We are living in the age of transformations. Even the most ancient and most popular art, the art of storytelling, is being transformed by the emerging technology, particularly first by Computers and now by Mobile Phones. My research in the last few years has been related to some aspects of storytelling using emerging technology. Storytelling plays a very central role in human life and society. The nature of storytelling is closely related to how we communicate, how cultural traditions are formed, how we learn and educate, and how we entertain. This white paper is the result of my observations in this fascinating area. I would love to hear your comments and suggestions on this.

Here is a link to the white paper: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5644217/Extreme%20Stories%20120902.pdf

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The way people think depends a lot on their early experiences. Early experiences become filter for later experiences. No wonder culture and language plays a very important role in interpreting every experience. That is the reason that the same situation is perceived by different people differently — sometimes unbelievably differently. No wonder people look at the same experiential data and come up with different interpretations.

Some people remain open to new set of experiences and have capability to reduce the filtering effect of early experiences. Most use early experiences more or less to block completely all new experiences to allow you to see new things. And this is almost as true in sciences as it is in religion. The fundamental difference between sciences and the religion is in how you are suppose to interpret new data. In religion, you must use only established ideas; in sciences you are suppose to challenge new ideas when the data does not fit old theories.

I am always trying to train myself to learn from new experiences by reducing effect of earlier experiences. By nature, we must use earlier experiences to shape our knowledge — in fact that is the essence of learning. So the goal is not to eliminate knowledge gained from early experiences, but to remain flexible in interpreting new experiences. In fact One should keep collecting experiences so your knowledge bank has enough variety to help you in classifying new experiences for interpreting new experiential data correctly. This ability to look at the new data is becoming more important as we are collecting more data.

What is interesting is that this is as true in human thinking as it is in analyzing data. In the age of over-hyped ‘Big Data’, after the initial fascination with the size of the data and the speed of processing it, soon we will realize that processing data using wrong models (derived from earlier experiences) only gives you wrong results faster based on large volumes of data. For using big data it is important to refine models used in its analysis and those are derived from increasingly newer experiences. In the next few posts, I will share my thoughts on this topic to hear your opinions. I must mention that I consider myself an active student in this area that I just started calling Experiential Analysis.

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Have been discussing research issues with some of my graduate students and it is shocking to see how we are all trained to think ‘within the box’. It seems that our culture as well as our education system trains us to first create a box around the problem that we want to solve by considering all the limitations that previous people have faced and then thinking of the solutions. We are encourages first to look at related research and then think of the solution based on what people already did. We are encouraged to be incremental.

What happened to the wisdom that argues for thinking ‘Outside the Box’?

Should we not be thinking about the problem first by considering the problem and then bring in the real world constraints? I guess, people who learn to defy the thinking within the box are the one who become great problem solvers.

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One of the most important thing in life is bold thinking. Many times we build walls around our thoughts and then think within the box created by those walls. I found that we create these walls more often than we think – in fact most of the time – and use all kind of trivial reasons to justify. This limits our thinking and the results of the thinking are definitely suboptimal, if not useless.

LifeLesson 2: When thinking about a problem or an issue, first think about what should be done. Once you have the results of your thinking, then only think what could be done with practical constraints. Should is important and should be used in initial thinking. Could should only come after Should.

All new solutions, all innovative approaches start with bold thinking without any constraints. If something is really important, then even if it is not feasible today, people will make it feasible some day.

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Education in life continues for ever. It is strange that you think that you have already seen a lot in life, have seen many events and had diverse experiences. Life still surprises you and surprises you in different ways so you can not relate it easily to your earlier experiences.

I lead a very interesting life — and I love it, and even today I am loving it more than anything else I can imagine.

Since I consider myself an entrepreneur, researcher, and educator, I get many interesting experiences. Finally the educator in me said that I should start sharing some of my compelling experiences in simple form with people who care to come to this web site. So I decided to start a series of blogs with titles ‘LifeLessons N:’ where N will keep increasing and in each I will share what I consider important life lesson. These will not be in any order of importance — they will be shared as they come to my mind based on what I am going through. In most cases to protect privacy of other people, I will not give details of the situation, only discuss the lessons abstractly. Only exception will be situations that only relate to me.

So LifeLesson 1: If you suspect there is bad news coming, don’t delay; get it as soon as you can..

I am alive today because a doctor suspected that I may have Gastroesophageal cancer and he insisted that I go through endoscopy even with extremely remote possibility of it – result was its detection even before it had touched any lymph node. This early ‘bad news’ (or diagnosis) saved my life. Many specialists have told me that I am very lucky to be alive. And every time I thank Dr. Major Reid for that. Now for the last month, I was again having difficulty in eating so finally I gathered courage and went to a doctor and expressed my anxiety due to my history. And today I had the test.
Luckily, clean record this time. But now at lesat I know that I may have many problems with my body, but relapse of Gastroesophageal cancer is not one of them. So I am a relieved person.

My Lesson: If you suspect something bad is likely to happen, try to find the details as much as you can. That may give you a chance to face it and take care of the situation. Or it may tell you that you should stop worrying. In either case, finding sooner is better.

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