Million Dollar Question

When analyzing a complex situation with too many rapidly changing time and event variables it is often easy to get distracted and get caught up in little things while losing sight of really important one's. How do we make sure that we are focusing on the right things and not wasting our time on trivial things specifically when we are dealing with something complex and important. One technique that is useful in such situations is to look for the "million dollar question" in the problem we are attempting to solve.

What is a million dollar question?
A million dollar question is the most crucial, most important part of the puzzle. Getting an answer to this question will solve most of the problem and give the greatest chance of success. Let's take a simple example. Say you want to buy a home. There are so many things you need to figure out example location, number of rooms, builder, whose name should the house be on, which society, water, electricity, and other basic convenience, proximity to schools, healthcare, premium features like club house, etc etc but what is the million dollar question here? Do you have the necessary financial arrangement to buy the house or not. If you have figured this out then you can sort out everything else. If you have not figured out the financial arrangements then it doesn't matter if you have sorted everything else out. You still cannot own a home. So your million dollar question here is if you have the necessary financial arrangements in place to buy a home or not? It is not always about money. For example choosing a school for your kids will have a completely different set of variables and a completely different million dollar question associated with the decision along with several other small distractions.

Solve the biggest part of the puzzle first or fail fast
But the key here is to understand this. Whenever working on a complex thing, we need to figure out what is that most important thing that I need to ask and solve first and worry about the rest later. Easier said than done. The million dollar question almost always is not as straightforward as the other smaller parts of the puzzle and as humans we tend to try to solve the easiest problems first and deal with the difficult one's later until it cannot be delayed any further. The problem being if later at the last moment you are unable to solve the biggest block of the puzzle then all the effort and time spent solving the smaller one's go waste and we have setup ourselves for a royal failure.

On the other hand if we solve the million dollar question first then our chances of success increases dramatically. If not, then we simply fail fast and move on with other options.

Just keep in mind
Nothing new in this blog. This theory of attacking the hardest and most important problems first has been discussed & taught in almost every training but the only difficult part is practicing the theory. For me it is just easier to remember & practice it by looking for the "million dollar question" in every complex problem I am working with. Maybe I understand things better if you associate a concept with money for me, especially a million dollars :) So give it a try !

Shivlinga and the mystery life lessons

Shivlinga is a popularly worshiped by many in India across the country from north to south, west to east. It is an abstract form associated with Lord Siva one of the three main Gods in hindu culture  that forms the trimurti or the hindu trinity Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer or transformer. There are lot of theories behind what Shivlinga represents and why it is worshiped but I will discuss the most interesting and non-conventional one that I came across recently while watching a video.

It says that Shivalinga is actually a normal distribution with a positive skew. If you look at the image below you will understand what I mean. (I created it using different images from Internet and superimposing a normal distribution on Shivlinga). I further extended it using balanced normal distribution along with the positive and negative distributions and I got the trinity !

So Shivliga is like a statistical function, what's the significance? To understand this, let's look at the statistical significance of the normal distribution. From Wiki
"In probability theory, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution is a very common continuous probability distribution. Normal distributions are important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known.
The normal distribution is useful because of the central limit theorem. In its most general form, under some conditions (which include finite variance), it states that averages of random variables independently drawn from independent distributions converge in distribution to the normal, that is, become normally distributed when the number of random variables is sufficiently large."

In short everything is a Normal distribution. So what does the positive skew mean? The normal distribution with the positive skew has a secret message on how life should be lived which is also mentioned in the maha mrityunjaya mantra below:

Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra:
1: Om Try-Ambakam Yajaamahe
2: Sugandhim Pusstti-Vardhanam
3: Urvaarukam-Iva Bandhanaan
4: Mrtyor-Mukssiiya Maa-[A]mrtaat ||

Meaning:
1: Om, We Worship the Three-Eyed One (Lord Shiva),
2: Who is Fragrant (Spiritual Essence) and Who Nourishes all beings.
3: May He severe our Bondage of Samsara (Worldly Life), like a Cucumber (severed from the bondage of its Creeper), ...
4: ... and thus Liberate us from the Fear of Death, by making us realize that we are never separated from our Immortal Nature.

The third line actually signifies the positively skewed normal distribution. We come to life and as we rapidly grow young we become more and more active, ambitious and adventurous where we want to do, experience & achieve everything that life has to offer (this is the peak of the Shivlinga or the normal distribution), but once we reach the peak we must slowly and gradually detach ourselves from the bondage of the material world so that our transition out of this life is easy, without fear and peaceful without any attachment to the material existence (like a cucumber). This can happen only if we work on it gradually over a long period of time like the positive skew. Worshiping the Shivlinga is actually a reminder for us to bring this positive skew in our life, being prepared for the transition instead of dying abruptly while still full of earthly desires. Note that traditionally Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra is also recited to avoid pre-mature or abrupt death (Mrityunjaya: victory over death). It is in a way a request for more time to seek a gradual transition instead of abrupt ending, considering eternal victory over death is impossible.

Now let's look at the Sanskrit meaning of linga 
"The lingam (also, linga, ling, Shiva linga, Shiv ling, Sanskrit meaning "mark", "sign", "inference" ) is a representation of the Hindu deity Shiva used for worship in temples." 
Makes sense that it carries a mystery lesson for life :) ?