Winning In The Beginning oR Winning In The End ?
My Cousin, who is a perceptive and wise man was telling me about a very successful Indian entrepreneur called Kishore Biyani. Mr. Biyani is the founder of the future group which owns retail chains like Big Bazaar (and Pantaloons ?). He was telling me about Kishore Biyani saying that whenever Mr. Biyani plays any a game like Bridge etc. He does not try too hard to win the first game on purpose and does not pin too much importance to winning the first game. According to Mr. Biyani, if he does not focus on winning but on learning the principles of the game, he might lose the first game but he gets to understand things that equip him to beat his opponents later on as the games progress. This logic sounds very sound (:)). I thought about this and then it also came to me, that winning in the end is much more important than learning nothing in the beginning and winning and then keep on losing for the rest of the time.
Then I also found my thoughts corroborate from a completely unconnected source. This was a report by a group called the STANDISH committee, that was setup to review the success rates of IT projects in the US. The conclusion of the report almost reverberated with my thoughts. The report was concluded by words which meant the following (after the first few lines I have added my words freely). There are two ways to success, luck or knowledge. If you succeed early on with luck you learn nothing but arrogance, you feel it was your ability that caused the success. If on the other hand you begin with failure, you learn a lot, it gives you knowledge, it gives you wisdom. And wisdom becomes the basis of sustainable and long term success. It makes you humble and you are much better prepared for any situation. Arrogance on the other hand breaks like a sheet of glass. When it is not damaged, it stands very hard and erect and shines as well. When even a small pebble of failure hits it, it comes crashing down in a million pieces. And it becomes very hard to gather the pieces for the owner of the arrogance. In all probability he then replaces the glass with a much more but not so good looking steel. With time and immense effort though, the steel can be replaced with diamond. Sparkling, shining, and completely unbreakable. Deserving all of the shine it exudes. Glass looks like diamond for some time, but it is just a very very cheap lookalike of it.

Time And Randomness: Sworn Enemies.

Randomness And Time Work In Exactly Opposite ways. Randomness tries to create bumps and turns and twists where no one expects. Time on the other hand works hard to iron out those bumps and twists and make things just as they are expected to be. Sure time takes a lot of time to do it (:)) but it does it anyhow. In the end the principle of ergodicity and the maturity of time does win over the tantrums thrown around by lady luck. Patience and faith in the Grand dad called time is very important.

Forcing The Child Or Taking The Force Out oF Him / Her ?

We are all familiar with situations in which we see children doing things that we don't want them to do. Like for example a child eating too much ice cream. Now if you have to stop the child from eating ice cream what would you do ? Give it a nice little reprimand about eating ice-cream right ? That would create a negative incentive for the child and the child may indeed reduce eating ice-cream, but that would still leave a feeling of love for ice-cream and you bear the risk that once you are not there the child will try to eat ice-cream.
But I have a solution to this problem, something that will completely eliminate the love for something that the child finds so delicious and enjoys like nothing else. You know what the solution is ? Well most parents are experts at its implementation so it should not come as any surprise. The solution is that you drown the child in ice-cream, put ice cream into its mouth whenever he / she opens it. Keep nagging it to eat ice-cream whenever you speak to him.
That way I can guarantee you that your child will not only stop eating ice-cream, but will start hating it from his guts. It will feel nauseated the moment someone mentions it.

Well those of us who have children are already doing it right ? Instead of respecting the child's intelligence and understanding, we think we can manipulate the child the way we want. A general underlying principle that comes out of all this is that, when things are forced on to you, no matter how much likable the thing is, you will still hate it. Because the first reaction is to get rid of the feeling of being forced, only when I get rid of that feeling can I see whether the thing is good for me or not. That applies so much to learning as well. Learning is so much fun. Who does not like to think about how the world works ? Why apples always fall down or why there is night and day ? Or what lies beneath our skin ? So when we force people to learn (memorize would be more apt) these things, we are making sure that our children will never love science or math or history or arts. Or probably as a society we do not want people who think freely, whose minds are unlocked from the matrix. We (or lets say the beneficiary ) want people who can think and are smart only in their little world, drones who can do their job well, but cannot think about anything else, who in other words behave like a battery which gives out 3.2 BTUs of body heat, which when combined with a form of fission provides the perfect source of value creation for the powers that be. And that shall be the topic of our next discussion. For now, all I'll say is forcing the child, drains him / her of his / her force.