Thank God it's Monday?

Note: You may not get the point of this post. This is just a musing.

For many of us, Monday is the most dreaded day. You hear Monday, you get a stomachache. The fear of Monday may be due to multiple reasons we all are familiar with. However, more often than not, its just plain laziness. After a good two days of fun and enjoyment, we are just unwilling to go working. 

Friday, on the other hand induces a pleasant feeling. Thank God it's Friday. However, if you notice, the Friday excitement only survives the day. You don't even realize how Saturday passes by and by the time it is Sunday, you have already started worrying about the upcoming devil - Monday.

The Friday bliss is about two things.

1. The days you are actually happy: Friday.

2. The days you are happy about on the day you are happy: Weekend.

On a deeper thought, the feeling of Friday bliss is not about the weekend but actually about Friday. We like Fridays more than the weekend. It is a feeling of anticipated fun. The actual fun days are the weekend days, but you feel good about it only on Friday.

This is true about any kind of anticipation: good and bad. This feeling of anticipation these days has grown so acute that even Sunday feels like a Monday!

Corruption

Corruption in any provider consumer system is fueled by two very human characteristics: laziness on part of the consumer and greed on part of the provider. To stop corruption, both the provider as well as the consumer must contribute.

Whistle-blowing is actually a very powerful technique to fight corruption. It works on both the ends: the provider as well as the consumer end. Only two things are needed to unleash its full potential: Protection of the one blowing the whistle and appropriate Reward/Punishment for the actions.

Officials and bureaucrats who spend so much of their time in weaving the web of red tape, could for once try to establish strong laws and strategies for whistle blowing.

Like every other technique, this may have pitfalls and we'll need to face a trade-off.

Job Satisfaction - What is it really?

A job, or more generally work is a noun which cannot attract any good adjectives. People may say various things about their jobs. "I love my job!" or "My job is very interesting" or "I have complete job satisfaction". People who run after job satisfaction are trying to catch a ghost. 

The key to job satisfaction or interesting work is non-monotonicity. You don't want job satisfaction. You want job rotation! Be it any kind of job. If you are asked to do it forever, it will ultimately become boring. If you want to maintain excitement, you must try and do different things.

Most employers today are resistant to practice job rotation for their employees fearing they would lose expertise. However, what is stopping them to gain expertise in multiple fields? It is the result of this resistance that the attrition rates are so high these days.

Life - A Dream - A Longer one!

Don't you sometimes feel that the whole world around is shattering and falling apart, and you just wished that it weren't happening and that it weren't true?

At that time, remember, it isn't.

In such times, you wish that that it was just a dream. Know, that it is! Troubling incidents in the dreams that you have while sleeping, cause you the same amount of pain and suffering as the incidents in your real life. However, that pain and suffering is short-lived as it ends as soon as you wake up and everything is alright. Similarly, this life is a dream of a higher being in you.

I don't want to sound like I know everything or that I am the "enlightened one". I just want to point out that there is enough evidence that there exists a higher self in each individual. Knowing or at least believing this even without experiencing it sometimes helps a lot to get through the hurdles in life!

Biomimicry - Real world problem solving

The key to problem solving is to know that the problem you are facing has already been solved in some way or the other. It could be a human being, or even nature. If you have studied computer science, you must be familiar with the concept of reduction. All you need to solve a difficult problem is to reduce it to an already solved problem.

This reduction is a way of making an analogy with a similar problem. In other words, analogy itself is a great tool to solve problems. For me, when faced with any problem, I simply make an analogy with some concept or phenomenon in the real world.  The I can notice how nature deals with it and what can be done to solve it. Finally, I need to map the solution of nature back to my actual problem context. Thats it!

Nature is the best thing to make an analogy with. In fact, I recently found out that Biomimicry is already a popular concept in order to gain inspiration from nature to solve human problems.

All you need to solve a problem is to make an appropriate analogy with some concept of nature and you have your solution!