The Common Denominator of Intelligence

Wikipedia defines intelligence as “a property of mind that encompasses many related mental abilities, such as the capacities to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn.”

Over the years scholars have debated over the definition and the constituents of intelligence, dissecting and bisecting the existing work and adding new dimensions to it. The single characteristic though that seem to flow through all “intelligent” individuals is undoubtedly their ability to synthesize unrelated or loosely related fields to produce their own novel thought.

Be it arts, science, management or any other field of thought, an individual with above average intelligence is able to comprehend and retain the available stimuli, process is with the existing thoughts and produce an entirely new enchanting point of view. An application of thought is thus the corollary of this common denominator of intelligence.

This can be observed in great scientists who were also philosophers, architects and painters using the spirit of each area in the other, blurring the boundaries to discover new un-ventured territories. This can also be observed in not so famous people, our everyday acquaintances who dabble in multiple areas and bring out the best of all in their own way. So an excellent physical trainer would take the best from tai-chi, yoga, aerobics and pilates to produce her own 60 minute work-out; an accomplished dancer would channelise the finest of salsa, bharatnatyam, kathak and ball room dancing to manufacture her own 15 minute dance form; a true management researcher would solve a human resource or people’s problem using theories from marketing, finance and operations and a great cook would include the best from chinese, continental, mexican and indian food to concatenate her signature recipe. The synthesis in each is unique.

The amalgamation does not stop at related fields. It is also exhibited in relating unrelated fields. So essence of spirituality is displayed in business decisions, the rhythm of music is used in writing computer programs and the knowledge of physics is used in understanding and elaborating religion.

Moreover this multi-faceted application of knowledge is feasible because of an extraordinary ability to be interested in, comprehend, interpret and assimilate almost all the available stimuli in verbal, written or observed form, with a learning curve that is almost vertically steep.

So the next time you observe someone generating a beautiful synergy out of loosely related or unrelated fields you would realize how truly “intelligent” the individual is.

Masterpiece is unique: Law of diminishing returns in action

There possibly could not be a second Mona Lisa, an encore of the “Fountain Head” or another “Sound of Music”. Masterpiece, with respect to an artist, is unique.

A writer, dancer, filmmaker, painter, architect or any other artist has a specific spirit to her work of art that pervades in all her creations. This spirit is often generated from her learnings through the years and her unique assimilation based on her interpretations and comprehension of the available stimuli. This synthesis of the acquired knowledge is what gives a visage to all her creations. What makes this process different for each is that which stimuli are caught and assimilated and which are ignored is based completely on the interests and propensities of the artist- making this person specific.

So there lies in her creations a strong essence, defined in the artist’s mind, and transferred to the art form. The first time this essence is eloquently expressed in an art form is when it is the most captivating and new to the audience because they witness an expression which has been nurtured and enhanced all these years by the artist and is different because it is an outcome of the artist’s years of understanding.

As she churns out one work after another, all seem to be distant cousins of that first work of art that defined the core of the artist. Her major thought seem to lie in every future work of art, sometimes loud sometime deliberately hidden to give the creation a new spirit. And most of the times, the reiterations do not even give similar feeling of enlightenment that the audience would have experienced on witnessing her first work. The loyalists still stick and like an addict searching for the same high as he felt on his first puff, frantically search for novelty fighting back the law of diminishing returns with each new creation.

Some artists are not irked by being “branded”, they develop their own set of loyalists and remain happy with their practice of ‘assembly line production’ of art, but a mature artist grows by breaking out of the comfort of basking in the glory of the first creation till the land is reaped fallow. A true artist embarks on a new journey of knowledge, stacking her old knowledge on the farthest corner of the top shelf, and metamorphosing into a completely new artist. The learning curve might be steeper this time because of the experience, but the gestation period of knowledge seeking, comprehension, assimilation and synthesis strong enough to make it the essence in her future creations would certainly be very long.

The arid patch in the absence of new creations, as the artist takes a sabbatical for re-birth, might also be too difficult for most resulting in a fall-back to the old way of expression. But a true artist would overcome these difficulties and temptations to be born anew and operate at a higher orbit - they owe it to the audience and themselves.

The Profuseness of American Appreciation

The place never ceases to amuse me – the passage of time elapsed has still not taught me to not be caught off guard by the surprises this country throws at me.

All our life us Indians are brought up on a ‘fat-free’ diet of discipline and striving to get those extra crumbs of an appreciative nod or pat for our back-breaking efforts. But not here – welcome to the world of singing eulogies and showered praises as a prelude to the beginning of a task. How much of it is honest, the skeptic in me is still not sure but whether it serves as a trampoline boost to the ego is unquestionable.

It sometimes seems a scene straight out of a cross-over bollywood movie when the naive Indian taught to ignore her positives in the name of humility meets head on with the appreciative American frantically searching for something he can praise her for. Especially we Indian girls have grown up ignorant to the fact that a man can appreciate you without a latent motive. So when a guy in a in a party walks up, shakes your hand and says you are beautiful you start hoping that you suddenly become invisible or the earth looses its gravity and you float over to another galaxy but in the absence of all that your eyes desperately look for spots on the ceiling or your feet they can focus their gaze on while pretending you never heard his remark. Being called beautiful or pretty is still not as hard to handle as being called what we don’t say aloud in our part of the world –at least not to a stranger from the opposite gender. So handling someone calling you hot or sexy as if it’s just natural to call all women that- is an art that is worth learning from the members of our gender from this side of the globe. I still wonder what is expected as a reply to being called hot with a handshake – should I say ‘thank you and you are hot too’, or should I say ‘ and you must be blind’ or like a reflex action I should just look away and mumble something that seems like a reply lost in the music playing out loud.

It surprisingly does not end with a man-meets-woman in a party kind of conversation – fortunately or unfortunately it pervades all minutes of waking hours. So your trainer keeps screaming how good you are all though the workout session, or your professor keeps nodding in appreciation to whatever lame reply you give in the class – making you feel like a god’s greatest gift to mankind.

Guess the overwhelming praise on every trivial action is the source of the confidence oozing out of every single person here – something we need to still learn to make our children, peers and everyone else continually feel beautiful as a person.

Letting Go vs. Holding on: Treading the Fine Line

Staying in a more privileged part of the world brings with it an intuitive assumption of being in control of every aspect that touches your physical being. But witnessing the helplessness most of the people experience when it comes to the fluctuating moods of the weather, hammers home the realization that some things are beyond so called incumbents of superpower also.

This also reinforces my belief in the fact that there are some facets of life where resistance is simply futile. The trick is to learn when to hold on and when to let go.

The holding on must be to the time and extent that it provides you the drive to push yourself just a little harder. What Peter Senge writes in ‘Fifth Discipline’ as the creative tension that generates as a result of your vision and your reality pulling in opposite directions. The ‘holding on’ to your vision must help you maintain that creative tension sans there would be no act of intellectual creation in the world. Holding on must also be to the feeling of achievement a delicious relief that you would have experienced multiple times after an honest effort. This would keep you warm when the winds of reality are the coldest tugging at every strand of your being to give up….the holding on to that warm feeling of making it through would provide you with that burst of energy latent in all of us.

The letting go part is more difficult because it requires a special effort and conditioning to overcome our natural instincts of clinging on. Most of us, without realizing, get a marijuana-high on feeling like a victim – so we make sacrifices but want credit for that, we give up so that we can blame fate for that and we hold onto the feeling of loss of a loved one because the sadist in us like this feeling of self pity. The words might seem harsh but most of us fall into this trap of adorning the robe of a victim and walking through life as if the cosmos has conspired to inflict all this adversity on us. The effort here should be to condition the mind to overcome this feeling by being aware of it and then consciously ‘letting go’ of it.

How we do it should be more through our intuition and gut rather than by succumbing to the whims of our mind. This also implies that we must learn to listen, to our body and our intuition - it would whisper when it is time to let go.

I read a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that sums it all up:

Life is like a roller coaster ride. If you resist you will feel dizzy and disoriented but if you have faith in the builder of the ride you end up having a great time!

Physical Workout is Mental

The more I enhance the intensity of my workouts, the more I realize that there are absolutely no limits to human physical potential. There seems to be an infinite reservoir of energy, tapping into which can take one to unthinkable highs.

The trick here is to develop the skill of tapping into that reservoir. There are umpteen ways good instructors coach you into increasing your physical limits. Most common is ‘visualization’. Let’s say one is in a ‘group cycle’ class which demands incessant cycling for sixty or more minutes, alternating and modulating the pace and power. The coach would lead you through the routine by asking you to imagine yourself in a cycling marathon. The ups and downs of a marathon trek are simulated by increasing the resistance for uphill and decreasing the resistance but increasing the pace for downhill. The most difficult part of the routine are the last ten minutes, where your mind starts tugging on your determination asking you to give up. This is overcome by bringing the adrenalin flow and excitement of overtaking the cyclists ahead of you in your visualization and giving it all you got with that last bout of energy to the finishing line. Before you become aware of your surroundings and the aches and pains in your muscles, you would have successfully completed a beautiful long workout and most importantly lived through the excitement.

Another strategy adopted is to tune your mind inside. To get into what successful athletes call ‘the flow’. Where you are blocking all the external stimuli by closing your eyes and concentrating on the body part from where the energy is obtained to take you further. So in a cycling class it would be the ball of your toe and nothing else. The practice concentrates on relaxing all the body parts, legs, hands, jaws, except the ball of the toe and tuning in to derive all the power from there. The goal here is to reach a meditative stage of mind where you are aware of nothing except the fountain of energy emanating from the ball of your toe.

Finally, the crux of a sustained physical exercise is to defeat your previous effort. The objective should be to perform better than what you did in the last minute. In a cycling class this translates into leaving your pace behind and never falling back into it. This also means never allowing your mind to persuade you into going slow once you have increased your power and pace. Further it translates into performing better than what you did in the last class and challenging yourself just a little bit more with every workout, so that there is never a point where you feel you have arrived.

Effective coaches help you develop these skills to the extent that it becomes a part of you being in life beyond the class also. Where you develop the attitude of an achiever and train your mind to walk on the path you have chosen, never allowing yourself to give up.

Its not surprising hence, that good trainers exhibit all the qualities of an achiever, always looking for feedback and helping you to understand the spirit behind your physical efforts. As one trainer said in one of the classes, a workout is not solely physical; it’s about the totality of your being, reaching a point that the lessons learnt become a way of your life.

The Tao of Data

The more I work with numbers, the more I feel awed by the power and mystic of data. The shape and form raw numbers take on the trigger of analysis, undoubtedly makes them a powerful source of competitive advantage for any entity.

It was love at first sight for me when I understood the inherent nature of numbers. The fact that any random set of data falls into similar shapes like a normal distribution gave them almost a spiritual tinge. Like the “Tao” or ‘the way’ in Chinese philosophy, which professes that everything follows ‘the way’ of nature and bliss is obtained by one which espouses ‘the way’, numbers so beautifully follow the Tao.

Whether the data is quantitative in nature or a qualitative set of data metamorphosed into quantitative set via innovative techniques, it speaks volumes if we are tuned in and are listening.

The intriguing essence of data further gets interesting when we move to the next level and watch the interaction of one set of data with another or what we technically call as ‘correlation’. This ostensibly simple phenomenon is the backbone of all advanced data analysis techniques. How one set relates to another predicts the nature of events through discriminant analysis, shapes the visage of new entities through conjoint analysis and makes it easier for us mortals to handle the huge magnitude of data by decreasing its span through Factor Analysis. The techniques are myriad, but as the Gita professes ‘One Source’ of all beings, the core of understanding and using data is ‘correlation’.

Hindu philosophy delineates that to find that connection with the ultimate One, we need to tread a long and difficult path, what is specifically named as ‘Tapas’ or ‘the heat’ so that we come out of the effort spiritually evolved. Data collection is such a path a dedicated analyst treads to understand the true nature of data. Undoubtedly, collecting data is the most difficult and biggest bottle neck in all efforts for unraveling the mystery of any phenomenon. Unfortunately, the strength of interpretation depends on the quantum of the data, making it what Goldratt would describe in his ‘Theory of Constraints’ as the one constraining process limiting the overall process. If the analyst is able to overcome this bottle neck through constant efforts, the rewards are deliciously gratifying.

In spite of the beautiful potential and inherent nature of data to define the truth behind all phenomena, most of the entities sit on piles of numbers, not realizing the leverage they can exercise to catapult into a higher orbit. Like the omnipresence of the higher powers waiting for us to make the effort of connection, using a set of numbers to discover the truth can take us to highs that only true yogi experiences on enlightenment.