Common sense and/or application of mind

What differentiates smart people and dumb people or idiots?

It is the power of common sense, a keen eye to observe things, validate what they hear or read, not take things for granted. It is about application of mind on simple things and not doing things blindly or mechanically. A lot of graduates know or taught only doing tasks and not application of mind. Over a period of time and a lot of skulduggery of their bosses and by learning from mistakes they become wise and start using common sense. They start perceiving information and how to relate it to what they already know. But some people are unwilling to learn or disinterested to learn and are sometimes pre-occupied with other than office work to continue being ignorant and committing a lot of errors and blunders at which point in time they are either given lesser responsibilities or are forced to leave the organisation.

A major part of the ability to think on things and apply their minds and be conscious of the environment and data while performing a task or taking a decision is dependent on the way the people are brought up during their schooling or college days. The environment, the people and the projects that encourages them or forces them to think through things is the key to understand how things work and what things affect and how they affect a certain object/objective. This enables them to do a self check with readily available knowledge/information in their head to understand the trade offs and take a decision or perform the task right in the first instance.

Curiousity is another factor that enables people to learn and apply their minds. Curiousity also leads to creative thinking and adds value to things and brings about new solutions. Curiosity too is a factor that has to be encouraged in the childhood and cannot come suddenly at an old age. This factor in turn can be identified and leads to a talent.

Determination helps people focus. Another key factor that avoids innumerable distractions and stops others needs taking over your identified goal. This also allows people to bring more of their resources (time, money, connections, etc.) to the goal instead of using their resources to do other things.

So, to be smart and use common sense, encourage people to increase their curiosity and help them achieve their goals for them to see the value of their goals achieved through determination.

The Paradox of Choices

Our needs and the understanding of our needs tends to be poles apart when it comes to choices. We get to choose from tens of flavours for a face wash (Does it really matter whether it was a peach flavoured one or an apricot) and keep changing them but when the big important things come, we hardly have much chance to change the choice (which city to settle, who to marry, which house to buy, which career line to choose). Not impossible but very difficult. Such are the forces the humankind is forced to.

Society's changing address

When our generation was young and in school, we all used to call all people even slightly elder to us as "bhaiya/didi" (north India) or "anna/akka" (south India). Even people who were a year older were called like that and if people below your age call you only by your name, that would be disrespectful. Times have changed. Now people prefer to be called only by their names with no suffixes even by people twenty years younger. There are two possible reasons for this: People are more age conscious and more international exposure/norms. The first is obvious when my female friend and cousin sister dont want to be called aunties by even their 4 yr old niece/nephews. Maybe the popular image of an aunty is a 40 yr old with enough girth that even a baby elephant gets inferiority complex.

The second is perhaps because of the software companies' culture wherein people are addressed only by their first names mostly.

Just an observation and hence no conclusion!

Keep those flight tickets

When you get so much free spaces on emails, spare some space for those old emailed flight tickets in your inbox. You never know when it will come in handy.

Take for instance, my aunt's case. She has travelled to UK a few times to meet her son who lives there. And then one day, she lost her passport in India. She applied for a new passport and got it and applied for a new visa for seeing her son in UK. The UK visa team rejected her application on the basis that they were not sure whether she returned back to India during the vaildity of the visa term or stayed back as an illegal immigrant after the proposed visa duration stay as the new passport lacked the immigration check seal of departure from UK. Although the UK's immigration department has details of my aunt's checking out of UK, the country's system puts the onus on the foreigner to prove that they left the country in time and didnt violate any rules. This is one of the ways the government tries to permanently avoid other people coming into their country.

To top this, the British Airliner says they keep information of passengers for only three months and since the travel was beyond that period, they cant give them a copy of the ticket or the confirmation of travel. I wonder how these same airlines and airports would have all the required information and recorded video of the passengers if the enquiring people were some anti-terrorist detectives.

The saving grace was that my aunt's son had a email copy of the ticket lying somewhere in his inbox which he found out.

Moral of the stroy: Despite feeling sometimes that an email/document(air tickets, bank accoubnt closing letter, bank account statements after closing a bank account) is a piece of junk i have to live with, one may never know when it will be a life saviour and where.

Another Marketing gimmick

When you wish someone prosperity, isn't it for a lifetime? It doesnt seem so for marketers as usual. Five years ago, a common man in the city was unaware of an auspicious day called Akshaya Tritiya. Maybe people seeing star calenders knew about it and did whatever they did on those days. But suddenly, this day has become so conspicuous, unignorable and synonymous to buy gold on this auspicious day for prosperity with every jeweller advertising it. So I ask again: Does the prosperity the gold (supposedly) brings expire in one year and new gold have to be bought every year?

Is this what we are actually ending up with?

My friend said something he had heard his friend asking: "Are we really working our a**es off to have a higher hard disk capacity, faster processors and download speeds with more high definition resolution so that someone out there can watch more high quality porn in newer devices? "

Well, I don't think he was much off the mark when you consider the numbers below...

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-numbers-behind-pornography/