Wednesday, May 25, 2011
How the idea of having "GOALS" in life is completely MISGUIDING
Pick up any of the popular self-help books, or search any motivational website and you'll come across literature incessantly proselytizing "GOAL Setting". The key to success is all about having the right goals and pursuing those goals doggedly.
"Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes of the goal"
Now this quote is from Vince Lombardi who was a football coach. Football is taleb's proverbial extremistan where the superstar effect takes hold. Now, this quote makes a lot of sense to someone who got successful in a field dominated by luck, but a much better version of the quote would read like this:
"Opportunities are what you see when you take your eyes of the goal"
Even Vince Lombardi was a failure at many things he did, above all as a father. He failed at many different things during his lifetime and only probably settled at something which he thought he could be good at. Quitting at the right time was probably the key to his successes. He quit law school probably because he couldn't see himself as a lawyer, although according to him he needed to settle down and start a family. Success would in this context mean that one needs to at times settle down and just focus at the task at hand. You look for passion/pleasure at work only when you don't have a personal life. Marriage probably solves a lot of these problems by providing a good substitute. With a marriage and responsibility you wouldn't be spending time day dreaming and looking for distant opportunities.
The assumption behind setting goals is you know everything about everything. These goals are set apriori, which basically means that they are based on some sort of projection or extrapolation of the present environment. You cannot set a long term goal without making massive assumptions about what the future is going to look like and what your place in that future will be.
As I have learned from experience, the future doesn't look anything like you've imagined. And setting goals, at least long term goals is a very foolish proposition. Anyone who continues to pursue a long term goal even when the future he had in mind, changes, is a fool himself. The key to success it seems is not to pursue goals altogether, but to live in the present and to learn to quit as soon as possible. Quitting it seems is far more effective than any strategy for success. Opportunities open up all the time around you, and we must open our eyes for these opportunities.
Life is in essence subtractive. You need to figure out what not to do, than to find out what to do and pursue it doggedly. Look around you and grab opportunities when they appear, because they are very rare.
"Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes of the goal"
Now this quote is from Vince Lombardi who was a football coach. Football is taleb's proverbial extremistan where the superstar effect takes hold. Now, this quote makes a lot of sense to someone who got successful in a field dominated by luck, but a much better version of the quote would read like this:
"Opportunities are what you see when you take your eyes of the goal"
Even Vince Lombardi was a failure at many things he did, above all as a father. He failed at many different things during his lifetime and only probably settled at something which he thought he could be good at. Quitting at the right time was probably the key to his successes. He quit law school probably because he couldn't see himself as a lawyer, although according to him he needed to settle down and start a family. Success would in this context mean that one needs to at times settle down and just focus at the task at hand. You look for passion/pleasure at work only when you don't have a personal life. Marriage probably solves a lot of these problems by providing a good substitute. With a marriage and responsibility you wouldn't be spending time day dreaming and looking for distant opportunities.
The assumption behind setting goals is you know everything about everything. These goals are set apriori, which basically means that they are based on some sort of projection or extrapolation of the present environment. You cannot set a long term goal without making massive assumptions about what the future is going to look like and what your place in that future will be.
As I have learned from experience, the future doesn't look anything like you've imagined. And setting goals, at least long term goals is a very foolish proposition. Anyone who continues to pursue a long term goal even when the future he had in mind, changes, is a fool himself. The key to success it seems is not to pursue goals altogether, but to live in the present and to learn to quit as soon as possible. Quitting it seems is far more effective than any strategy for success. Opportunities open up all the time around you, and we must open our eyes for these opportunities.
Life is in essence subtractive. You need to figure out what not to do, than to find out what to do and pursue it doggedly. Look around you and grab opportunities when they appear, because they are very rare.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Iterative and Incremental Living
Iterative and Incremental Living
By Dr Shoab Khan
Iterative and incremental living helps you to remain positive and assertive all your life. Depression and negativity are two major mental states that are to be countered for executing excellence in a professional setting. They affect a person’s creativity and cause a dark shadow in his personality. A depressed and negative person is looked down by his peers and people around him start avoiding his company and would even not like to engage with him in any technical arguments and discussions no matter how intelligent and smart he is. Such a person looses respect in the eyes of his peers and gradually finds himself in isolation. This further aggravates his negativity and makes him sourer in dealings. It is therefore very important for professionals to learn to counter negativity.
It is critical for us to know the ultimate objective of life like an objective function in an optimization problem. I am not against setting high worldly goals but for us the Muslims the highest weight in this objective function must go to life hereafter. Whatever we do, should be constrained and driven by this ultimate objective of pleasing Allah and winning heaven. This objective must reflect in our professional life as it will then ease our decision making ability.
To me the life has always been a highly non linear problem to solve that depends on many random and chaotic variables. A person’s life is invariably controlled by these variables and many a times a person’s set objectives would simply not meet no matter how hard he tries. There are always few variables that are not in his control and are very chaotic in nature. They can cause major upsets in his set goals. A person who sets high goals is very assertive and usually is self centered. Any little perturbation that makes him suspect of losing his objective makes him reactive. To counter the disturbances he strives harder to balance them out. If he tends to fail, he gets depressed. The negativity clings to his personality and makes him very unpleasant for people to deal with.
It is important to learn how to counter depression and negativity in professional life. Like any non linear problem in engineering the issue should be solved by making non-linearity in life piecewise linear on smaller duration. This incremental linearity helps a person to counter upsets that usually results in negativity. This incremental way of living also makes you focus more on problems in hand. It will also help you to live a life rather than waiting for a tomorrow to come. I have seen ambitious people always waiting for something to happen in their life in future. They seem to me like people on transit at the airports just waiting for the time for their next flight while changing terminals. They are very itchy and uneasy. These people would wait to get good grades in high schools to get in a good engineering or science program, then they are waiting to become engineers or scientists to get good jobs and this waiting makes them always wait for something higher in their life. In this waiting, they keep losing the precious time and pleasures of life, they don’t live rather they are always waiting for a better tomorrow to live. And in this cycle they become machines rather than sensitive human beings. In this process though they may get professional success, earn fortune, get citizenship of some advanced country, own big houses, but once they look back, they don’t find if they have lived a life. They will find themselves still waiting for something of even greater value to happen in their life. For these people, if something other then what they are striving for happened, they get depressed. It is therefore always good to live an incremental life, like an adaptive iterative algorithm with a small step size. These algorithms are slow but they always converge and adapts to the current situation. More ambitious people always try to take a bigger jump. It is like increasing the step size in an adaptive algorithm; if luck is on their side they get to the destination otherwise most probably they hit divergence that may never bring them back to their desired course of objectives.
Now the question remains that what is meant by incremental living? To me it simply means living in today where we are not eagerly waiting for future to come.
For students in professional schools it implies that they should not eagerly wait to become an engineer or scientist as they would ultimately become one in due course of time. I would rather say that don’t even think about this once you are in a professional school. Think about what you need to do today for tomorrow and day after tomorrow. The assignment you need to complete today for tomorrow’s submission deadline. Live in that assignment, enjoy it, and just think whole purpose of professional excellence is to complete that assignment. Better prepare yourself for a surprise quiz that may surprise you tomorrow. If there are extracurricular activities in your school then actively participate in them but don’t compromise on your studies. Live your life, believe me this is the best time of your life, and enjoy it. Enjoy your studies, your classes, the money you don’t have that you don’t spend, the food from the chabba hotel, the travel in public van and chinkis, affection and love of your friends, the little fights you have among yourselves, the little sacrifices you give for others. Look how smart you look in the second hand clothes someone bought for you from landa bazaar. This is the life you are going to miss for rest of your life. This incremental hard work and local focus will also make you gain more and in this process you will not only live a satisfied life but shall also become more significant as time goes by. It will always keep you positive and pleasant for people to deal with.
Remember for us the Muslims, we must not stop striving or retire on any set destination. We need to keep our objectives in perspective while working with devotion and dedication. We need to strive harder and harder. Iqbal has beautifully reflected this in one of his poems.
تو رہ نوردشوق ھے ، منزل نہ کر قبول
لیلی بھی ہمنشیں ہو، تو محمل نہ کر قبول
اے جوۓ آب بڑھ کے ہو دریاۓ تندوتیز
ساحل تجھے عطا ہو، تو ساحل نہ کر قبول
We must never set any such destination that stops us from striving in life; a janoon must drive us to work harder and harder. We must not accept any destination no matter how valuable it is. We must ignore it, and must always keep striving and in this processes we will become very assertive. This transformation would be like few drops of water changing to a fast flowing river. The river once it gets to the sea, its water must also not accept to remain closer to the shoreline.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Importance of Religion
Importance of Religion:
Marcus Aurelius:
A man must be upright, not kept upright
Thursday, May 5, 2011
When Success could mean Failure, and Failure could mean Success.
My hypothesis for this post is that sometimes success also means failure and failure may not turn out to be as bad as one thought.
I have had considerable experience at failing and at succeeding. For me personally success is a double edged sword. Its like a trap which opens and gobbles you up when you are good at succeeding. The result may not be as good as one anticipated.
In my class, we had all sorts of people, some were intellectually sharp with probably high EQs while others were dumb and spent most of their time bumming around, getting into fights and were destined for failure. This was my opinion of my classmates 5 years ago, but now, 5 years down the line, the exact opposite is true. The failures have succeeded while the successful classmates are trapped for eternity as a result of the opportunities there success got them.
Success has a lot to do with ambition. The more ambition someone is, the higher he will aim and the more risk he will take on because he believes in himself. That is the trap of being successful. They are sure to go into fields where the superstar effects takes control and the distribution are skewed. These fields or distributions are also known as extremistan by Nassim Taleb. Most of the intellectual superstars that dominate intellectual pursuits are concentrated in Physics. So most of the really bright students in my class decided to pursue higher degrees in Physics because they believed that they too were capable of becoming superstars, unaware of the type of distribution they were getting into. Their pursuits are dominated by fat tails and winner take all effects. The more successful they are the more they will be sucked into such fields. Have you ever seen a really bright student opening up a garage somewhere or starting his own business, they would never stoop that low. Their success keeps on narrowing their path for them until at the end there is no way to go back and their is nothing forward. The brightest students in any class end up doing PhD which mostly is a vow of poverty. They eventually fail, while the truly lucky few make money.
The people who bum around are the ones who will eventually succeed. They will not be able to get into or succeed in truly competitive fields and quickly fail and drop out. They look for niches where there is less competition and that is where most of the success will come from. The riches lie in these less competitive fields.
When you fail, then it either tells you that you are not good enough or that this field is not good enough for you and is over saturated and you wouldn't enjoy the endless competition and low returns. Failure tells you to move on, towards greener pastures, towards success. So generally, the bigger the failure, and the more you fail, the more you will be pushed towards success.
IBM's Watson said, to increase your success, increase your rate of failure. The failures will push you towards success. And if you succeed in the first few attempts, then remember that it might well be a trap and there are greater riches that you will miss out on.
I have had considerable experience at failing and at succeeding. For me personally success is a double edged sword. Its like a trap which opens and gobbles you up when you are good at succeeding. The result may not be as good as one anticipated.
In my class, we had all sorts of people, some were intellectually sharp with probably high EQs while others were dumb and spent most of their time bumming around, getting into fights and were destined for failure. This was my opinion of my classmates 5 years ago, but now, 5 years down the line, the exact opposite is true. The failures have succeeded while the successful classmates are trapped for eternity as a result of the opportunities there success got them.
Success has a lot to do with ambition. The more ambition someone is, the higher he will aim and the more risk he will take on because he believes in himself. That is the trap of being successful. They are sure to go into fields where the superstar effects takes control and the distribution are skewed. These fields or distributions are also known as extremistan by Nassim Taleb. Most of the intellectual superstars that dominate intellectual pursuits are concentrated in Physics. So most of the really bright students in my class decided to pursue higher degrees in Physics because they believed that they too were capable of becoming superstars, unaware of the type of distribution they were getting into. Their pursuits are dominated by fat tails and winner take all effects. The more successful they are the more they will be sucked into such fields. Have you ever seen a really bright student opening up a garage somewhere or starting his own business, they would never stoop that low. Their success keeps on narrowing their path for them until at the end there is no way to go back and their is nothing forward. The brightest students in any class end up doing PhD which mostly is a vow of poverty. They eventually fail, while the truly lucky few make money.
The people who bum around are the ones who will eventually succeed. They will not be able to get into or succeed in truly competitive fields and quickly fail and drop out. They look for niches where there is less competition and that is where most of the success will come from. The riches lie in these less competitive fields.
When you fail, then it either tells you that you are not good enough or that this field is not good enough for you and is over saturated and you wouldn't enjoy the endless competition and low returns. Failure tells you to move on, towards greener pastures, towards success. So generally, the bigger the failure, and the more you fail, the more you will be pushed towards success.
IBM's Watson said, to increase your success, increase your rate of failure. The failures will push you towards success. And if you succeed in the first few attempts, then remember that it might well be a trap and there are greater riches that you will miss out on.
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