“Follow your passion” or the similar “Follow your dreams.” I’ve seen this advice lead people into paths in which they could not have productive lives or support themselves or families.
With this advice, many kids will choose to become professional athletes, and then fail. My daughter (Elizabeth Muller) once wanted to become a professional dancer. I think she is very glad now that she instead went to UC San Diego, majored in math and literature, and got a masters degree in international management. (She is now the CEO of our non-profit BerkeleyEarth.org.) One of her friends, in contrast, decided to become a professional bicycle racer (encouraged by her parents) and she now supports herself by selling and repairing bicycles. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it was what she envisioned when she took this career path.
I suggest to children that before they set out on a career path, they consider what will happen if they are the 1000th best in the field. If your field is boxing, you will either be completely out of work, be a sparring partner, or (if you are lucky) be running your own gym. (Or, maybe, you’ll be an enforcer for some mob.) If you are a ballet dancer, it is unlikely that you will be performing; you will probably be teaching children how to dance ballet. If your field is physics or math, you will have very good income, have the respect of your neighbors (maybe they’ll think you are a genius), and a good diverse and productive life.
I suggest instead that you teach children to try to plan their future lives, to design their futures. They should approach it as they would a challenging homework problem. Learn more about possible careers, and what they are like. Don’t choose too early, since many careers (running Berkeley Earth?) are not obvious to a youngster. Get a broad education, and do a good job at it. Study hard and learn. Get familiar with the world. Beware of childhood passions; they are based on a limited experience, and may not be a good choice for a career.
Despite being not well off, they educated me (and my brother) well.
My family isn’t the richest out there - my father is a nurse and mother is a teacher - both in government sector. They had moved in from the village my father is from to city just so that we could gain a good education.
My father was a bright student, but he could not become a doctor because of the abject poverty my grandfather lived in. So he decided to never compromise on his sons’ education (one of his sons ended up becoming a doctor from AIIMS :). We always got new books, got admitted to good schools, and got whatever we wanted. They cut short their expenses and dreams to make sure we get the best education.
Let me tell you an anecdote to answer this better. When I was in class 9, I was selected for the International Astronomy Olympiad camp in Mumbai. In order to prepare for it, we needed to study a book called “Roy and Clarke: Structure of the Universe.” It cost around Rs 5000. At that time, Rs 5000 was a VERY big deal for my family, and I decided against it.
My father ordered me to order it right away without second thoughts. This made me realize how much he cared about our education - and I tried my best to study well.
Today my brother is doing his Masters in AIIMS Rishikesh and holds an MBBS from AIIMS Jodhpur. I am studying CSE in IIT Bombay, and working on a profitable Tech Startup. The single most important reason for that is my family’s committment for our education - irrespective of the financial condition.
Invest in your education - you will not regret it. Buy that book you always wanted. Pay for the course you need the most right now. Attend that coaching if you can. The returns are huge.
-Kalpit Veerwal, JEE-Main AIR 1, First ever in History to get 360/360 in JEE Main ie 100%
Up to 6,000 people sold apples in New York during the Great Depression.
Finding
a job wasn’t easy. Businesses struggled to sell their products. The
apple industry was no exception. They needed to sell their produce to
people who had little to no money for food.
How could they do this?
To do so, they started promoting apple stands on the streets of New York.
These
simple stands helped the apple industry move the apples that would most
probably never get consumed, while it also helped men earn some money.
The
program was a huge success. By selling apples instead of begging, this
gave men a sense of pride, proving they were fighting for their future.
Soon, up to 6,000 people were selling apples in New York every day.
Did the 6,000 apple vendors succeed?
Why would you buy the apples?
Why would you buy from one seller instead of the other?
What makes one apple stand unique and better than the that of the competitors?
If you approached a seller and asked, “Why should I choose you over your competitor’s stand?” What would they answer? You’d be surprised how many wouldn’t be able to give you an answer!
That is why many businesses fail. They can’t answer this question!
Here’s an example that recently blew my mind:
A simple sticker with Mickey Mouse makes a remarkable difference in today's world of abundance.
Many businesses fail because they don’t have a clear differentiation that makes them stand out in the market.
Volkswagen once proposed a "interesting theory" that they wanted to prove that people's daily behavior can be better because of their fun.
In Stockholm, Sweden, they transformed the staircase of a subway station into a piano keyboard to see if more people choose to give up the escalator and choose a healthier way to climb the stairs because of the changes in the stairs.
The results showed that 66% of the people chose to give up the elevator and choose the stairs.
Experiments show that we all like to make life a little more fun. As long as cities become more interesting, our lifestyles will be happier and healthier.
2. Racial discrimination experiment In 1968, after the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, a teacher named Jane Eliot tried to arouse a discussion of racial discrimination, prejudice and discrimination among the third graders of a school in lesville, Iowa.
Because all the children in the class were white, Eliot divided the children into "blue eyes" and "brown eyes".
After the experiment started, the first group of 19 children with blue eyes was the good children group, while the other 19 brown eyes were the bad children group. The good children group had priority to enjoy lunch and toys, while the bad children group not only had no priority, but also could not use the pool or play with blue eyed children, and their bodies were clearly marked.
After the experiment started, 19 children in the good children group obviously began to have hostility and some aggressive behaviors towards the brown eyed children. Their language also changed from the usual address to the discriminatory language, which was very shocking to all, because no one told them to do this.
The next day, the experimental group switched, the results are still the same, and after the switch brown eyes group of children more revenge! In the process of the experiment, there is a little influence worth thinking about, that is, the group judged as good children should be significantly higher in the examination and intelligence level.
At the end of the experiment, Jane explained to the children the purpose of the experiment and what she hoped they would understand. In this experiment of testing human nature, children do feel and understand the feeling of being discriminated against, but the aggression shown by children in the process of grouping is also thought-provoking.
This experiment also shows that when a person's authority is strong enough, it can influence people's thinking. If a leader teaches good, he may become Martin; when a leader teaches evil, he will become Hitler.
3. A smoky room This is an experiment to test the individual's response in a group. The tester first invites each subject to answer a questionnaire in a room alone, and then puts smoke into the room, When the subjects were alone in the room, 75% of the subjects immediately noticed the smoke within two minutes and reported the situation.
However, when the interviewees were arranged to fill in the questionnaire between the two actors, only 10% of the respondents voluntarily reported the existence of smoke because there were other people in the room. Most of them filled in the questionnaire attentively while covering their mouth and nose, trying to wave the smoke away with their hands.
This experiment shows that when we are in a crowd, our response to an emergency may become slow or even unresponsive. We rely on other people's reactions, and even ignore our own instincts. Other people's negative attitude may lead to your inaction. Don't always assume that others will come forward, because maybe others are waiting for you to take action first.
4. Tumbler experiment Albert Bandura conducted a tumbler experiment in 1961. He divided the children into three groups. The first group saw an adult fight the tumbler, the second group saw an adult playing with the tumbler, and the third group was the control group, which did not show the demonstration of adults.
The results showed that the group who saw the adult violence against the tumbler was more likely to show violence tendency when they came into contact with the tumbler.
Studies have shown that human behavior stems from imitation rather than internal genes.
I was meeting with the CEO of a large oil company to gain insight on business. I won't disclose his name but I can tell you he had a net worth upwards of 8 figures. I was excited to meet him and drove over 4 hours to Atlanta to catch him before his flight left.
He was very kind, but you could tell that he was stern when he needed to be. Instead of picking a five star restaurant, he chose a small burger joint.
We talked about innovation, marketing, management, accounting, investing, and a few other things.
We got to the end of our lunch and I asked, “is there any one thing that's contributed to the success of your career?”
Being the CEO of a large oil company, I expected him to say something like:
“Work hard”
“Don't take crap from anyone”
“Profit comes first”
But instead, he said:
.
“Tithe.”
“Tithe?” I asked, a bit surprised.
“Yes, never forget to tithe.”
“Like give to the church?”
“Well, yes that's a form of tithing. But a great way is to give to those less fortunate than you.”
I left our meeting a little confused. I was in the process of starting a business and didn't have much to spare. I thought, “I barely have enough to get by, how am I supposed to give?”
Right at that moment I drove passed a homeless man.
And then it hit me.
No matter where you're at in life, there's always someone doing worse than you.
I immediately drove to Target and purchased supplies to make care packages. I was literally making sandwiches in my car. I put them in bags along with clothes and other items.
I then went around Atlanta handing out these bags to homeless people.
They were just the essentials. Nothing fancy. But from the looks on their faces, you would've thought I had just handed them a gold bar.
I can't explain the feeling you get from giving to those less fortunate, but it's wonderful.
It's something that’s always stuck with me.
And if you dig deep enough, you'll find that every super successful person participates in some form of tithing, whether it be money or simply time.
The reason is not only because you get to help people, but also because it puts you in a state of abundance.
I promise you that for every bit you give, you will get tenfold back.
As tech hubs, Bangalore and Beijing lead Silicon Valley. Some way behind are London, New York, Dublin, Boston, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul.
Python is the world’s leading programming language.
70% of the world’s population own a smartphone, 20% wear a smartwatch, 2% wear Google Glass or an equivalent product.
Smartphones and tablets, fairly similar to ones 20 years ago, are common. Android has 95% market share.
Laptops with keyboards are alive and kicking. Windows and Chromebook are fighting it out for market leadership in terms of unit sales. MacBook comes in a distant 3rd yet is still the most profitable.
Voice recognition finally works damn well. We’re talking a lot to technology.
95% of cars produced are completely autonomous. 90% of them end up being owned by taxi-app companies and 60% of them are powered by Waymo. Most car manufacturers from 20 years ago have gone bust.
Drone deliveries went mainstream in developed countries nearly a decade ago. Items are frequently delivered within an hour of order.
Remote-working has revolutionised white-collar working - resulting in a dramatic reduction in demand for office space.
To order a Big Mac and fries, with a Coke to help wash it down, you talk to a bot. Your order will also be made, packaged and given to you by bots.
Automation has decimated the manual labour market. Global unemployment levels have risen from 8% to 15% over last two decades - plenty of long-term untrainable unemployed workers in that 15%. This results in record levels of crime and xenophobia in developed countries.
Paper-currency has ceased being legal tender in a handful of countries, the first of which was Singapore. Government-backed currencies, in electronic forms, are the most widely used currencies. The Wild West cryptocurrency bubble burst well over 15 years ago.
Higher-education has embraced technology far faster than primary and secondary education. A fundamental shift is that most courses, including those run by Ivy League schools and Oxbridge, are now available as MOOCs.
There are as many fresh MTE (Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship) grads as there are fresh MBAs. Stanford’s MTE is the most prestigious in the world.
For every graduate that goes into finance three go into technology.
Globally there are 25x as many tech startups this year as there were in 2018.
19 out of the 20 largest companies are technology ones - Alphabet and Amazon are the largest - both with market caps of over US$4T.
The richest person in the world is a tech entrepreneur worth US$500B.
The number of unicorns has gone up from around 300 20 years ago to 5,000.
There is a colony of 5 people with Tesla buggies on Mars. Each coloniser will stay for at least a decade as it’s extremely expensive coming back.
Technology has made us many times more productive but it hasn’t made us happier. Suicide rates are the highest in human history.
-Asim Qureshi MA in Physics, Oxford University(UK)
{Blogger's Note : Please see the statistics If overall suicide rate has increased and the reason behind them . Most importantly you have to work on yourself.
Medicine has also progressed much, Pilots Maybe Removed by AI, Quality of Life overall has increased by a great Margin , Life expectancy is increasing & Now its your time to grab this opportunity and make your life much better in health, wealth, relation, communication, peace, security & most importantly utilize it for learning }
This experiment was done by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel et al in in late 20th century. In this study, children of ages four-to-five were offered a deal.
You can either eat one marshmallow (sweet) immediately, or
You can wait until the experimenter returned and get two marshmallows
Some kids resisted the temptation and got two marshmallows while others couldn’t wait that long and could eat only one.
Decades after the initial experiment, researchers followed up with the participants and it was discovered that those who were able to delay gratification had higher SAT scores, and were significantly more competent and successful in their lives compared to the students who couldn’t delay gratification and ate the marshmallow
I
find that I don’t usually get to choose the “right point in time” to
make a decision. But I’m going to outline a simple, quantitative
decision procedure that I’ve used to make important decisions, and it’s
what I recommend to my students. It’s how my coauthors and I decided to
choose MIT Press as our publisher for Introduction to Algorithms, and it’s how my wife and I decided that I would take the faculty position at Dartmouth College.
This
procedure is for a situation in which you have to decide between or
among a number of candidates—in my case, publishers and job offers.
First, list out all the criteria that you are considering. Give each criterion a weight and, for ease, make the weights add to 100.
Next,
for each candidate, give it a score in each criterion between 0 and the
weight of that criterion. For example, when we were choosing
publishers, we gave proximity a weight of 5 (out of 100). The score for
MIT Press was 5 out of 5 since their office was literally one block from
my apartment. We were also considering a publisher based in California.
I don’t remember its proximity score, but it was probably 1 out of 5.
(0 would have been for a publisher on another continent.)
Next,
add up the scores for each candidate. You’ll get a number from 0 to 100
for each candidate. Presumably, you won’t see 0 (why are you even
considering this candidate?) or 100 (why isn’t this decision a
no-brainer?).
You’re
not done, however. You will very possibly realize that you need to
adjust the weights and/or scores. Perhaps you weighted one criterion too
lightly and another too heavily. Change the weights and scores, and
re-add each candidate’s scores.
Iterate as needed, until you feel like you got it right.
Chances are that you’ll end up deciding what you wanted to decide in the first place. But here’s the real benefit: you’ll know why you made that decision.
And knowing why you decided for the winner will help you live with the decision later on. Because there will
be times when you second-guess yourself. I have found that remembering
why I decided to take the Dartmouth position helped me get through the
tough times.
It’s really depressing to see millions of hard-working people not being able to make a good living.
Why is this happening?
Picture these students working very hard preparing for “battle”:
Monday: Physical training
Tuesday: Sword fighting trainings
Wednesday: Sword and shield training
Thursday: Dagger and axe fighting
Friday: Warhammer fighting
Saturday: Horse riding fights
Sunday: Resting
Graduation day comes, time to celebrate!
“Graduates! You have achieved a major milestone in your lives. You paid THOUSANDS for this training… Are you ready for battle?”
“Yes Sir! We’re ready!”
Next day… reality kicks in. Time for battle!
“Okay soldiers, listen carefully… you were trained for this! Be confident! We will face the enemy moving forward!”
“Yes, Sir!”
“You’ve got your weapons ready?
“Yes, Sir!”
“You’ve sharpened your swords?”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Armor and shields ready?”
“Yes, Sir! We’re ready!”
“NOW ATTAAAAAAAACK!!!!!”
“TO VICTORYYYYYYYY!!!!”
…
…
…
…
….
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Not even a scratch to the enemy. DISRUPTED!
Rules have changed!
Welcome to the New Economy.
Hard work is NOT good enough anymore. It demands an additional ingredient:
INFORMATION to anticipate change.
SKILLS to adapt to change.
KNOWLEDGE to disrupt, and prevent being disrupted.
We’re in a new economy. The rules of work have changed. As I’ve explained before, I strongly believe that ignorance will be the number one source of poverty in the decades ahead.
-Hector Quintanilla
{ Blogger's Note : For Many in India Coming from lower middle class family : Studying hard, Getting Good College & Scholarship & getting the degree is the way out of that socio-economic status , But do not forget to improve your personality and also learning the latest technologies after you have build a firm base }
Sunday, 21 February 2021
TCS recruit freshers at Rs 3.36 lakh per year gross compensation. In hand you will receive around Rs 22,000 - Rs 23,000 monthly.
I received an offer from Infosys as well at a gross package of Rs 3.25 lakh per year. The gross monthly salary was shown as Rs 22,500 on offer letter but probably you'll receive around Rs 20,000 after deductions.
As for Wipro, one of my friends joined Wipro at Rs 3.6 lakh per year but after deductions, they used to get around Rs 23,000 in hand.
If you are like 99% of people I know, you may interpret this picture as a feel-good picture of a man cracking jokes with tourists. This is Rome. A city that looks and feels like a living museum. Every street corner seems to have a historic monument. It’s an amazing and enchanting place!
And, you are right. In fact, he is not only cracking jokes with them, he is offering them free gifts - bracelets and trinkets - gifts that he is going to give away to the tourists as a show of kindness.
You refuse but he walks up and ties it on your wrist. “Take it, my friend, this is for you!” In fact, he will not only tie you a friendship bracelet, but if you listen to him for at least 15 seconds, he will want to offer you a second and then another. It’s all for you to keep. And all he wants is for you to be happy. He has had a tough life and he sells items on the roadside to help his young family who live in poverty. Chances are, you’ll be at a point now to feel obliged to give him ‘something’. By human nature, we are too prudent to simply take (forced to receive rather, in this case) items for free.
“No, sir, please … don’t bother,” says he.
“Let me give you something …, ” you say, feeling even worse at this point that you are receiving “gifts” from someone who is exponentially more needy than you.
So you take out your wallet. At this point two things can happen -
The first, and I hear this is the most common - he will demand money and you better pay up. You’ll suddenly become aware that he has friends all around. You didn’t notice them because you were too lost in your feel-good moment of helping this fellow. But they are there. I realised this once I reviewed some videos I had taken and observed many - many other tourists being approached the same way.
The second - and the one I can relate to is the following. I’d add that this may be an exception, but this is exactly what transpired -
As you open the wallet, in a swift, completely unexpected, chilling, moment, he will snatch everything out of your wallet - EVERYTHING - the cash you kept on your way to the Colosseum from the hotel, US Dollars, Euros - everything. Gone. You stand there - trying to process what just happened. After two seconds, you ask him to give it back and he starts screaming that you are taking his money!
There are tourists all around you. But you are not getting it back. He will keep the money and he and all his friends are ALL armed. A second ago he was a kind-hearted, jovial, cheerful fellow with a difficult life trying to share happiness with the world. A second later - you are staring into the face of a vicious and angry man - his eyes have turned red - his voice has changed, the smiles are gone. You’ve been brought back to reality from a utopian world!
This ‘scam’ is apparently known as the “African Bracelet Scam”. This site on Rome Vacation Tips explained the factors that make this one of the most successful scams anywhere - “
This scam works by preying on the natural human instinct not to be impolite: not to brush off a friendly greeting, not to drop an unwanted gift on the ground.
You’ll pay dearly for being compassionate towards someone and you’ll regret it. That gift is something way more sinister in disguise (See the comments to this post from so many other readers who have experienced the same situation)
Many of the individuals are Africans from war-torn countries who take a dangerous trip to Europe. Countless stories in articles such as, One Migrant's Harrowing Journey From Senegal to Italy, talk of the harrowing tales. Unfortunately, the actions of a few leave a stigma on the entire population from the respective countries. Based on the comments, it also seems that these scams are perpetrated by organised groups based in Italy, not just migrants.
These incidents also raise an ethical dilemma. If you call the cops the individual might get deported back to where he came from and might not survive. If you don’t, he would continue to scam other tourists. It’s a hard choice that you have to make in that brief, fleeting, animated moment!
Several commentators have also mentioned being forced to wear the bracelets and in one case with the other person brandishing sharp object. Once they put it on your wrist, they oftentimesdo not let go of your hand until you pay them.
As you may observe from the comments, these incidents are not just common, it is the — norm — believe it or not. If you visit any Roman site, you’re bound to be approached by someone with bracelets in a majority of cases. Every traveller to Rome should be aware of this and avoid becoming a victim.
Please help spread the awareness by sharing this post with friends and family! Thanks for reading!
