Happiness Express

by Khurshed Batliwala

  I still remember that feeling of exhilaration I had after writing the last exam of my life in IIT. As I walked out of the hall after my exam on Statistical Inference, there was such a deep sense of relief. No more exams. Ever. I could finally get on with life. . .

  It was not always like that. I remember, as a child, I loved studying. I would look forward to getting brand new textbooks at the start of every school year and read them long before school started. I enjoyed learning. In fact, I don’t know any child who is averse to it. Somehow, as we grow older, the drive to learn diminishes. For some people, it vanishes altogether and few even develop anxiety issues around it.

  Have you noticed how most young children are like sponges? They soak up knowledge from everywhere. They can learn things at breakneck speed. The younger they are, the faster they learn. They brim with curiosity and wonder. Age seems to rob us of our enchantment with learning. As we grow older, even though we do the same things day in and day out, we don’t seem to get any better at doing them. We work hard at them, because we care for them. . . but we tend to stagnate. We fail to become better spouses, better parents, better teammates or better friends.

  Compared to the phenomenal growth in our childhood, we hardly improve as adults, be it professionally or personally.

  Learning a language is widely accepted as a great benchmark to figure out how much one is open to learning new things. Research reveals some fairly scary figures.

  A child knows around 50 words at 18 months of age. 1000 words at age three and 4000-6000 words by the time she is seven. As a teen, her vocabulary hovers between 20,000 and 40,000 words, though most teens use around 1000 words in their interactions. At 25, you know nearly 42000 words—just 2000 more than you knew at 13 or 14.

  Your vocabulary rapidly declines till you learn hardly any new words as you grow older. Most adults learn only one new word every two days. This means that by the age of 60, they would have added only 6000 more words to their vocabulary from the time they were 25.

  Check the learning rate:

  Age 0-20, normally, most people learn up to 42,000 words.

  Age 20-60, we add just 6000 more words to our repertoire. This is an incredible decline considering that there is so much more to learn. Most languages have around 250,000 words in their lexicon!

  It’s not just about learning more of a language. It’s about learning anything. Most people simply stop wanting to learn new things as they grow older. Unfortunately, these days there are quite a lot of children, too, who have become learning-averse. What’s going on?

  Learning Zone and Performance Zone

  Edwardo Briceño, co-founder and CEO of Mindset Works, gave a brilliant little TED talk titled ‘How to get better at things you care about’. He talks about the learning zone and the performance zone.

  The learning zone is for improvement. Here, we increase our knowledge of the things we know little or nothing about and hone our existing skills. This is the place where we expect to make mistakes so that we can learn from them.

  The performance zone is where we action all our knowledge and strive to do our best. We really want to shine here. There is tremendous pressure in the performance zone with barely any room for making mistakes.

  Both these zones have to be a part of our lives. The performance zone maximises our immediate achievement, while the learning zone maximises our growth and future performance.

  When I learn a new piece of music on the piano in the privacy of my home, I don’t worry about making mistakes. In fact, I know that I will make many mistakes and that would be the only way to learn this new music.

  I would keep the score (musical notation) in front of me. I would play very slowly and repeat difficult phrases over and over again. I would experiment with different fingering. I wouldn’t care too much about expression, being loud or soft. My goal would be to get the music into my fingers and my head. As I become better and better, I would strive to be more precise with the music, bringing in the speed, the pedalling and, finally, the expression.

  I would still be absolutely okay with making mistakes. If I found something really challenging, I would seek guidance from a teacher. Once I am confident with the music, I would play it to a few friends. It would still be okay for me to make a few mistakes here and there, because I would still consider myself in the learning zone. Only when I am absolutely confident about my virtuosity with the music would I go public. This brings us to the performance zone.

  If I am performing a piece of music for an audience, I would be mortified if I made a mistake, even if I was the only one who noticed it. Sometimes you practice an entire year for the five minutes that you get in front of an audience. One wrong note, one place you falter or make even a semblance of a mistake, and all that effort feels futile.

  Performance zone can be nerve-wracking to be in.

  You may think that the performance zone is all stress and pressure. That may be true, but it can be very motivational, even inspirational. It is much required. It is where the real work happens. Most importantly, it gives insights on where to focus next. It tells us how we could be even better at what we do. . . taking us back to the learning zone.

  Dinesh and I have been teaching Art of Living courses for more than 25 years. Conducting an Art of Living programme is a richly rewarding experience. It requires great presence that one needs to develop through one’s own practice of meditation. It requires authenticity and honesty to facilitate meditation, teach knowledge from Vedic sources that has been contemporarised to be relevant today, and conduct group activities that would make people realise some deeper truths about themselves and the world we live in.

  Even after all these years, and after teaching thousands and thousands of people from all over the world, after every course, Dinesh and I still discuss what we could have done better. After each foray into the performance zone—delivering a course—we return to the learning zone to think again and again of how best we could enhance the experience for our students.

  This back and forth between the two zones is critical for success in life. And you will go into an ever-increasing spiral of superior capabilities. You will develop skills that will enable you to do things way better than you could have imagined.

  What would we be doing in the learning zone?

  We need to believe that we can improve. Many people feel they are already perfect at what they do. Others feel there is nothing more that could be done, even if they wanted to. Gurudev once said something amazing which I implement all the time: You are perfect the way you are. Move from one level of perfection to another! A seed is perfect as a seed. As it sprouts, it is still perfect. It grows into a small plant and it is perfect. As a fully grown tree bearing fruits and flowers, it is perfect yet again. We need to feel at all times that we have done the best we could and then see how we can do it better.

  Be aware that it takes time and effort to improve. The last 20% will take up an inordinate amount of time compared to the first 80%. We need to really care about what we want to improve; otherwise it will feel like we are wasting time and we will end up feeling useless about ourselves.

  There needs to be a methodology in place for improvement. Practice makes one perfect, but wrong practice makes one perfectly wrong. It is wise to seek help from a mentor, a teacher, or a coach.

  Learning thrives in a friendly, low-risk zone. Mistakes are expected here, and making them shouldn’t have significant consequences. Rookie pilots would learn to fly in a simulator, not on a commercial aircraft. A chef would try out a new creation for himself and people he trusts around him, not put it on the menu to experiment on customers.

  After every event, Dinesh and I make it a point to answer these four questions:

  What else can we do?

  What can we do better?

  What should we continue doing?

  What should we stop doing?

  Adults spend far too much time in the performance zone. If the stakes are always high, and there is no freedo
m to make even small mistakes, learning will continue to elude you. Even if you slog it out, you would see hardly any improvement.

  I attribute the growth of the Art of Living and all our teachers and volunteers to Gurudev’s philosophy on this: You are allowed to make mistakes. Even big mistakes. Just make new mistakes! Keep learning.

  If flawless execution is the norm, then the team will feel too scared to try out new things. This means that the company will not be able to innovate and improve, and stagnation will set in.

  Even if you have to continuously function in high-stakes zones, it’s a great idea to create islands of low stakes. Being able to talk things through with a friend or a mentor, having informal feedback meetings, etc. are fantastic ways to do just this. My friend, Dr Rangana Choudhary, has ‘feedforward’ (instead of feedback) meetings with her team. The term itself changes everything!

  Schools, colleges and universities are places of education. Of learning. Or, are they? Instead of being safe learning zones, these once-venerable institutions have become high-stake performance zones. It’s no wonder that most people learn very little when there is such minimal scope for making mistakes. Result? Countries full of ‘educated’ people too frightened to make mistakes and thus doomed to mindless middle-class mediocrity. Maybe this is probably the reason why more and more of us are becoming so averse to learning.

  If we give ourselves more time in the learning zones, our performance will be in ever-increasing spirals of success. We will be able to embrace learning all over again and become like sponges that can easily absorb knowledge from everywhere. The enchantment of learning will sparkle within us once more and the world will become better for it.

  All the best!

  Chapter 7

  THE FEYNMAN TECHNIQUE

  The derivative of a function f(x), denoted by ƒ’(x) is:

  Wonderful!

  Did you instantly switch off as your eyes hit these dreaded symbols, reminding you of horrible times in calculus class? Or, maybe you never studied calculus and were left wondering what a derivative is, what those symbols meant, and what all this is doing in a book called Happiness Express.

  For a person who has studied mathematics, the definition above is familiar and something they can take in their stride. . . with maybe just a small wince or two. For the rest of the world, this looks like the beginning of some nightmare.

  Enter Richard Feynman.

  Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a brilliant scientist. His memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, was one of those books I have read again and again. He was known as the ‘Great Explainer’ and was famous for his ability to explain complex ideas to others in simple, intuitive ways. He (or Einstein or somebody) is known to have said that if you cannot explain something in plain language stripped off jargon, you have not really learnt or understood it.

  The Feynman Technique for studying is all about dejargonising content and being able to explain to a lay person what it all means. If you can do that, it means you yourself have understood it and are not likely to forget it in a hurry. Besides, if you teach it to others, you cement it into your memory.

  On a side note, this is the way I always used to study. I wrote my M.Sc thesis such that my mother, a BA in French, could understand it. Mr Feynman has done a lot more for physics than I ever will; he was before my time; so we will continue calling this The Feynman Technique, not Bawa’s Study Methodology.

  Stay with me while I apply The Feynman Technique to the concept of a derivative. I am not trying to do some hardcore math here, expect a few omissions, assumptions and some sweeping generalisations. Not at all acceptable in a math textbook. But this is not a math textbook, so we are going to be impetuous. My goal is to make you understand what a derivative is, and if you read the next few pages with an open mind, I am quite convinced that you probably will.

  Possibly you may even see the elegance and beauty in that formula. Or, possibly that’s hoping for too much!

  Functions

  Let’s start off with the definition of a function.

  What’s a function? What does it mean when you say y = f(x)

  In English this simply means, tell me what’s happening to as I mess around with x.

  If is x 42, what is y? If x is 0.655, what is y? If x is -34, what is y? If x is 0, what is y? If x is 350001, what is y? . . . You get the drift.

  There are a few rules about how a function should behave for it to be called a function, but let’s not get into that. If you are curious, I have made a YouTube video to explain that. Check it out at www.happinessexpressbook.com/videos/functions.

  Slope

  See this line below?

  Let’s make a triangle out of it:

  Traditionally, we call the vertical side and the horizontal side x.

  Slope for some reason is denoted by m, and defined as

  What does this mean? And what do you mean by slope? Let’s apply The Feynman Technique to this. If you had to explain slope in English, without using those symbols, what would you say?

  I would ask you to roll a marble from the top of that line. The faster the marble rolls down, the greater the slope; the slower it trundles along, the smaller the slope.

  Or,

  Say I am walking from here to there. When I get ‘there’, how high did I go with respect to my starting position (here)? I went very high, big slope; not so high, smaller slope.

  Now, let’s check in with the mathematical definition of slope:

  In the first instance, y is much bigger than x and so m is going to be big. In the second instance, x is much bigger than y, so m will be small. This is exactly what our English definition says.

  Instead of saying, I am walking from here to there; when I get ‘there’, how high did I go with respect to my starting position (here)? if I went very high, it’s a big slope, etc., we simply say:

  Concise, precise and elegant! Do you see how you can appreciate this little formula only when you have truly understood what a slope means?

  Going further, this means that slope changes depending on the changes in the height (y) and width (x). We could as well look at slope to be the ratio of the change in to the change in x.

  How do we figure out the change in y and x?

  Think of the walking again. Here to there is and how high is y. These turn out to be just the length of the two sides of that right-angled triangle above. If the end points of our original line had coordinates (x1, y1) and (x2, y2), then change in y,

  meaning the length of y, would be y2 – y1. Similarly, change in x would be x2 – x1.

  If this is confusing you, take real numbers and check it out. For example, a segment with end points (2,1) and (5,3)when plotted on a graph paper, will have y = 3 – 1 = 2 units and x = 5 – 2 = 3 units. These lengths are easily seen as illustrated below:

  This is an important result to remember as we foray onwards.

  Bending That Line

  Slope of a line is all very well. Bend the line, it becomes a curve. How about the slope of a curve?

  It is quite obvious that the slope of this curve will keep changing at every point on it. We don’t even talk about the slope of a curve, we simply talk about the slope of a curve at some specific point on that curve.

  To find out the equation that represents this curve, we ask the question, what’s happening to the y coordinate as we change the x coordinate? Remember functions from earlier?

  To represent the equation for this (or any) generic curve, we can say: y = f(x). Keep telling me what’s happening to y as x changes.

  Let’s take a random point K on the curve. If the x coordinate of that point is a, then the y coordinate will be f(a). The point K will have coordinates (a, f (a)). We want to find the slope of the curve at the point K.

  We don’t know how to do this, but we do know how to find the slope of a line. Let’s draw a line, so that the first point is K (a, f (a)), and the second point is a little farther down the x-axis, some h units further
and still on the curve we are working with. The coordinate of this point is a + h, and the coordinate will be f(a + h). This second point will have coordinates (a + h, f(a + h)).

  The slope of this line is change in divided by change in x, meaning:

  This becomes:

  We don’t want to know the slope of that line. We are actually still interested in the slope of the curve at that original point K. Let’s start sliding the second point closer and closer along the curve towards K. . . meaning h is becoming smaller and smaller. We make h so small that the second point has slid almost on top of the original one. They are kissing each other.

  You may ask, why bother with making smaller and smaller? Just make h = 0? Isn’t that what we are after? Well, h = 0 will means division by 0 which screws things up and is the equivalent of a mathematical sin. Curious why? Watch this video which is all about division by 0: www.happinessexpressbook.com/videos/divisionbyzero.

  So, what to do now?

  Mathematicians are crafty little fellows. They came up with the concept of a ‘limit’ to handle these prickly situations. The exact mathematical explanation of a limit is a bit too tedious, so here it is in reckless English:

  read limit of h tending to zero, simply meaning h is getting closer and closer to 0. h is super super super super close to 0. It’s sitting soooooooooooooooo close to 0, it’s for all practical purposes 0. . . But it’s not 0.

  They whisper, actually h = 0. It’s not. But it is. Just don’t tell anyone. It’s our little secret. And we get out of that unfortunate division by 0 business.

  Coming back to that equation we had where we needed h to be 0 but we didn’t want to flout the division by zero rule, we stick that into it and the second point now has virtually become the first. Voila, we have the slope of the original point K on the curve, the very thing we were looking for! It is denoted by ƒ’(x) and we can write: