(a + b)2 and Goal setting

What is (a+b)2 ???

You must be thinking what sort of a question is that. Obviously it’s   “a2 + b2 + 2ab”

But today I learnt something else. Today I learnt how to visualize (a+b)2, or for that matter(a+b)3

Hello everyone, and welcome to another exhilarating class of Dr.Mandi… today the day began in one of the most unexpected ways. Today we ‘saw’ what we had been mugging up for years. And you can see my excitement in my anxiety to just tell you how and what surprise did Dr.Mandi revealed today in class. But let me start from the beginning…

For the last few days a toy was lying in one of the corners of our class that Dr.Mandi had brought with him nearly a week ago. We all were curious to know what it was but couldn’t find out. Today was the day  when finally Dr.Mandi picked it up and asked us what it was. We had no idea. It a cube made of tiny plastic pipes that could be dismantled.

Then came the hint, “what is (a+b)2?”. One of the students gave the obvious reply that we all know. But that was the surprise. One of my friends picked up the hint and understood what the toy was actually. And when Dr.Mandi asked him to explain it to all of us what he grasped, he shared that if you look closely, each of the 12 sides of the cube was made of two distinct pipes, one red and the other yellow. If we assume that the red coloured pipe is “a” and the yellow coloured pipe is “b”. Then (a+b)2 is nothing but the area of the face containing the side chosen…  to make it more clear, let me show you one of the sides of the cube with the pipes denoted as a and b. you can see how the entire surface area contains ‘a2’, ‘b2’ and two ‘a*b’… Hence the simple formula that we had been learning for so many years was nothing but an area.

Similarly he explained how (a+b)3 would mean we are talking about nothing but the volume of the cube. This is the beauty of Dr.Mandi’s class. He explained to us how small-small things carry meaning in them and how easy it is to neglect them and just be confined to their upper meaning. He made us realize how interesting education can be if shared in the right manner….   Hope you will never forget the formula now ;-)

Now was the time for some management to begin… and the agenda of today’s class was “SMART goals”. But we all knew that Dr.Mandi would not just give us a lecture on smart goals. And it was true, he began the topic with another surprise from his MAGIC BAG… He took out a snail (obviously not a live one, but only its shell) and handed it over to us… to observe!!

               

                   

The thing that we had to observe was the “SPIRAL” nature of its shell’s growth. How it began with a small centre and EVOLVED as it moved out… This is how our Goals should evolve… in a spiral… If today we have achieved 20, tomorrow we should aim for 25, then 35, then 50 and so on………. We must never limit ourselves but should evolve as a Fibonacci Series evolves… 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 and to infinity…

This is known as Goal Setting. The higher you set the goad, the more you achieve. If your Goal Achieved is higher than you Goal Set, then you undermined your abilities. You must always, and always Set for more than your potential, then only you will be able to strive for better results and grow with every attempt. Dr.Mandi used a simple graph to explain to us what should be the relation among our potential, goal set, goal achieved and previous achievement.

If you believe that your potential is at B, then your Goal Set should be A…

A – Goal Set

B – Potential

C – Goal Achieved

D – Previous Achievement

This concept where higher expectations lead to higher results was derived from Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw and hence is called as the Pygmalion effect. To give you the precise definition of Pygmalion effect, The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform.

Finally it was the time for the class to prove that we will always follow this principle of aiming high in our managerial and personal lives. And then we again saw those interesting tower building cubes in front of us. this time again we were asked to build a tower. Last time, if you remember, we built a tower of 16 blocks and Dr.Mandi told us that till date the max height achieved was that of 27 blocks…

So we began our tower building, but this time it wasn’t ‘Craftsmanship’… this time we were coordinating, thinking, seeking help and improvising. And we surely did keep our expectations high. We kept a target of 50 in mind. And with that target set, we beat our previous record and made a tower of 24 blocks. HURRAY!!!

But that was not what we had in mind. We tried again and finally broke the previous set record by creating a tower with 28 blocks…

That is the power of Expectation and Organization…!!!!