Critical Perception

On what science knows.

2009-12-06T21:01:00.000Z

The TED talk above (by Dan Pink) is now one of my favourite TED talks. It is very provocative and raises some points that seriously make one question current incentives in the corporate world. I am rather curious to see what new business models will be in place to reflect this knowledge.

And it's not like the results shown are surprising. I'm sure everyone has experienced this -- internal motivation works best. So why are current business models built in, what seems to be, an illogical fashion?

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Leadership 101: Doing without doing.

2009-11-09T13:42:00.000Z

I came across this TED talk by Itay Talgam in the Presentation Zen blog and found the discussion quite intriguing. Indeed, the talk is very impressive and even though it comments on different conducting styles, it actually points out different leadership ways and leaves the audience with a bag of take-home messages to consider.

I've shared some of my personal favourite quotes from the talk. Itay Talgam says these words in the context of conducting, but I would like to transfer them to the context of leadership...

"The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time."
"Because you do not let us develop. You are using as as instruments, not as partners." (the reason why all orchestra members signed a petition asking their conductor to resign)
"The whole idea is to let it happen by itself; do not interfere."
"The worst damage I can do [...] is to give them a clear instruction."
"Not only creates the process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place."

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On Climbing.

2009-10-24T17:27:00.005+01:00

I've been climbing since August 12th this year when I took a 5-hour intro course on indoor climbing and loved the sport immediately. It's about the body and it's about the mind and it's just amazing :) To put it shortly, I'm quite into it, so you'll be seeing a post on climbing from time to time. I believe climbing, yoga, mind training all go very well together and complement each other on the road to self-knowledge and awareness.

There is a cool pro tips series out on YouTube and here are two of my favourite clips. Enjoy :)

And it can be rather practical...

About a cockatoo.

2009-10-13T20:25:00.006+01:00

OK, I will tell you about the cockatoo, but first things first. This is hopefully what I would like to call a come-back post. When I started off blogging, I did not mean for my activity to be just a whim, something that I discontinue. I rather meant it to be a space where I would be able to focus my efforts once in a while, something that I do and enjoy. But as happens sometimes in life, divergence from plans is necessary and compromises are in order. My blog is now spared from the compromise and is back rolling again. I can sense you are happy to hear that :)

Now about the cockatoo. I am dedicating a whole post to the bird, so it must be an unusual one too. (Alright, half a post, I kind of stole it's thunder with my come-back announcement.) I came across an article in Scientific American about the origins of dance. An excerpt:

"Researchers have long assumed that humans were the only animals that could dance—even our close primate relatives cannot keep a steady beat or be taught to move to a rhythm. But new evidence shows that birds can dance, revealing that the mysterious ability could be a by-product of vocal learning.

Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute, Adena Schachner of Harvard University and their colleagues studied several birds, among them a cockatoo that dances to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.” When Patel sped up or slowed down the song, the bird adjusted its moves to match the tempo, eliminating the possibility that it was in sync with the music by chance."

I conducted my search on YouTube and found the dancing cockatoo, named Snowball. She (or he, I am not sure) has some pretty good moves:

The head moves at the end are quite something :)

And the video below shows three excerpts of the experiments used in the study cited in the Scientific American article.

Applauses for Snowball - dances better than some people do :) And a final video - Snowball on Animal Planets Most Outrageous Talented Pets:

2009-06-30T12:16:00.002+01:00

I am very excited to announce that now TED is going places! Places like my home city, Sofia :) I am very pleasantly surprised at the pace with which things are developing as only some few months ago I was one of two Bulgarian TED translators :) For more information on TED in Sofia please visit the official TEDxSofia web site: http://www.tedxsofia.com/
[за българската версия, моля кликнете "Click to read entire post"]

Много се радвам да събщя, че TED вече ще се организира и на места като моя роден град, София :) Приятно съм изненадана, тъй като само допреди няколко месеца бях един от двамата български преводачи на TED :) За повече информация, моля посетете страницата на TEDxSofia: http://www.tedxsofia.com/

"he ought to choose a woman, sez I"

2009-05-04T14:19:00.003+01:00

Tomasky on Obama putting a woman on the Supreme Court:

"[...] a common point will be that it's wrong to say Obama should choose a woman and should simply select the "best person" for the job. Okay, that's a nice idea, folks, but really, in a country of 306 million people, a couple million lawyers, and tens of thousands of judges and law professors, how can there really be any such thing as one best person?

It's a crazy idea and a chimerical standard. Ten or 12 people will emerge who meet the various criteria, and from among those 10 or 12, there's no way in the world to guarantee that person X or person Y is THE best. So, from among those 10 or 12, he ought to choose a woman, sez I."

I thought that was quite interesting four a couple of reasons. First, the question of choosing someone for a post when there are millions, thousands, hundred candidates is always curious. How do you choose? It is definitely not easy, but seems like the HR of big corporations are indeed looking for ways to find The Best candidate out of the huge pool of applicants, hence the (often) 6-month long recruitment process where candidates need to take and re-take psychometric tests, go through assessment centres and interviews, etc, etc. At the end of the ordeal there should be a winner or two... or even more, because (large) companies may just hire all the candidates who qualify. (I won't comment on this kind of recruitment process in this post, some other time maybe.) I guess the more relevant question here would be, how do you choose among few candidates, when your choice is easily influenced by subjective criteria. And even more importantly, is subjectivity at all wrong?

In any case, the issue with the Supreme Court is very different not only because we are not talking about any job, but also because the main question is about having more women in government positions and leadership positions in general. If we know for a fact there are not enough women in such primary posts, is it OK to discriminate and hire a female candidate? That was the second interesting point. Check out another article by Tomasky, which is an informative review on the issue of equality.

On High Fidelity. The book I mean.

2009-05-01T10:58:00.006+01:00

I finished re-reading one of my favourite books, 'High Fidelity' by Nick Hornby, just a few days ago. It was an enjoyable experience. The book is written in a very engaging way. The main character, Rob, talks to the reader throughout the book, which makes the reader part of the action and puts them right inside the story; the reader is not a mere observer. Apart from the writing style, I find the story quite interesting because it is about a modern (read: unrealised) quest for happiness, even though (surely) not explicitly defined that way. We live in a society where having a job we like and a partner we like are a few of the necessary 'requirements' for us to be happy. Clearly, having 'requirements' for happiness is right where the quest is doomed to failure, because things in the outside world get depleted, used out, we get tired of them, etc, i.e. are subject to disappearance in one form or the other. As Mr. Ricard points out in his TED talk on happiness, real happiness (not to be mistaken with pleasure) is best sought inside. I've blogged about this before, so I will refrain from going into it again.. (can't hide that it's a favourite topic of mind though :-) Anyway, because of these reasons, the reader never really sees Rob finishing his quest, we rather see him content with his life and not necessarily feeling joyous about it. Maybe in the next book?
It'd be cool to see him go to a Buddhist hermitage for a while... maybe an interesting story could come out of this too :-)

In line with the book environment, my top five favourite moments from 'High Fidelity':

#1: "'Have you got any soul?' a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues." (p.67)

I like the pun :-), especially with the blues.

#2: "The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windscreen wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven't heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, 'Happy Go Lucky Girl' by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental." (p.83)

Life, jobs.. it's what we make of them. As a records salesperson, someone might just be sitting on a chair and popping gum, another will be having thoughts like the ones above.. Put your heart into it and it makes all the difference and I love this difference. (Although in only later in the book we see Rob sort of realising that he actually likes his job.)

#3: "It's just that none of us had the wit or the talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle." (p.111)

I like the phrasing of this one. This sentence appears when a singer tells Rob about a popular song, whose lyrics tell a story of a popular singer and his girlfriend.

And these are some interesting uses of countries:

#4: "It's only beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn't seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does." (p.67)

#5: "I'm starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can't remember anything good about him at all." (p.64)

I will leave those two without a comment ;-)

PS: About the book: 1996 Indigo Edition

On thoughts about the future. Cars and schooling.

2009-04-25T16:05:00.001+01:00

When thinking about the future, I think about two aspects: first, raising healthy, responsible, and creative individuals and second, ensuring that this planet is healthy for them (here I'm not rating the order of importance). And both of these aspects are of supreme importance when we talk about the future of the people on Earth. In this line of thought, recently I saw two TED talks, which hit exactly these two points in very interesting ways.

Talk # 1: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
This is by far one of my most favourite TED talks ever. Very funny and entertaining and very very thought provoking...

Talk # 2: Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars
I am looking forward to this future...

To wish or not to wish. And a burning airplane.

2009-04-25T13:04:00.009+01:00

Imagine that it's the middle of the night and you lie in bed awake, turning from side to side and no sleep comes your way. You get up and go by the window, staring outside into the darkness. Many windows of the near-by blocks are dark, as if blinded by the night. Others are well lit, resembling happy eyes. You look around exploring the calmness of the surroundings and you see an unusual light in the sky. Soon you realise that this is an airplane burning and heading down. You are captivated by the sight and you wonder whether you are the only spectator or other people happen to be sleepless and watching as well. You hesitate... should you call the police, should you take some action...

Something like the above scenario is described in a book I read recently, "Saturday" by Ian McEwan (thanks Artur for the lovely present!) And somewhere after this scene comes one of my favourite parts in the book... It doesn't have to do with the story itself, it's more of an interesting thought:

"As he comes away, he remembers the famous thought experiment he learnt about long ago in a physics course. A cat, Schroedinger's cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is lifted from the box and the cat is examined, a quantum wave of probability collapses. [...] Surely another example of a problem of reference. He's heard that even the physicists are abandoning it. To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting its discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance." (page 18)

This reminded me that when I was younger I frequently wondered whether how strong I wished for a particular outcome had an influence on the outcome itself. I used to experiment and sometimes wished just a little bit, other times more, and so on and made notes in my head, correlating wish strength and outcome. I never reached a conclusion, not any that I remember anyway, but it was always important for me to support my desire with strong wishing.

I got intrigued by the following two sentences, because they offer a different, "no-wishing" approach: "To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting its discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance." It seems to me that if we know this for a fact and rationalise it, it will be then pointless to wish for things to happen. However, we people like wishing... ("like" is even a weak word here... wishing is, I could say, intrinsic to our nature). It seems to me that wishing is a realisation of the hope that is always with us, the hope for happy moments, better days, or whatever it is that we are hopeful for. In some cases wishing is one more way of showing to ourselves that we've done everything that we possibly can to influence a certain outcome. And in other cases we just turn our back on facts and wish for a miracle. Maybe there's more than facts as we understand them and the universe's facts are different :-) "Surely another example of a problem of reference." as Mr. McEwan put it.

Just in case you are wondering, the main character, Henry, never takes some action regarding the airplane, except for frequently following the news throughout the book to check what happens with the crew and passengers (turns out it's a cargo plane, so no passengers are hurt and the pilots are fine too). This is not the major story line of the book, so should you decide to read it, my revelation will not in any way spoil the reading experience for you :-)

Anyway, another favourite quote from "Saturday":

"When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion." (page 198)

On the emotional risks of creativity. Following up.

2009-03-13T12:13:00.005Z

Since I saw Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk and blogged about it, writings on the issues she discusses keep coming to my attention, so I've decided to share a couple:

For example, this is what Stephen Covey writes in his book Principle-Centred Leadership on being responsible for one's own actions and reactions. I guess by adding responsible for one's creations, I won't be reading too much into the text (which I find rather inspirational):

"Be proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness -- an ability to choose your response (response-ability). At the low end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment -- anything or anybody "out there" so that they are not responsible for the results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: "I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts." You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a "hot reactor" (meaning there's little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser -- no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.
[...] Proactivity cultivates this freedom. It subordinates your feelings to your values. You accept your feelings: "I'm frustrated, I'm angry, I'm upset. I can accept those feelings; I don't deny or repress them. Now I know what needs to be done. I am responsible." That's the principle "I am response-able."
So on the continuum you go from being a victim to self-determining creative power through self-awareness of the power to choose your response to any condition or conditioning."

And this is what Diego Rodriguez writes in his most recent blog post, which touches right on the issue Ms. Gilbert talked about:

"A few weeks ago I ripped off a quick post about Travis Pastrana and the future of the world economy. It took me 15 minutes, I'm not sure where it came from, and it was easy, easy, easy to write. Largely because I wasn't worried about who would read it, words just poured out of my fingers. I just wanted to catch the thought and get it down on paper. The thing is, people liked it. People really liked it, and since then I've been spending a lot of time -- too much time -- thinking about what I could write that would be as good as that one, and in the process of doing so I've stopped writing.

What a mistake. I've fallen in to a classic creativity trap. And I should know better.

The reality about bringing cool stuff to life is that you actually have to bring a lot of crappy stuff to life along the way, and sometimes good stuff happens. And sometimes great stuff happens. But spending your time doing nothing in the name of perfection is a sure recipe for failure. In other words, for something great to happen, things first need to happen. If anything, 2009 is a year for all of us to laugh in the face of perfection and embrace sins of commission. The good stuff will come.

It's hard, though. Be strong."

Views on dirty jobs. And a bit on happiness.

2009-03-06T19:23:00.003Z

This is (below) quite an interesting recent talk by Mike Rowe, co-creator and host of the show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. I haven't seen or heard of the show, but I was really intrigued by the talk, so I will surely check it out.
The idea of Dirty Jobs is to show (by Mike Rowe getting directly involved as an apprentice) jobs that require some amount of getting literally dirty. Sounds fun, right? :) And as it turns out fro the talk, it could be scary, challenging, and very dirty. What I found particularly interesting in the talk is the part where Mike Rowe says something like "People with dirty jobs are the happiest people I know. [...] These are balanced people. [...] They've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life." And then he goes on talking about what's wrong with the advice "follow your passion." Some things definitely worth thinking about...

A bit technological again.

2009-02-26T11:09:00.007Z

I started this blog with the idea to write about pretty much anything that interests me and was with the mindset to follow my thoughts wherever they decide to take me. And they decided to take me on the road to figuring out how people think about and figure out happiness. I like that. I like it that I didn't know that's where my thoughts would lead me and I am curious to see where else I will go.

Certainly, happiness is not and will not be the only topic here. Leadership still interests me quite a lot, among other things. Sporadically though, I will write about technology (after all, my major is wireless communications) and some new and not so new gadgets that I find cool. This post, for example, is one of those rare gadgety posts:)

I opened my Google Reader yesterday and there's one new item from xkcd. Cool, because I really enjoy those (from time to time; sometimes I really don't get them). So I checked out the new comic and I saw the first picture and it's about e-books and some kindle thing... and I thought, oh, alright, it's one of those jokes I don't get. And I went on to read some news updates.

This morning, as usual, I opened the Google Reader and I saw this: "Reinventing the Kindle (part II) from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin" and also this "kindle 2 thoughts coming from John's Blog by John" (John is John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla, and Seth Godin is a popular author of business books.) Alright. So now I feel a bit out of touch. What is this Kindle? John writes "on kindle overall, still a bit of a niche device, with flaws, but i would not give mine up for really any amount of money. improves my life immensely." Niche device? OK, now I am really curious. Not that I wasn't before, but now I really need to see what it is right now. So I type kindle in my Google search bar and open the first hit (out of, wow, 34,100,000), which is on amazon.com and oh, now I see, it's a digital reader. It's like a digital book collection. And it seems quite cool. (demos below) How come I never heard of it? Did you? So I go to Wikipedia to see when it was out and how come now everyone is writing about it. It turns out that it was released in the US 2007 (however, "Plans for a launch in the UK and other European countries are being delayed by problems with signing up suitable cellular operators.") and Kindle 2.0 was just released on Feb. 23, 2009. If you are wondering what cellular operators have to do with digital books: the Kindle includes free wireless access which allows you to download books, blogs, newspapers, etc.

By the way, from what I saw Kindle seems to me a really really cool gadget to have around. And not just cool for the sake of it, but cool meaning very useful and handy. I would definitely get one at some point.

AmazonKindle Demo:

AmazonKindle 2.0 Demo:

As it turns out (no surprises here), the Kindle is not one of a kind. Sony has also released a digital reader in 2006. The newest model is available in the UK since September 2008. And I am sure there are quite a few others. Well, the MP3 players became a big thing. The digital readers might not become as huge, since I am guessing far fewer people like to read than listen to music, but it looks promising. There are events to encourage reading. Like this one:

By the way, I am curious how the issues of rights are managed. A Wikipedia article on the Sony reader says, "The digital rights management rules of the Reader allow any purchased eBook to be read on up to six devices (at least one of those 6 must be a PC). Although you cannot totally share purchased eBooks on other people’s devices and accounts, you will have the opportunity to register five Readers to your account and share your books accordingly. At this time Sony has no plans to introduce time-expiring books in the U.S."

Fyi and for the sake of completeness, (from the same source as the above) "The sony Reader competes with other e-paper devices - the Amazon Kindle, iRex iLiad, the Jinke Hanlin eReader, and CyBook by Bookeen."

On the happiness of the Earth? And on helping ideas worth spreading.

2009-02-23T22:31:00.005Z

I have been writing quite a lot about happiness of the human being... of the individual. How about the happiness of this place we inhabit which we so recklessly exploit and ruin day by day? We all need to think about how to do our bit for environmental protection (and continuously improve) and we need to start now, if we haven't done so already. But I won't be writing here about this. I would rather show. The following is a talk by Sylvia Earle -- TED prize winner.

In addition, I would like to draw your attention to a recent initiative by TED to make TED talks available to the whole world by translating them to different languages. Anybody who wishes so can get involved and translate. All you need to do is sign up with TED and with dotSUB. You could find out more information on TED Blog.

On emotional intelligence and the road to happiness. There is no road, really...

2009-02-21T14:52:00.005Z

Some posts ago and many more days ago, in one of my posts on happiness I talked briefly about Matthieu Ricard and posted his TED talk. I recently stumbled upon another talk which was on the same day as Mr. Ricard gave his presentation. The talk is by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor. He talks about happiness (actually so far I have seen two of his TED talks on happiness, both great talks, which I have posted below). And at some point Mr. Gilbert said something like:

With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, but a shopping mall full of zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable because they don't want stuff enough.

How nicely said and how true. I have for quite some time observed people around me (and myself) and noticed that wanting things is O.K. but there is a fine boundary which when crossed starts making things a bit ugly. Why should wanting something and trying to get it lead to suffering of any sort and kind? Shouldn't the pursuit of our dreams and desires be a happy place on its own, not just a means to an end? A questionable end, mind you. In this regard the title of this post says, there's no road, really. Because I believe that happiness should be with us when we follow our desires, when we get what we want and when we don't. Seems like a difficult task... when I imagine working towards something and working really hard and at the end not getting whatever it is I worked towards. How can I be happy and not frustrated or disappointed? I guess that's what emotional intelligence should teach us. There is no road to happiness, as happiness just is. In any way, troubles usually seem more minor after we have gotten some distance. Then it would be a great and healthy approach to keep our cool about problems even before we have got the distance.

To point out a few other ideas from Mr. Gilbert's talks, which I firmly believe in: Wanting things at all costs makes people unhappy and causes suffering. Obtaining things at all costs makes people just lose face. Actually, Mr. Gilbert showed this quote, which is right on the spot:

"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another... some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice."

Adam Smith
"Turgid Truth", Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759

Is it possible that the artists I talked about in my last post just want it too badly? Whatever "it" might stand for... maybe living up to expectations (theirs or someone else's) or the lost inspiration. Whenever the ego is at stake, things tend to get serious, maybe too serious. Not surprisingly, one of the first things that the book "Happiness: a guide to developing life's most important skill" by Matthieu Ricard talks about is letting go of the ego. Seems to me that could be the very key to a happy artist... not to get a genie, but to forget about their ego.

And these are the two talks by Dan Gilbert I referred to in this post for you to enjoy:

By the way, I mentioned emotional intelligence only once and this post is under the title of emotional intelligence but I never really defined what emotional intelligence means, only sort of hinted the meaning by titling the post. For the sake of completeness and in case you are wondering, this is the Wikipedia entry:

"Emotional Intelligence (EI), often measured as an Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ), describes a concept that involves the ability, capacity, skill or (in the case of the trait EI model) a self-perceived ability, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. "

Now there is something which slightly bothers me about this definition (especially managing emotions of groups) so I checked out a few more web pages in search of something that better suits my understanding. This is what I found:

"Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought."

"We define EI as the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth (p. 197 of this article)."

"Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them. (p. 267 of this article)"

On the emotional risks of creativity.

2009-02-20T14:03:00.004Z

Do you think that being creative is emotionally risky? I mean, do you think that leading a life throughout which you devote yourself to creative work (pottery, art, anything that is conceived in your own mind, from start to finish) puts you in a risk somehow?

I am not sure what I think yet, but let's start anyway, and I hope by the end of this post I will figure it out.
I watched this TED talk, which basically addresses the idea that being creative puts enormous pressure and responsibility on the fragile human psyche. This enormous pressure and responsibility is to blame for the death record of writers and painters in the 20th century. Ms Gilbert (the person who gave the TED talk) suggests that in order to relieve the burden, people may think of a divine power of a sort (a genie), which is there to share the responsibility of the success as well as of the failure of the creative attempt. If one writes a book which is awfully successful then they know they are just some kind of a tool and if the next book is a failure, well, then it's not their fault.

I found the talk quite interesting and intriguing. It made me think. So, if I could just break down the subject matter: the problem is that creative people are burdened by their success or/and failure and the solution is to find a getaway for the mind in a genie. These are the parts of the talk that made an impression on me:

"Aren't you afraid that you are never going to be able to top that?"
"Is it rational, is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they are put in this earth to do?"
"I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct"
"Emotional risks of creativity"
"Couldn't take all the credit for it"
"Too much responsibility"

Alright... so is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong here? First of all, why should anybody really be expected to be afraid? I mean, what does it mean to be expected to be afraid? Literally, of course, it is clear. Put practically, when I think about expectations, only bad things come to mind. And when I think about the great creative minds of our time suffering because they did not on time realise to think about the genie... wow, even worse things come to mind. Worse things about our society, I mean. What does it mean for our society today if people really need getaways for their minds in order to function without wanting to kill themselves?

I think that once the problem has been realised, i.e. creative people are put under too much pressure, we should rather address the question of why. And after that has been answered, only then can we talk about what the solution is. So why are creative people put under too much pressure? I think the key here is expectations. Because society expects from them. Society expects that their next artwork is success, or that their next artwork is better than the previous one, or that the artist is afraid because the artwork is not up to the standard they've already set. Even if the person is not famous yet, they know how they will be seen through the collective eyes of society. From that virtual point the person is under the pressure of expectations. I think even that the notion of expectation is so deeply rooted into our minds that mostly we don't even realise that this is why we are unhappy (or suicidal). And I don't even think it's just about creative people. But I won't go there now. So.. expectations. Let's say I want to (or need to) do something. But I am expected to do something else. Which way am I supposed to go? This conflict can be pretty disastrous and pretty harsh on the mind (as well as simple as a non-conflict). Why do we need it? Why do we burden others with our expectations? Can't we just not expect? Just think about your daily life and about how often there are conflict situations which are caused by expectations... expectations not met, expectations too harsh, expectations which are purely wrong and unfair...

I think it is up to us. Change the world by changing yourself. If you stop burdening others (and yourself) with your expectations and if you stop taking others' expectations seriously but instead just follow your heart and mind. I dare you not to seek getaways in genies. I dare you to take responsibility for your own actions. I dare you to stop expecting and take things as they are. And they are not that serious.

And finally, I saw this talk by chance and I found it quite relates to the topic of this post and I thought, this is a lady who takes full responsibility for her artwork and does not take it as seriously as to need a getaway:

On contradictions that complement each other.

2008-12-11T09:08:00.013Z

If you checked out the two talks I posted one post ago, then your response could have been, "Could this be more ambiguous?" Or maybe not and I watch too much Friends. Anyway, the post I am referring to is meant to be ambiguous.

The gist of the first talks is: there is this guy who figured out that there is no one single favourite spaghetti flavour. Instead, there are clusters of people who tend to like one flavour or another. This guy made people happy, because people were able to identify and consume their favourite sauce. Or rather, because they were able to exercise their freedom of choice. Yey!

The essence of the second talk is that there is way too much choice about everything. "Is this good news or bad news?" "-Yes."
Yes, because choice brings individual freedom and individual freedom maximises our ability to act on our own. Good stuff, no?
And yes again, because people get frustrated and unhappy because there is so much choice that decision-making becomes hard.

So don't the ideas of the two talks contradict each other? On the one hand choice=happiness and on the other hand, choice=unhappiness.

The way I see it, the two ideas actually complement each other. If we analyse the decision-making process, we could point out the following:

Let's say that there is a choice to be made. You do not have the slightest idea about your preferences, i.e. you lack them. At the same time you see that you have unperceivable amount of options. At this point you might get frustrated. Wouldn't it be much much easier if there was just this one option, hence obviating the need for you to decide? But hold on. If you really care about this choice that needs to be made, you may exploit all the freedom this world has granted you and research your options.
This brings us to the happiness brought about by the ideas discussed in the first talk. You decide what you want and you go ahead and dig in and find it, among all the stuff that the modern world has to offer. Yey! To avoid the frustration discussed in the second talk, you really need to first know (i.e. find out) what it is that you want and then get it. Otherwise you will end up wondering if you could have made a better pick. Which is bad, because then the opportunity cost will be subtracted from your overall joy and your happiness will go into the negative zone. And who would want that?
Alternatively, maybe you don't care too much about this choice that you have to make. In this case, you just make a pick at random, sort of .. or a simple educated guess. And in this case you know that your pick is not important so you would not be prompted to enter a discussion with yourself (or with others) whether you made the right decision, right? So, no frustration brought about by the immense freedom should be exhibited.

What I am saying is that I tend to disagree with some of the ideas presented in the second talk. Freedom and choice are a good thing. I have already sort of talked about this in a previous post of mine. The frustration that the second talk discusses is, in my opinion, due to the fact that people are used to a different sort of world, where choice is not that abundant. The necessary adjustment we need to make is to catch up with the world and with the freedom we are offered and adjust our decision-making process accordingly. We absolutely cannot invest time in all the decisions we need to make. Some need to be quick and some need to be well researched. It is a conscious choice to pick which one is which. And it is not healthy to wonder whether we made the best choice post-factum. Should we somehow discover that our choice wasn't optimum, we just need to equip ourselves with a useful lesson learnt and go on.

For Linux fans: Tux fun.

2008-12-06T23:51:00.003Z

Tux

In light of my recently rediscovered inclination to be a fan of Linux, I played around with Inkscape, an .svg image of Tux I found here, and some logos of popular software I found on the web to create a few application icons. Feel free to download and use them if you like :)

On sauce. And choice. And happiness?

2008-12-06T14:07:00.005Z

How do you like your spaghetti sauce?

Would you care to make a choice?

Sometimes. When it matters. The rest is vanity. (imho)

On ducks. Or not so much.

2008-12-05T16:58:00.004Z

This post is in the spirit of quote of the [choose your time unit here]. Today I came across this post on Seth's Blog and I liked it, in particular this sentence:

"Getting your ducks in a row is not nearly as powerful as actually doing something with your duck."

How nicely put.

On something new.

2008-12-04T15:51:00.006Z

A round of applause for Motorola and Kodak, who co-created something new and original -- a phonecamera, the Motorola/Kodak Zine ZN5. This new gadget boasts a full featured phone as well as a full featured camera with loads of tweakable options. I'm saying it's something new, because usually so far the market has been full of cameraphones with cool phones and not so cool cameras, at least not as cool as the real thing. Anyhow, for a review of the Motorola/Kodak Zine ZN5, check out this Herald article. And for a quick demo, check out the Youtube video below. Looks impressive to me, however, I must admit that I am biased being a Motorola fan as well as a Kodak fan :)

On complexity and simplicity. The versus bit.

2008-11-28T20:59:00.008Z

Mr Maeda nicely pointed out in his TED talk that humans love complexity, but they also cherish simplicity. This got me curious to try and define (to any possible extend) when we tend towards one or the other.

So let's start from complexity. Humans appreciate complex scenery, when the colours nicely blend together, to form a phenomenon of a sort. For example, the picture below (courtesy of The Big Picture) -- of Nacreous clouds near McMurdo, Ross Island, Antarctica on August 28, 2004 -- shows the power of nature in creating amazing, terrific, breathtaking landscapes. What we see here is by no means simple and we are speechless before this setting.

However, still if we see a clear blue sky in the morning, we can admire its beauty as well. It might not have the complexity of the colour combinations we see above, but we might still find the clear blue sky breathtaking. I think that we are fascinated by nature and its creations -- be it animals, little bugs, the shapes of clouds, or the colour of the sunset. We appreciate nature. We do not strive to understand exactly how the colours are formed, what sort of physical reactions are behind them, etc. We can appreciate the beauty without necessarily having a scientific understanding but by just looking and absorbing.

When talking about human creation, however, the story is slightly different, I feel. We need to differentiate between human creations generally classified as a type of art and as a type of non-art. In other words, if the public can appreciate a human creation by using sensual information then that's art. Like paintings, poems, stories, movies, theatre plays, etc. For the non-art creations we can talk about science. Now, I don't mean to start a debate whether science is art or not... Just bear with my vague definitions here :) So, in the scientific/technological world, if someone creates something amazingly complex, they most probably will be labelled as quite smart/geeky. And most probably a limited number of other people (i.e. the specialists in the field) will be able to understand and appreciate the nitty-gritty part of the complex creation in all its glory. However, generally speaking, a sophisticated concept can be broken down into its composite parts and each composite part can be made analogous to something that the general public can easily grasp such that the whole convoluted bit is also made graspable. OK, so why is that appreciated more than the convoluted bit? Well, I guess because once the complex concept is made understandable, people can actually say "Wow!" (can be quite rewarding sometimes) and can somehow distantly relate to whatever the invention is.

So, I think that part of the art of creating something really convoluted is also making it available for the public to appreciate and make use of and feel comfortable with it. Why is that? In my opinion this holds because it requires the capability to get out of the scientific/technological/specialist world and put oneself in the shoes of someone who does not have a clue about the theories, ideas, etc that one is otherwise used to dealing with every day. This means imagining that one does not have any of the knowledge used in creating the convoluted invention. And then explaining it. Not that I have invented something so complex, but in my short research experience I have discovered that this can actually be a really challenging task. And quite a healthy one too, as it brings a different perspective and an interesting insight on things; it makes one question their methods, assumptions, etc.

A good example of making complex issues understandable that comes to mind is the Financial Crisis 101 whiteboard talk I referred to some time ago. I still need to view it a couple of more times to fully grasp it, but I like the methods used there to bring the point across.

Alright... lots of writing, so what are the conclusions?

When it comes to nature, we tend to appreciate its creations. After all, it wasn't us (humans) who created them.
Talking about human creations: On the one hand, we appreciate the forms of art, because we can see it/feel it/hear it, i.e. experience it, directly. No rocket science to crack there ... no need of a mediator between us and our experience. On the other hand, we appreciate complex technology/science made simple so that we can grasp it a bit and sort of relate to its complexity. Clearly, there's the need for a mediator (the "crazy" dude(ss) who likes digging deep), someone to simplify and clarify, but the reward is us feeling a wee bit more informed and more understanding of the world around us. To us humans that seems quite important.

I need to casually mention at this point that when talking about complexity and simplicity, there is also the issue of consumer electronics. Well, there has been a lot of talk about this side of things already, so I will casually skip it :) Obviously, we as consumers like simple things which work. It's as simple as that. And there have been some companies who have realised this rule already and are therefore doing quite well.

On life and simplicity.

2008-11-22T15:08:00.005Z

The Balm of Simplicity
"Having a simple mind is not the same as being simple-minded. On the contrary, simplicity of mind is reflected in clarity of thought." (page 165)

It's interesting how it can be very hard to make something simple, while making the same thing complex could be much much easier... The above is again a quote from Happiness: A guide to developing life's most important skill. I have mentioned simplicity before (remember the TED talk of David Pogue Simplicity Sells? If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it) and decided to do a little follow up.

Google swiftly (or not, depending on your internet connection) returns 31,300,000 hits on simplicity... the first one is some sort of store (not really of interest here), but the second one catches my attention: John Maeda's Simplicity. And I'm thinking I have heard the name before... so I remembered there was a TED talk I saw some time ago, which was quite cool. The talk is titled Simplicity patterns and I'm sharing it with you below:

On daring and renunciation.

2008-11-20T21:56:00.005Z

I have been faced with some situations recently which teach me to calmly accept that not everything is in my own hands (no matter how hard I try) and that life has its own ways. Weirdly enough, until now I tended to believe otherwise and there was nothing to prove me wrong. The book I keep mentioning in this blog space, Happiness: A guide to developing life's most important skill, offers some valuable insight on this topic:

The Intelligence of Renunciation
"Renunciation is a way of taking one's life in one's own hands, that is, of becoming fed up with being manipulated like a puppet by selfishness, the scramble for power and possessions, and the never-ending quest for pleasure. She who practices genuine renunciation is well informed of all that goes on around her. She does not flee the world because she is unable to control it, but knowing how prejudicial pointless worries are, she has no interest in entertaining them. Her approach is eminently pragmatic. The renunciant shows no weakness, only daring." (page 164)

On Happiness. The meaning.

2008-11-18T18:51:00.003Z

I already referred to Matthieu Ricard in the context of happiness. As a follow up to, I quote a few (inmo beautiful and insightful) snippets from Mr Ricard's book, Happiness: A guide to developing life's most important skill, in order to reflect on the meaning of happiness:

Talking about happiness
"By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it." (page 19)

A way of being
"... it [happiness] is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearance and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things..." (page 23)

Everything you need to be happy
"Happiness is a state of inner fullfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things." (page 31)

On We Feel Fine.

2008-11-14T18:07:00.006Z

After my last post on Bhutan and GNH (Gross National Happiness), I decided to check out TED. There are 19 talks tagged with happiness and one in particular caught my attention: Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories (posted below). I got intrigued by the title and I wondered what the talk is really about. Actually, Mr. Harris demonstrates the really innovative and impressive projects that he has been involved in. One of these projects is called We Feel Fine and it deals with collecting stories of people around the world by scanning blogs for the phrase I feel. Whenever such a phrase is identified, the sentence containing it is collected, together with any associated photos. The data presentation can't escape a comment as it is rather unusual and eye-catching. Quite an interesting coincidence with my last post is that Mr. Harris talks about Bhutan and GNH. In fact, he went to Bhutan to execute a project, where he interviewed people on happiness ... Well, enough said. Happy TEDing :-)

On happiness again. Happiness is gross and national this time.

2008-11-14T14:58:00.003Z

GNH is something like GDP, but not quite. GNH stands for Gross National Happiness and the term was coined by Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972 when he was crowned king of the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. King Wangchuck essentially said that he was more concerned with the growth of GNH than the growth of GDP. His concern is not surprising, as Bhutan is officially a Buddhist country. According to Buddhism, the pursuit of happiness is (a central part of) life. In this way, the ideology of GNH bridges the values of the country with its official philosophy. Bottom line: the focus is not on money, but on self-cultivation. The four pillars of GNH are:

promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development
preservation and promotion of cultural values
pristine natural environment
establishment of good governance in the form of democracy

An interesting fact is that in a research done in 2007, Bhutan ranked 8th out of 178 countries on a measure called subjective well-being (more about subjective well-being can be found here). Even more interestingly, Bhutan was the only country with a low GDP (below 3 billion USD) in the top 20.

While the rest of the world had their eyes on the US and the president elections, Bhutan chose their new country leader as well, but did so by crowning a new king. I found out about this from The Big Picture, where one can see really cool pictures from the event (a teaser shown below).

I got curious because the environment looks very familiar to me and I was wondering where I have seen this scenery before. And I remembered :-) It was in the movie Marco Polo (1982) on which I had post recently. The movie wasn't filmed in Bhutan though. The filming locations are: Beijing, Italy, Mongolia, and Morocco. Seems like Bhutan is doing quite well on pillars 2 and 3.

PS: The concept of GNH has apparently spurred interest in the rest of the world and there have been conferences and committees to try and implement a well-being measure in today's country prosperity evaluation tools. Haven't heard or read anything going on in this direction recently, but I do hope the right folks are working on it.

Post history:

Pictures from the coronation of Bhutan's new king
The Big Picture refers to gross national happiness. Ask GOG about "gross national happiness" (80.5 thousand hits)
Attention caught by the Wikipedia entry and the Time article
GOG suggests there's also GIH? This article gives more clues on GNH
Time article refers to King Singye Wangchuck. Wikipedia gives more information on him.
Resemblance between scenery from the Marco Polo movie and the pictures postedonThe Big Picture. IMDb has information on the filming locations for Marco Polo.

Simply on happiness.

2008-11-10T20:29:00.007Z

Are you happy? (By the way, GOG (good old Google) returned 2.5 mio hits on "Are you happy".)

Seems like a tough question? Are you able to give a simple yes/no answer? Most probably not. What if I asked "Are you unhappy?" Could you then give an yes/no answer? I would guess so.

In fact, "Are you happy?" is one of the toughest questions one could ask ... and might not even get an answer. The Guardian has an article series titled "Are you happy?" where "Guardian readers answer the eternal question". So I wonder, why is this the eternal question? Why is happiness so hard to attain? Why does it seem it's so easy to get sad, depressed, or simply feel bad?
So I wonder ... I wonder and my thoughts take me away to the Stanford prison experiment. What this experiment essentially shows is that you can have people with no history of misconduct whatsoever who under bad circumstances turn into cruel creatures. That's the essence. In case you haven't heard about the experiment, check it out. It's quite an eye-opener. There's also some multimedia on it.

What happens if we were to transfer the conclusion from the experiment to the discussion at hand: Why is it easier to be sad, or rather, be not happy than happy? Maybe it could be far fetched, but my gut feeling tells me it has to do with the world we live in, rather than some disposition we have. Our environment has changed enormously. Life is getting more and more sophisticated every day: we need to choose a school, choose a calculator, choose a mobile phone brand and model, and choose, choose and keep choosing all the time, because there's so much choice about every simple thing. And it takes effort. If we strive to make it all right, it takes a lot of research too. Have you seen the TED talk The paradox of choice? The freedom to choose doesn't provoke as much delight as it can be puzzling and frustrating. In the end, all that has been invented so that life is easier on us, in a way also makes life tougher on us. And of course, not to mention the pressure for achieving and success. In my opinion all this has much to do with why it seems so hard to reach happiness. We single-handedly give ourselves a hard time. And the ironic part is that we do it with the goal to improve our lives.

I have noticed a trend. People who are happy tend to be elevated above all that is from this world and seem to be following a back-to-nature, back-to-basics approach. They strive to keep things simple. Some might say they are out of touch with the vanity of today. I add, we are out of touch... with ourselves. I mentioned simplicity and get reminded about the talk Simplicity sells. It's not surprising [that simplicity sells], right, because people have started looking to have things easy on themselves given all this choice around. And I remember about this joke from The paradox of choice, about a woman at a phone shop who asks, "Can I get a cell phone that doesn't do too much"? That is kind of hard to get nowadays, isn't it. But I deviate. So, there are these few people who are fans of the back-to-nature life style and they write books and give talks at seminars on how to be happy. Isn't this a wee bit strange? I mean, do you think it's alright that people have forgotten how to be happy and they need to be lectured on that? Something worth thinking about, imho.

And in case you have embarked on a journey in search of happiness, I recommend looking into Matthieu Ricard. He has given a talk at TED (posted below), titled Habits of happiness and authored a book as well, "Happiness: a guide to developing life's most important skill".

On the elections, pitbulls, and interviews.

2008-11-08T09:50:00.006Z

This is history in the making. We just witnessed president elections to remember, not only because of Barack Obama's improbable road to the White House, but also because of John McCain's choice of running mate. Rumour has it Mr McCain said Mrs Palin was "more trouble than a pitbull". (At this point my automatic spell checker prompts me to replace pitbull with one of the following: pit bull, pitiful, pitfall, pitiable, politburo. Politburo sounds fancy, but nope, that's not the word I'm looking for. Unconcerned, I decide to stick with pitbull.) You might ask (because I sure did), what made Sarah Palin so troublesome? I mean, think about, a pitbull is no joke to handle (if you are not sure about it, check out a pitbull demo). You might find some of the answers here (because I sure did):

My previous post has part of the Katie Couric interview referred to in the above snippet, notwithstanding here come some more precious moments...

(At this point I am thinking I should start having an anti-leadership post label as well.)

Post history: as I believe in source recognition, here comes a brief outline of how I came across the above information

Michael Tomasky's blog
which referred to Americablog
which referred to Katie Couric's interview available on YouTube
a Guardina article crosses to my mind, which mentioned that John McCain found Sarah Palin quite troublesome
my memory tells me I read somewhere about Barack Obama's improbable road to the White House but I cannot remember when/where; GOG (good old Google) comes to the rescue so I find an article on Chicagotribune.com; doesn't look like this is the one, but it serves the desired purpose
so I've finished my post, and I'm wondering about pitbulls; I check out YoutTube and I find this; looks pretty troublesome to me

On a topic which can't escape a comment. Let's make a list again.

2008-11-05T20:07:00.006Z

In light of the past US elections and in light of my desire to itemise recently, here comes another list. While getting my daily guardian-reading portion, I came across an interesting blog post, where Oliver Burkeman shares his top 25 election moments list. I will recycle this list and make my own, nominating my top 5 favourite. Here they come.

1. "I know it's a little bit chilly, but I'm fired up"

2. "Yes"

3. "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska"

4. "I'll try to find ya some and I'll bring 'em to ya"

5. Little Piper Palin has other concerns

On sets, lists, other stuff and the Brain.

2008-11-01T20:05:00.006Z

I came across this article which identifies the top 10 skills essential for success and got inspired to think about the skills/qualities I deem of highest importance. Of course, the skill set is highly dependent, if not entirely dependent, on the definition of success. So, for the purposes of this post, I will stick to the following definition: success = achievement of one's own goals. The key words here are own and goals. Having said that, below you can find the top 10 skills (and personal qualities) I consider essential in my life. So, without further ado, here comes The List (subject to updates, should I reconsider):

1. Creativity: thinking outside the box and in different directions

2. Enthusiasm/passion: being enthusiastic and passionate about something in a way that this something keeps you up at night (not all nights though ;-))

3. Problem-solving: the ability to logically structure a problem into basic practical sub-problems

4. Positive outlook: that one speaks for itself :-)

5. Communication: the ability to effectively communicate both in writing and in speaking; in fact, this point has loads of sub-points (including being able to trust other and evoking others' trust, seeking to understand others when communicating), so I will even make it a whole other post of its own.

6. Leadership: being able to effectively manage/lead yourself and also others

7. Desire to have an impact: observing the world around, thinking about how things can be improved, and pro-actively following up on your thoughts

8. Balance: having hobbies, interests, etc.

9. Persistence/dedication: trying hard to find what it is that you want and then trying hard to get it... and knowing what to do after that

10. Desire to grow: the desire to continuously develop and grow as a person and as a professional; I think this one should be #1, actually, as it inter-relates with all the other points and brings them on another level..

What is on your list?

By the way, speaking of lists and sets of 10, here you can check out the top 10 TED talks. One of these talks happens to also be among my favourites. It is about the brain and its ways of being. I'm sharing it with you below:

On rope pulling, pizzas, and size. Not necessarily in this order.

2008-10-29T22:47:00.012Z

Many thanks go out to ro-tex who commented on my Memory Spot post and in this way inspired me to do a wee bit of research on optimum team size. If you are curious what do spots of memory have to do with team sizes, check out the above-mentioned post ;)

To start my investigation, I gave Google "optimum team size" and impatiently browsed through the many entries (753, in fact) it cooperatively gave me back. And here is what I found.

Knowledge@Wharton has an article on team size, titled "Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number?", available since June 14, 2006. The article reviews published material on the subject of team size, which I am not going to summarise here, but will give some curious things I came across instead:

The most productive teams are found to have 4.6 members. (I like this result. That's the fun of averages.)
It has been recognised that teams can function better in monitoring individual team members than managers can. (I personally would wave a red flag here. It definitely depends on what kind of monitoring we are talking about. We would want to keep an honest team spirit in the best possible sense, right.)
As team size increases, the tendency to form sub-teams increases. (I would say that if the tasks assigned to the team are diverse, then forming sub-teams is not really expected. On the other hand, grouping of team members may even be necessary/desired in some situations. Good old "it depends" fits nicely here.)
Apparently there is a Mr. Ringelmann who has a famous study on team functioning: Let's say you assign a number of people to pull on a rope. As you increase the number of people who pull, the total pull force increases, however, the average force applied per person decreases. This is to show that as team size increases, there is more chance for people to put less effort and hide away. (I cannot help but comment here that the study shows what happens when you increase the team size of a team of people all having the same task. However, as intuition tells us, and also Wikipedia, "Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks." Not much subtasking in rope-pulling.)

Now moving on the other interesting article I stumbled upon, which got me curious as it uses a mathematical approach to team size :-) Here is the gist:

As team size increases, the number of communication links among team members increases exponentially, which, the author suggests, increases the probability of erroneous links as well; the author also says that this is just to raise caution, not to discourage people from forming teams the size of their liking. (By the way, the result is obtained using combinatorics, i.e. the n-choose-m kind of stuff.)
Toyota has an approach called "Big Room", which serves to integrate team members working on the development of a given product. In essence, the idea is to have a large office, where all team members work (no cubicles, walls, etc) and also to have displays around the desks, where the progress reports/data are posted. So, should someone need an update, all they need to do is walk around. The need for Emails, phone calls, etc is completely obviated. (I love this approach. More info can be found here.)
No team should be larger than what 2 pizzas can feed. This is the view of Jeff Bezos, founder, president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Amazon. (In theory though, it depends on how much the team members eat, i.e. the team size can be anything between 1 and 24, let's say.)

The 2 pizzas idea of Jeff Bezos got me intrigued and I decided to check out whether he has spoken at TED. He has, not that this came as a surprise. I've posted the talk below, it's quite gripping. Even though Mr Bezos spoke in February 2003, the points he makes and his outlook for the future are very much valid today. My favourite bit: when electricity started making its way into homes there was an advert that goes "Use your electricity for more than light."

Following up...

2008-10-27T22:44:00.003Z

on the post What would you do...

If I were to become president, I would to exactly two things:

Before: Get the most capable and diverse team together. Hire the best consultants to help me: find out what the problems in the country are, from the biggest and most painful, to the smallest one; figure out how to break these problems down and structure them into solvable bits; and how to go about solving them. I am aware that the president has a team, but I'm not sure if they are hard-core consultants, trained at solving problems...

After: Face the challenge. Start solving. Get my hands dirty.

Simple, right? (Maybe even naive..) The devil, as usual, is in the details.

Eight centuries later

2008-10-26T11:59:00.003Z

I saw the movie Marco Polo recently, which tells the adventurer's story starting from his birth and follows him around during his travels. I was quite impressed by what Marco Polo lived through, by his curiosity, eagerness to find out more about different people's ways of being. Also, while watching the movie, I couldn't help making a comparison between people during his time and people today:

People back then (13th century) had no way of knowing how life looks like outside of their village or town. Everything was based on stories of "adventurers" who dared to travel around the world and who were lucky enough to maybe come back one day and share their experience. (I am saying lucky, because it was very possible to get amidst a battle, a plague, or just get caught by an illness and perish on your way.) Life was so simple, and yet so complicated. Everything required much effort, even mundane things as washing your clothes, or having water to take a shower. Eight centuries later and today, ah.. today everything is so different. And yet, in some places of the world not at all different.

There were what we would call "open-minded" people back then. People, who realised that there should be bridges built between nations, transfer of knowledge, acceptance, tolerance. These were forward-looking people during those days. Today, there is still division among people; there is still fear of what is different and what cannot be understood. And the people who see the need to build bridges between nations, who advocate for understanding, are also perceived as forward-looking today. Eight centuries later and what was forward then is forward today.

War was frowned upon back then. It was seen as the necessary evil. Just as it is frowned upon today. Back then there were many many wars. Today, maybe not so many, but too many still.

And on a more positive note, enthusiasm, passion, curiosity, seeking to understand were all virtues back then. And they are virtues today as well.

My point is that as people we haven't changed much for the past eight centuries. I'm not even sure if we are meant to change, in the sense that the core human understanding of good and bad seems eternal. Actually, the point that struck me the most is #2, as I would have expected to have what was forward-looking during the 13th century, to be the norm today. Maybe that would have had quite an impact on the rest of the points (except for the last one, which is in a different dimension).
And, of course, the above is not meant to diminish the value of all that people have achieved for these eight centuries, which is tremendous.

As a side note, I really recommend the movie Marco Polo (1982, it's the first movie made about Mr. Polo). It is very nicely done (IMDb rating 7.9 for those who take note of this rating), and the music is by Ennio Morricone (check out part of the soundtrack below, it's amazing! my favourite part is around 1:50 min). A heads up: the movie is quite long, about 450 min.

What would you do ..

2008-10-25T12:20:00.004+01:00

if you became president?
I ask you this question in light of the ongoing US elections ... and because I think it is a good question to think about. It may guide us to inevitably also think of the question how one would go about achieving what one wants to achieve, which to me is ever more fascinating, as it offers the real challenges usually.

And since this is a tough question, Betty Boop comes to the rescue. Check out her presidential campaign which I came across while reading one of Agnes Poirier's comments on guardian.co.uk.

Bloodhound SSC

2008-10-23T12:22:00.007+01:00

Bloodhound SSC? What is that? A mutated dog breed? -- No, it's not a dog.
A new band? -- Naah, not that either.
Then what is it?

Bloodhound SSC is a car in the making named after the British cold war supersonic air defence missiles. It is designed to break the world land speed record and even outrun a Magnum .375 bullet. Got you curious? Check out this Guardian article, which also features a video of the speedy runner.

How TEDsters define success

2008-10-21T09:23:00.008+01:00

Richard St. John gives an entertaining 3-minute TED talk, sharing his findings on what leads to success according to his fellow TEDsters. My personal favourite is persist through failure and CRAP (CRAP= Criticism, Rejection, Assholes, and Pressure). Enough said, enjoy the talk :)

Cotton, the white stripes, and life

2008-10-19T21:07:00.011+01:00

I came across the above image whilst browsing The Big Picture, a site I learnt about from one of the interesting blogs I'm keeping an eye on, John's Blog. I must say that I second John's recommendation -- The Big Picture has truly amazing photos.

The above picture shows raw cotton (original picture caption: "A worker stacks cotton at a cotton purchase station in Manas county, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region October 11, 2008. Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the largest cotton producing region in China, plans to expand wheat and corn planting areas while cutting down cotton sown areas, Xinhua News Agency said. (REUTERS/China Daily) #") ... I like the picture. A lot. It reminds me of the raw materials. All consumer goods were raw materials at some point and it seems to me that often people forget where things came from and forget about the significant efforts necessary to bring a good to the shelf.

Thinking about people forgetting the origins of things made me recollect a song by The White Stripes called "Little Room". It's a very short song, but says a lot. The lyrics go as follows:

Well you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it's really good
you're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room

It is worth remembering about the raw materials once in a while, about the starting points. Reflecting on these things makes us appreciate where we are and how we reached there, which enables us to make a down-to-earth decision about where to go next. One might go as far as saying that from time to time remembering where we started from is a compass of a sort, keeping us on the right track.

How did you get started?

Which reminds me of my philosophy teacher in high school, Vasya Ilieva, and her attitude towards us students comparing our grades. After every test, we would ask one another, "How much did you get?" Having noticed that, she told us that we should not compare grades among ourselves. We should compare only with ourselves. If you got a 2 last time, but this time you get a 4, well done! Don't be discouraged by someone who got a 6. (Bulgarian grades go from 2 to 6, 2 being the lowest.) Just keep working and improving your own performance. Competing with yourself is the hardest because you have to set your limits. If you set your limits high enough, being the best is a consequence, but it is not an aim in itself. The aim is to be the best you can be. A life-long lesson I truly cherish.

Too many bottles?

2008-10-16T15:16:00.004+01:00

Are you wondering what to do with them? How about building a bottle house ? No, that is no joke. Apparently, people have started building bottle houses back in the early 20th century. For some more facts and pictures, check this out.

And leadership it is

2008-10-14T01:39:00.020+01:00

I find leadership quite a hot topic. It seems to have an influence on so many things around us, starting from the current crisis (but no, this post is not about the crisis), through what we get offered in the stores every day, to the way we are educated. Every institution, be it physical or virtual, needs to have a leader, right?

In my previous post I mentioned leadership and I also mentioned Stephen Covey. As for me Stephen Covey and leadership are hand-in-hand, I feel he deserves some more credit than a mere by-the-by mentioning. Stephen Covey is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and he also authored Principle Centered Leadership. The first book talks about being your own leader (which is my interpretation, he doesn't put it exactly like this), while the second book talks about being the leader of others; and both books talk about effectiveness in being. Stephen Covey describes himself as "authority on leadership, a family expert, teacher, organizational consultant." To me, he is someone who had a significant impact on my life. I read both of the above mentioned books and I was impressed. I was impressed not by the break-through ideas that he presented there (because there aren't any), but by the common-sense simple ideas. All that he talks about is, in fact, common sense. But the kind of common sense that we take for granted, the kind of common sense that we forgot about or chose to ignore, because it actually requires significant will power to implement. And there he is, graciously reminding us what being effective means, both as your own leader and as the leader of others.

If you get some time on your hands, I strongly recommend those two books. Be proactive, by the way, is the first habit ;)

But I mentioned simplicity once or twice so far, which reminds of ... a TED talk! And being the TED fan that I am, I cannot miss the opportunity to share another of my favourite TED talks, titled Simplicity Sells. Enjoy!

Managing for creativity

2008-10-12T23:58:00.016+01:00

I came across this post on metacool, and I find it worth sharing.

The role of the manager, and of the leader for that matter, has become increasingly discussed and is gradually shifting. The leader is not someone who literally controls his/her people and enforces fear to increase productivity. The leader is someone who enables; enables creativity, enables maturity, enables decision making and standing by one's own work. As the above-mentioned blog post has it, "One does not manage creativity. One manages for creativity."

I quite like that and I think this approach is the way to go. This attitude demonstrates the respect of the leader towards the employee, i.e. the leader recognises that it is the employee's choice to produce high-quality work (which is in the best interest of the leader). As a result of this betokened respect, the employee feels enabled (as opposed to pushed, made, scared, etc) to perform. What better way to trigger creativity? At the end of the day, if you truly enjoyed working on your project and are proud of the final outcome, (speaking generally here) aren't you quite likely to feel good about your next project? Happy employees make for a successful company :-)

In case you are interested in leadership issues, such as what makes an effective leader, Stephen Covey is one author to check out. His ideas go in the same direction as the above.

Memory Spot

2008-10-10T13:44:00.004+01:00

Memory spot is basically a grain-sized chip which can store data and is the newest invention of HP (press release on July 17, 2006). Memory spot's tag line is that it "links the Digital and Physical worlds". In essence, this is a small chip, which can be placed on different objects and be loaded with data about the objects. For example, imagine you go past a poster of the Dark Knight, and let's say you haven't seen it, and you get curious about it. You look for a small spot on the poster with the memory spot logo and you bring your phone near it. In no time a trailer, cinema movie times and you name it all get downloaded to your phone. So you passed by a movie poster and off you go equipped with the information that enables you to decide whether, when, and where to see the movie.
In case you got intrigued, check out HP's press release here.

I first heard about memory spot at a talk at the university. The new technology impressed me, but I got more interested in another aspect of the talk. It was about a change that was recently introduced by the new director of research in the way HP structures its research groups. Instead of developing many ideas at the same time and each idea having a small team working on it, there are now fewer ideas worked on but larger teams are involved in each. And it definitely makes sense, right. If you want to make a difference, i.e. as a research company, if you want to create a break-through idea, chances are that you have higher probability of doing so if there is more brain power. So you can either hire more people (but this requires more financial resources), or decrease number of projects, therefore increasing team size. Of course, the relationship between valuable productivity and number of brains involved is not linear, but you get my point :-)

Mobile battle

2008-10-09T11:36:00.010+01:00

Nokia, Google, and BlackBerry roll up their sleeves to challenge each other and Apple.

Here you can check out a demo for the Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic. Seems like the phone looks and behaves like the iPhone. Perhaps the only news is that it comes with a year's subscription to unlimited music download and you can choose from more than 5m tracks.

The BlackBerry Storm introduction video can be seen here. The Storm seems to have everyting one would expect in the iPhone world, and also a couple of extras: it brags a touchscreen keypad, which has the feature of slightly vibrating when you press a key, which serves as a physical click. In addition, a Storm-specific feature is the ability to highlight text. This can be done by putting two fingers on the screen: one at the start of the text and one at the end.

Google's G1 phone also adds on a bit to the standard set by the iPhone. G1 has a sliding keypad and, in addition, has cool navigation features. You can check out a demo here. It seems though that, impressive as it looks, the G1 has bizzare limitations, such as locking you to only one Gmail account, incapability to synchronise with Microsoft Outlook, and others.

In case you are interested in how Nokia 580 XpressMusic, Google's G1, Apple's iPhone, and the Blackberry Storm compare against each other in terms of standby time, etc, then that's the site to check out.

Financial Crisis 101

2008-10-06T17:30:00.004+01:00

Thanks to Garr Reynolds for sharing an interesting whiteboard presentation which throws some light on the current financial crisis situation. Check it out here.

PIMRC 2008

2008-10-05T05:24:00.015+01:00

I've been meaning to write about this for quite some time, but never got around to do it ...
Remember, I was writing about the trip to Cannes in relation to buying a new camera? So PIMRC 2008 was there this year, in good old Cannes, France. And in case you missed out on PIMRC, it is International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications... or a gathering of people who are interested in/passionate about/working on wireless comms issues.

This is the second conference I have attended. The first one was VTC (Vehicular Technology Conference) back in the fall of 2006, when I was young and green in the field, so I did not fully realise/appreciate the opportunity I had, to be among so many knowledgeable people. In this way, equipped with the understanding that I missed on something before, now I was all ready to embrace my opportunity of attending a big international conference.

Things I liked:

The very lively and friendly atmosphere, where people can get together and talk.
Of course, the setting was amazing. Cannes, being a small city, made the atmosphere of so many people coming from all over the world cozy and easy-going.
The presence of such a large number of students was a good sign.
Making friends and finding people who are thinking in a similar direction as I am. The latter has been rather uncommon recently, so the change was welcome.
Finding out about real-world wireless problems/issues from the very people who are facing these problems/issues (i.e. representatives from Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile).

Things I did not like:

There is a single item in this bullet list, and that would be -- the service at the official PIMRC venue. The waiters were very rude and they treated the requests of the guests as a burden. Actually, not only the requests, but their own job seemed like a burden and it looked like those guys and girls were not happy.

Things I learnt (a few of the ...):

It is never a bad idea to make a good presentation, meaning, a nice set of slides, to complement a knowledgeable talk. There were quite a few presenters who did an amazing job in the talking part of giving a talk, but performed quite poorly on the slides part. In case you would like to learn more about making good slides and giving presentations in general, check out Presentation Zen (listed in my blog list on the right).
The next big thing in the mobile services is video on demand (youtube-like). (According to Vivek Badrinath, CTO FT/Orange, France)
The user demand on data rate increases as the screen size increases. (According to Vivek Badrinath, CTO FT/Orange, France)
Main obstacles for cellular voice and data services: 1) throughput, interference, etc; 2) mobility; 3) battery life. (According to David Goodman, Polytech University, USA) Interestingly enough, the last issue seems to be an obstacle even for today's 3G -- e.g. here you can read an advice on how to extend your iPhone's 3G battery life and that is, surprise surprise, by switching off 3G.
The management of quality of service issues, i.e. user experience, will take on a new direction. The idea is to have differentiated pricing for different user experience levels (bottom lined to data rates) which can be controlled at the mobile terminal. (According to Joachim Horn, CTO, T-Mobile AG & Co, Germany)
The wireless service providers (like Orange, Vodafone, etc) have connectivity-only users, which use USB dongles to connect to the Internet. These users make up around 1% of the total user population, however, they generate about 70% to 80% of the total traffic. This high asymmetry might soon result in overload situations as traffic demands increase even further. (According to Vicente San Miguel, CTO Telefonica, Spain)
There are two big players in the field of next-generation wireless cellular -- LTE (long term evolution) and WiMAX (worldwide interoperability for microwave access). The first is backed by the 3GPP (3rd generation partnership project) group hence is a continuation of GSM and 3GSM. The second is Intel-backed and is hence a new player, trying to break through. There was a 1-1 panel with panelists Ze'ev Roth, CTO, Alvarion, Isreal on behalf of WiMAX and Rémi Thomas, Director NGMN, FT/Orange, France on behalf of LTE. They discussed the advantages of the two technologies and each tried to prove that "his" technology was better and thus to be chosen as the next-gen technology. However, I did not hear anything which would make me choose LTE over WiMAX or the other way around. If anything, I would go for LTE, as it has the advantage of legacy. Mr Roth claimed that producing WiMAX chips was cheaper, but he could not back the claim, so overall bringing up the chip price issue appeared as a disadvantage. And in this way, after an hour or so of talking, the 1-1 panel ended with a result of 50-50 ... and we are where we started. Lesson learnt: when participating into such a debate, which involves comparison, always prepare information on the comparison and be ready to answer the question "How is whatever you represent better/more advantageous?" and be prepared to back the answer with hard ("citeable") proof.
Apparently, the major cost driver in wireless networks is the cell cites, which makes about 60%-70% of the cost. (According to Joachim Horn, CTO, T-Mobile AG & Co, Germany)
Femto-cells appeared to be a big buzz word. These are office areas (or the like) which are provided wireless connectivity via small base stations. In the words of the vendor, this is a way to improve coverage and at the same time off-load cite cost to the consumer. (According to Vivek Badrinath, CTO FT/Orange, France)
Most importantly, I learnt that when organising such a conference, I would go about it in a different way. First of all, panel sessions were great. I think they are most enlightening, as they give the opportunity for debate and interaction between panellists and the audience. So, having those is definitely very useful and to be encouraged. Second, I would change the ratio of talks vs poster presentations in favour of the latter. Here I should mention that if a paper is accepted for publication in the conference proceedings, it gets presented at the conference either in the form of a talk (which lasts for 20 min, 15 min talk + 5 min questions) or a poster. I would actually only schedule talks for the few invited papers (where authors were asked to write a paper) and have all the rest of the papers presented with posters, as they allow for a more interactive and relaxed discussion between the presenter and the interested audience. That's all imho, of course.

Spreading on...

2008-10-05T05:07:00.001+01:00

http://www.xdrtb.org/

Cruise. Kidman. Kubrick. A 9-year old movie revisited.

2008-10-05T04:17:00.007+01:00

I had seen Eyes Wide Shut once until a few days ago and not remembering much (oh well, to be honest, I didn't remember anything so was rather clueless), I saw it once again. It was quite an interesting experience. I guess I wouldn't be able to tell that the movie was 9 years old (release date Sept 10, 1999), if it weren't for the soundtrack which blatantly gave it away.

Interestingly enough, after the end of the movie I wasn't sure what the movie was about. Then I felt it was a mid-life love/marriage crisis movie ... one can even go as long as calling it, a romantic comedy. Only that it's not your average romantic comedy. It's Cruise. Kidman. Kubrick. It's like jackfruit, which I learnt recently about. Jackfruit is a vegetable, but when you cook it, it tastes like meat (or so one of my Nepalese colleagues tells me). To finish my analogy here, I felt that Eyes Wide Shut tasted like a thriller/drama, but it was actually pertaining to the group of romantic comedies. One of those you cannot laugh with, but laught at, after they are over. Like those difficult moments in life when you can laugh at yourself after the moment is passed, but it's hard to laugh with. Some people can do that, some people can laugh with themselves at themselves even in the hard moment itself. Respect. It's a divergence, but I try not to let a moment of respecting slip away...

Eyes Wide Shut is in fact identified as Drama/Myster/Thriller on IMDb. User rating, agian on IMDb, is 7.1/10 with little over 73.5 thousand votes. The Dark Knight. Release date July 24, 2008. Action/Crime/Thriller. 9.1/10 with over 284.5 thousand votes. Again, information courtesy of IMDb. People don't like jackfruit, it seems?

Wondering how to insert a footnote without a marker when using Latex?

2008-09-22T22:24:00.008+01:00

I know that most of you have answered with an overpowering yes to this one :-)
This one goes to all of you enthusiasts who use Latex.

I was wondering how to insert a footnote without actually getting a marker in the text body, but just the footnote at the bottom of the page. And naturally I checked with all-knowing Google and read about all sorts of weird and roundabout ways to do that. But I wasn't satisfied. These things need to be simple. And with this thought in mind, I started my own quest of collecting the bits and pieces from what I read and using the trial and error approach ... and voila! Finally my efforts were rewarded.

To sum up. In case you would like to have a footnote at the bottom of a page, but you do not want to have a marker in the text body you can use the following simple command:

\footnotetext[0]{Footnote without text}

Happy Latexing :-)

PS: I realised that this works with the article documentclass, but not with report ... and I have not yet tried other classes.

Kodak Easyshare M863

2008-09-12T21:59:00.019+01:00

We needed a new digital camera and going to PIMRC was a good reason to get one, because PIMRC is held in Cannes, France this year and I won't need to advertise Cannes and why having a good camera is absolutely necessary :-)

So I started checking out Argos and Amazon and basically my eye was caught by the 7.0 MP Kodak Easyshare M753, which had a good price at Argos and at the same time was enjoying pretty good reviews at Amazon. Tough luck though, because the object of my desire was out of stock. Rather unfortunate. However, after some more browsing, I came across a better model, the 8.2 MP Kodak Easyshare M863, which also was well spoken of. Luckily, my new pick was available, so I got it immediately. And it has been pretty great. A major advantage for me is the fact that the included battery is rechargeable and it can be recharged via a USB cable. The USB cable connects to either the computer or the mains supply via an adapter (which by the way, has both European and UK "plugs" ... what a relief for someone who has to exist in both worlds ..). The picture quality also seems fine, but I have not yet tested the camera extensively. Below is an example, a panoramic picture taken from our flat (click to enlarge). I like the fact that the panorama mode has overlays, so that you can pretty easily make sure that the separate shots stitch together nicely.

So I've been pretty happy with the new camera, except the fact that in order to transfer pictures from the camera to the computer, one needs to install software. And I'm not just talking about drivers, but a whole full-blown software, which you need to use every time you want to download your pictures. And there is no easy straightforward way to just go and check out which pictures are on the camera and delete them or do whatever .. so it's not that easy to share after all.

Fortunately, there is a very simple (and low-cost) solution to this inconvenience. It is called USB card reader, which basically looks like an USB memory stick, however, you plug your SD card, or whichever card your camera is using. These days there are million-in-one card readers (well not exactly, but large enough number), which work with all sorts of cards. I have laid my eyes on two of these card readers: one made by HAMA (available at Currys) and one made by MIKOMI (available at Argos). Unfortunately, the first one is currently out of stock. Both products have received quite good reviews at Amazon and Ciao (can be found here: HAMA, MIKOMI).

So there is a solution to Kodak's lack of forward thinking but so what ... I don't mean to be judgemental here, but I really don't see what is the point of making downloading pictures so difficult, while calling your product Easyshare. My expectations would be to have a plug-and-play USB cable, which allows you to view your camera as a mass storage device. Easy and simple, simple and easy. Even my old Samsung Digimax 201 camera had that, so it's not something impossible to do. And besides, I don't even see how the way Kodak have approached downloading pictures from the camera in any way improves their revenues ... if that was the point of making the whole transfer thing seem like an ordeal.

But the future is bright :-) and I would like to finish my review of the Kodak M863 on a positive note. And because a picture says more than a 1000 words, let the next 1000+ words speak instead of me...

From "musician doesn't feed a house" to grad schemes

2008-09-11T09:52:00.014+01:00

On the way to the office (I consider myself lucky to take a 40 min walk to and from the office) I was thinking about a recent conversation with my boyfriend and an ex-flatmate of mine. It was about the cool thing that graduate schemes are. The importance of what you are studying becomes less while the passion you do your studying with actually becomes your selling point once it comes to job interviews. This is in huge contrast to what was the perception maybe just a decade ago .. or less actually ... even today still.

Back then a person was not supposed to study something that made them happy and something they felt passionate about, but rather something that was demanded in society ... like law, or medicine, for example. Such a track ensured that a person would not be left without business, i.e. without money. This extreme attitude actually sort of smeared quite a while ago. However, many people still believe that one should find a job in whatever they studied for. Which sounds logical but ... shouldn't people have the freedom to switch careers? What if whatever you found interesting at the age of 18 is no longer so interesting at the age of 25, let's say? Shouldn't we strive to work with passion and not make compromises in this respect?

This thought brings me to Kiyosaky (a businessman aiming at educating people about money), who in one of his books said that the lessons taught to our parents were not valid any more and that we needed different lessons today. The world has changed. He is very much criticised about his writing style (overly repetitious, for example) and I'm not even sure I can go through with reading his book, but on this point I do agree. And very much so.

That is why I am so happy to see so many companies offering graduate programs. What these graduate programs are about is finding talent and training talent. It does not matter what one has studied (of course there are some exceptions, especially in the technical fields), rather it is important that the person is perceived successful, has acquired the necessary transferable skills which are valuable for the job, and is passionate about whatever is that they want to work. And if one is capable and energetic and determined, then learning the art of the job should be easy, right?

The wow effect

2008-09-10T23:34:00.015+01:00

I am a fan of TED. And of their main sponsor, but that's another story ... or blog post for that matter. Back to TED, I generally tend to discriminate on the basis of labels and choose among the ones ranked as the most jaw-dropping or funniest or inspiring. So this post is about sharing my experience and recommending a few of the talks that had the wow effect for me.

This one is about a girl ... and that's as much as I will reveal. Check it out.

This one is really curious to see. It's about 4am.

And this one is called "The paradox of choice". Very elegant, imho.

The start of the beginning

2008-09-10T23:21:00.009+01:00

Hello world!

I have been inspired to start blogging by a blog called metacool.

For quite some time I have been postponing the day of the first post and I am not sure yet where this beginning is going to take me, but I am rather curious to find out. Hopefully this blog will become a regular treat in the blog diet of a lot of people, and I am looking forward to the challenge of blogging.

... and that's the start. See you along the way.