I have started another blog by the name InsightStory. The main theme is sharing insights, mostly in matters related to internet, web, organization development and technology.

I deferred it for quite some time but it was becoming clear that these things didn't mix with my personal blogs and they had to go in a separate bucket.

So, if you have enjoyed reading what I have written so far, you'd most likely enjoy InsightStory even more.

Over to http://insightstory.net

अकेला ही चला था मै राहे मंज़िल मगर
लोग मिलते गये, कारवाँ बनता गया

I don't remember the author name now. It roughly means that if you start alone in your journey, if you stay on course, people will join you.

Today morning over tea, my colleague made an interesting observation about how we acquire skills. He is learning guitar these days (remember rock on?) and he made a remark to the effect that we are the biggest obstacles in our own progress.

How is it? He gave the example of swimming. When you begin to learn swimming, you tend to be quite sincere. So, you put in good amount of "sincere" effort with the "focus on learning". Then one fine day, you find that you are able to swim. May not be as good as you would eventually like to but good enough to give you an ego boost. And there your focus changes from learning to enjoying.

Now you stay at the same level for sometime. Not trying to learn anything new but just doing it the way you are able to do and feeling good about it. After a couple of days, you feel that others around you are far better swimmers and you need to put in more effort to be able to swim better. So, it's time to go back to learning.

However, in this duration (which could be a couple of days or a couple of weeks), you have already developed a style and more importantly, you have got habitual to a specific ego-boost-level. Now, you must throw away the style that you have acquired, come down to ego-level-zero and "focus on learning". When you are changing your style and learning new things, you'll not remain as good a swimmer as you were at least for sometime. This leads to some amount of disappointment (instead of getting better, it's just getting worse!) and doubts (will I ever be able to swim like a fish? I am already losing the flow!!).



Here, you do one of the two things - 1) you quit because you lose interest (I don't want to swim if I can't swim like a fish), or 2) you get into a comfort zone and stay where you are (who wants to swim like a fish anyway? let me swim the way I can).



However, a little bit of persistence, a little bit of acceptance for that time-window when your skill turns south would eventually take you to a new height with new learnings.



So, the curve of skill acquisition is not a straight and upward line. It is rather a line that goes up, flat, down and up again over a period of time.

Then we realized that it's not just about skill acquisition, it's true about any progress whatever the field may be. Look at software development. There is a frequent need to re-architect the software systems to be able to do add some new extra-ordinary features. When a piece of software is re-architected, it may become worse for sometime because it will have new bugs that need to be found and fixed, it would not have carried forward some of the previous features because they won't be relevant when the new features come in. But afterwards, the software product can reach new heights of functionality.

Let's look at a person trying build a professional network. Intially, you don't know anyone. Then you start moving around in one social community and you get to know all the people who are part of that community. Now, to know even more people, you must start visiting some other communities. Which means you wouldn't be able to give as much time to the previous community where you already knew everyone. This will seem to take you a couple of steps backward where you are yet to establish contacts in the new community and are already losing touch with some people in the older community. However, if you persist, after some time-window, you'll have more people in your network than you had previously.

If you are a professional blogger, you already have a steady stream of visitors to your site. If you want to get even more visitors, you'd have to change your coverage, you'd have to change the way you write, you'd have to spend time on marketing your blog which will give you less time to blog and affect the quality of your blog. Regardless of what you do, you'd lose some visitors to your site for sometime. But after a while, once you have got things stable again, you may actually have more visitors than you had previously.

For any progress to be made, some amount of destruction is necessary. The goal is to move forward. The key is to accept the time-window when progress curve heads south. It will not go north otherwise.

As a kid, you just want to grow up, as fast as you can, as much as you can.

As a grown up, you miss those childhood days (especially when you see your little ones having fun)...

Isn't something wrong here?

During my school history lessons, I learnt that India was divided in small parts whose kings used to keep fighting with each other for more territory. That made the country so weak that invaders from outside could conquer the country.

I used to always think how stupid of those kings who were so busy fighting with each other and couldn't see a big picture. Why didn't people of that age resist this kind of foolishness?

And well, after all the stuff about Alexandar, Mahmood Gazhanavi, Moguls, Britishers and other European colonizers has happened, we still have small kings ruling small estates and fighting with each other to increase their territory.

And what are we people doing? Nothing.

करत करत अभ्यास ते, जड़मति होत सुजान,
रसरि आत जात ते, सिल पर पड़त निशान|
 - रहीम

It roughly means -

By practising again and again, even a fool can become intelligent,
Because of the constant pressure of the movement of the rope, even the stone gets its impression.
(In old days, people used to draw water from the well. They would make a pulley of stone and put a rope over that pulley to drop the water. This pulley was made of stone. The second line is in that context).

In short, be persistent and you'd make a difference :)

हजारों ख्वाइशें ऐसी की हर खवाइश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमां, लेकिन फ़िर भी कम निकले.

- Galib

I just felt like adding a couple of strokes to what I had written earlier about Great Man or Zeitgeist.

A couple of days back, a colleague of mine was relating one of the incidence of life to me. In his school days, he participated in a debate whose topic was whether we can have a leader like Mahatama Gandhi today or not. His stand was "NO". His reasoning was that there are still a lot of people like Mahatama Gandhi today. What's not there are the people willing to follow that kind of philosophy. He got that stature because back then, there were people who would follow that kind of philosophy/methodology.

Since, he was not very good at speaking, he didn't win the debate but one of the judge had rated him the highest for his reasoning.

I agree with him. We cannot have Mahatama Gandhi now. To have Mahatama Gandhi, it takes a person like M K Gandhi and a nation like India striving for independence. Even if we have former, we don't have the latter.

I was just reflecting on this and got some more interesting conclusions. There are some people who have intrinsic quality to lead. This is regardless of their ideology/methodology. So, at any given point of time, there are goon leaders, spiritual leaders, economic leaders, social leaders, political leaders etc etc. Who gains prominence depends on the "time" and "place". In a social setup leaning towards anarchy, the goon leaders will tend to rise. Similarly, in a social setup where people are looking for self-actualization, the spiritual leaders will tend to rise.

So, the leaders are always there for everything be it gundagiri or gandhigiri. Who gains prominence depends on where people want to be led to.

It also takes us to another interesting conclusion. It's foolish to say that India doesn't have good leaders or it needs good leaders. On the contrary, Indians need a better sense of direction where they want to be led to. The leaders will automagically emerge.

How the people of such a large nation acquire that sense is a topic worth investigating.

All that I have written so far pales in front the this brilliance. Hats off!

Some gems -

While preparing for a challenge, there is a parallel mental game which we subject ourselves to. While we are engaged in the preparation we start developing the fear of failure syndrome.

Sometime we stretch ourselves, and consciously or unconsciously set the benchmark for us. Since life always do not let us operate in perfect conditions, but in general the expectations do not take into account all these factors. Thus we continuously engage into stretching ourselves.

Thus the some characters in the hierarchy in group, who are supposed to take decisions, starts building the fear failure mania and starts feeding this back to the whole group.

Don't leave a path without concluding it, as situations created by the fickle minded jokers will ask to to dig hundred 10 inch holes to see if there water underground.

put forth your best and don't think about the results too much, because come what may you cannot better your best. Thus you have already contributed for the worst case scenario.