Sometimes worse is good than better

Sunday was not a very great day except for the fact that I got to rest so as to gear myself for the grueling week ahead. I read the book “Good to Great” and it was not that great a book to recommend someone else to read, but I got few insights after reading that book.

As the title goes, I will try to justify the fact that sometimes worse is good than better. Those of you, who have some remote knowledge of optimization, this might make sense as you can not guarantee to reach the peak by always making the better moves. Those even more into optimization might know this is the reason that people use simulated annealing (SA) (I wont go into the details of SA) as this method sometimes makes the worse move to reach the peak. A chemical engineer might like to understand this in terms of RTD of CSTR and PFR. What kind of profiles does one get for both of them? PFR doesn’t give any profile till space time and so CSTR profile is ahead of PFR profile till space time. But, at space time, PFR gets the spike which might be linked to its becoming successful.

I pondered on this and correlated this with real life peak and that is success. Then, I grasped why many people always say that its not those who have good GPAs through out the career become successful rather those having a modest career might get a spike in life to become great CEOs like Bill Gates.

I think ahead of my grueling week, I have written a post which may be grueling to read for some J. Last but not the least, a simple example (for non-optimization and non-chemical people). Two mountaineers (A and B) start expedition from Patna to reach the highest point on the earth. Both go towards south and A becomes happy to see the deccan plateau. He tells B, “I think I will go this way to reach the highest point of earth”. B also follows the same path as of A. But, after sometimes he starts going down the valley and he keeps going down and soon he finds himself in the plains of north. He keeps going towards north and then finally reaches the Mount Everest which is 8 km + where as B who has been taking better move to go up the deccan plateau ends up at 1 km.

I don’t know if Prashant will put this post under his alchemist category or not, but to sum up, the bottom line is

“Take the risk of doing worse than other’s better sometimes, as u never know u might end up at Mount Everest”.

And the most important word in the above line is not Mount Everest rather its “sometimes” :).