what ever related to brain and our activity, we have to practice it a lot.

Source:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_9_16/ai_57786889/?tag=content;col1
http://tolearn.net/hypertext/brain.htm
http://www.viewzone.com/leftright.html

Jobless Recovery

Are we heading to a jobless recovery? From Krugman to Joe Biden everybody thinks the same. Actually the last job report was a scary and it overturned all the predictions and met all threshold. But a point to remember is, job market is a trailing economic indicator, it would take some time to stabilize the condition. Based on previous recessions 1981-82, 1991-92 and 2001-2002, when economy turning around it would start sending mixed signals.

The recovery may not be uniform as we like, because the medications prescribed for economy would start show it signs at different times from different places. For example, investors always positive thinkers since they buy in all from Fed reserve and treasury's assessments and start buying stocks hence sock markets going north but employers are causally optimistic about future business hence we are seeing a lousy unemployment report. It is pool of people thinking differently and some sees half empty and some sees half full. But the truth is, we are not going to live like this forever, people have to come out and start buying stuff, economy going to recover like the previous one. But timing is the matter now.

I think President Obama's stimulus plan going to be in full effect from September and gas price again easing and people come back from summer vacation, back to school, long term investment decisions all going to happen on late Summer. The first 6 months are not good for markets as well as any recovery since i think the 2nd half would be better for all of us. Good news is we already in 2nd half.

Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070200354.html

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/Politics/story?id=7966402&page=1

http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/07/biden-we-misread-the-economy-.html

Software Development – Ego Driven – Part III

In almost all white-collar professions, we have to deal with Ego, Ego is a trait mainly driven by superiority and some inflated feeling of self. Ego is a main driver of one’s growth and without ego there is no improvement. But ego is very complex subject, I’m here try to present my thoughts and how to work with Egoistic environments. Ego is great tool for improvements hence can be used as weapon whenever required. Too much Ego is not okay because that’s main team work killer. As a rule of thumb, too much egoistic person should be an individual contributor like sales, decision making and use the egoistic to beat outside market competition. Here are some more points about egoistic.

Polite or Bully: It is very hard to understand whether a person really bullies or showing bully behavior out of ego. A same person act very polite with “inferior” than one and act very aggressively or bullying with “superior” than one. But the reality is all are equal and everything is illusion that one is above and below. It is very tough to work with those but flexibility and showing some weakness of our own to egoistic person helps and improves team environment. One interesting story is, I know a sales guy who is very egoistic and very successful but always do some mistake in total price or ask some stupid questions like “John, how many zeros for millions”. The secret is he wants to work with others very friendly manner hence some time act like he is also a prone to mistakes and he is not a super human.

Can Do or I can do everything: Can do attitude is really great and positive but we can’t do everything possibly under the sun. We have to depend on others and our success relies on how others also willing to working with us. For example, Software we have initiation, plan, design, code, test, deployment, support phase and each one required some team effect from everybody. Even though we were experienced developers sometime we need a support from a system admin who joined just today, so some level of politeness required to get some help from him/her.

Balancing Ego: Actually we are all ego by birth, but getting mature and interacting with others help us to taming or balancing ego. My best advise to use ego as weapon or we are in team environment and want to balance ego, we have to start using “we” instead of “I” and share credit with others.

But any ways not all are same, we are all having different traits and Ego is not a bad one, as i said it is major factor for improvements and use it as weapon but not always. Actually my tactics would be, when ever i play cricket i would be always with non-tamed-egoistic caption because i always want to be with winning team. Here I’m ending my psychology side of software development series.

How to become a Saint

Actually a long ago, one of my friend used to do some unusual stuffs like avoid salt for 3 months, sometimes avoid sugar for 3 months, no talking with parents, friends for a week etc. I thought that he was kind of paranoid person. But I didn’t know that he was tried to become a saint. Each try of some thing unusual gives him some will power and feel the pain of others who really suffer from the disease. The main purpose of Ramzan and Good Friday is to experience the hunger of poor people, hence people start share something to others to eliminate hunger. Buddha was a rich prince and he become saint only after he sees and feels the pain of others. The same with Gandhi also, he also a rich and earning lot of money as lawyer in South Africa, but he become a father of nation because of his experience and feeling pain of others.

So becoming saint required emotional trauma or high integrity or something unusual things that my friend did, or 30 days no food, or go out to forest to see some things or go to South Africa or Jerusalem. I think none of them are required to become saint. In fact, we no need to become something extra ordinary personality to become a saint. There are some important things we can follow to become a Saint.

1. Don’t talk about others when they are not in front of us: The talking about others and gossiping is like a playing highly addicted video game. Once addicted it is tough to come out from it.

2. Not addicted to money: As I said in previous posts, addicted to **anything** has some remedy to come out from it, but addicted to money is incurable. So making money and saving money is waste? No, money should be considered as a tool, we have to earn it as much as we can and save it but never go beyond it.

3. No to superiority and inferiority: We are all human, equal, each one living for some purpose, some where and some profession. There is no one is above and below. Opportunities are out there, system is fixed and any body can become anything. But what we had in mind is stopping us to become what we want. There is no place in this earth has dictate that one has to do this and that (other than some regimes). The point is most of us has freedom and choice what ever we want to achieve and we are forcing or liberating others also to join us, greater example is recent Iran protests.

4. Stop Unnecessary Fear: 6 months back we are all feared, what is going to happen to our economy and job market etc? But now things are slowly returned normal but we are not out of woods yet but better than 6 months ago. If we fear now is meaningless and unnecessary, the bad time was behind us and we have to think about future growth. So unnecessary fear is won’t make us Saint rather pull us down.

5. Learn as much as possible: When ever I say learn, some my friends mistaken that I’m asking every one to rejoin school or check out books from library. Learning means everything we try something new including cooking, going/seeing new places, playing something, writing about some new things. What ever we do for fun is also learning.

There are many other things helps us to become a Saint including helping others, volunteering, community service, laughing with others, playing with kids, going to worship places, spending time with friends, socializing with others and many other things. So am I a saint? No, not really but like any body else, I’m also trying to become Saint. Together we will all try our level best.

Software Development - A new series 1

A long ago, a friend of mine argued with me that Software development is like painting and developers are painters. As per his view, software development should be done by artists. I straight away disagreed and his argument was immature and naive. Painting and artist are gifted one, not everybody gets those and Software development is a professional job, so it doesn't always required some gifted person to develop it.

Lets take a example of construction field, it is heavy physical intensive work, it required some 250 lbs and 6 feet to perform the job but that is ideal. If a construction company wants to hire only 6 feet and 250 lbs, they can't hire enough employers to build a house and can't make profit. They want to hire any body physically fit for work and then divide work that heavy object lifting job goes to 250 lbs and some arranging, nailing job goes to other below 250 lbs. This is the system, this is how our society work, no body feels discrimination if 150 lbs not getting 50 lbs lifting job.

The same with software development, for a minimum level of coding one should have fundamental strong on the programming language, some working knowledge of database, a decent level of knowledge of Linux/Unix. The distinguish comes as form of expert level, which can be achieved with in 6-8 years of experience. There are 10 million software developers are here in U.S, all of them are not gifted and they are fit into this expert, medium and starter category. But other than that in Software there is one main aspect is attitude, the attitude is really important for developers. In fact attitude is important for any professional work, but i feel very strong about attitude and software development. Development required brain work and run through some analysis/processes in mind all the time hence good attitude required to develop quality software and within budget. More over attitude is really important for young industry like software development.

Why it is important? Again lets take construction field, construction is very old industry and all are well defined and well formed. Lets assume there are 100 people building a house, they may not even know their names each other, but the coordination and building process goes smoothly. All they want to know is what is their job today and when they have to finish it. But the young industry Software development, there was nothing defined, each day there are new development methodology, processes, each company has it's own processes and so on, nothing was integrated and everything working as it's own area. At end of the day, based on my 12 years of progressive development experience, each software developers attitude is making difference of successful completion of project particularly in IT industry.

Based on my experience, there are some main factors contributing good and bad attitudes, they are A. Context Switching B. Stress Management C. Ask other's help/ego.

Context Switching :
What i mean context switching, there are two types of context switching, first as soon as we start to work, we have to forget our personal and concentrate on professional one. second, with in work switch context between projects without losing temper. The first switch is something important and everybody should follow it, a successful career rely on how one separating personal issues with professional life.

[Contd]

When positive thoughts replaced with….

Time to time I deeply dive into this “positive thoughts” and what make them disappear for some for some point of time or prolong period of time. I mean, when we watch great leader’s talks, most of time they speak on high positive note but for some time they speak on otherwise. Actually we should not always be positive on all the time, sometimes we need to think about other angle. Overly positive thoughts leads to self-illusion and overly faith based leads to always negative. So what is balanced approach?

Actually when we born, we are all positive thinkers, kids always want to explore new things and they never say I don’t want to go to some place or I don’t want to do some things. But after some time they express some kind of fear, 98% kids learn how to ride bicycle but 2% of afraid of learning the same. When age grows the positive Vs negative ratio heightened. The point is sometime environmental causing this flip side. What is it? And how not to fell into the trap? How to be positive?

When I was in California, we (I and 3 other friends) had a road trip to Las Vegas. As usual, everybody talked about money and gambling. One question was asked, how much money you need in order to fulfill your dream? Person A said 100 Million, Person B 50 Million, and Person C $300 for now (because that’s the budget for Las Vegas trip). I thought A and B are high positive thought guys, because they can think a high number and want to win that much money. After spent time there, when returning person C was very positive mood and A, B are negative mood because A and B couldn’t win 100 and 50 million or lost some money, C was made $200 and he was happy. So setting a small, realistic goals/targets always keep us positive and unrealistic goals leads to negative. I think so, it is something to do with our day by day expectation management.

I think we want to be always positive thinkers, even though it has some drawbacks. Be always positive actually yields better results. As a common average human, we all need positive thoughts, to achieve some greater results in our day by day life. It goes like this, a mistake/error committed by positive thinkers will be corrected within desirable time limit, but a mistake/error committed by negative thinkers required positive thinkers to correct it. So think always positive after all safeguards are considered and placed.

Blink’ers

It was the boom IT time in Silicon Valley most of IT companies required to fill up both Software Engineering position to top level executive jobs. For top level executive position they went to East, Midwest, and South U.S.A based blue chip companies. Once the top executives settled with new, young Silicon Valley companies, they hired their subordinates from the same place where they came from, because understandably they want to work with trusted and friendly, cohesive team, rather than with unknown geeky Silicon Valley brought ups. It is very common all the places, for example, President Obama hired most of his friends and well known to him for his top level jobs. But the problem with Silicon Valley was, they spent millions of million dollars for those executive’s relocation charges, as .com burst these issues came up and most of them fired.

The point is, as an experienced executive leaders why they couldn’t trust and friendly with some unknowns and builds a cohesive team quickly. The trusting people is not an easy task, we want to confirm everything and double checked. But as per my opinion, we can trust and form a cohesive team within short amount of time, rather than always work with same team. Based on my experience, people who trust others with in a “blink of time” is most successful than others who took so much time to trusting others, that is, intuition.

How this successful Blinker’s trust works? Malcom Galdwell wrote the book “Blink”, he mostly covered intuition but not how it works and what are the main factors which lead to conclusion in social context? For onlookers, this highly blinkers seems to be a “push over” or “easy goers”, but each decision this blinkers made required enormous amount of analytics and cognition skills.

The fundamental of these blinker’s success is no prejudice, no jump into conclusion, flexible stereotype fixation and most importantly not seeing things black and white, good or bad. Each one is different and they are champion of one thing but not good at some other thing, that doesn’t mean that they are bad people and not trustworthy.

Gun Control

Last summer, I just touched about Gun Control because of Chicago’s heighten violence, since then I did some research on Gun Control. One of the strong points against gun control is U.S constitution amendment 2, which says “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Last year Supreme Court’s decision to struck down the famous D.C gun ban as unconstitutional. The Supreme court’s decision virtually shut down all gun control activists voice, because there is no way to fight for gun control in Federal level. But there is some other ways to continue the fight against guns.

Actually court should not intervene private establishment’s rules and regulations. For example, as per amendment 1, all U.S citizens enjoy free speech, but not really, can we speak anything in work place? We can’t speak everything at all places, in other words we use common sense. But for amendment 2 we are not using same common sense. A ranch owner in Texas might need gun for protection, but why a New Yorker living in Manhattan pent house need a gun, he/she was already protected by private and police security force. So we should encourage private establishments to make strict rules against gun owners like they have to submit a psychological evaluation certification once a year.

After further reading and analysis, the gun ownership should be case by case basis. There are some rural area citizens of U.S may required guns for self protection against human as well as animals. They are not yet protected completely. As per records, the rural area homicide is very low and they are really utilizing gun for self protection. But urban area it is misused widely and it is going out of control sometimes. The law applicable to all citizen of country whether they live in urban or rural or occupied territory. It is in hands of private organization to control guns within their territory for better living condition for all.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
http://www.nraila.org/
http://www.guncite.com/

Jump to conclusions

I very often come across some “jump to conclusion’ers” in my life. I think the following factors are contributing jump to conclusion.

1. Want to achieve something quickly and desperate, spontaneous and impatient.
2. Lack of experience, novice, immature, tyro.
3. Unable to see big picture, see things as half full or half empty.
4. Chimerical, impulsive and erratic.

Jump to conclusion is any other psychosocial disorder can be cured but there is no medication. The only cure is Cognitive behavioral therapy, which changes the way brain digests the information and producing results.

Here are some tips to avoid Jump to conclusion.

Set the context. Jump to conclusion happen mostly after a conversation (formal or informal), but one have to use common sense to understand the context.

For example, we are at some informal meeting and talking about American football, person A is saying “yesterday’s match between Bears Vs Titans, Chicago should used most of running game rather than passing game”, person B is observing the words, can Jump to conclusion that Person A is not a risk takers because A is supporting running game. Person B completely missed the context, A expressing an opinion about a game not general football. If person A says “football coaches should use more running games because that is very safe and low risk” then B can use that as some judgment.

Judging others: Unless our profession required to judging others, don’t judge others. There are several negative aspects of judging others, if a person found that someone is trying to judging them, they try to avoid them altogether, in other words withdrawn. Judging others is the main recipe for jump to conclusion disorder. Person A is not a judging character and Person B is, person B can be professional jump to conclusion for all the aspects of his/her life.

Graphical contents also misled us to jump to conclusion. The latest example is Obama’s national anthem issue during his campaign. In sastwingees.org we discussed it extensively.

Taking literals as literally, this is really important and once we learned how to take literals as perceptive or alternative meaning, we can avoid most of the jump to conclusion. The advance reading and writing ability would give us maturity for not taking literals as literally.

For example, my 5 year old said, “Dad I’m starving and gonna die”, I knew that he ate enough food just before, for some reason he is hyperboling. But a stranger overheard this, and murmuring that “see this monster not feeding his kid, even though he said he is going to die”.

Reference:
http://www.sastwingees.org/2008/04/27/building-a-belief-system-why-do-we-believe-what-we-believe/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conclusion

How to see simplicity from a complex system?

I want to write something about how to derive a simple workable solution from a complex system. A System can be anything, for example, Eiffel tower, what we are seeing now is a complex tons and ton of steel structure and it is very complex to build. But some human like us built it from scratch, they assembled simple steel structures to build this complex architecture. This is very basic, a multiple simple systems forms a complex system. If we see it correctly, we can make lot of simples from a complex. So nothing in this world is complex.

Why some systems make us think that it is complex, because the way it was present to us is wrong or we are jump into conclusion very fast about a system. If we see a system as it's whole integrity. it is, yes definitely it is complex. All we need to do is see the system as parts and find a simple pattern hidden in the complex system. If we understand the simple pattern that makes the complex system, we are well off and we can resolve any system.

2008 - Not good so far. But how to beat it?

Since this year started we are not hearing any good news. All are bad and negative news from around the world. All are temporary and will be good after some time.

1. US housing market meltdown

2. Banking loan system break down in US and around world.

3. Rising Oil price and subsequent rise of all essential commodity price.

4. Food crisis and warning about "silent Tsunami". 

So how to stay positive in this all negative environment?

1. Stay away from TV channels such as CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX. Media always hype everything, specially this news channels are worst. Just watch good sitcoms like According to Jim, Two and half man, Talk shows etc.

2. Watch as much as sports events, NBA playoff, Baseball, NHL etc. at least there is one winner from sports events.

3. Plan for weekend trips in weekdays, there are lot of sites to search good places to visit in weekends, so that we don't browse any news sites.

4. Teach some new activities to your kids. So you can learn something and spend more time with your kid like cycling, boating, fishing, horse riding.

5. Don't talk with any friends or relatives who sounds always negative. They try to pass their negative feeling to you. Just delete their mobile and email address from your contact list.

6. Daily visit my blog and read my posts :)

Who is listening?

Earlier, I often get discouraged by my wife, friends and relatives because they are not listening to me. Sometimes a small things required lot of effort from me to get things done as I want, for example, which movie to go? Where we want to spend our next vacation? But after getting little older and enough maturity now I know how to get things done as per my wish. This is called Persuasion. Persuasion is something everyone has within their soul, this might take some time and experience to use it fully and successfully. Persuasion is not something related to marketing for selling goods, we should not confuse persuasion with sales and marketing, In fact if you are sales man for GE, you might not need to use your persuasion to sell your rocket engine to NASA, because everybody knows about GE brand. Same with Japan auto makers because of price everybody comes to your show room without having to persuade. Persuasion is “You must convince others to take action on your behalf even when you have no formal authority.”

Persuasion required following 4 basic steps

1. Credibility: Collect both positives and negatives of your points. People will not ask only positives but negatives also. You should prepare for both side of argument.
2. Understand your audience: This is sometime you have to switch context and present different arguments that is one’s positive point now become negative now. I can’t persuade same way to my son as my wife. I can tell superman story to persuade my son but not with my wife.
3. Connect emotionally: You have to connect emotionally with audience to persuade successfully. You have to be enough smart and emotionally intelligence to adjust your tone and body language according to audience emotion state.
4. Don’t loose your position: You are persuading something’s because you are 100% sure that what you are trying to do is right. Your instinct tells you do so. If you have that instinct, just persuade persistently, until you hit the success. If you are not too confidence then don’t even try to persuade others. Don’t even think about persuade others by threatening them because no body will listen to you after that and your credibility will become a question mark.

Devil's Advocate.

I enjoy debates and I love playing "devil's advocate". What is devils advocate? (from wikipedia) "a devil's advocate is someone who takes a position for the sake of argument. This process can be used to test the quality of the original argument and identify weaknesses in its structure." Each one of concepts/things in this world has both positives and negatives and we have to identify both and accept it if positive is more than negatives, otherwise just ignore them. I used change positions just for debates. The most popular one was about 3 years ago when we driving back to South Portland from NYC after a family trip, myself and my friend start debating about Indian educational system , I took the "good position" which was hardest to debate. After some time, I was debating with my wife the same topic but this time "bad position" which I learned from my friend's argument. I learned a lot from this debates. The most riskiest one was about 12 years ago, when I was travelling in train and train is full of Atheists from a famous political party, I was debating with one of their member by taking "theist" position, the debate went out of control after 2 hours or so and he got angry with me, he was ready to beat me with other members if I continue travelled in same car. 

But devil's advocate is good if you play with a mature enough to understand the basics of debates and curious to know about both positives and negatives of each concepts. Otherwise it would lead to a bad relationship or even a break up after the first meeting. My favorite topics are Atheism Vs Theism, Capitalism Vs Socialism, Democracy Vs Dictatorship, Real Estate Investment Vs Stock Investment.

Emotional Intelligence.

When I was watching today's football match between Steelers and Jacs, I noticed when steelers were 14 point deficient, the steeler's coach Mike Tomlin showed lot of emotions in side line and made his team to overcome all deficient and finally his team was leading by 1 point. But finally steelers lost the game though. But the fact is emotional intelligence playing a important role in sports, workplace and where ever we are working as team to accomplish a task. I did some research on EQ and found lot of good information's.

The main components of EQ are

Using Emotions

Understanding Emotions

Managing Emotions.

David Golman, author of Emotional Intelligence, defined “EQ” as an ability to understand one’s own feelings and to express empathy for the feelings of others. His studies showed that EQ is four times more likely than IQ to indicate your level of success. According to Golman, the communication skills responsible for EQ are:

1. Empathy (One must be careful not to confuse empathy with either sympathy,pity,emotional contagion,telepathy
   
2. Graciousness.
   
3. The ability to read others.
   

There is a possibility that high EQ person can be labeled as Sentimental(because of Empathy), Sensitive(because of emotionally helping others) or pushover(because of Graciousness). But the truth is EQ person are highly skilled and know how to out perform in team environments.

There is now strong business case for EQ and most of the Fortune 500 companies try to asses their employee's EQ level. Based on articles,unlike IQ, EQ can be improved and developed.

Here is link for more reading

EI Consortium