I have a gripe with the way entrepreneurship is generally talked about or even taught.

Most of the aura associated with entrepreneurship kind of suggests that it is the ultimate professional nirvana and the path which everyone worth his salt must tread.

The truth couldn’t be farther.

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody despite what numerous B-school professors or entrepreneurship experts might have to say and this is irrespective of the eventual outcome of the “entrepreneurs born or made?” debate.

The truth is its like any other professional choice you make. It requires different kinds of skills and attitude and temperament, is exciting like hell for some and can be equally depressing for others. Bungee jumping may be exciting, sexy and adventurous but is not so for all. Now, even if the bungee jump example is over-glorification of entrepreneurship, not liking bungee jumping doesn’t make one a “lesser man”. I, for one, am too scared to bungee jump.

A more pertinent question may be, if it is for me. Again, no decision tree algorithm exists which can help you figure that out. For most of the entrepreneurs, it is some mysterious voice in their stomachs which keeps telling them, “You HAVE to do it”. This is distinctly different from the moments of frustration and anger with your boss or your company which may happen to most of us some time or the other. Deciding to be an entrepreneur becaue your job/boss/company sucks is bad decision making.

This voice of the gut is so persistent, it gradually starts consuming you with drums beating all around your head. This persistent crescendo from within you brings you to a situation when you tell yourself that even if you were all alone, stripped of all the good things you cherish, you’d still do it. In this somehwhat metaphysical sense, entrepreneurship no longer remains a choice.

What all these entrepreneurship courses/trainers/professors could do then is to encourage students to listen to their inner voices and know themselves more. What makes them happy, what gets them excited, what gets them depressed. Self discovery should probably be the first chapter in any book which wants to tell the truth about entrepreneurship.

The steps, structure, financing, strategy, marketing – are the details. Once the inner game is set right, all else follows (yes, that’s the truth no matter how philosophical it may sound; entrepreneurship, in that sense, can have highly philosophical overtones).

And this is where I agree the most with Sunil Handa’s Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation (LeM) course at IIM Ahmedabad. He doesn’t talk about financing, strategy, recruitment, the works. He tries to get the inner game right.

In that sense, the guys who did the course were lucky. It helped identify the inner voices and convinced a lot of us that following the gut was in no way less scientific or more superstitious than following an enormously involved decision making algorithm.

The directive for the curious, then, should be that if you do not hear that crescendo in your head day in and day out, the pesky little voice screaming, “Why the hell did you not get started already?”, either the time is not right or you’d be happier not doing it.

For a first generation, first timer, the reasons have to be all internal. Unless and until internal reasons gather enough steam to become unbearable, don’t do it.

We launched the unique “Quiz a Day” for SAT and ACT students – register for free, come every day and solve a new quiz building yourself up for the gruelling challenge of a real SAT and/or ACT.

Tackling some of the common questions about “Quiz a Day” that I come across:

But isn’t there enough material on SAT and ACT already?

Yes and no. There is material but most of it is in the form of bulky text/guide books. Internet as a delivery medium has not yet been fully exploited for SAT and ACT practice content delivery. Also, good practice content comes at heavy price tags and most of the free stuff essentially doesn’t really say anything.

Even a preliminary round of googling around will demonstrate that good online practice material for SAT and ACT is much more difficult to find than we possibly imagine.

What’s with a new quiz every day?

The idea is to provide consistent practice over a period of time. This, coupled with systemic reinforcement of struggle areas is the only real method to build competency. Quiz a Day takes care of the first part – once the weaknesses are known, in most cases, a review the particular topics from the school curriculum suffices. It puts the control back to the learner and with control comes the responsibility. It’s not spoonfeeding a set of techniques and tricks to get a particular type of problems solved.

How is it different?

Standardized tests put a huge amount of stress on kids, ask any high-schooler or his/her parents. Our kids are continuously bombarded by messages highlighting the need for a great score and how a particular course or book or program is their ticket to academic nirvana. All this conditioning creates an artificial awe and fear of the tests and the preparation becomes a gruelling task.

Quiz a Day seeks to give them consistent practice in a fun way sans the unnecessary overload. The imperative is to think ahead, start working while there is still time and give some time every day to the test prep without really going overboard and building unbearable stress loads.

Are the questions of the same pattern and standard as the tests?

Absolutely. That is a pre-requisite for any test prep program to be successful. All the questions are carefully created to reflect the testing philosophy, standards and competency level of the respective tests.

How do you tackle various sections of the tests and various question types?

The “Quiz a Day” provides a proper mix of the question types and sections carefully designed with the actual tests in mind. followed over a period of time, it will give proportionate practice in all the sections and sub-sections covered in the actual tests.

But are there any free lunches?

No, but there can be free drinks thrown in with the paid lunch package, and to take it a step further, you can offer free drinks to people who just pass by to get them to the restaurant.

But how can you offer premium content for free?

The location of our Content Development hub in India gives us a strategic advantage enabling us to provide top quality content with a cost advantage. If creative allocation of our resources helps us provide premium value to our customer base and build a connect with them, good, and if we can reduce their entry load, even better.

What’s the roadmap?

More features and power to “Quiz a Day”. Let me emphasize, it is still evolving and will be a much more potent test prep tool in the months to come.

An innovative offering from eTutelage is in the final stages of development. This new service is designed to be an enormously useful tool for students preparing for ACT and SAT. The beta version will be out soon.

Watch this space for more updates!!!

(An older post, here only because of contextual relevance)

The basic pedagogical process can be defined as a systematic transfer of knowledge and – or skills from an instructor to a learner. Depending upon the basic objectives of the process, the transfer may be limited to cognition of facts or may be extended to application and extension of facts, their inter-linkages and derivative concepts.

Since the important players in this interaction are the instructor and the learner, the important determinants of the effectiveness of the process should include the instructor centric parameters, the learner centric parameters and the transaction centric parameters.

Instructor Centric Parameters

Instructor centric parameters revolve around the instructor’s ability to effectively transfer the skills / knowledge and ignite the curiosity and motivation of the learner to explore the area through active thinking and alternative knowledge sources.

• Level of the target knowledge / skill with the instructor
• Level of transaction skill of the instructor
• Ability to engage
• Ability to motivate
• Ability to transfer the knowledge / skill
• Ability to activate the curiosity of the learner
• Ability to answer related questions
• Ability to positively handle unrelated queriesMotivation level of the instructor

The level of target knowledge is to a great extent determined by academic achievements of the instructor. To ensure adequate target knowledge, it is important to not only go by the academic qualifications possessed by the instructor but also testing his actual level of knowledge through independent testing.

Transaction skills of the instructor depend upon the awareness of the learning process possessed by the instructor and his aptitude for teaching. A University degree in education provides adequate understanding of the learning process to the instructor. However, it is important to actually test the teaching aptitude of the instructor.

Motivation level of the instructor determines his level of proactive effort in ensuring effective learning. This depends upon the career goals of the instructor, his basic personality and behavioral traits. It is important to ensure that a sound synchrony exists between career objectives and opportunity and progression, the teaching profession provides.

Learner Centric Parameters

Learner centric factors determine the learner’s ability to grasp the target knowledge set in isolation as well as in the context of related concepts. This includes:

• Level of the pre-requisite knowledge and skills
• Level of inherent aptitude for the specific knowledge set
• Level of inquisitiveness
• Ability to process, analyze and link new information with what already possessed

Together, these factors determine the learning speed.

Actually, the India bit is a tad unnecessary. Test prep for a global test like GMAT has to be the same, Timbuktoo or Tinsukia.

Coming back to the question, what’s the best way to prepare yourself for the desired high score (cliched, I know – no one wants a low score !!!) in GMAT. For that matter, what is the best way to teach yourself anything new be it horse riding, bodybuilding, a new language or even how to write a blog. Simple, go to someone who is an expert and ask him to be your guiding angel for a while.  Imagine learning bicep-building from Arnold or business building from Bill Gates or Larry Page or Richard Branson, imagine learning basketball from Michael Jordan or acting from Al Pacino.

Yes, it’s not going to happen, not at least to the mere mortals unless you happen to be born into one of these families and, then by some strange coincidence, you too take a liking to the same field of endeavor.

Let’s now come back to the relatively less ambitious task of scoring a perfect 800 in GMAT. The best bet would be to catch hold of a guy who is an expert; pray, cajole or somehow convince him to be your guiding angel (try, for instance, making him an offer he can’t refuse !!!) and then follow exactly as he says.

The idea is to seek guidance from an expert who also has the time and inclination to help you understand your own unique combination of skills and attitudes which make you pre-disposed towards a certain score and helps you work on those improvement areas, again unique to you, which can result in the maximum improvement in the score with minimum time and effort investments.

As long as the Perfect Test Prep engine (as discussed in the previous posts) does not attain a high level of maturity, plain old guru-disciple model is the best bet.

Yes, find yourself a personal guru.

If you cannot, do something that approximates the classical guru-disciple dynamics as closely as possible.