Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Finally Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy make it to the big game and come away big winners! Congratulations to the entire Colts team and the wonderful city of Indianapolis.

Having grown up in India my sports roots are in Cricket and Soccer. But I have grown to love American Football in my years of living here in the US (probably has something to do with going to Ohio State for MBA school and OSU having such a strong college football team). 

My MBA internship was at Delco (General Motors) in Kokomo, Indiana and since then I have followed the Colts and like the rest of their fans have grown used to hopes raising through the regular season only to be bitterly dashed during the NFL playoffs. Not this year!

I am happy for Peyton and his coach, without a doubt two of the most deserving winners. It was truly team work that triumphed with every part of the team delivering the goods when push came to shove (not just today but through the playoffs as well).

I want to touch on one aspect of all this. If nothing else Indy’s win today proves that you can be nice and win. There is no humbler person than Coach Dungy, he does not bark, he does not scowl, he does not swear at the officials, he is not aggressive. He is calm, he is focussed, he inspires his team, he is very competitive, he wants to win.

Nice guys can win, being nice and competitive can work together, life is not a zero sum game.

PS: This is a web analytics blog and this is a rare off-topic post.

But if you are visiting for web analytics content, here are the top five posts on this blog in the last eight months of its existence (measured simply by number of page views):

# 1: Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture.

# 2: The 10 / 90 Rule for Magnificent Web Analytics Success.

# 3: How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative.

# 4: Top Ten: Signs You Are A Great Analyst.

# 5: Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It.

As always please share your feedback via comments.

A rare exception, a personal post on an otherwise non-personal blog.

This is our beautiful daughter Damini…..

Damini turned five yesterday, Sept 6th. Tomorrow she goes for the third major surgery of her young life. She was born with a congenital nevi that covered most of her right forehead area through to her eye lid. She has had two surgeries and a skin graft to remove the nevi over the course of the last 18 months. Thanks to those we don’t have to worry about any life threatening impacts from the nevi.

My little Damini is the bravest person I know. Amazingly she never complains about pain after her surgeries and never cries, even though stitches cover most of her forehead area and recovery is tough. Her strength and resilience is a source of deep inspiration for me. She is also the source of the passion I have for work, life, and beyond.

As a human and father dealing with this on behalf of my daughter is the hardest thing I have done in my life. I only wish that I could be as resilient as she is in dealing with all this.

I’ll be off the blog for the next week.