Maths is the most important subject to know if you are starting your own business. The concept that helps an aspiring entrepreneur to run their business successfully is percentages and fractions. The reason why percentages matter for a person running a business is because, more often than not, businesses require teamwork. A person needs the help of a business partner to run their business successfully, share work, and divide the profits earned. This is what I learnt at Tinker Village, a place that is all for experiential learning. Fractions go hand-in-hand with percentages, something I discovered in the first activity, which made use of a “fraction wall”—a rectangular block divided into ten rows, with each row split into equal halves, one-thirds, one-fourths and so on till one-tenths. The aim of this fraction wall was to understand the proportionality of each segment of each row. Another item that helped me study the proportionality of fractions was a few pictures of pies. In the subsequent activities, I studied city planning and setting up a gaming arcade with the help of fractions and percentages. In the segment dealing with city planning, I made decisions regarding the placement of buildings and open spaces and created a town within a grid of 100 squares. In the gaming arcade segment, I used another 100-square grid to figure out, with the help of the markings on a spinning wheel, how much each arcade game would be played and what percentage of money each game would generate. I did this with the help of a spinning wheel with all the games’ names on it. I then worked on an extension of the arcade activities, in which I had to deal with a hypothetical situation involving forming a partnership with friends, selecting games, and splitting the partnership. Observations I found percentages and fractions an interesting concept, and I jumped headfirst into the activities because what made these tasks fun was the aspect of hands-on learning involved. I faced a couple of challenges. Firstly, I had difficulty with the activity wherein I had to think of games and a partnership with a few friends. However, I ignored this since it was a group activity, which meant that there was no scope for teamwork. The second challenge is the one that I will be elaborating upon. I started the activity with the right amount of surety. However, I got stuck here as well. Here, I’d like to speak about something minor yet pertinent—the pursuit of perfection. I was looking forward to a flawless experience. However, the first flaw in this entire exercise was my mistaken belief that my experience would be perfect. I was expecting it to be more straightforward. However, that didn’t happen. This probably happened because I was relearning a concept after many years. Doing this activity, I learnt a crucial lesson—the pursuit of perfection is a problem, not a virtue. This doesn’t mean that perfection shouldn’t be pursued. Rather, it means that I won’t expect things to be perfect if I don’t put in the effort. Learning after a long time takes time and effort to get accustomed to. When a child struggles with a concept or makes mistakes, it does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong. It may simply mean that the child is learning. Perfection is not problematic. What is undesirable is the approach that we take towards achieving it: expecting the process to be smooth and free from obstacles at every stage. Flaws will be there at all stages of the process. These flaws, both within the process and within the individual, are not to be avoided. They are to be accepted as the stepping stones to success.
