On Desire by William B. Irvine

On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (Hardcover)
by William B. Irvine

This is an interesting book especially if you have not read something contemporary on the very interesting topic of "desire".

If you have read some scriptures such as Dhammapada (a Buddhist classic) or Bhagvadgita (a Hindu classic),  you must be having a good perspective on desire. Desires are to be mastered is their general message. Many people confuse that message with something which is utterly wrong that desires should be suppressed or killed. Be it Buddhism or Hinduism or any other religion advocates - yield to desires, know the limitations of yielding to desires, realize the temporary nature of the satisfaction, understand that there is higher purpose for your life and then become moderate. Buddha's 'madhyama marg' advocates this very philosophy. This is credible because Buddha started with  repressing desires by living a very austere life and then when austerities started causing more harm than good, he realized the usefulness and effectiveness of 'madhyama marg' (middle path).

Irvine who is a professor of philosophy at some university in Ohio writes this book like one long refreshingly easy to read essay. He does not take one or the other position on anything related to desires but seem to say 'I have read a lot about desires from various sources. Here is a summary for you...go read if you like....' For people trying to find some concrete position being taken this may come across as something very discouraging. Otherwise, it is a good read.

The author must be complemented  for mixing psychology, human physiology, philosophy, religion very nicely to present a cohesive material in a concise format.

The book is divided into 3 parts. 1)The secret life of desire 2) The science of desire 3)Dealing with our desires.

One can expect to learn a lot about certain interesting communities and how they deal with the concept of desires. Amish people who belong to a closely knit community prefer to live with minimum modern amenities as a way to avoid and moderate desires. The author describes a few more similar communities and how they deal with desires. Right or wrong, it provides an interesting view of these much misunderstood communities.

Cheers!

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Valuable skills

You may have earned several degrees. Bachelors, masters, doctorates, diplomas and what not.

However, it seems to me that some of the most valuable skills are not taught in academic programs. If they are, I certainly am not aware of.

First and foremost skill that is very valuable in our professional life is organization skill(s). Start with organizing desktop to organizing everything. Importance of organization skills cannot over emphasize. Only people who have benefited from organization can attest to the value of organization and rich dividends that are paid on a small effort spent on organization.

Do schools or colleges or universities teach how to organize your personal and professional lives? Probably not. Many of us pick up and improvise on organization skills as we go along. We observe and learn organization skills at work and at home we are probably little better as we have seen it all along while growing up..

To make a point, does any course teach the information presented in David Allen’s best seller “Getting things done”? The material presented there is not anything radically new. But, it makes a big difference to see all that wisdom at one place.

Reading and/or listening to “Getting things done” and similar other books can probably be a good alternative to a course in basic organization skills. Smalls things such as coming up with working solutions to arrange our work space, organizing our files (paper and electronic), taking notes, tracking action items etc. make such a big difference in productivity that it has to be experienced. Unorganized mind is a wasted mind. Some people think that organizing every small detail takes away the creativity and spontaneity and totally unorganized life boosts creative energy. Nothing can be farther from  truth. On the contrary, discipline helps creativity by taking care of mundane things that absolutely need to be taken care of and frees the mind for creative pursuits.

So, think about spending some time getting some education formal or informal on organizing skills. It can start with organizing your workspace. Very soon, do not be surprised if you are called to organize your team, department or entire organization. People with superb organization skills stand out and are called upon very often to help reduce the chaos in  organizations.

Second most important skill or knowledge everyone should acquire is basic financial management. It is not required to become a CPA or major in finance. However, being able to make sense out of myriad of financial terms that bombard us on daily basis, goes a long way to successful financial state. To begin with, if a person understands basics regarding bonds, stocks, investing for retirement, practical understanding of risk and reward, some theory behind financial markets, some dos and don'ts, some historical perspective to weather inevitable short term financial ups and downs, debt, credit cards, rent v/s buy among others. It is criminal that some very talented people in other fields lack basic financial management skills or knowledge. They are either leaving the money on table by making mistakes such as not investing in 401(K), not taking tax benefits, not keeping track of all deductions, not investing wisely or investing based on latest fads, trying extremely speculative investments such options, futures etc. Many people put off acquiring financial knowledge for two reasons. One, they do not have much money now and do not expect to acquire much in the future. Second, they are already loaded and do feel they need to maintain it wisely. Both cases need financial acumen more than anyone else.

Get  basic financial management education and it may make huge difference of millions over your lifetime. Good news is that a lot of formal and practical education is available on personal financial management. Check out your town's recreation department and/or colleges and universities in your area. Armed with this education, you can very well pick and choose a financial advisor who you think can take care of you finances if you do not want to do it yourself.

Third important skill or knowledge is to acquire is interpersonal skills. Some people are blessed with great interpersonal skills. It comes naturally to them. They also can benefit from formal learning as if you become consciously aware of your strengths, you can further strengthen them. For rest, importance of teamwork and interpersonal skills should be taught from the beginning so that we don't learn them by  trial and error. It is much easier to recover from mistakes in other areas. But, relationships with fellow humans are far more fragile and are some time irreparable once we screw them up.

A lot of knowledge about interpersonal skills boils down to one simple thing that is to put ourselves in others’ shoes so that we can empathize with them. This alone when practiced effectively makes a big impact on how successful you can be. Once the other person knows that you empathize with him or her, then they work with you with full trust. Once people interact with trust, rest all falls in place. All other problems are solved because people trust each other.

Related to interpersonal skills is getting in touch with ourselves. It takes a lot of effort to harness even 10% of our true potential. A lot of our vital energy is wastefully dissipated by our prior conditioning, which results in all negative traits such as fear; greed, anger, jealousy and you name it. Making a conscious attempt to get in touch with ourselves from time to time and taking heart in reminding ourselves of our true mission goes a along way in keeping us spiritually healthy. With that, physical health and menthol health cannot help but improve. There are many good courses and books on different topics related to getting in touch with ourselves. If not anything, following should serve your adequately. Our classic scriptures and commentaries on them by eminent scholars are a good start if we want take the route of tried and true. On the modern front, Dale Carnegie’s books, Wayne Dyers works and works of many other social scientists are a great way to get in dialog with your core. Meditation and other practices which help strengthen your faith in anything that you value (God, work, family etc.) are a really great add-ons.

Start spending sometime on all of the above and you will be amazed at how purposeful your life will become. You also start feeling a sense of renewed energy as you take control of different aspects of your life.

Only thing to watch out is not get into the cycle of regretting and repenting. It is not at all unlikely for people to develop a sense of despondency and utter sense of having wasted so much over the years. This can lead you into self perpetuating cycle of self pity. Let bygones be bygones. Future is bright and we all have more than adequate time to live our life to the fullest.

Cheers!

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Kindness

"Be kind - Remember every one you meet is fighting a battle - everybody's lonesome."

Marion Parker

How often we imagine things about people? For example, you send an e-mail to a long lost friend. You are certain that he/she  received your e-mail. But, you get no reply in reasonable time. It's quite natural for us to think negatively about our friend. If we are sure that the person deliberately ignored us,  such a thought may be justified although for just a moment.

But, many times, we can take a step  in the right direction and give full benefit of doubt to the other party. One way to avoid thinking negatively about people when they seem to act out of normal is to become their best defender. We can
say to ourselves that our friend may be out of station or may be some family problems or does not have access to the computer or our mail may have been filtered out by junk mail filter. By the way, the last possibility is way too common if you put seemingly innocuous plain 'Hello', 'Hi' as the subject line.

I think Steven Covey's famous book 'Seven habits of highly successful people' starts with one such example. Covey talks about an incident in which he was inconvenienced by a bunch of young boys on  local train. Covey felt angry at their father who was very much there but did not do anything to rein in the kids. Covey asked the father why he was not doing anything. The story father told was heart wrenching and changed Covery's attitude for ever. This guy's wife had just died in the hospital. You can imagine the plight of a man whose wife has died and has responsibly for so many kids. Covey says this was his clear understanding of often used term 'paradigm shift'

Many times similar situation will be going on with people who we think are arrogant or cranky or rude or discourteous. Even if somebody did it on purpose, it is still possible to feel compassion for them as people who on purpose act nasty are crying within for help, love, understanding.  Their poor behavior is their last refuge and last try to say in a clear and loud manner that they need help. We can choose to help such people. If we do not feel angry about someone with a head ache or stomach ache, why feel angry about someone with 'mind ache'? This was one of the things Buddha said. As we give
some medication to people with aches in physical body, we should be able to provide similar medication to people with 'mind aches'. In this case, patience, love, understanding are the medication. No one illustrates such a thing better than the people in a nice family. When one member is going thru some problem and is being nasty to other members, for outsiders it may seem that rest of the family is putting up with such a person for no good reason. But, the family knows better than anyone that it is in forgiving others that we are forgiven.

Point is to give every benefit of doubt to the other party. Even if you have to ask someone why they acted in a certain way or why they ignored you, it helps to ask them in a way that would help them bail out without losing face. For example, if someone never replied to your e-mail, asking them if they could not reply because they had some computer problems gives them a ready made exit. You don't care about the real reason, do you? You want to stop being ignored. What can be better than making the person feel all important and perfect than making him or her feel that way. Give them an impression that if not for some glitch, perfect person like him or her can not even be imagined to do such a thing.

Giving benefit of doubt is not easy at all. Our first impulse is to pay back with interest. But, once we realize the importance of BOD (Benefit of Doubt), we achieve so much positive turn around from almost everyone including some of the nastiest people that it becomes worth it.

Cheers!

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Fish Rots from the Head Down

"Fish Rots from the Head Down"

This is a good quote to remember when we feel like admonishing people who work for us or in some way look up to us for guidance.

Many times we hear senior managers complaining about ineffectiveness of their people. Parents say similar things about their kids. Many times the ineffectiveness is just a symptom. The root cause is somewhere else. Root cause is rotten, that is, rotten head of the fish.

If you go by the saying, it seems fish always rots from the head down. So do organizations and families. In any organization leaders to follower ratio is very large. If the leader is not effective, it trickles down and makes the whole organization ineffective.

How can organizations overcome this problem? There is one remedy to many problems ailing organizations. It's a like wide spectrum antibiotic which can treat a broad variety of bacteria. That remedy is communication. Leader has 3 priorities. They are communicate, communicate and communicate.

People always live up to your expectations. Expect greatness from even mediocre people, it creates such a positive pressure in them that they go too far in delivering performance which is at least a couple of notches higher. So, it makes sense not to write off people so early and easily. You should avoid hiring wrong people. Once you have  hired and confident about candidates capabilities, it makes sense to give them ample opportunities.

Second important thing is the power of positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement happens when you scold people or just do not communicate with people. We humans crave for feedback even if it is negative feedback. If we do not give feedback to people, their minds manufacture feedback. They are free to manufacture anything and everything. Majority of such 'manufactured' feedback is often highly negative and critical. This is extermely demoralizing and damaging. Unless people maintain a balanced life, such conditions have driven people to insanity.

Highly recognized motivational speaker Steve Chandler's book is subtitled "leader are those who deliver insane performance without driving people insane". That explains everything.

Cheers!

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Keep plugging on!

Imagine a rectangular enclosure. Let's say that it has only one exit. Consider some toy such as a toy car. This toy car, once set in motion, will continue to move unless it hits an obstacle. In this case, obstacle will be hitting any of the four walls. When this toy hits any wall, it tries to turn 30 degrees at a time till it enables itself to move forward. It continues to do so forever. We can assume that it has enough energy. Don't forget that the enclosure has one exit thru which the toy car can pass thru and get out of the enclosure. Now the question is how long the toy car has to move around before it gets out of the enclosure thru the exit.

This problem is really  a nice candidate to write a neat simulation program. There are quite a few variables that determine the outcome. Some that come to mind are 1) length 2)breadth 3) location of the exit 4) speed of toy car 5) starting coordinate of the toy car 6) departure angle and may be few more variables.

Simulating this must be a fairly straight forward exercise. We can imagine the enclosure to be 2 dimension coordinate system. Initialize above mentioned variables to some values and execute a loop whose exit condition is if and when the toy car makes it to the coordinate matching the exit.

But, more importantly, is there something else we can take away from this toy car which turns  by 30 degrees and continues to do so till it enables itself to surge forward?

This is the way successful people plug along. Eventually they succeed. Every time they hit a wall, they turn until they enable themselves to surge forward. Two things to note 1) they remember to recognize that they have hit the wall and turn without delay 2) they do surely persist till they get out.

Point 1 is very important. Many times when we hit a wall, we do not want to admit that we have hit the wall. Especially if it is our pet wall (i.e. close to our heart or ego). We waste so much energy banging against the wall that we destroy ourselves in the pursuit of a pet idea that has proven to be impractical.

Above mistake is so common in software companies especially ones that are managed by old time executives who have come from manufacturing or some other hard engineering background who think software can be engineered the way you build machines or bridges. Of course, certain variety of software can be engineered that way and it should be when requirements are stable, architectures are well understood and do not have many unknowns. But, it is utterly foolish to take that road to deliver cutting edge technologies. Problem is that executives fail to remember "software is like pan cakes. first one is always tossed out.". New product development ideas are not fool proof. More things are unknown than known. So, when you hit the wall in terms of requirement or technology or whatever, always remember to turn 30 degrees and change. Change as in CHANGE. Hitting the first wall may have costed you only a couple of hundred thousand dollars. But, not turning but continuing to bang will flush millions of dollars down the drain. Executives who are not spending from their pockets are more than willing to do because it just bothers their ego to come clear and admit that previous approach was not workable.

I think one of the best examples of this was by famous Coral software when at the height of Java trend  it tried to rewrite its flagship product Draw in Java. After many months they had to abort it as it was not worthwhile. I think the management team deserves to be complimented if they decided to drop the idea and not that they were forced to drop it because market told so in no unclear terms. In another case a Nasdaq listed software company tried to develop some kind of thin client framework and abandoned it only after customers dumped the technology. This was after 4 years and a few millions short. It had such a devastating effect that the that particular RD division was reduced by 60%. Other factors contributed too but precious dollars that were wasted on this could have been spent on something else. Morale problems from internal bickering and frustrations from having to use immature and unstable technology also caused many intangible problems. In this case it was management's utter stupidity and big egos that helped make this happen. Big deal!

In innovative pursuits such as new product development there is no such thing as a mistake or failure. When originally conceived idea does not work, it is just a result from an experiment. The blunder is when people do not learn from it quick enough and continue down the wrong path just because their ego or some other reason. In software, rule of thumb should be, 3 months, <100,000, get usable alpha with minimum feature set. If that is not possible to accomplish, pull the plug at the end of 3 months and choose some other path.

Cheers!

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