Tag: achievement

Prodigy

Sometimes I wonder if being a prodigy is more of a curse than a blessing. The sense of having “achieved something” fairly early in life leads to a lowering of objectives, not being excited by anything, and a sort of satisfaction of having “arrived” that reduces motivation to do anything else in life.

A few prodigies keep up the fight and make a successful career for themselves as adults (eg. Sachin Tendulkar). Most fall by the wayside. And find it struggle to come to terms of having become ordinary. And find being an adult incredibly hard, and then get into all sorts of issues.

Five years ago, the Guardian identified the “best young player from each Premier League club“, and they’ve kept at monitoring the progress. Five years later, the results aren’t encouraging.

Out of our 20 players from the English top flight in that 2014-15 season, only three are playing at Premier League clubs now: Marcus Rashford, Dominic Solanke and Hamza Choudhury.

That may not sound very impressive but some others are at Premier League clubs but on loan in the Championship. Six of the 20 are playing second-tier football (five in England and one, Harley Willard, in Iceland) so nearly half are playing at a very high level. On the other hand, two of the 20 – as far as we are aware – are not playing football any more.

While it is natural for parents to push their kids and get them to “achieve something” at a young age, such achievements in most cases don’t result in any lasting advantage as adults. Instead, children who achieve something get labelled as “prodigies” or “gifted” or “talented” and these labels only seek to increase pressures on them as they grow up, rather than helping them build sustainable careers.

OK I might be ranting so I’ll stop here.

Why is Ten Sports sitting on so many rights?

I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to stay up and watch the WI-Eng match till the very end. Waking up this morning and checking the scorecard, it seems like it was a really good match. And Fidel Edwards seems to have become a last-day-shutdown specialist. This is the second time this series he’s hung on. And he’d done so once before against India at ARG.

There was another reason I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to watch Liverpool play Real Madrid. I woke up this morning and saw that it was an amazing game, too. Looking through the Guardian Football site (btw, Advani seems to be advertising heavily on that site; it’s a pity he never advertises here on my site) I noticed that Chelski-Juve was also a strong game, despite the result. Another reason I would’ve wanted to stay up last night. For the record, I slept at 12:10. Tea-time in the Test match, and before either of the football games had started.

Ten Sports seems to have bitten off more than it can chew. It seems to own the rights to telecast too many different things. I think I have raised this point once earlier, but it pzzles me as to what Ten Sports is trying to achieve by getting rights to telecast so many things, most of which are happening at the same time. For example, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been unable to watch the first hour of WI-Eng even if I’d wanted to, because it was overlapping with the last hour of SA-Aus, which was being telecast at the same time.

The reason I slept off early last night was because I didn’t have the option to watch what I wanted. All the three games that I’d’ve been reasonably interested in were supposed to be on Ten Sports (Zee Sports doesn’t count since Tata Sky doesn’t offer that), and I  realized that I’d be forced to watch what the guys at the Taj Entertainment Network would want me to watch. Denied the option to choose what I wanted to watch, I went to bed.

It puzzles me that Ten Sports isn’t subletting its contracts. Devoid of anything decent to show, I suppose that ESPN or NEO would’ve only been too happy to acquire the rights to telecast last night’s Liv-Real game by paying a fee to Ten Sports. And it would’ve unlocked value at the hands of the remote-holder. Ten Sports need not let go of the rights to show all the games. All they need to do is to sell the “out of money options” – the rights to the game which they won’t be able to telecast anyway.

Now, the problem will be if accounting for all costs, no options are out of money. For example, you know you won’t be able to show Liv-Real. But you think that the loss of brand equity of your channel would exceed the money you’d gain by selling this option to another willing channel. The viewers are the only losers at this game, but I don’t know what can be done. After all, viewers  are way too dispersed in order for them to take any kind of action.

Extending this question, what can a sports body do to prevent a bidder from acquiring rights to telecast and then mess up the telecast (or not telecast it at all) ? After all, the sports body is out there to make as much money as possible from the TV rights, and they need to ensure significant investment into broadcasting by the broadcasters, so the “i’ll give rights to only those channels that are in the interest of the people” model won’t work.

One option would be to sell the rights to two channels in each market. But given that broadcast is a natural monopoly, the sports body will not be able to make as much by selling to two bidders as it can by selling to one bidder. Is there any other solution that you can think of? If yes, unleash.

Process

A couple of days back, I was debugging some code. And yes, for those of you who didn’t know, coding is a part of my job. I used to have this theory that whatever job you take, there is some part of it that is going to be boring. Or to put it in the immortal words of a brilliant co-intern at JP Morgan “chootiya kaam”. And in my job, the chootiya part of the kaam is coding. That doesn’t mean that I’m not enjoying it, though. In fact, for the first time in nine years (note that this takes me to a time before I’d started my BTech in Computer Science) I’m enjoying coding.

Coming back, I was debugging my code yesterday. It was one of those impossible bugs. One of those cases where you had no clue why things were going wrong. So I started off by looking at the log files. All clean, and no bugs located. While I was going through them, I got this idea that the strategy sheet might offer some clue as to why things aren’t doing well. Half the problem got diagnosed when I was looking at the strategy sheet. Some problem with cash management.

And when I thought looking at the trades might help. The bug was presently discovered. And then it hit me – that I’d unwittingly followed what seems like a “process”. Everything that I did had been guided by insight and instinct. Yet, the steps that I followed – 1. look at the logs; 2. look at the strategy sheet ; 3. look at the trades – seemed so much a preset process. It seemed to be like one of those things that I’d just ended up reading in some manual and following.

I realize that most “standard processes” that are followed by  various people in various places are stuff that were initially not meant to be processes. They were just an imprint of somone’s train of insights. It was as if someone had a series of insights that led to a solution to whta might have been a difficult problem. And then, he realized that this kind of a process could be followed to deal with all such similar problems. And so he wrote down the process in a book and taught a set of people to implement them. The field thus got “fighterized“.

The argument I’m trying to make here is that a large number of so-called “standard processes” are just an imprint of someone’s insight. They just happened to get into place because the inventor noticed this pattern in a bunch of things that he was doing. They need not be the best way of doing what is supposed to be done. Maybe there isn’t even a single best way of doing it that might work every time.

People who are likely to have worked on processes later in their life cycle are likely to have been people who are process-oriented themselves, and given how these kind of people work, it would have been likely that they would have resisted changes that could make the process worse in the short term. They are more likely to have been incremental in their approach. With a succession of such people working on improving the process, the process of refining the process would’ve ended up taking a hill-climbing algorithm and is likely to have ended up in a local maximum.

Once again, the large changes to the process would’ve happened when someone who was willing to take a large step backward worked on them, and it is again likely that such a person would be driven more by insight rather than by process.

My hypothesis is that most processes are likely to have been largely defined by people who are themselves not very process-oriented, and who thus will expect a certain level of insight and discretion on the part of the person implementing the process. And one needs to keep this in mind while following processes. That it would be good if one were to take a critical view of every process being used, and not be afraid to take a backward step or two in process development in order to achieve large-scale improvements.

Yet Another QLC?

An article I was reading on Cricinfo a few minutes back had this line:

Taylor sat quietly beside his captain, no doubt trying to soak up the moment.

Thinking about it, I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve had such a moment. A moment which had a sense of achievement, where I just sat, quiet, trying to soak up the moment. It’s not that I haven’t felt this way before; it is just that this kind of thing hasn’t happened for a long time. And looking forward, there doesn’t seem to be much scope for this kind of a thing.

It seems like life has been reduced to short occasional moments of intellectual wankery, and nothing surronding them. Life seems to have become, to an extent, mechanical. It doesn’t seem like there is anything on the horizon which will give a sense of achievement. It seems like whatever good I will do will be slow and incremental; like an innings by Shivnarine Chanderpaul; rather than like a hostile spell of pace bowling by Jerome Taylor.

I’m only twenty six, and occasionally I have trouble convincing myself that I’m ONLY twenty six, and that twenty six isn’t that old, after all. When this brought up in conversations, most people like to comment that it is time for me to get married. I’m not sure if the tenure matching on that is right. Apart from perhaps one “achievement moment” when I finally end up successfully pataofying someone, I don’t see how that will solve the problem that I have described here.

Thinking about it yet again, I wonder if this “achievement model” is faulty and unsustainable, and if I should reorient myself to work towards incremental benefits. Kodhi (ok before I forget, I should credit him for the discussion that led to this post) said “Tendulkar of 98 is not the same as Tendulkar of 08”. It was a poignant comparison.

Maybe a time comes for everyone – when this time occurs is not a matter of importance, and varies across people – when ticking off achievements is not the priority, and priority is to just go on and do one’s duty (which, in Tendulkar’s case, is to play excellent cricket, and win matches for India). It is not exactly an encouraging thought, but is probably true. What do you think?