People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel

Hello there....

Just an update there. This week, we had our presentation for one of our modules - financial engineering... it's one of the more interesting subjects around, but also the most difficult. Our group had to present a topic on Quanto Swaps... Initially, it sounded easy, but the mathematics and formulae behind the derivation of the pricing was nothing less than a nightmare. Fortunately though, one of the teammates covered that portion. I had some understanding of the formulae, but not all...

The gist of this episode is that we had a bit of disagreement with one of the team members - a very nice guy but who might have made some mistakes in portraying his presentation in slides. His ideas were correct, but the way he portrayed the information was not audience-friendly... we couldnt understand what he was saying, let alone a large audience of 30 people. Long and short was that there was some miscommunication about one technical point. So, given that we didn't have much time left to the final presentation, two of us decided to split up his portion to reduce the risk that he presented something wrongly. Anyway, I must admit that we didn't do it in the nicest manner. I was more focused on the goal of doing a good presentation but forgot that this poor guy must have felt really bad. i was told later that he practised very hard for his portion of the presentation (but actually, it was still pretty bad, really). I was told that I acted like a "boss"... haha... perhaps so... since i am the oldest in the group, it's hard not to (in the light that rest of the group are all so young... this guy is 24 years old... I could really be his boss in real life - anyway, that's a different story)

To make matters worse, i found out later that he was not wrong after all. We just had different angles of seeing the issue. I apologised to him for the misunderstanding and reverted to his angle, but had to redo the slides to make them audience-friendly : my own fault for taking over his part. I had to spend an entire night redoing everything... serves me right. Anyway, the presentation went very well. I think our group was the best one for the day. The other groups were pretty bad, i must say.

So, I apologised to him and i think he felt better after that - so... i think all's well... but it was an important lesson for me. Even though i think i can be soooooo right, I can still be wrong... or rather, the other person could be right as well... we just have to be patient to listen carefully... secondly, it's ok to make mistakes... just own up, apologise, and try to make good the damage. But this quote came ringing in my head... "people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"... this rings loud and clear for me, esp in my own life. hehe... oh well... the pain will fade, but of course, i will still remember the degree of the pain. (hope i make sense here).

So much for a lazy Sunday afternoon post. (i did go to church this morning... sermon was pretty good... that's another story)

Ciao.

B