Just heard today that "chronic perfectionists are classic procrastinators." And I agree to that because I learned that the hard way while doing programming in a computer science language. Because I always worried about typing in the most optimized code with the proper comments, descriptive variables and function names, and factoring the methods and classes appropriately, I ended up wasting so much time and also delaying beginning to write the code in the first place. I compared myself with other colleagues who wouldn't give a rat's ass thinking about the nomenclature or factoring the code but reached the end result soon. Basically, when you take off the perfectionist's hat and take up the result-oriented approach, you will not get it appealing but you will get it done. And you have all the time remaining in the world to get it right afterwards. Definitely there has to be some mindfulness about getting it right while you are working on it so that your approach has perfectionism built into it. So in a nut-shell, your mindset should be result-oriented and your act should be smart and artistic.
I had a very connected dream the other night reinforcing this fear within me that I am chronically perfectionist. The dream went like this. That I am a part of a team of students who are studying in a class and the class plans a field trip to a local planetarium. The organization of the event is divided among students, with the arrangement of lunch assigned to a lady, acquisitions of tickets to a boy, and facilitation of transportation put up for election. I campaign aggressively to get the votes for arranging the transportation because I fervidly wanted to save our class valuable amount of time. I pitched that instead of going for bus, I will arrange to have us picked up and dropped off through private cabs and will end up saving us atleast 1 hour of working time. I became the favorite and was elected. I thus began to jot down my plan. I decided to go with the taxi company, Uber, to have students picked up and dropped off. I planned to have every one invite others to use Uber from a new account so both the invitee and inviter gets $30 off their first trip, which will make the first trip essentially free for everyone. We would further have 3 people ride the taxi at the same time, which would ensure that third of the class takes the cab 1 way and the other third pays for the way back and the remaining third population rides free. And if we can have 4 people ride the same taxi, we have a possibility of getting the same thing done with the $30 credit being saved for almost half of the class with half of the class paying for the other half. In this way, if some people have even used the taxi, we can still have the entire trip done for free by relying on those extra people in the model.
The concept seems involved at first but works out well and I end up taking till the morning of the actual event date to come up with this concept in the dream. Now I am all set, but the time has almost run out for me to delegate the arrangement of the Uber service. This plan actually involves requesting half of the population to send email invites to the other half and then having the invited half to register for Uber and then request the taxi. But everyone is busy getting ready for the trip and some people have even come to the departing spot. Only 2 hours are left and all of this needs to be done. I didn't even request other people to help me out in encouraging others to do it, collected people's email addresses and checked Uber's availability. Even the time for reserving the bus in advance has passed. And if I even deliver a bus at the end, it won't be any thing unique and I won't end up fulfilling my promise of saving everyone money and introducing a novelty.
Essentially, I got screwed by coming up with the perfect plan to save everyone money and overlooking the result-oriented approach. A dream explained to me my problem with the simplest of example by putting me in the shoe of an organizer of a low-stake but high-accountability task. If I could properly handle the perfectionist within me, always keep the goal of delivering before me rather than delivering best, then I can succeed in real life. An artist within you often times stands between you and your goal!
Monday, November 17, 2014
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Live you interest and Get earned for it
From childhood, I have been hearing this peace of advice from my elders that enjoy your work, make your livelihood your hobby and then you will never work your entire life because you will be playing instead. It was simple enough of an advice to understand but very difficult to implement. I could not see how can I begin to like my work. I liked to rest, to play games, to sleep, to collect stamps, to watch tv, to not do anything, etc, etc. But who would pay me to do these recreational activities unless I get recruited into a sports team.
I was actually lacking a curiosity for exploration at that time. Once I began to do scientific research at college, I realized that I can enjoy researching new phenomena for livelihood. But that still would get boring for me when I would attempt to push frontiers of science without having fully mastered its foundations. Only when I began to write software programs and that too for processing images and videos that I began to stay curious for longer hours while I studied or worked. Still, I would get a feeling that I am not regulating my efforts in understanding the bigger picture of the existence of this universe. As I would continue to ponder on ways to fill this gap in my approach of doing research, I came to a realization that understanding the purpose of ones creation holds the key to understanding the existence of universe. To this point, a scholar has famously said "one who finds himself finds God." And to understand ones self, one must understand ones mind, how it thinks, perceives, makes connections, reasons, and so on. But how can I apply this into my research in image processing software development, I asked. And I quickly got an answer, which was by learning to train computers to do that image processing for me using the model of a human mind. I could then see myself entering into the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I now feel that if I keep learning new ways to make intelligent systems that can automatically perceive and reason, I can continue to understand our mind better. Since mind is the supreme creation of God and the creator manifests himself in his creations, I can actually understand God better through my research.
So I like to explore the world around me, I like to research the scientific phenomena governing the happenings around me, I like to answer questions arising in my mind regarding the reason for our creation, I like to pass on my knowledge to others through teaching, I like to train machines to do tasks for me, and I like to see the results of my efforts within my attention span for a given quantifiable task. And the goal for me is to center my work for earning the livelihood around these likenesses.
I feel that I am quite close to achieving this goal because I have apparently taken the first set of steps of quantifying my likenesses and picking up the areas in my academic and professional fields of interest that are aligned with these areas of my personal interest. Now, I need to begin to fuse my profession into my daily life.
I need to continue to write software programs which would enable the training of machines to facilitate the image and video processing. And I need to keep doing this at home, as I wake up from sleep as I sit down for a few moments after having a sweet cup of tea with my wife. I need to adapt it as my life style. I need to find ways to infuse curiosity about my work in my family, get them to appreciate me and contribute in my efforts. And I need to start finding ways where I can use the skills learned here in areas that can directly benefit my community of brethren in faith.
Once I achieve this feat, I will be living my work and hence enjoying my living and thus getting paid for my enjoyment. Then, I will never have to work my whole life!
I was actually lacking a curiosity for exploration at that time. Once I began to do scientific research at college, I realized that I can enjoy researching new phenomena for livelihood. But that still would get boring for me when I would attempt to push frontiers of science without having fully mastered its foundations. Only when I began to write software programs and that too for processing images and videos that I began to stay curious for longer hours while I studied or worked. Still, I would get a feeling that I am not regulating my efforts in understanding the bigger picture of the existence of this universe. As I would continue to ponder on ways to fill this gap in my approach of doing research, I came to a realization that understanding the purpose of ones creation holds the key to understanding the existence of universe. To this point, a scholar has famously said "one who finds himself finds God." And to understand ones self, one must understand ones mind, how it thinks, perceives, makes connections, reasons, and so on. But how can I apply this into my research in image processing software development, I asked. And I quickly got an answer, which was by learning to train computers to do that image processing for me using the model of a human mind. I could then see myself entering into the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I now feel that if I keep learning new ways to make intelligent systems that can automatically perceive and reason, I can continue to understand our mind better. Since mind is the supreme creation of God and the creator manifests himself in his creations, I can actually understand God better through my research.
So I like to explore the world around me, I like to research the scientific phenomena governing the happenings around me, I like to answer questions arising in my mind regarding the reason for our creation, I like to pass on my knowledge to others through teaching, I like to train machines to do tasks for me, and I like to see the results of my efforts within my attention span for a given quantifiable task. And the goal for me is to center my work for earning the livelihood around these likenesses.
I feel that I am quite close to achieving this goal because I have apparently taken the first set of steps of quantifying my likenesses and picking up the areas in my academic and professional fields of interest that are aligned with these areas of my personal interest. Now, I need to begin to fuse my profession into my daily life.
I need to continue to write software programs which would enable the training of machines to facilitate the image and video processing. And I need to keep doing this at home, as I wake up from sleep as I sit down for a few moments after having a sweet cup of tea with my wife. I need to adapt it as my life style. I need to find ways to infuse curiosity about my work in my family, get them to appreciate me and contribute in my efforts. And I need to start finding ways where I can use the skills learned here in areas that can directly benefit my community of brethren in faith.
Once I achieve this feat, I will be living my work and hence enjoying my living and thus getting paid for my enjoyment. Then, I will never have to work my whole life!
Monday, January 20, 2014
Existence of God cannot be a Myth. Lack of proof is itself a Proof.
God exists to answer all the possible questions that science does not have any explanations for. And the science will never have an explanation for everything. We should always strive to find an explanation though so we can fully harness the energy and matter around us and to not get fooled into believing in an illusion. However, its true that the science will be helpless at some point from generation to generation, no matter how advanced it gets.
This is simply because of the fact that the humans will never be able to reach every part of the universe and there will always be a "final frontier," as Star Trek puts it, for the humankind to explore and to explain by scientific reasoning. For instance, we might never ever be able to get the first-hand knowledge of the physical laws that govern the interplay of energy and matter on the most distant brightest star, Deneb, in our galaxy, because even if we travel at the light's speed, we would exhaust our body's limited lifespan and die as it'll take us over 7000 years to reach it.
Even if we do discover and theorize all the scientific laws in play in this universe, we can still never be at a stage of tweaking the laws to our taste. Every scientific advancement so far has involved harnessing/transforming matter or energy to our needs, but how can we generate this matter or energy out of nothing, having customized qualities and attributes of our liking? Somehow, the 116 elements in the periodic table came about to their existence, but how can science explain their origination. We will have to call their origination a reaction to some action, [knock knock] "Newton's 3rd Law"? There has to be the source of this action, some source that preceded the "reaction" that was caused i.e. the origination of the periodic table elements and all the matter that resulted from them!
Besides these more technical questions regarding the universe around us, even the most elementary of questions pertinent to the existence of all "living" beings in this universe are equally bewildering. Questions like the inception of a soul in the embryo within a female's womb, and the itinerary of that soul beyond this material world after the body's heart stops pumping, are completely unanswerable and silly to even hypothesize by science. Genetics can explain the physical traits of a baby but cannot comment on the moral traits inherited by the soul.
Not having an answer to any of the above questions is an irrefutable evidence in itself of the existence of an external power. "Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations," as Einstein puts it in an interview published in 1930's Viereck's book, Glimpses of the Great. At every instance of the humankind's existence, we will be forced to believe that the existence of that mysterious force, God, is to our delight or distress, alas, inevitable.
This is simply because of the fact that the humans will never be able to reach every part of the universe and there will always be a "final frontier," as Star Trek puts it, for the humankind to explore and to explain by scientific reasoning. For instance, we might never ever be able to get the first-hand knowledge of the physical laws that govern the interplay of energy and matter on the most distant brightest star, Deneb, in our galaxy, because even if we travel at the light's speed, we would exhaust our body's limited lifespan and die as it'll take us over 7000 years to reach it.
Even if we do discover and theorize all the scientific laws in play in this universe, we can still never be at a stage of tweaking the laws to our taste. Every scientific advancement so far has involved harnessing/transforming matter or energy to our needs, but how can we generate this matter or energy out of nothing, having customized qualities and attributes of our liking? Somehow, the 116 elements in the periodic table came about to their existence, but how can science explain their origination. We will have to call their origination a reaction to some action, [knock knock] "Newton's 3rd Law"? There has to be the source of this action, some source that preceded the "reaction" that was caused i.e. the origination of the periodic table elements and all the matter that resulted from them!
Besides these more technical questions regarding the universe around us, even the most elementary of questions pertinent to the existence of all "living" beings in this universe are equally bewildering. Questions like the inception of a soul in the embryo within a female's womb, and the itinerary of that soul beyond this material world after the body's heart stops pumping, are completely unanswerable and silly to even hypothesize by science. Genetics can explain the physical traits of a baby but cannot comment on the moral traits inherited by the soul.
Not having an answer to any of the above questions is an irrefutable evidence in itself of the existence of an external power. "Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations," as Einstein puts it in an interview published in 1930's Viereck's book, Glimpses of the Great. At every instance of the humankind's existence, we will be forced to believe that the existence of that mysterious force, God, is to our delight or distress, alas, inevitable.
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