You cannot see without a "frame" - or without a "word" for it

I found the following on the 12-Manage site recently. It said; "we have no choice but to put a frame on what and how we interact with our environment. Without a frame we would not know what to focus on and what to ignore." What an astounding and deep observation. This was discovered by a linguist called Lekoff.

That reminded me of the experiments by another linguist Noam Chomsky - who established relationship between cognitive growth and language -  who found that red Indian children - when shown videos of the flights of different birds - could "see" and identify differences in the flight of the birds because they had more words for movement of animals in their language - probably because traditionally they were hunters. The Caucasian children on the other hand  found less differences in the same videos - because the English language does not have many words for flight of words. Conclusion : You can "see" something more easily if you already have a "word" or a "frame" for it. No wonder there is as strong correlation between IQ and the number of words you know and can use.    

Making Magic Happen To Your Life

I see students all around me whose main purpose of coming to S P Jain is to earn Rs 12 Lakh job that comes at the end of it. I feel like telling them that there are 3 criteria for deciding what they must do.

1. Do what makes a difference to someone. Be of service to someone or to a good cause.
2. You all have your own unique and special gift given by the god. Ask your "trusted truth-tellers" - friends and family members who won't just tell you what you want to hear but who will share their true opinions - get real.
3. Discover your passion but have patience. Or rather let your passion find you. It will not happen overnight, but like love, it will find you and you will know. 

Trust me, when 3 combine,  a magic will happen that is beyond your wildest imagination.

How to appear for Sales / Business Development Interview?

I was delighted when Sanil and Dexter from the information management class of 2nd year PGDM came to me on Friday and said that there was a strong recommendation from the last year students - who attended my elective course on "Customer Acquisition" - that they found my teaching very practical and useful during their internships and their jobs in the industry. I immediately agreed to hold the class very next day but without an outline ... I said the title will be "Q&A with Prof Palekar". The 2 sessions went off very well. I too enjoyed immensely. This was the first time that the students were being taught by me and normally the class is naturally wary of a new teacher. In this case it was the opposite - in the first 2 minutes itself I realized I was welcome and wanted. What more does a teacher want ?