Employing Basic's Instinct

Sometimes I think I am too harsh on myself. I always thought all my education was a futile exercise which basically distanced me further away from my interests. My efforts to pursue academic knowledge were mostly retaliatory – a struggle against my inward instincts, to put the book aside and saunter back to slumber.

And more often than not, the instincts won hands down. The few times they were surmounted, I mounted the throne of material success. So, it basically boiled down to the choice I made at each instant of indecision where I alternate the decision taking powers between the two halves of my brain. It is very similar to the toss of a biased coin, one side of which is always more intent on embracing the warmth of mud. I am still trying to catch that oft-guilty half.

Few times has my education helped me. Today was indeed one such instance wherein I used the trace skills of Marketing Research I had acquired during my two year faux pas termed MBA. I am thankful to the moxie of such few courses which were adamant enough to desert me despite my earnest efforts to unemploy them.

Coming to how I redeemed such traces scraping the phrenic vessel - I was caught up choosing between going for a career at US vis-à-vis a career in India. I did the following analysis to take a more objective and informed decision. High time I realized the significance and reach of academic knowledge.


* F&F - Family & Friends.

I listed down my parameters which I believe are going to impact me in one way or the other during my brief stay in this world. I also gave them weights in the second table. I scored those parameters on the scale of 1-10. A parameter scoring 10 would mean it is the best given the combination. For example, US team scores 10 - it is the best team I could ever work with. Food in US couldn’t scale much and gets a couple of points only for obvious reasons. The second table is based on simple logic – if I had Rs. 100, what would I spend on each of them. So, its basically a constant sum of importance which I have to break between all the parameters. The next step would be to compute the score of each parameter, given their importance/weight. Its just multiplying the weight with scale to get the score. I cumulated the scores to obtain the final figure for both choices.

As one may say/see, there is very little to choose from. However, I think I have made my decision! Only time will tell if I have to thank Malay Bhattacharya for teaching us Adv. Mktg. Research.