They Don’t Have to Think Like You : Devdutt Pattanaik

They Don’t Have to Think Like You : Devdutt Pattanaik

Winners of life

Perception

We take in other people's observable behaviors through one or more of our five senses. Perception is the process by which we select, organize, and interpret observable behaviors. We select which parts of a message we pay attention to based on our expectations, needs and wants. We organize the message based on what is important to us. We interpret the message based on our past experiences and attitudes. The process of selecting, organizing and interpreting observable behaviors creates our own unique filter for how we perceive what others are saying.

Since we all have different expectations, needs, wants, importance, experiences and attitudes we often perceive the same message quite differently. This causes tremendous problems in large group communications when trying to create shared understanding on a complex issue among a group or team.

“I know you think you heard what I said, but what you heard is not what I meant” is an accurate description of most communications. Through the process of perception we interpret what we think the other person is trying to say. In other words, we can never directly know what other people are trying to communicate; we only know what we perceive. Since the process of perception results in addition, deletions and distortion of what someone is trying to communicate, what we hear is often not what they meant. Communications is when two people realize they do not yet understand each other.

Source:-http://www.dsperformancegroup.com/?submit=MI3#

THE SUCCESS OF MARRIAGE -Once upon a time

THE SUCCESS OF MARRIAGE

Once upon a time a married couple celebrated their 25th marriage anniversary. They had become famous in the city for not having a single conflict in their period of 25 years. Local newspaper editors had gathered at the occasion to find out the secret of their well known 'happy going marriage'.

Editor: "Sir. It's amazingly unbelievable. How did you make this possible?"

Husband recalling his old honeymoon days said: "We hav been to Simla for honeymoon after marriage. Having selected the horse riding finally, we both started the ride on different horses. My horse was pretty okay but the horse on which my wife was riding seemed to be a crazy one.
On the way ahead, that horse jumped suddenly, making my wife topple over. Recovering her position from the ground, she patted the horse's back and said "This is your first time". She again climbed the horse and continued with the ride. After a while, it happened again. This time she again kept calm and said "This is your second time" and continued. When the horse dropped her third time, she silently took out the revolver from the purse and shot the horse dead!!

I shouted at my wife: "What did you do you psycho. You killed the poor animal. Are you crazy?"

She gave a silent look and said: "This is your first time!!!"

Husband: "That's it.. We are happy ever after."

All is Well !! Not Worst

Letter to DAD
A father passing by his teenage daughter's bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was neat and tidy. Then he saw an envelope propped up prominently on the centre of the pillow. It was addressed 'Dad'. With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter with trembling hands:-Dear Dad,It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you, but I'm leaving home. I had to elope with my new boyfriend Randy because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mom and you. I've been finding real passion with Randy and he is so nice to me. I know when you meet him you'll like him too - even with all his piercing, tattoos, and motorcycle clothes. But it's not only the passion Dad, I'm pregnant and Randy said that he wants me to have the kid and that we can be very happy together. Even though Randy is much older than me (anyway, 42 isn't so old these days is it?), and has no money, really these things shouldn't stand in the way of our relationship, don't you agree?It's true he has other girlfriends as well but I know he'll be faithful to me in his own way. He wants to have many more children with me and that's now one of my dreams too.Randy t aught me that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone and he'll be growing it for us and we'll trade it with our friends for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so Randy can get better; he sure deserves it!!Don't worry Dad, I'm 15 years old now and I know how to take care of myself. Someday I'm sure we'll be back to visit so you can get to know your grandchildren.Your loving daughter,Rosie.At the bottom of the page were the letters 'PTO'. Hands still trembling, her father turned the sheet, and read:PS: Dad, none of the above is true. I'm over at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than my report card that's in my desk centre drawer. Please sign it and call when it is safe for me to come home. I love you!

Cup Or Coffee.....

This is the best mail for our current situationA group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other's cups.Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change. Some times, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it."
Don't let the cups drive you... Enjoy the coffee instead!!!

Eagle's Egg

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to Aruna Narayana Murthy

An eagle’s egg was placed in nest of a hen. The egg hatched and the eagle grew thinking that he was a chicken. The eagle did what the chicken did. It scratched the dirt for seeds. It did not fly more than a few feet because this is what chicken did.

One day he saw an eagle flying gracefully and majestically in the open sky. He asked the chicken “Which is that beautiful bird?” .

The chicken said “That is an eagle.. He is an outstanding bird, but you can’t fly like him as you are just a chicken”. So the eagle never gave a second thought to it and lived and died as a chicken, depriving himself of his heritage because of his lack of vision.

We are born to win but conditioned to lose.  This is true of most people. We don’t achieve excellence because we think we can’t achieve it.

Source: Ramadurai's weekly motivational email

Related articles by Zemanta

• Do you have this kind of vision? (andyskinstad.wordpress.com)
• Why I'm trying to make myself redundant. (dougbelshaw.com)

Life is all about living

Image via Wikipedia

Exactly 1 year back things were looking all rosy with us ... Kenny turning 1 and Nissi growing fast and I was leading a reasonably successful life  as you could say with property in Sydney, and in India. You can't ask for more when you haven't even turned 30 and contracting in SAP without a break for 4 years.

Last June we visited India for Kenny's 1st birthday and before going there I was down with flu a few times but anti-biotics were doing their job reasonably well ,but not getting to that 100% you would want to. After returning  to Brisbane I started again seeing my GP to dig deep on why I was constantly falling sick(in other words not feeling 100%) but still feeling quite normal and was able to do my day-to-day activities without any drama.

Prognosis went on for 2 months and after a series of tests it was revealed that there is a lump on the left side of my neck which needed biopsy to find out what exactly is happening. But by that time my GP was confident it could be Lymphoma(haven' t heard that till then and so didn't really bother me when he delivered the news, should say ignorance is healthy). GP simply said it was unfortunate and something which is not good to have and can be treated fairly effectively. Thanks to the internet I came to know what it was and shocked to know what it could be, but life wasn't flashing in front of my eyes or nothing like that but was hugely upset that I might not see my kids grow or walk my daughter down the aisle on her big day. But I wasn't complaining WHY ME? because I never thought why me when I topped studies after ordinary preparations and never asked why me when I was making heaps of money when still friends of mine were still struggling. Told Priyanka after 2 days because I had a heamotologist appointment in 2 days and I didn't want to give her a shock on that day. News spread so quickly among friends here and people started praying and my wife fasted every day for few weeks before the surgery asking God for a  miracle. So after 2 months of prognosis and biopsy on the lump ... miracle didn't happen ... it was diagnosied as Hodgkin's Lymphoma which is favourable of the Lymphomas. It was at stage 3B and the hematologist decided that it would take 16 cycles of chemotherapy and radiation to treat it.

May be for the first time in my life I would have cried so badly for my future ... and I couldn't be out of work because of the commitments I have(investments ... too many in fact) ... my wife meet with her friends on friday's to pray and 1 of the girls told her that she had a vision from Jesus and I don't need to worry about finances because he is gonna provide. I am not a very religious person but anything that's in my favour am gonna take it, I was so revealed but once my treatment starts I didn't know how my physical condition would be in terms of work. No work no pay(downsides of contracting) .

Ironically my treatment started on 27th Nov, 2008 , the day after my 30th birthday ... what a start after a big birthday. Before the treatment started I just prayed that God give me the strength and energy to go through this challenge with a smile and positive attitude. Doctors were quite confident that it could be treated fairly effectively but still you will have your own doubts about the 'C' word. I had to take lot of needles for the treatment but just before the start of the treatment my 4 year old daughter had a vaccination and she took the needle with a smile . Then I said to myself -If my daughter can take it with a smile I should be able to do it and that really helped.

Finally chemo started and it wasn't a pleasant experience but thank God it's over now. Half-way through the treatment the doctor decided I don't need 16 as planned but 12 would do the job. In-fact may be 8 would have done but he wanted to give more chemo rather than less and his aim was to make sure I go through this if possible only once. 20 sittings of radiation everyday and after 7 months of treatment, I am successfully cured of cancer. I don't like to use the word but I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

Infact miracles do happen and I can say with a big smile that when it happened it was so pleasant . Could you believe that I only had to take 1 day-off every fortnight for the treatment and as an icing on the cake I made nearly 15000 dollars on stocks in 2 months after the treatment . God fulfilled the promise that he made through that girl and he has helped me to stay with postive attitude and as a matter of fact I wasn't even thinking about the disease through the journey. Having a caring wife and 2 innocent kids at home also helped during the journey because there was always fun at home and no real movie jaisa atmosphere. Even colleagues and friends made sure that I would be part of all their parties and never missed a thing except a couple of parties. A real blessing was one of our friends who left his job in Sydney and stayed with us on all the days of my treatment and he used to look after the kids when we were busy making the hospital trips.

Right now am back to normal and energy levels are back to pre-disease levels. Still need to put-on the 10 kilos I lost through disease.

The reason I am sharing this is to let you know that life could throw challenges at you but there are other people in the world who will be going through tougher things than you could imagine and also the need to not neglect health and see a doctor (there is no harm in going for a regular general check-up). Am not preachingJ

Related articles by Zemanta

• Former Survivor Winner's Cancer Returns (perezhilton.com)
• Lance Armstrong VS Cadel Evans (livingstrongandhappy.blogspot.com)
• Lance Storm Commentary - Booking Hulk Hogan (klqwrestling.com)

Is this Bird Alive?

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to M Beena Arjunan


The young man was at the end of his training, soon he would go on to be a teacher. Like all good pupils, he needed to challenge his teacher and to develop his own way of thinking. He caught a bird, placed it in one hand behind is back and went to see his teacher.

'Teacher, is this bird alive or dead?'

His plan was the following: if his teacher said 'dead', he would open his hand and the bird would fly away. If the answer was 'alive', he would crush the bird between his fingers; that way the teacher would be wrong whichever answer he gave.

‘Teacher is the bird alive or dead?' he asked again.

'My dear student that depends on you' was the teacher's reply.
We all have a 'bird' in our hand, a bird we call 'life'. Our teachers may teach us everythinkg but finally it depends on us to how well we use our learning.

Source:- Ramadurai's weekly motivational email

Related articles by Zemanta

• Are You a Parent or Teacher with Homework? (blisstree.com)
• Recipe for Learning Success: I DO, YOU DO, WE DO (angelamaiers.com)

What Matters Now

What Matters Now

Work Efficiently During Office Hours And Leave On Time

Image via Wikipedia

VERY SHORT, MOST EFFECTIVE AND VERY TRUE... 30 seconds Speech by Bryan Dyson (CEO of Coca Cola)

"Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them - Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you're keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls - Family, Health, Friends and Spirit - are made of glass.
If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it."

“WORK EFFICIENTLY DURING OFFICE HOURS AND LEAVE ON TIME.  GIVE THE REQUIRED TIME TO YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS & HAVE PROPER REST.” 


Source:- Suresh's email