Monthly Archives: October 2012

Folks, I am part of the IIT Mentors group where I mentor a team of professionals during their career. We are organising a panel discussion for corporate executives who wish to do an MBA. If you have friends interested in doing an MBA, please pass this message to them. And, if you wish, please post this on your corporate bulletin board.  My book will also be available there at a discounted price.

Thank you for reading this.

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Business school is for the informed and the driven. It is a planned intervention in your career to lift you from where you are to the next higher level. B-School education, across the globe, comes with a heavy price tag (typically above Rs. 30 Lakhs) and just having any B-School degree is not good enough to change your fortune. In fact our experience shows most successful MBA grads did very diligent homework of fact finding around B-school education before plunging into it.

IIT Mentors (http://www.iitmentors.org) is proud to bring an extraordinary session for those who want to undertake MBA education to leapfrog their career. So, register now – to get answer to all your queries – whether it be do’s and don’ts of an application letter or how does a USA or an International B-school fares against its Indian counterparts – from noted experts in the field of MBA across the prominent geographies. Seats are limited to ensure the quality and depth of interactions, so register now to secure your opportunity to attend one of the most sought-after pre-MBA workshops.

The pre MBA workshop would mainly cover three areas: Selection of B schools and managing your profile, Leveraging maximum out of an MBA degree and Career progression post MBA.

Panel of experts

1. Chirantan Chatterjee – Assistant Professor IIM Bangalore, IIT Roorkee alumnus

2. Pamli Deka – Alumnus INSEAD 2010, IIT Roorkee alumnus

3. Dinesh Nilkanth – Principal, Jain University Bangalore

Registration fee: Rs. 200/- only

Find out more and Register here: http://iitmentors-event-workshop-23june2012.doattend.com/

About IIT Mentors:

IIT Mentors is a unique PanIIT ‘nation building’ program that aims to unlock the powerful network of the IIT alumni across the globe. With the vision of ‘Touching the lives’, this program offers global mentorship opportunities in an informal, supportive and resourceful manner through the multi-domain pool of the alumni mentors, knowledge resources and local networks. With the core belief that true mentoring can only be gifted, IIT Mentors are aspiring to touch the life of every young professional.

This probably is the most pithy statement about life purpose or goal. Do read the book, which probably, along with “‘To Sir With Love” and “The Last Lecture” would stand among the top 3 books about teachers.

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“I decided what I wanted on my tombstone,” he said.
I don’t want to hear about tombstones. “Why? They make you nervous?”
I shrugged.
“We can forget it.”
No, go ahead. What did you decide?
Morrie popped his lips. “I was thinking of this: A Teacher to the Last.”
He waited while I absorbed it.
A Teacher to the Last.
“Good?” he said.
Yes, I said. Very good.

Suppose I feel pretty proud of winning a prize. I feel on top of the world and I want to share my happiness with others.

If others tell me that this prize has no value, or do not reciprocate my happiness, I have two choices:

1. I can feel terrible because others did not value this prize, and therefore the value of the prize has decreased
2. As long as I feel good about my achievement, I need not consider others’ valuation.

People with high self esteem value themselves and their achievements and do not care of others’ opinions, unless it is beneficial to them.

On the other hand, people with low self esteem depend on others to give themselves and their achievements some value. They depend on others’ approval. If people tell us we are no good or we did not do good, we feel bad.

Another example of this is how we treat fortune.

If I am a person of low self esteem, then if good things happen to me, I shrug my shoulders and say it was luck. If bad things happen to me, I say it must be my fault.

However, if I was a person with high self esteem, I would be attribute good luck to my efforts and bad luck to fate, that this did not work out.

Therefore, in order to increase self esteem we need to do the following:

1. Make a list of things that we are good at (skills) and what we have done (achievements). Use our friends to help augment this list. Paste this list to the mirror and read it every day.
2. Make a list of things we want to achieve and create a glide path. An aeroplane, while landing, has an optimal glide path. If it is descending too rapidly, it may crash; if it is too shallow, it will overshoot the target. If we create a target level of our desire, and the time frame, we create a glide-path. Just like a pilot does course correction based on the numbers on his instrument panel, we need to have some way of measuring if we are on-target and therefore make course corrections. These small successes give us confidence that we will reach the target.
3. What we are (traits) is not what we do (action). Each action has a consequence. Whenever we act, people will react. Sometimes their reaction is favourable to our cause, and sometimes they are not. If we can control their reaction, we have a better chance of success. But we cannot control everything, since we do not know who will react in which way. Therefore, at best, we can only improve the probability of  our success. Since our success and failure is uncertain, we cannot attribute it to our capabilities and therefore should not feel guilty about it.

The result of this is:

• increased awareness of our traits,
• understanding that our traits have nothing to do with our failures and
• that our value is based on how we see ourselves.