K. Kumar's Blog, page 13

Hair Color

I am not sure how to make sense of the following articles:

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Habits, Hope, and Projecting into the Future

I have been listening to this book about habits. The premise of the book is that successful people and organizations exhibit the right kind of habits that allow them to achieve their goals. All human beings will fall back on habits, some good and others bad. They are shortcuts that allow one to live without thinking too much, action without thought. People will use words like "motivation", "discipline", "toughness", "pride", and even a word like "will"...but it is all a ruse. It is all about...

Reasonable People

I recently attended a training session and one of the instructors said something to the effect of:

"Reasonable people can look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions."

Later in the class we had a group exercise where we were broken up into six teams and given some background documents and were asked to develop a preliminary plan to manage the assignment. The teams worked in isolation and then we all presented our results. Some of the teams came to similar conclusions about t...

Letters from the World VI (Gold Edition)

Letters from the World Part V (Gold Edition)

Shaping the Future

I was recently in Washington D.C., a city I called home for about five years, five years ago. But a lot has changed the past five years, for me and for the city. What I mostly like about the city is the ability to walk outside in the open air and enjoy the warm, humidity and the brilliant architecture. The parts of the city I like to walk around are the areas near Metro Center, the Smithsonian, Georgetown, and all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. It really is an amazing city.
But I also thoug...

"no will to fight"

I came across this article a few weeks ago:

Source: BloombergWhat caught my attention were the words used by the Defense Chief. I find it to be reflective of the reality of the world when people try to help each other. The U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to train and equip the Iraqi forces and when the time came to fight, the forces outnumbered their enemy and yet they still lost. They lacked "will".
You'll find this to be the case in almost any other human endeavor that fails, w...

Projecting the Future from the Present

To get around the issues with the future tense, you can project the future from the present. This more accurately reflects our collective inability to control the future. So instead of saying, "I will be President", one can say, "I want to be President". The person who says the later is more credible because they are projecting a present desire into the future. The later example correctly describes the limited control we have over the future, which can be reflected in many ways:
We can fear th...

Future Tense

SourceIn language, there is often the need to speak about what you are going to do in the future. For this to work, they had to come up with a new tense. So in English, the form is "will" plus the verb. So, for example, if you are going to the movies, you could say: "I will go to the movies."
But the future tense is fraught with challenges because no one can predict the future. If you say that "you will go to the movies", and then decide later not to goto the movies, then you have undermined t...

Picasso

A few weeks ago, a story came out that a Picasso painting was sold for close to $180 million. The significance of the story was that this single painting sold for the most amount of money in the history of art auctions. Some art experts were quoted in the article and they were trying to ascribe some explanation to justify the $180 million figure for a single painting. Some said that there are a lot of rich people that have a lot of cash and they felt that putting money into a Picasso was bett...