Ashwin Kumar Nagarajan’s Post

Dogs... they leave paw prints on our hearts. ❤️

Ever heard of the Super Mario Effect? When YouTube star and former NASA engineer Mark Rober challenged 50,000 people to a basic coding challenge, he learned something profound. Half the participants were given penalty points if they made a mistake. The other half were simply told 'That didn't work. Please try again.' Interestingly, the group that faced the risk of penalties had 16 points lower overall success rate. Why? They tried far fewer times. They were far more reluctant to learn from failures. They 'played' less with the challenge. This insight made Mark reflect on his early days of video gaming. Together with his friends, he would keep trying over and over to beat games. Their focus was always on the end goal, never their failures along the way. He coined this 'The Super Mario Effect', named after his all-time favourite game, and it's a powerful reminder of the difference between 'learning from failures' and 'focusing on failures'. Fear of failure kills creativity and limits our learning. An important life lesson from an 8-bit Italian plumber. #learning #development #gaming #technology

There are now innumerable articles and I won’t reference them here on the war like preparations for test kits, ventilators as well as food production and distribution. As a logistics and supply chain expert, I am volunteering my services to any organizations across the world that are involved in this effort and facing challenging planning and execution problems focused on this humanitarian crisis. Please share widely so that someone in need can reach me. #solutions #weareheretohelp #supplychain #logistics #distribution

I bombed my GMAT test. Every top 10 university I applied for rejected me. I was stationed in Afghanistan. I had to wait 6 months to take the test in the only approved center in the country. The week of the test we were out chasing the Taliban after they stole election ballots. They didn’t believe in democracy. But we did. “Isn’t your GMAT today?” said my Commander. “Go find a helicopter and take it.” We’d just retrieved the ballots so I flew out, dirty and sleepless from combat. I scored 570. All the business schools I applied for told me it was too low. I felt awful “There’s a professor at UNC who’s always sending us food,” my unit’s chaplain told me. So I emailed him. He responded after 5 minutes. And personally submitted my application. “I will work as hard as humanly possible,” I told the admissions officer when he interviewed me. I had the 2nd lowest score in my class. But they accepted me. A couple years after graduating, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill awarded me as a Distinguished Young Alumnus. Only 2 other individuals had ever won it in the history of the b-school. Michael Jordan won it too. That underdog who’s not a picture-perfect candidate on paper? Give them a chance. They might make up for it with more heart than you’ve ever seen.