Luck = Preparation for opportunity

About 8 years back, when I used to be unhappy in my job for lack of serious work, one of my colleagues, who was 8 years senior to me, used to tell me that one should always work towards sharpening one's claws so that when opportunity strikes, you are ready to attack. 

In these 8 years, I have firmly come to believe in that statement and in fact I now see luck as just a convenient name for "preparation for opportunity". Convenient because when we feel we have been lacking "luck" in something, it really means the inconvenient truth that we lacked preparation for opportunity. So, to avoid inconvenient thought, we attribute it to luck or lack-of-luck.

Now, the question is what is preparation for opportunity? Before I go into that, let me rephrase couple of proverbs I learnt while in school :
- God helps those who help themselves
- So shall you sow, so shall you reap

The problem is, the education system just makes students remember these quotes and to some extent learn the meaning as well. However, the real meaning of these quotes is ingrained in how real life works. 

Reaping success or finding luck (God's help) are not straight-forward things. As explained in these 2 quotes, it requires a solid background of preparation in the form of "sowing effort" or "helping yourself". Going further, it is even more difficult to figure out where to put your effort to achieve a certain success and sometimes the thought itself is discouraging for many to even attempt for higher success. The key to solve this problem is that, learn there is no shortcut and so just keep spending effort!! Long ago, I read somewhere that success is not defined by where you reach, but by the difference between from where you started and where you reached.

So, achieving success or excellence or "luck" is not an event, it is a process with two parts - preparation-for-opportunity and striking-opportunity and both of them leading to one-another throughout the process. It is something like a Fibonacci series in mathematics where any number is sum of previous two and so on, so every number is conceptually result of all previous numbers...
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,.....

And there is no end of the series, it is infinite. So is the pursuit of success or achiving luck.

Story - 2009

Another year is about to finish, giving way for a new one.
However, life is not that simple and smooth like the flow of time. It can not be measured in terms of number of months or years. The pace of life can be measured by the number and impact of the events and the incidents happening in it.

For me, for sure 2009 was an year of events - some quite big and turning points of life also.

The MBA dreams
2009 started just in quick continuation to 2008 - with most of my time spent on writing MBA applications. I submitted applications for Ross and NUS in Jan 2009. For most of the Feb, I spent time relaxing and waiting for results. Soon it became clear that there was no point waiting. I had to move on and decide what next.
The whole MBA app process had taught me that my profile is not yet suited for a globally reputed MBA course. So I thought of spending my time not just on thinking how to do MBA but also do things that I like to do.

AID and the maths kit
I was getting more and more responsibilities in office and enjoyed my work. Apart from that I wanted to spend my extra time on something creative. I talked to a colleague (Mr SD) of mine who is very active in social work to get involved in some activities with him. One of my friends (NP) is working under SD in same project. He also talked to SD regarding the social work. SD asked us to join AID - association for India's development.
NP also pulled in his roomie TB who brought in his friend NS too.
So, we four, along with SD, started working on a mathematical kit for primary classes students. It was a very ambitious project.

--- below was written in 2013

Marriage
2009 ended with my marriage to Pooja Gupta and an awesome trip to Andaman & Nikobar islands.

Hyderabadi and Settled

It is more than 2 years back when I wrote my last blog. That was 2009, while I was applying for an admission to MBA in one of the good schools and waiting for results from a couple of others. Well, none of them found me "fit" for their classes. From my experience of applying, I learnt two things. One that my profile was not strong enough. Second, I needed to put in more hard-work to research about MBA schools and write my applications.
Amidst all this, somehow I decided to marry and luckily soon I found my soul mate.

Without I realized it, I had become a "Hyderabadi" and "settled" - terms which my friends used for me. They were too accustomed to see me changing jobs often and writing different exams that they could not digest the fact that I was working in same company and staying in same city.

Well, Hyderabad is a pretty good place! It is the city of Sania Mirza (tennis), Saina Nehwal (badminton) and recent TV sensation Indian Idol Sreeram.
And Qualcomm, a great company to work with and with a rising stock price!!

So, here I am now. Sitting in KPHB Colony and writing this blog to resume my off-and-on interest of writing.

I don't know, except the next blog, what exactly I am going to write. And I would like it to be just random! Random, like electrons in an atom. Random, like thoughts in my mind.

Q & A

This is a long weekend. Tomorrow (26th Jan, Monday) is our republic day. I mean today only...it's already 12:31 Ante Meridiem.

Almost everybody is my friend circle is busy watching movies or on trips to unseen places or killing some quality time with their gf/bfs.

Well, I am confined in my 10'x10' room pondering over a question which I have to answer, but I am not able to find/recall any incident from my life that could provide me with the answer. May be I need to talk to Jamal Malik to know how to dig into memory pretty much effectively and probably become a millionaire.

Hoping that my unconscious mind may work out a nice algorithm and flash an answer, I am going to write the 'Q' here and discuss what it means.

"Describe an ethical dilemma you experience first-hand. How did you manage and resolve the situation?"

An ethical dilemma is defined by Wikipedia as
"An ethical dilemma is a situation that will often involve an apparent conflict between moral imperatives, in which to obey one would result in transgressing another."

So, you see, the conflict between two moral aspects is necessary. If one of them is not moral, then it is a dilemma not an ethical dilemma. You will ask "why"?

Good question...because assuming that you are an ethical person and were confronted by a situation that demanded you to exercise ethical leadership. You had two choices. Let's say, one of them was an ethical one and other not. Also you could manage with the ethical one. So obviously you'd go for ethical one. So that was not exactly an ethical dilemma. It was very well a dilemma.

However, if the situation is so demanding that you can not manage at all (some major risk, need, etc) with your ethical stand, then you are in a real dilemma. Consider a hypothetical but not so perfect situation as told to me by a nice friend.

You are working in a team. One particular day, you are not in a mood to work and ask a colleague to cover up for you. You don't inform your manager about it. He covers for you. No issues. After 2 years, you are leading two people. One of them does the same thing that you did 2 years back. You come to know about it. Now you want to tell him about the mistake he has done. But you are not getting the courage to do so as you know you had done similar mistake earlier. To make matters more complicated, let's say he also knows that you have also done the same once.
You also don't want to sour your relationship with your junior.
So you are in a ethical dilemma. Should you go and tell him his mistake and ask him not to repeat it again, you are going to feel guilty and your professional relation will get affected. However if you don't talk to him about this, it is going to affect your leadership. Moreover your junior might get used to such small mistakes. So you really want to correct him.

So what should you do? Neither of the two ways seems like a good option.

A possible way to resolve such a situation would be to have an open talk. Forgo your ego and follow an honest and sincere approach. Tell him that you have also skipped work like this without informing your manager. Also that you realize it is wrong and can have some repercussions later. So basically you'll advise him as a candid senior that he should not practice unethical practices.
Effectively, you have managed the situation very well. You had to undergo a decision making that was tough.

Well, this was in a professional setting. Much bigger and complex ethical dilemmas can happen in personal life also. But they are more on human moral values.
Here, I am generally expected to answer something related to professional ethics.

I have got some examples from my life, but they are more of dilemmas where I knew what was right and I did that. So I won't be able to show my difficult situation and the decision making my mind went through.

During this whole process of applying for MBA, I have certainly gained on intangible aspects (transferable skills, in MBA jargon). I do not know whether I am going to do an MBA this year or not, but this experience has already started having an impact on me. I have started becoming more watchful of my personality aspects. How do I work, how do I present some presentation, how do I carry myself in meetings, what kind of words do I use et al. Well, more on that, later.

For now, my thinking is not yet over and I need to finish this essay before India's 60th Republic day is over.

Wikipedia has some nice links for some practically possible and really tough Ethical Dilemmas. Check them out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_dilemma

Problem solving

I have already told in the introduction about myself, my blogs can be random...well, I mean, with a probability (P) of any topic being covered defined as
P = a rational number x where 0 <= x <= 1 ;)

So, let's solve a algorithmic problem, which I found on someone else' blog (http://my-experiments-with-it.blogspot.com) and liked it.

Here goes it:

You have an array of size 'n' with numbers from 1 to 'n'. You need to sort this array in the most optimal way.

HINT(Don't read the hint if you think you can do without it): The solution has a complexity of O(n). i.e. even less than the O(n.log(n)) which is given by the best sorting algorithms.

Find the answer in the comments section.