Donkeys vs Dogs- Strategies for Donkeys

      If I were to describe human behavior by comparing it to animals, I would pick donkey and dog. As the famous story goes, when the donkey is shown a carrot, it chases and walks towards it. That applies to many of us as well. Show us a reward and we will get to work. Others of us behave more like dogs. Now, what do dogs do that donkeys don’t? They sniff. All the time. If there is a bone in the room, they will sniff and find it. They don’t need to be shown the bone in front of them for them to go and get it, oh, no. You put the bone in the next room, they will sniff their way to it and get it.

To put things in better perspective, let’s imagine a conversation between a donkey and a dog…

Dog: Hey Donkey, why are you standing still? Why don’t you look around for carrots?

Donkey: I don’t see any carrots.

Dog: Yeah.. but why don’t you go search over there, you might find something? 

Donkey: Yeah, there is a chance that I MIGHT, but what if I don’t? Why waste time and energy when I could just stand here and relax. (relatable, anyone?)

Dog: Dude, what?! How can you be so lazy… Whatever. I’m going to search for a bone.

Donkey: Where though? Do you know where the bone is?

Dog: No, I’m just going to start searching..it usually works..If I search long enough, I usually end up finding something.

Donkey: Wow…that never works for me. Any way, good luck, I’m just going to sit here and relax.

Some people will follow their curiosity and interests without thinking about the ‘carrot’- the end result or what they may get out of it, thus exhibiting dog-like behavior. They will sniff and keep sniffing and eventually find something valuable. You know who I’m talking about. That kid in your class who stayed up till 4 am reading about quantum computing just because she was interested to know more, and ten years later, she’s in Silicon Valley inventing cutting-edge technology. Or that guy with a day job who devoted his entire weekends to making YouTube videos just because he ‘wanted to try it out’, without necessarily having a plan or vision or making any money, and five years later, he’s a Youtube Millionaire. I recently spoke with someone who runs a brilliant podcast — he doesn’t make any money out of it, he doesn’t have a vision or plan of where he wants to take it, no concrete idea of how it will help in his future career. But in addition to having another job to make ends meet, he runs this podcast, and it’s amazing.

...You get the idea. There are people like that. And then there’s me. Or, well, people like me. The donkeys. Unless we see a carrot- a clear, concrete idea of what we will get out of doing something, we will not do it.(I understand that this isn’t always the case, there are some activities that may give you intrinsic pleasure and you may do them without seeing a ‘carrot’. For example, if you like to play the guitar, you’ll play everyday, for fun. But you probably won’t quit your job, start a band, invest in professional equipment and record an album.. unless you see it going somewhere, will you?)If you’re a donkey like me, do not worry. It’s not over for us. There are several successful people who are donkeys. We just need some different strategies to get to work.

1. Write Down Your Goals

Write down your goals. Pen and paper, please. And be as specific as possible. For example, don’t just write ‘lose weight’. If you want to read everyday about a particular subject, set that as a goal. And don’t just write that you will spend half an hour everyday reading about that topic. Write down the exact number of pages/chapters/articles/books you will read everyday.

2. Look At Your Goals Everyday

Stick your goals on a wall in your room where you are forced to look at them everyday. This helps keep the motivation up.

3. Track Your Progress

At least once a week, record your progress. Now this is super-important.

You need to believe that you’re getting closer and closer to your carrot with every step you take.

I like to do it on the papers I have stuck on my wall: For example, record your weight every week. Or, if your goal is to read a certain number of books by a certain date, record the number of pages you read. Also write down what you learnt from that, and how it will help you attain your bigger goals.

4. Reward Yourself

Promise yourself a reward for attaining your goals, and be sure to reward yourself when you do. We donkeys need to have our carrots and eat them too. (See what I did there? :))

P.s.- I’m not saying it’s binary for everyone- some of us are sometimes more like dogs, other times more like donkeys.

The four steps mentioned above would help anyone and everyone, regardless of whether you’re more like a donkey or a dog. But donkeys definitely need it more.

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If you liked reading this post, do comment below. This will encourage me to write more 🙂

‘Le Petit Prince’, and Why Imagination is Essential To Problem Solving

I’m currently reading ‘The Little Prince’ (‘Le Petit Prince’ in French), by Antoine De Saint Exupery. The narrator starts by telling a story from his childhood when he was 6 years old. He talks about a time when he drew the following picture:

and asked the ‘grown ups’ if his drawing scared them. They answered, ‘Why be scared of a hat?’ He then tells the reader that his drawing was not a picture of a hat.

‘It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Then I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so the grown-ups could understand. They always need explanations. My drawing Number Two looked like this:

The grow-ups advised me to put away my drawings of boa constrictors, outside or inside, and apply myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.

The ‘grown-ups’ failed to see the boa constrictor- they only saw the hat. They failed to realize that a simple seemingly hat-shaped brown structure could represent a zillion different things. There are multiple ways to see the same problem, or, in this case, the same drawing. Yet all they could see was the hat. And when they were shown a more explicit drawing, they dismissed it, perhaps thinking it was ridiculous. But no, it’s not that ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is when you don’t use your imagination.

Today, in trying to solve the world’s most pressing and challenging problems, we need to be able to see things in different ways. To go beyond what is obvious and visible. To imagine all the possibilities. Not just to come up with innovative solutions but more importantly, to first be able to correctly identify the problem, and be able to look at it in different ways. In trying to come up with new ideas to solve a problem or design a new feature for a product, a lot of people engage in ‘brainstorming sessions’, where you typically sit in groups, perhaps with a whiteboard, and try to come up with as many solutions as possible for solving the problem, which is great for generating new ideas. But I think before that, it’s important to spend time with the problem. As Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

‘The Slow Elevator Problem’…

Now, imagine you’re a landlord of an office building in New York in the 1930s. And the employees in the office complain to you that the elevators are slow in the building, and threaten to leave if nothing is done about it. Now this is a serious problem, you could end up losing your tenants if you don’t fix it. You’ll probably call your team of engineers and get them to come up with possible solutions to make elevators faster. But that’s not what this one particular landlord did when faced with the same problem.

You might think that the problem is that the elevators are slow, and the landlord should get better machines and make them faster. But is that really the problem? Or rather, is that the only way of looking at the problem?
Here are some other possible perspectives:

a)The tenants are not good because they complain a lot, so they should be fired.

b)The threat of leaving is the problem- if the landlord offers the tenants something else in return for not complaining/threatening to leave, it may solve the landlord’s problem

c)Or…The tenants don’t like to wait for the elevators. It’s the waiting, and the boredom that comes with having nothing to do while waiting, that’s the problem.
This is exactly how the landlord saw the problem. So he decided to install mirrors in the elevator waiting areas, to give people something to engage themselves with (admiring themselves in the mirror), whilst they waited for the elevators. And it actually worked. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.Today, if you’ve noticed, it’s fairly commonplace to have mirrors outside elevators. And that, is how this practice started.

Again, what looks like a hat may not be a hat, it may be a boa constrictor digesting an elephant! If we have a hammer, we tend to see everything as a nail, but it may not be a nail, it may be a hole in the wall, or a leak in the pipe, or any one of a hundred and forty six other things. We need to open our minds to see things differently. To go beyond the obvious. To use our creativity to think of different approaches and perspectives to the problem at hand. Had the landlord tried to make elevators faster, he would have ended up spending much more money and resources, but all he did was install mirrors and the problem was solved.

Lesson: Don’t try to build faster elevators. Use your imagination to get to the root of the problem before trying to fix it.

My Experiments with Truth: DOES GOD EXIST?

There are many wild, wacky, bizarre, absurd, foolish and irrational ideas and beliefs when it comes to the subject of God. One hears many things related to this subject, different people have different viewpoints. Whether the truth is among them is not clear. And, of course, the big question familiar to all of us: Does god exist? Many people believe that he does; and is the supreme creator and destroyer. Many others (atheists) think more skeptically and refuse to believe in God without any evidence. Then there are others (like me) who are somewhere in the middle, they don’t completely have faith and neither are they ignorant like atheists; many of them are looking for answers, trying to find the truth.

Let’s look at some real life experiences and incidents, and see if we can conclude anything and resolve this dilemma.

A six- year-old boy, the only son of his parents was on his way back from school. As usual with children on their return journey, he was impatient to get back home. Without bothering to look on either side, he ran across the road and was knocked down by a speeding truck and killed instantaneously. The truck driver sped away and was never traced. An innocent life was lost, the man who took his life escaped punishment.

Is there a God? An all powerful and just God? The holy book promises: “No ills befall the righteous, but the wicked are filled with trouble” (Proverbs). The holy book asks: “Consider, what innocent ever perished, or where have the righteous been destroyed?”. Let those who believe in God and His infinite mercy explain why a child whose parents had committed no sin had pain inflicted upon them and then the man who caused them suffering went scot free.

So this was one incident that suggests that there is no God, or at least it does suggest that God (if there is one) is above the notions of fairness and moral rules, that apply to us mortals; He is in fact (if He is) one who is the wadda beparwah-the uncaring great one. 

Well, this incident and the conclusion that it provides does appeal to me as it would to many. But I have a reason not to believe completely in what it suggests. It has incubated out of my own experience.

In June 2010, I had an extremely rare and severe case of typhoid. I was in the hospital for nearly two weeks. It was a very painful experience, particularly for the first few days as I was living only on tasteless juices and also had to undergo many tests and scans. Anyways, getting to the main part, I was discharged after two weeks though I was not completely alright but well enough to go home. After getting discharged I was visiting the hospital for the medicines, tests, scans, and frequent meetings with the doctor continued. Till that time I had no idea about how rare and severe my illness had been.

Then, sometime in August, during my meeting with the doctor, he told me that my H.I.D.A. scan (it’s a nuclear scan to see your gall bladder) results showed that my gall bladder was still inflated and was not functioning, and that I would have to get my gall bladder removed if even after taking loads of antibiotics it didn’t function. (This is because a non-functioning organ can act as a carrier of infections). A fourteen-year-old is bound to get scared on the thought of an operation and the removal of an organ. (Though the body functions perfectly well even without the gall bladder) So, I sat there on the doctor’s chair, terrified at the thought of an operation. To the surgeon, though, it was no big deal, for him it was just a typical hour long surgery which he had performed many times. The other doctor whom I was consulting prescribed me with more antibiotics and told me that there was a chance that the gall bladder may start working. He told me that I was going to take another HIDA scan after two months, and if the gall bladder still didn’t work, it would have to be removed. Petrified, I went back home. For the next two months I ate cautiously, took the prescribed antibiotics in the hope that my gall bladder starts functioning and I don’t have to undergo an operation.

So, in November, I again underwent the HIDA scan and the result was astonishing. My gall bladder was functioning. I took the report to the Doctor and he was also very happy and exclaimed that there was no need for any operation. Then he revealed all the “dark secrets” about my case that were hidden from me so far: My case had been so rare that out of all the typhoid cases in the country, only 1-2% were similar to mine. The doctors in that hospital had never seen a case like that. And, they had held a seminar on my case in which doctors from all over the city were present! “Wow” I thought. “A seminar on my case, it was so rare!” It was blowing my mind. Then he went on to disclose that my case had been so severe that doctors had lost all hope that they would be able to treat it with antibiotics. They were prepared for an operation from the beginning. But he had told them to wait, and see if they could cure me with antibiotics. He didn’t want a fourteen-year-old kid to lose an organ of his body. Even though he knew that the chances were EXTREMELY less, he tried, and he succeeded. “It is all due to God’s grace” he said.

A doctor saying that I had been cured due to God’s grace? My case had been so severe that an operation seemed unavoidable? Then how did I escape it? How was it that I was cured completely with only antibiotics?

Was my illness cured because God (if He is) listened to my family’s prayers and his blessings got me out of it? Yes and No. Yes, because there is no other scientific explanation. No, because, well as the doctor had told me that the chances were extremely less but there were chances, so I might have been lucky. Atheists will most likely go for the second option: I was lucky to get out of it. But think about it. If I was lucky, why did I get typhoid in the first place? Why did luck favor me only when I needed it the most, and only when my family prayed? I am not concluding anything here.

There must be some supreme power that created us and keeps a watch on everything that’s going on and responds when there is someone need. Think about it.

P.S.-I'm not saying that there was some dude who wanted to help rescue his kidnapped chick with the help of some flying monkey. But there must be something. What do you think?