“Success Or Failure – Both have to have a Reason”

On a warm sultry monsoon afternoon, some 15 years ago, my boss- a very senior and learned professional, who went on to eventually become my Guru Dronacharya – & I were taking a drive around the Tea Estate we were working in. We had achieved a record breaking crop that season and were being applauded by just about everybody who mattered. Things couldn’t have been better and my boss should ideally have been on the “top of the world”, but somehow, he had a worried look on his face. I eventually mustered up enough courage to ask him why?

 “Both success & failure, young man ,have to have a reason. And in the present scenario I can’t quite figure out the real reason for this Success”. 

If you don’t know what led to a certain success, you would probably not be able to replicate it. It’s what is generally referred to as a “flash in the pan”.

On the other hand, if the root cause for failure is not known, odds are that one would become a failure all over again.

“Influence vs Acquired Influence”

Ever wondered if “The Beatles” ever really intended influencing an entire generation. Or if Elvis Presley had thousands of look-alikes and millions who wanted to follow every aspect of him, only because he had intended it to be that way. Maybe, not. Its probably because these people “acquired influence” from what they saw.

 “You seemed to be influenced by him / her?”. People tend to react negatively; even with anger at times, when encountered with such a question or a statement. They go into a reactive, defensive mode. What they are unable to comprehend at most times is that, while their conscious minds might deny “getting influenced”, their sub conscious has somewhere “acquired “ the “influence”.

While “tuning yourself to learn” is more of a conscious effort,” acquired influence” is a lot to do with the “sub-conscious”.

“Slow Down If You Want To Be Fast”

This dates back to the time when I bought my first car. I spent the first night after having taken delivery of the car, engrossed in absorbing every single word in the “Owners Manual”, as if it were a holy book. Not that it was necessary to learn about the car, but the sheer pleasure of knowing the car as something that was my very own made me somehow go back to school days.

 I learnt a scientific concept that day. Amongst other things, the manual described how the angle of vision goes on diminishing as the speed goes up thereby reducing the field of vision with increasing speed. So what you end up ultimately seeing at a high speed is only a narrow portion of the road. That, it said was also one of the factors that related fast driving and the risks associated with it.

 The same happens with us in day to day life. In the rush to attain “ speed of thought”, “speed of execution”, “speed of implementation” and so on, we tend to lose sight of the more important aspects that are essential. We start believing that “speed of execution” is the real measure of success. As a result, we are often landed in a situation where we have executed something that lacks something very fundamental. What follows is rework, more lost time and finally frustration. In these cases it is SPEED that actually slows you down.

 “Slow down, don’t dance so fast, life is short and the music won’t last.”

“Success in Isolation” – Probably A Myth?

What a fantastic co-incidence! Just after I had posted my previous thought, I came across a story which so beautifully describes the above. So I had an insuppressible urge to share the same. Happy reading!

 “There was a farmer who grew superior quality and award-winning CORN. Each year he entered his CORN in the state fair where it won him honor and prizes.

Once a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learnt something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors’.

“How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why sir, “said the farmer, “didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior, sub-standard and poor quality corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn.

If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.”

So I guess from “Nothing succeeds like success” we could start moving to “Success succeeds by sharing it”.

“Success in Isolation” – A Fact or A Myth?

“Nothing succeeds like success- nothing fails like failure” – an often heard statement, quite loosely used at most times though.

 The ambition to succeed is mostly accompanied with an element of self-imposed secrecy. It’s the fear of somebody else beating you in the race for success or maybe the fear of your success being replicated by somebody else that drives this. Unfortunately it is a popular belief that, the “sweetness of success” is always directly proportional to the level of “exclusivity” of the same. Had this been true, no team in the world would ever have been successful. There would never have been an army that won a battle. There would never have been a “game plan” discussed before a game because “that has to be kept closely guarded”

I always thought of cycling as an individual sport till one day I saw a documentary on Discovery on the Legend called Lance Armstrong. I was surprised to learn that what I perceived all along as an individual sport was actually an out & out team effort. An entire team works around ensuring that Lance wins. The striking difference, however, is that unlike other team sports, the glory in this case is bestowed upon the single apparent winner only. The element of selflessness made quite an impact on me.

 For all of us who have been “successful” in something or the other, I guess its time to reflect if we actually share the enablers and the finer points with others around us? If somebody hadn’t thought of this before us too, then I am not sure how “successful” we would have been today.

One Should Not Have “Filters” or Maybe One Should Have a Few

From all the training programs I have attended or the interactions with Management Gurus that I have been through, a common thought that has always been discussed is the need to be “unbiased”, “unprejudiced” and have an “open mind” when you engage with people.. What we all popularly know as the ability to remove one’s filters.

 An “open mind” would definitely have a clear reception of the inputs. But an open mind would also receive unwanted “distortion” which would ultimately cloud one’s thinking.

My take on this is that while it is important to remove one’s filters and see things from a different paradigm , it is also equally essential to have other filters in place to block the negativity that would otherwise find its way in.

Just like the friendly filter at home which blocks the impurities but lets the water flow through.

“Only Machines Require Validation”

A beautiful analogy can be drawn from this to the work environment around us. But before I do that, let us go back a bit into our childhood. As children, grow up , they draw a great deal of solace from their mothers who are continuous reassuring factors in their lives that (in Rancho’s trademark style) “ALL IZZ WELL”. A mother’s unadulterated love for her child sees nothing wrong in his or her actions. Logic & rationale take a backseat. How else would you explain a mother slapping the “floor” for hurting her child when, actually the floor had absolutely nothing to do with it. It all just boils down to seeing the smile back on his / her face.

 In the bargain, unintentionally though, what gets cultivated within the child is the need to be reassured each time he is faced with a situation he can’t comprehend.

 As one steps into the real world and is more often than not , confronted with the “distortion” that results from the lack of “ tuning to learn”, the first reaction is that of looking for assurance around oneself. If not careful, one would not even realize that he / she has slipped into the “victim mode”. This coupled with the sub-conscious which nests an insatiable desire to be constantly reassured, leads to another need – the need to be validated for your actions, each time.

What is important to realize is that we are humans and it is “Only Machines That Require Validation”

To Make Mistakes is Human, To Repeat Them is “Insincerity”

“To Err is human” or “its human to make mistakes” or maybe “nobody is perfect – its human to make mistakes.”

 Common, everyday statements all of us make, as well as hear in the environment around us. Yes, it is indeed “Human to make mistakes”; all of us do; but what is more important to understand is whether we are sincere enough from making an effort not to repeat them. It is commonly known and accepted that we should “learn from our mistakes” but that should not be the end point. It should go beyond. Or else the learning will happen but the repeated mistake will have the same impact all over again. The only thing that will change the second time around is that the impact will not seem like a stranger.

 To Make Mistakes is Human, To Repeat Them is “Insincerity”

Tuning Yourself to Learn

Ever wondered how an outstanding student throughout school & college  suddenly starts struggling in his professional career. His learning curve rapidly declines and over a short period of time, he starts to question his own learning ability. “This is the real world”, you are told, not a case study or a classroom simulation. The question lingers on in your mind- what am I doing wrong?

 What usually remains unexplained is the reason why this happens! Think about it- all through school and college, you are told what you “need to learn”. There is always a syllabus to follow, an index to guide you and a point of reference. Life on the other hand is different – it doesn’t have a syllabus, its boundary less. So what becomes important then is to tune yourself to what you need to learn. Like a dish antennae or a radio. You would end up with an uncanny distortion if it weren’t pointing in the right direction or wasn’t properly tuned in.

Respect– a word that encompasses much more than what meets the eye

Respect, my dear boy, can be broadly divided into two parts, I was told by my first boss – a thorough Gentleman who had spent five years in the Army before deciding to join the Corporate race, whose presence itself conveyed self discipline of a man in control, humility and a strange aura around him made me want to listen to him with all my heart. It was only later on in my association with him that I realized that, this Gentleman was not only disciplined; he was an epitome of self-discipline.

 The first part is the respect that you would command by sheer virtue of the fact that you were holding a particular position in an organization. This was something that you would get from day one, irrespective of who or what you were. It was at face value.

 The second part is the respect that one “earns” over a period of time. The respect that people give you because of the level of knowledge that you possess,the commitment that you demonstrate and your overall involvement that you exhibit with the job as well as the people you work with. .

 Both of these come with perseverance and hard work. The first part is always perishable and will need to be nurtured with the second in order for it to be sustainable.