The Courage to Do What Is Right

Yes, you're happy you did what you had to do then. And it's paying off now! You braced up the challenges and the criticism, though it wasn't easy. Now you have your wife, you won her back. You quit that job that took all you had. You cleaned house of friendships that weren't helping you. You set your priorities straight.

What Do We Want? Money, Power, ...Or Happiness?

People have spent many years learning. Others, countless hours working in the day and at night. And some have stolen and even killed.

The cost of  'Success' is rising so high I'm afraid we might be spent in its pursuit. But what is it we are really looking for? The literal dollar bills or power just for its sake? I doubt it.

We are looking for happiness. A very high dose of it.

The big mansion, the yacht, the high profile event, the spacious office, are means to an end. A drug-like end. We get it. Addictions can be hard to break.

Who is entitled to the so-called success? The intelligent? The educated? Royalty? And what about the man who has non of these? Now it's getting twisted.

Everyone has a right to happiness.

The man on Wall Street makes his money out of his briefcase, and the criminal unleashes mayhem on society to get his own means.

Can the world contain all our 'success' chasers?! Or let me rephrase it. Can the world contain all our happiness chasers?

Why has happiness been so elusive?

Could we be looking in the wrong direction for happiness? I think so.

The Amusing Nature of Complexity

The Cambridge dictionary defines complexity as "the ​state of having many ​parts and being ​difficult to ​understand or ​find an ​answer to".

Taking a closer look at entities, we find that they compose of many layers. Do these layers hold the secret to complexity? May be.

On descending to the innermost layer, we find a 'dumb' simple structure. This is where it begins to be funny. 

Complexity is a composition of simple structures.

The Future of Business

A bank welcomes a customer and he has a headache. A doctor employed by the bank is called in to make a quick diagnosis with some medicine dispensed to the customer till he sees his doctor.

Another customer walks in and she's hungry. She's kindly shown to a restaurant within the bank before she does her transactions.

Both customers smile as they leave their bank. Enter the modern business! Though this is exaggerated, the business of the future is not so different. All businesses would blur their lines to become almost anything to please their customers. A balance is what would be struck to ensure profitability. But watch closely and you see that many businesses are already beginning to transform to this model. They are becoming 'Emotional businesses' -- wildly creative to provide services and perks not related to their core business -- they are stealling hearts!

Any competitors that don't follow suit, would be doing so at their own peril. Companies would budget larger funds for customer pleasing. And who wins in this courtship? Both customer and company. The customer is happy to receive love and care which are priceless, and she gladly empties her purse to the company. Let's hope this affair turns out well.

Intelligence vs Wisdom (I)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines wisdom as "Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends; sometimes, less strictly, sound sense, esp. in practical affairs: opp. to folly".

Wisdom is not fully taught in the university. And many who claim to be authorities have contradicted one another on the best path to follow when we are at crossroads. Our modern culture seems to place more emphasis on making a living than on making a life. The media is awash with stories begging for wisdom.

Are You Cut Out to Be an Entrepreneur?

This is a difficult question as it depends on what cuts you out. Lets look at a few ways in which people have become entrepreneurs, though the list is not exhaustive:

1. They were 'born' entrepreneurs, that is they have wanted to be and have successfully acted as entrepreneurs from childhood.

2. They lost a job, sought another but couldn't find one.

3. They were inspired by an idea or others while on the job and they left.

4. They were heirs to a family business and had to 'learn' entrepreneurship.

5. They were unemployable in conventional jobs.

Now lets discuss each of the ways in detail, as it may determine how successful one would be.

1. The 'Born' Entrepreneurs

You have heard of the kid that baked and sold cakes while his peers where playing at the parks and upgrading their video games. These people have a thing in their genes that gives them a little push that the average individual doesn't.

Greg Davies, head of behavioural and quantitative finance at Barclays Bank noted that there is a surprising amount of entrepreneurial success that can be attributed to genetics or personality development in early childhood. “It’s pretty obvious it isn’t 100% either way. You can teach someone to be better at anything,” said Davies – who has studied entrepreneurial characteristics extensively. “You can teach someone to play the piano but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be a concert pianist.”

2. The Job Losers

These include your neighbour that worked at an insurance company and lost his job, searched for another for three years and failed, and is currently a business owner. These people can be quite successful sometimes. What accounts for their success? Emotions are a strong element of entrepreneurship - the thought that you have no options - real or imagined.

People have an enormous capacity for change, admitted Doug Richards, founder of School for Start-ups and former investor on the TV show, Dragon’s Den. As they grow and undertake new tasks, they become more confident, he added. There is also a significant amount of information that can be learned through lessons. And as that knowledge expands, other intangibles such as ability to calculate risk, perseverance, resilience and desire also grows, he said.

The question may be if you have such emotions.

3. The Inspired

Some have been inspired by an idea or successful peers. Many entrepreneurs get started on their path when they come up with ideas and are prevented from implementing them. Jamal Edwards, founder of SB.TV, an online youth-oriented broadcaster, said he worked at HMV when at school and was frustrated by the chain of command that separated his ideas from implementation.

Success will depend on how good your ideas are, and on your implementation skills, as an idea is just an idea and not a finished product.

4. The Heirs

This category of entrepreneurs are nearly destined to be entrepreneurs. Your family owns the Hilton Worldwide and your parents are old and about to pass away. Or your family has a winery in Spain. The first son or daughter or even children are being groomed to take over the business.

This may seem easy on the surface to many but there is more to it. The size of the business matters. If the business is big, then there is a lot of learning the ropes to be done. The kids may take the business down.

5. The Unemployable

These guys are bad for employers of labour. They are too independent or too sick to hold down a job - they have tried and failed! They are an odd mix of overly creative and overly independent personalities and ADHD and Aspergoid personalities pushed too far beyond Google's doors.

The former type are very driven and go on to start a number of businesses. The latter partner with others that complement their social and business skills while they themselves bring the brain that builds the products as they are often comfortable with complexity.

The Threshold for World-Changing Discoveries Has Risen

Could Einstein be the last fortunate scientist? It appears the threshold for world-changing discoveries has significantly risen. When last did we hear of people like Isaac Newton in his time? Are we impatient? Or have we practically exhausted our 'big discoveries'?

Are there so many learned super performers today that it is difficult to stand out? Or are we standing too short to make the difference?

Do we need more brainpower? Do we need a healthier mind or body? Or do we need help?

Artistry in Many Walks of Life

Have you ever listened to a wonderfully constructed piece of music? You are drenched in dopamine wondering how such a piece was conceived. Or have you driven a super car and you imagined what the engineers had done?

Do you remember the first time you used a tablet computer and you were swiping away pleasurably? Yes, that talk you listened to and you just fell in love with the speaker.

Wikipedia defines art as "a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities, usually involving imaginative or technical skill". So what do you do? Do you see art in your job?

Take a look at the fictional detective Patrick Jane in the television series The Mentalist. And don't forget Dr. Gregory House in House.

Creativity is a key ingredient in art. Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. Creativity is the connection between the evolution of the submarine and Gucci.

How can we increase our inspiration? Inspiration can be defined as a new and better way of answering a question, or solving a problem. Professor Preston Ni offers the following suggestions:

1. Change Your "I Don't Know" or "I Can't" Thinking to "What If...?"
2. Take a Break from the Mundane
3. Listen to Complex Music
4. Get Out of Your Head with Exercise and Movement
5. Immerse Yourself in Nature and Colors
6. Consult Your Board of Advisors (you need to understand this)
7. Read or Watch Biographies of Inspiring, Creative People

We can be an artist at the workplace or our private practice. The next time you have a problem on the job and you need inspiration, try out some of the aforementioned tips.

So when are you going to create something awesome as a mathematician?

Puzzling Findings About the Rich in China

The following is a 2013 CNN article, 'Report: As Chinese millionaires rise, happiness falls':

It's not easy being rich. At least that's what new findings suggest from "The Millionaires Happiness Report" released by the Shanghai-based Hurun Research Institute.

"In general, the report shows that the richer you are, the less happy you are," the report authors said.According to the inaugural report which surveyed 551 Mainland Chinese with a net worth of over 10 million yuan ($1.6 million), the average millionaire in China sleeps only 6.6 hours during the working week.

Chinese millionaires are dissatisfied with their health and are looking to prioritize spending more time with their family, the report said. The "self-made" female super-rich, who were 37 years old on average, are more likely to be unmarried with 35% of the respondents being either divorced or having remained single. The figure is almost twice that of the men surveyed.The average age of all Chinese millionaires surveyed was 38 years old, rising to 40 among the "super-rich" -- those with net wealth of $16 million.

The lack of satisfaction for China's nouveau riche appears to be growing. Hurun Report, a magazine best known for its ranking of the wealthiest individuals in China, surveyed 1,000 super-rich Chinese in 2011 found that 55% of the respondents either in the process of leaving China or seriously considering it.

"What we are seeing is a sense of insecurity or, perhaps you want to look at it from another side, looking for a sense of insurance policy," said Rupert Hoogewerf, publisher of Hurun Report, told CNN in November. "So they are beginning to quite actively try and get a green card in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Singapore."

End of article.

The rich globally may have their stories to tell.

Beating the IQ Challenge

In his post, 'Why Are We so Obsessed With Improving IQ?', Jonathan Wai of Psychology Today noted:

"I think that the reason the desire to improve intelligence has always been popular is because as a society we really care about smarts. The recent article in The New York Times 'Can You Make Yourself Smarter?' along with Hambrick’s latest opinion piece shows that trying to make ourselves smarter has become something of a societal obsession."

In a society that rewards smartness, the juiciest of jobs are reserved for the smart. In another post, 'Of Brainiacs and Billionaires', Wai further observes, 'In the age of big data, the biggest brains will increasingly set the country's course and become top earners in the process.'

Where does that leave you and me? To get a better picture, half of us are just average! This is not a devastating shortcoming. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. But for curiosity's sake, how can some of us go up against the super-smart? Can we beat the IQ challenge?

Welcome to the laboratory. If you are in the top 15% of intelligence (IQ of 115 or higher) you are an eligible candidate! Better still if you are in the top decile (at least IQ of 120). According to The Bell Curve, you are capable of engaging in any profession. The assumption is that you have good work ethic and harmless personality traits. A paper uses Swedish conscript data to examine characteristics of CEOs of large and medium sized companies. It looks like large company CEOs are roughly +1 and +1.5 SD on cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability respectively!

On the Nobelist, Richard Feynman's reportedly "low" IQ of about 125, the educational psychologist, Arthur R. Jensen, admitted "...the outstanding feature of any famous and accomplished person, especially a reputed genius, such as Feynman, is never their level of g (or their IQ), but some special talent and some other traits (e.g., zeal, persistence). Outstanding achievement(s) depend on these other qualities besides high intelligence". He continued, "However, there is a threshold property of IQ, or g, below which few if any individuals are even able to develop high-level complex talents or become known for socially significant intellectual or artistic achievements. This bare minimum threshold is probably somewhere between about +1.5 sigma and +2 sigma from the population mean on highly g-loaded tests."

Can you beat the IQ challenge? Probably. You have to be above average in intelligence with a ton of creativity.

Is Formal Education Also for Its Creators?

Two famous mathematicians [who] became closely associated with one another as “teacher” and “student.” The reason for the quotation marks here will soon be obvious, because the teacher later claimed that he learned more from the student than the student had learned from him. G. H. Hardy was England’s leading mathematician, a professor at Cambridge University, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the recipient of an honorary degree from Harvard. Remarkably precocious in early childhood, especially in mathematics, he became an exceptionally brilliant student, winning one scholarship after another. He was acknowledged the star graduate in mathematics at Cambridge, where he remained to become a professor o f mathematics. He also became a world-class mathematician. His longtime friend C. R Snow relates that Hardy, at the peak of his career, ranked himself fifth among the most important mathematicians of his day, and it should be pointed out that Hardy’s colleagues regarded him as an overly modest man (Snow, 1967). If the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) had been in existence when Hardy was a schoolboy, he would have been a most prized and promising student in the program.

One day Hardy received a strange-looking letter from Madras, India. It was full of mathematical formulations written in a quite unconventional—one might even say bizarre—form. The writer seemed almost mathematically illiterate by Cambridge standards. It was signed “Srinivasa Ramanujan.” At first glance, Hardy thought it might even be some kind of fraud. Puzzling over this letter with its abstruse formulations, he surmised it was written either by some trickster or by someone sincere but poorly educated in mathematics. Hardy sought the opinion of his most highly esteemed colleague, J. E. Littlewood, the other famous mathematician at Cambridge. After the two of them had spent several hours studying the strange letter, they finally realized, with excitement and absolute certainty, that they had “discovered” a major mathematical genius. The weird-looking formulas, it turned out, revealed profound mathematical insights of a kind that are never created by ordinarily gifted mathematicians. Hardy regarded this “discovery” as the single most important event in his life. Here was the prospect of fulfilling what, until then, had been for him only an improbable dream: of ever knowing in person a mathematician possibly of Gauss’s caliber.

The above is an excerpt from the book Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues by the renowned Psychologist Dr. Arthur R. Jensen. The book continues:

A colleague in Hardy’s department then traveled to India and persuaded Ramanujan to go to Cambridge, with all his expenses and a salary paid by the university. When the youth arrived from India, it was evident that, by ordinary standards, his educational background was meager and his almost entirely self-taught knowledge of math was full of gaps. He had not been at all successful in school, from which he had flunked out twice, and was never graduated. To say, however, that he was obsessed by mathematics is an understatement. As a boy in Madras, he was too poor to buy paper on which to work out his math problems. He did his prodigious mathematical work on a slate, copying his final results with red ink on old, discarded newspapers.

This may be the most intriguing, from the same book:

At Cambridge, Ramanujan was not required to take courses or exams. That would have been almost an insult and a sure waste of time. He learned some essential things from Hardy, but what excited Hardy the most had nothing to do with Ramanujan’s great facility in learning the most advanced concepts and technical skills of mathematical analysis. Hardy himself had that kind of facility. What so impressed him was Ramanujan’s uncanny mathematical intuition and capacity for inventing incredibly original and profound theorems. That, of course, is what real mathematical genius is all about. Facility in solving textbook problems and in passing difficult tests is utterly trivial when discussing genius. Although working out the proof of a theorem, unlike discovering a theorem, may take immense technical skill and assiduous effort, it is not itself a hallmark of genius. Indeed, Ramanujan seldom bothered to prove his own theorems; proof was a technical feat that could be left to lesser geniuses. Moreover, in some cases, because of his spotty mathematical education, he probably would have been unable to produce a formal proof even if he had wanted to. But a great many important theorems were generated in his obsessively active brain. Often he seemed to be in another world.

Ramanujan's Wikipedia page says this about him:

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations). Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct, although a small number of these results were actually false and some were already known. He stated results that were both original and highly unconventional, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, and these have inspired a vast amount of further research. The Ramanujan Journal, an international publication, was launched to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by his work.

And finally, from the same source:

Ramanujan was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree by research (this degree was later renamed PhD) in March 1916 for his work on highly composite numbers, the first part of which was published as a paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The paper was over 50 pages with different properties of such numbers proven. Hardy remarked that this was one of the most unusual papers seen in mathematical research at that time and that Ramanujan showed extraordinary ingenuity in handling it.

Abstract Reality(?)

Physical and Mental universes. Yes, we know objects, and confidently believe that they exist - perhaps because others also see them and attest to their reality. Could we possibly have 'objects' that exist in our minds? Objects that are not physical, but equally real because others attest to having similar experiences. I'm interested in this extended definition. Could we explore a 'mental universe'? I want to hear your thoughts.