Motivational Tips:

1. Consequences – Never use threats. They’ll turn people against you. But making people aware of the negative consequences of not getting results (for everyone involved) can have a big impact. This one is also big for self motivation. If you don’t get your act together, will you ever get what you want?

2. Pleasure – This is the old carrot on a stick technique. Providing pleasurable rewards creates eager and productive people.

3. Performance incentives – Appeal to people’s selfish nature. Give them the opportunity to earn more for themselves by earning more for you.

4. Detailed instructions – If you want a specific result, give specific instructions. People work better when they know exactly what’s expected.

5. Short and long term goals – Use both short and long term goals to guide the action process and create an overall philosophy.

6. Kindness – Get people on your side and they’ll want to help you. Piss them off and they’ll do everything they can to screw you over.

7. Deadlines – Many people are most productive right before a big deadline. They also have a hard time focusing until that deadline is looming overhead. Use this to your advantage by setting up a series of mini-deadlines building up to an end result.

8. Team Spirit – Create an environment of camaraderie. People work more effectively when they feel like part of team — they don’t want to let others down.

10. Recognize achievement – Make a point to recognize achievements one-on-one and also in group settings. People like to see that their work isn’t being ignored.

11. Personal stake – Think about the personal stake of others. What do they need? By understanding this you’ll be able to keep people happy and productive.

12. Concentrate on outcomes – No one likes to work with someone standing over their shoulder. Focus on outcomes — make it clear what you want and cut people loose to get it done on their own.

13. Trust and Respect – Give people the trust and respect they deserve and they’ll respond to requests much more favorably.

14. Create challenges – People are happy when they’re progressing towards a goal. Give them the opportunity to face new and difficult problems and they’ll be more enthusiastic.

15. Let people be creative – Don’t expect everyone to do things your way. Allowing people to be creative creates a more optimistic environment and can lead to awesome new ideas.

16. Constructive criticism – Often people don’t realize what they’re doing wrong. Let them know. Most people want to improve and will make an effort once they know how to do it.

17. Demand improvement – Don’t let people stagnate. Each time someone advances raise the bar a little higher (especially for yourself).

18. Make it fun – Work is most enjoyable when it doesn’t feel like work at all. Let people have fun and the positive environment will lead to better results.

19. Create opportunities – Give people the opportunity to advance. Let them know that hard work will pay off.

20. Communication – Keep the communication channels open. By being aware of potential problems you can fix them before a serious dispute arises.

21. Make it stimulating – Mix it up. Don’t ask people to do the same boring tasks all the time. A stimulating environment creates enthusiasm and the opportunity for “big picture” thinking.

Master these key points and you’ll increase motivation with a bit of hard work.

In India, if 18 or 21 year old students or graduates tell their parents, relatives, teachers or anyone around them, that they have a great business idea and would like to start working on it, they would be laughed at and their idea will be dismissed as a joke. They will have more chance at convincing their elders that the earth revolves around the moon; than that they can build a successful company. Mark Zuckerberg was barely 20 when he started facebook; had people around him dismissed his idea as a youngster’s stupidity, we would still be sending emails and SMS to our friends. Forget about Facebook, Paul Allen was 22 and Bill Gates 20, when they started Microsoft. Think of all the good things we would have missed if they were stopped. Why are we still producing only employees and not employers?

There are several reasons for this. Our society seems to dawdle with the idea that business is passed on in genes and only a businessman’s offspring would possess the ability to start and run a successful business. Our educational structure is more interested in theory than the practical approach; our middle class and upper middle classes mostly stay away from businesses. Our society thinks that youngsters don’t have enough real life experience, to make the right choice; and above all, we have failed to accept failure. The truth is that, the society itself is restricting the number of innovators and genius business men it could have produced.

It is said that a child is born agnostic. Our society instills all of its traits and characters into them, and along with these traits, is the idea that business is not for us. Parents and elders seem to have pledged to make their child an engineer or a doctor and show zero interest in what their child really cares about, or wants to be. The bollywood movie ’3 Idiots’ brilliantly portrayed this aspect of the Indian society; we seem to have come to the conclusion that the purpose of life, is to take lesser risks and choose a path that offers an assured job and a lot of money. Interest and aptitude seem to have taken a back seat in the society; and in such a society there is no room for a Zuckerberg, or a Gates, or a Jobs.

An education structure, which is crafted according to the attitude of our society, cares little about anything, other than theory. The structure enables the students to get good grades and marks. But most of the students who graduate from Indian universities, have little or no real world practical knowledge. Companies are put in a difficult position when they hire these grads, as they will have to give them extensive training, to make them efficient. Nowadays, the companies also seem to have come into terms with this reality; we are literally manufacturing engineers, when what we could use more are scientists. Like in the U.S. or the UK, we need to weave in entrepreneurship to the very fabric of our society, so that the future generation will have the mentality to try something new and create a difference in this world. This can only be done through a total restructuring of education; our education needs to have more real world projects and assignment that would help students gain a practical perspective of businesses. We should move ahead from providing services and should concentrate more on research; then we will see more and more employers popping up in the country.

Parents in the country have to realize that they are training their child to be a part of someone else’s workforce, rather than becoming someone who employees the workforce. This idea of not thinking beyond working for someone else might have its root in our long history of being ruled by foreign powers, but that time has passed and we need to move ahead. A good majority of the people who made it big in this world, started trotting on that path early on; your motto should be, ‘let them be all they can be.’

“It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward,” a famous quote from Sylvester Stallone’s 2006 movie ‘Rocky Balboa’, captures the essence of winning completely. It is always about accepting failure, recovering from it and moving forward. Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Recently in NASSCOM Product Conclave, Vinod Khosla said that “I don’t mind failing, but when I succeed it better be worth succeeding.” It is attitude like this that needed to be instilled in the youngsters and not a fear of failure. We need to learn to accept failure and move forward.

Courtesy : www.siliconindia.com

Why is the computer pointer called a mouse?

It’s called a mouse because the wire that extends from the rear of the gadget’s body resembles a mouse’s tail. Douglas Englebart received a patent for his early version of the tool — an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System” — on November 17, 1970. The device that he and colleague Bill English built used two perpendicular gear-wheels, each of which moved along a separate axis. This was not the first mouse invented. Several weeks before Englebart received his patent, Telefunken began to market its roller-based mouse. English went on to develop the mouse ball that is the basis for the kind of mice still in use today.

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