MyTake

One of my students' Facebook status read:  Its often said that nothing fails like success. But I believe nothing is as permanent as failure. Once it gets inside you, it stays there for quite a long time and in this process it destroys everything. I am sure many of us, especially when we pass through the age he is passing, tend to feel this way. Many times we don’t share it with others. Once I saw this post I responded quickly (well within 6 hrs): It depends on the frequency of its occurrence... And one's attitude... Positive people take lesson from that and move forward with caution, care and commitment... Negative people curse it and kill their efforts, enthusiasm and energy. Ultimately choice is with the individual... One must not handover his/her remote to others be it individuals or objects. It did not just end there. It took me back to my own experiences and interactions. It drove me to the lessons that I learnt all the while. It has been really interesting when...

During the monsoon of 2005, I was in Hongkong for an international seminar on Happiness and Public Policy at Lignan University. One of the evenings while we visited IFC mall, a big board displayed in one of the lobbies of the mall caught my attention which read as - Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping. It seemed as if shopping made people happy provided one had money to spend. Elizabeth Dunn of University of British Columbia suggested through research that spending money on others makes us happier than spending for ourselves and further it is the experiences that we pay for adds to our happiness much more than the material things that we buy. Investing in others makes us feel happier and healthier even when it might make us poorer by few bucks. Seminal contribution of Richard Easterlin (Easterlin Paradox) help us understand the relationship between money and happiness much better. Increase in incomes (at national level) does not ...

The other day we were discussing among ourselves the motivation of students to study.  And some of the views of friends were really surprising. One of them said,  'these students are not really students, they are individuals, the class is a group of individuals, not really group of students'.  I thought let me think in my mind what ideally a student is. A student has a drive to learn new things, a student has urge to know more, a student has desire to excel, a student want to compete with others, a student raises questions, a student prepares and participates, a student engages him/herself in studies, etc etc. And then it struck to my mind, if a student is not doing either of this activity, one can not really call a student a student.   This is what gave me questions to raise and solutions to find for the problem that we, the teachers, are facing. Our experiences may not be generalised to all students at all geographies and I also wish that it is proved wro...

His presentation entitled ‘How to be a super achiever’ was simple and direct, interesting for teenagers.  His 6 step model (1. Setting clear goals, 2. Knowing the reason behind the goal/goals. 3.Finding the group. 4. Detailed action plan. 5. Setback dealing mechanism. 6. Faith) for achieving success was quite the same as researched by many academicians, though he made it simple.  He narrated his journey to become best-selling author and emphasized that he is best-selling and may not be best.  It  sets me thinking that the response to market forces has become such that we start thinking more on what sells best and not really what is really best.  May be he is able to relate more to the young Indians and he knows the language of the youth so they are able to connect better with him and he knows that’s what really sells.  I have read most of his books (5 point someone, 3 Mistakes, 2 States, Revolution 2020) and think that he knows the pulse of his audi...