life and lies

Read today about lies we tell ourselves and the plan for life. Reminded me of two things I read couple of weeks back.


First is an HBR article How will you measure your life?. Gist of it is – author advises to create strategy for life (find out the purpose of your life), allocate resources (time/energy) towards that strategy, create a culture which enforces that and avoid to deviate from that path 100% of the time. The author is someone who pledged never to play ball on Sunday and hence didn’t go to a college basketball final on Sunday. This is treating life as business or managing an enterprise. Food for thought at the very least.

I had reached to this article through NY Times column which is comparing Well-Planned Life described in above article to something the column author called Summoned Life – which flows according to the circumstances of a person. His conclusion is that both works – has to work anyway.

My take is – I admire someone who knows exactly what they want and what their priorities are. Of all the people I knew so far, very few knew what they wanted to do in life and proceeded to do it happily. Remaining takes life as it happens. My analogy for that is a pool game with unskilled players – opportunities come up randomly, some taken, some missed and all while keep moving it as best as they can.

Other one is also related to above – What makes us happy?. It explores "Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life?" through a study of set of Harvard students through a life over 72 years. Why I mentioned this is connected to the lies we tell ourselves. The article says we put up defenses (or (“adaptations”) to get through life’s pains. There are immature adaptations (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania), neurotic ones (intellectualization, disassociation and repression) and lastly mature ones (altruism, humor, anticipation/hope, suppression and sublimation). Having a mature adaptation as defense is key to good life as per this – along with education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. At one point in the article it says – “maturation makes liars of us all” – it may not exactly be a lie, but the version of reality we want to believe, a story we tell ourselves to get by every day – of good career, happy children, being an optimist, being a pessimist and so on.

feedback

It is not possible to give feedback to a person about his biggest problem – something apparent to everyone, but no one talks about it. Like you know someone lacks depth in knowledge, but can act extremely confident and boast about things – you can recognize the faking part of it, but will you be able to tell him? Or someone who takes life too easy, but cribs all the time about lack of growth. Or someone who talks so much that you are afraid to run into him on a Friday evening. It might be the single biggest feedback which might make a difference in their lives, but how much of a friend you should be to give such a feedback? Will you give such a feedback if it was your manager? I wonder if some of the folks never got the news or they never took it seriously.

move my cheese

When things are not going your way, try
Find someone with whom you can be yourself
Find someone to share with, your dreams, fears, disappointments
Try exercising
Travel somewhere, take a break
Smile more, try some humor
Try to read books, to give you a new perspective
Think about your priorities, constraints
re-evaluate the goals and the method
Make a change, take a leap
Learn something new
Talk to more people, make more friends
Help someone
Say Yes more often
Find a new passion, revive an old hobby
Look at your strengths and what you need to do
Do something


But just don’t wallow in despair

american politics

I have been following American politics much closely for last 2-3 years – mainly got hooked during the last presidential primaries. Today morning saw the majority leader taking a different stance compared to the president regarding an issue, so was thinking about good and bad compared to our politics.

The good –

• Two party politics – that is the best thing. Compare that to Kerala where we have Kerala Congress A, B, C, D, E… and then coalitions that can shift not based on ideology, but based on slots in the cabinet.


• Primaries – there is a chance for people to choose candidates. For us, I think people often decide not to even vote saying no candidates is worthy – it is often true as well. The candidates chosen by party hierarchy gives in to vested interests such as shares for castes, groups within the party etc. Deserving candidates might lose out just due to lack of political capital. Having the power to choose candidates by the party registered members relieves the would-be candidates and senators/representatives from sucking up to leadership, forming cliques etc to save their seat. For us, if running those many primaries fairly also becomes election commission’s responsibility, it might become too much.


• Members of a party are not bound to follow same voting pattern dictated by the party leadership (Whip situation). Senators / Reps are free to choose to vote with or against the party interest. This can let the elected folks govern rather than unelected party leadership.


• I like the fact that people are entitled to their opinion – if you differ from party’s (or party leader’s) opinion, they cannot reprimand or throw you out. This can bring in good discussion and more ideas to be considered for a legislation.


• Polls – even though it is said not to govern to score high in polls and instead do the right thing, knowing the barometer of the country is good. It wouldn’t hurt to know that a government, CM, PM are running 20% favorability and the country thinks that it is going in wrong direction – at least if someone does something to improve the metrics, it can give some results.


• Good political reporting – profiles of politicians, tracking political stories. NY Times, Washington Post etc must be keeping score on how many politicians they throw out of office by exposing scandals.

The bad –

• Campaign financing and lobbying – even though there is some amount of transparency, the basic thing is – if you give large amount of money, you are obviously expecting something back. I feel the system has to be corrupt, even though stories that come out are less – it got much more sophisticated.


• Rules like filibuster – few lawmakers having differing opinion due to whatever pressure or ideology can deny a majority to pass a legislation – so party rule which is more like minor dictatorship when it comes to passing legislation doesn’t work.


• Extreme fringes and conscious manipulators can change the public opinion with constant harping about something and make a non-issue a big issue.


• I used to think presidential politics is better with someone having control, but learned that president can only set the direction and have little control on the actual legislation.

The ugly –

• thing president can initiate is wars and when that is initiated on flimsy evidence and to propagate their world view, it becomes a massive problem.

queue rage

In my morning drive to office, there is a 4-5 km stretch of single lane road that has three major junctions that makes the entire stretch go at a slow crawl. I come to the first junction. Folks who want to go right are aligned to the right with indicators on, we crawl at slow pace and bikes are somehow making their way forward utilizing every inch of road. We make some space on the left for folks who want to turn left. Now there comes a guy on the left with right indicator on and goes straight to end of line, another guy behind gets emboldened since there is a leader and scrambles behind him, a mad rush follows, guys who waited patiently tries to assert their priority, cars go head to head or rather rear view mirror to rear view mirror to see who has guts – in the ensuing mess, somehow we make it to other side in parallel with the guys who cut in from left. It is single lane road, so someone has to adjust to avoid hitting the folks waiting for bus on the sidelines or the oncoming bus in the other lane – one gives in finally and the show continues.


Come the next junction, same tug of war continues with another set of folks who cut in. In between, a Wagon R gets almost pushed to the side by a Ford Endeavor – usually it is Wagon Rs that lack the courage to push through and hold on.

So we come to the third junction, the Wagon R is behind me now and we are crawling slowly waiting in the line, I see another guy going in the left as far as he can go. There is a bus stop to the right, so traffic is blocked with another set of folks waiting behind stopped buses, peaking to see if they can somehow get ahead. Now here comes a Maruti cruising through the empty right lane ignoring the long queue and tries to squeeze into the little space I had left between me and the guy in front. That snaps me, I close the gap, Maruti is stranded in front of the stopped bus and yet another one that is desperately trying to overtake. Instead of feeling victorious I feel bad.

Later, I was doing some company research in Wikipedia, at the end of it, references had this – Avenue Queue: One long wait inspired career shift. A MIT professor who did Queue research due to a bad experience – the results helped form innovations in supermarket checkout, highway tolls etc. Now I may not be able to switch careers to fix anything, but interesting to see that sophisticated research and implementations happened decades ago in developed countries to put in queue control systems, but we are still following the Most Aggressive First (MAF) method than the First Come First Served (FCFS). Anyway got to know that what I experienced is called “queue rage”.

it was a good morning

Feeling good – it is distinct/distinguishable, happens not so frequently. Each time this happens, I usually try to identify the reason why.
Feels very comfortable in clothes I wear, but it is not the clothes itself since I have worn these before.
Had slept for seven hrs, but I have slept even more before. Had a decent breakfast – but had the same many times before.
Exercised a bit – not normal.
Have a slight cold and sore throat – but the feeling is in spite of that.
Got a reasonably good treatment at car service station in spite of it taking more than an hour – they are well trained.
Work is not creating much stress – even though I need to figure out how to move something forward.
Appreciated someone whole-heartedly for a help – that felt good.
Have read some things reasonably good since morning – in spite of the stories of corruption, accidents, unrest and inefficiency in the newspaper. 
Hope the day will not grind it down.

early education

Came across this NY Times article – Study Rethinks Importance of Kindergarten Teachers. Quotes from it:-

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance.

Some teachers are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.

My daughter is in preschool now. My thought was – there are a lot of under advantaged children who never go to kindergarten, so are they losing out even before they start school?

I see our community reach effort which is to go to a school and distribute notebooks – while doing anything is better than doing nothing, what could make more real impact on improving the level of education? I am interested to learn what is going on in education – like Teach for India.