Learning too much from the past?

Decision making is a very important aspect in all spheres of our life; be it business, academics, profession, personal life etc. Given the nature of Indian society, our decisions naturally get altered based on our surroundings, upbringing and more importantly our past experience.

I read the below article in my favorite news paper The Hindu Businessline, which succinctly describes all these factors which we consider in the decision making process. The crux of the article is, while it is good to have rich experience in framing a decision, it is equally important to focus on the process. Time, people and situations change. We must learn from the past and alter the process based on the current environment. I always believe, in any life game, the rules or the processes which added value to you or to the society a few years ago might not necessarily add value now. Therefore, it is necessary to learn our lessons hard and correct ourself.

Since, I keep a lot of interest in politics, I hope Modiji our PM reads this article and understands that whatever worked in past might not necessarily work in future.

Here's the article from the hindu businessline.

What worked in the past may not work in the future unless we focus on the process.

We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We interpret the past – what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told – to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.

It could also be a mistake.

Experience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser.

The problem is that we view the past through numerous filters that distort our perceptions. As a result, our interpretations of experience are biased, and the judgments and decisions we base on those interpretations can be misguided.

If our goal is to improve decision-making, we can use our knowledge of those filters to understand just what our experience has to teach us and learn how to overcome our biases.

We focus on what we can see

In the business environment, the outcomes of decisions are highly visible, readily available for us to observe and judge. But the details of the decision process, which we can control far more than the result, typically don’t catch our attention. If the aim is to learn from experience – mistakes as well as successes – acknowledging that process is crucial.

Circle of advisers

Honest feedback – an unbiased, undistorted assessment of one’s experience – is essential for improving decisions. Yet decision makers are often surrounded by individuals who have incentives to feed them censored and self-serving information – and these people are not necessarily a crowd of yes-men.

Overvaluing experience

We can’t place all the blame for our distorted view of the world on the environment and our inner circle. Some of the blame lies with us. We tend to search for and use evidence that confirms our beliefs and hypotheses, and we gloss over or ignore information that contradicts them – an exercise of selectively building and interpreting experience known as the confirmation bias.

How not to be fooled

The following techniques can uncover the real lessons experience offers and help you base decisions on a clearer view of the world.

Sample failure: Failures and the processes that lead to them are doomed to stay in the dark unless special occasions are created to bring them to light. To identify what could be done better in the future, companies can also conduct decision post-mortems to analyse underlying processes.

Don’t miss near misses: Another oft-ignored event is the near miss – a failure that’s disguised as a success, but only because there are generally no dire consequences.

Pursue prevention: Recognising a potential problem requires a different approach than solving an actual problem. One strategy is to harness employees’ collective talents by allowing people to raise concerns about the firm’s operations. Disagree: As Peter Drucker wrote, “The first rule in decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.” To devise healthy strategies, executives need to hear many perspectives.

Disconfirm: Rather than finding clues that corroborate your hunch – all too easy in an information-rich world – start by asking yourself how you could know you were, in fact, wrong.

Source:  Experience is not always wisdom

Heartbreak

Every single person under the sun will go through the pain of heartbreak in his/her life. The pain is one thing which everyone from all walks of life, can relate to.No one in the world will be able to instantly take away your tears or heal the wounds that have been inflicted upon you. Only time can help here. However, what is hardly ever said about heartbreak is , the lessons we learn and take away in the times of emotional tragedy.

Without love for the other, there would never be this pain. And, without heartbreak, there would never be such amazing love. This may sound like the ultimate paradox, but losing someone you love proves to be an incredible learning and growing experience. You may be reading this thinking “Fuck you, you bastard. My heart’s in shambles right now and you want me to think this is going to turn into a good thing?” As confusing and almost insane as it may sound, having this happen may change you in so many different ways. One thing which it will do is definitely bring you out of your comfort zone. Your preconceived notions about people will change.

Having a hard goodbye, to someone you love, is one of the toughest thing to do but moving on with your life will only enhance the times you have with other loved ones. Going forward it will only deepen every minute you spend with the people about whom you truly care. 

One important lesson which you will learn is to be able to start forgiving with more ease and forgetting about the things that don’t really matter so much. Your endurance to bear this hardship will only make you a stronger person. You will be able to make out whom you should let in and who can’t stay in your life.This will open your whole life up to more and more great experiences because you will be able to share it with people who genuinely care for you and whom you really care for.

Nevertheless, it’s not a perfect system and it should not happen to anyone. Sometimes we become absolutely helpless. But, there will be another tomorrow, another day felt with warmth,affection,passion and love will embrace you one day..

Just remember that your bumps and bruises will heal and the scars will faint over the period of time. Time will help you heal, and heartbreak itself will help you grow. In what is, undeniably, the hardest, most painful life lesson one could ever learn, heartbreak will help mould the rest of your life. Only if you don't let the heartbreak get converted into a setback, it will teach you to love better and love more and more importantly value love....... 

Instant and Delayed gratification....

Gratification is an important aspect in human behaviour. Primarily it is instant gratification and delayed gratification. As humans we are always tempted to take decisions which suits us now, without thinking about its ramifications. It is not that this behaviour is prevalent only in teenage or early 30s, but repetitive thing. Looking back at your life retrospectively will help you understand what I am talking about. Think it this way – compare you and your parents and probably the coming generation too – our parents used to first earn money, then save it and then spend on whatever surplus they had. On the other hand, we first spend money and earn to payback the same and then save some if at all there is some surplus available. In a way our parents got delayed gratification. It’s important to realize that we give in more to instant gratification.This principle of instant and delayed gratification is applicable in all aspects of our life. Be it marriage, financial investment, career decisions etc. We need to win the war over instant gratification and need to envision what are the long term goals of our life. What is that we must to now, so that we reap a much better yield after 10-15 years? I am not a proponent of always being in the future and ruin your present, but having long term goals as well the attitude to safeguard your present will help your overcome this. I for one believe that we will have to find a middle path between instant and delayed gratification, because neither of them can keep us happy always. Its important that we don’t sink in to the marshland of debt and misery and neither do we ruin our present by over-thinking of the unforeseen future. Stay afloat is what I have learnt in life.In my subsequent blogs I will share more details on how I have lost and gained from either of these behaviours. Here I am sharing these articles which I came across and found then good leisurely reads:

Instant gratification costs in financial life -- Jagoinvestor

Delayed Gratification

Your mate probably doesn't go to work with you, but his or her influence does.

This article exactly summarizes my thought process. No matter how intelligent you are, or how hardworking you are; your success will depend upon how your life partner is. You might buy an expensive car, a big house with all modern amenities, but your happiness will only depend on how your partner is.....  I just wonder why this guy had to do a Ph.D to do this analysis.. :P

Nevertheless, a good read to share:

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          “Your husband, wife, or sweetheart probably doesn’t come to work with you every day,” says Brittany Solomon. “But his or her influence clearly does.”

Solomon, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, recently led a study analyzing the careers and personalities of about 5,000 married people, aged 19 to 89, over a five-year period. About 75% were in two-career couples.

The conclusion: Employees of both sexes who scored highest on three measures of occupational success—salary increases, promotions, and job satisfaction—all went home at night to mates with the personality type known as “conscientious.” These are people who are reliable, consistent, detail-oriented, and organized. The study, “The Long Reach of One’s Spouse: Spousal Personality Influences Occupational Success,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Note to singles: If you’re aiming high at work, you might want to settle down with someone conscientious. Psychologists often categorize people according to four other broad measures: openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Although previous studies show that “people tend to look for a potential mate with a high degree of agreeableness and low neuroticism, our findings suggest that anyone with ambitious career goals would be better off looking for a supportive partner with a highly conscientious personality,” Solomon notes.

          A mate’s conscientiousness boosts career success in three ways, the study found. First is what the researchers call “outsourcing,” which means it’s a lot easier to concentrate on your next brilliant idea at work if someone else can be counted on to make sure the dog has all his shots, the car gets inspected on time, and the kids are fed. Also, the ability to depend on a significant other cuts down on overall stress and makes work-life balance easier to manage, for men and women alike.But beyond the day-to-day practicalities, a conscientious partner exerts a subtler, more pervasive influence. “Conscientious people tend to be resilient in the face of setbacks, and they’re thorough. They finish what they start,” says Solomon. “Over time, those traits can rub off on a spouse. People often unconsciously emulate those they live with—and the qualities we associate with ‘conscientious’ types are the same ones that lead to success in a career.”

Source: Entrepeneur

Lessons of life....

It’s been more than 5 years now that I am out of college. I always tell my friends that 22nd year is the best year of your life. It is because you are just out of your college and probably you are just into your new job. There are no high expectations at office nor are you answerable to anybody for your studies, expenses, for the time you spend. To say the least you really do not have any responsibility on you. But the situation changes fast as you grow. I personally feel that I have changed a lot in last 5 years. In our instant gratification culture, it's easy to forget that most personal change does not occur as a single static event in time, but rather as a long, gradual evolution where we're hardly aware of it as its happening. We wake up one day and suddenly notice wild, life-altering changes in ourselves. Our identities slowly shift, like sea sand getting pushed around by the ocean, slowly accumulating into new contours and forms over the passage of time.It's only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can notice all of the dramatic changes that have taken place. Last few years were certainly dramatic, but here are 3 lessons I have learnt hard:

1.Fail early and often: Time is the only asset you have.

When you are young, your greatest asset is not your talent, not your ideas, not your experience, but your time. Time grants you the opportunity to take big risks and make big mistakes. I started investing in stock markets in the beginning of my career. A little more lust for money tempted me to put all the eggs in one basket and play bigger games in derivatives. Eventually I lost all my money but I learnt my lessons hard. I still thank God that I lost it all at a very young age when I had no responsibilities on me and neither was I answerable to anyone. Moreover, you aren't strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that come with later adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare for your kids, life insurance and so on. This is the time in your life where you have the least amount to lose by taking some long-shot risks, so you should take them. Nevertheless, it thought me the value of money and I learnt basic investing lessons by losing.

2.You can’t force friendships.

There are two types of friends in life: the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like nothing's changed, and the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like everything's changed. I am out of home since 11 years now. I have stayed at Aurangabad, Mysore, Hyderabad, Pune and of course my home town, Hingoli. That means I have left a lot of friends behind in various places. What I have learnt is you cannot force friendship with anyone. You might have very good friends in college or probably in your early career when you are single, but it is the truth of life that times change, people change, responsibilities do come in their way and slowly you lose keeping in touch with many of them. It’s not that those people whom you didn’t keep contact with were bad people or bad friends, just that life becomes too busy. It’s nobody’s fault. We have to reconcile and resign to the fact that life change, people change and so do their and your own priorities. What happened in your late teenage might not happen in your late 20s and early 30s. Those cacophonous fantasies and activities eventually fade out.

3.The sum of small things matters much more than bigger things.

We have a propensity to assume things just happen as they are. We tend to only visualize the result of things and not the arduous process (and all of the failures) that would go into producing the result. I think when we're young, we have this idea that we have to do just this one big thing that is going to completely change the world, top to bottom. I have faced such situation prominently at office, when I see seniors around me who are well settled, have a good home, a big car and spend lavishly on their lifestyle. And this is the phase when you too want exactly same things in your life and you start dreaming big. That’s a good thing btw. But we need to realize that those "big things" are actually comprised of hundreds and thousands of daily small things that must be silently and unceremoniously maintained over long periods of time with little fanfare.

Fear... the inevitable...

As a kid, I read Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “Where the mind is without fear”. I was quite inspired by that, the kind of dream he saw for India. Sadly, attaining freedom hasn’t exactly freed our minds of fear. In fact, no person, no country in the whole world is free of fear. It’s a fear driven world we are living in, where the government fears loss of power, businessman and service person fear inflation or recession, students fear the competition, lovers fear commitment, and the list can go on. What can be the origin of this invisible but ubiquitous devil? Or is it even a devil? If we go back in time, we will see that it was the fear factor that sowed the seeds of civilization. The fear of living alone and being exposed to carnivores made the prehistoric man settle and form communities. This gave them a sense of protection. Emotional insecurity made them nurture the concept of family. The destructive forces of nature, like storms, floods, eclipses made the man create the concept of God. As he saw how helpless he becomes in the night due to lack of visibility, he developed the fear for the dark night. And when he saw how the rising sun renders away the darkness, he started worshipping the sun. Further, the fear of invasion and encroachment made the man draw boundaries, invent weapons and as time advanced they started raging wars, killing people to assume power. Wars were fought in pursuit of wealth, slaves and land and to build and strengthen huge empires because the kings feared loss of power to some other king. In present scenario, wars and other violent activities occur broadly due to two reasons, first, to control the trade, especially oil and nuclear energy and second, to attain religious or regional superiority. All this is bound to happen, because we are insecure beings by nature. With time, some fears disappear and new ones replace them. For example, after the invention of electricity, man is no more afraid of the night, but over-consumption of electricity and many other energy supplies has led to depletion of our non-conventional and conventional energy sources. And now, the biggest fear is of losing our home planet. Even the nation which considers itself the most superior nation in the world, US, lives in fear of losing power and allies. Its relations which India, Pakistan and the obstinate China, are all muddled up. It cannot fully support one without upsetting the other. So there is huge risk of losing allies in Asia. These are just a couple of examples. There are many such things happening at national and even personal level. Fear of emotional inconsistency, betrayal or burden of responsibility makes couples chicken out of marriage and go for live-in relationship. To cover up, they would say, we want it the ‘no-strings-attached’ way. Students, afraid of facing failure, commit suicide. The fear factor, that helped creating civilizations, is now set to destroy them. Philosophically, the world is driven by two forces, love and fear. But in the modern world, fear seems to be out-scoring love. We cannot kill our fear, but we can be selective as to which fear we should succumb to, for example, choose between peer pressure and the rightful duty. Only then can we use our fear for our benefit and convert our weakness into our strength.