I was asked to have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with a cohort of new recruits, all freshers. This is a recipe for unexpected questions. It’s great fun, beats speech-making any day.
I refused to give textbook answers, and I refused to worry about whether my personal journey would have any relevance for someone less than half my age. I just decided to speak my mind.
“Achievements”
One young officer asked me how I meet my short-term goals. I said, how do you know I do? That’s when the “achievements” word was mentioned. Apparently I have “achieved so much”.
Don’t waste time. This was the first thing I said. If you want to get things done, you cannot afford to have free time the way “normal” people do. You can’t hang around with friends every evening, watch TV series or scan social media. This does not mean that you do not have free time. It just means that make your free time something rejuvenating, not dissipating. I would have recommended books and music-listening, but I stopped myself. This was the 21st century, no one reads, and music is for background listening.
Everything takes 3X time. The second thing I said is that everything worth doing takes 3X the time you thought it would take. Get used to it. Budget for it. Whether it is learning a new programming language, or getting a new account activated, or bringing about some transformation in the company.
Pick only things worth doing. The third point followed from the second. If anything you strive to do takes 3X the time people think it will, then please ensure that you pick only those goals which are worth working on even after 3X the time has elapsed. Try hard to separate short-term from medium-term, and try hard to ensure that the short-term things (there will always be short-term things) don’t distract you much from the long-term ones.
Have a lighthouse. I keep using this analogy, though I use it for traveling cross-country on land, not steering a ship over water. Imagine that you are trekking cross-country over unfamiliar terrain. You constantly encounter walls, rock faces, hillocks, and have to walk around them or climb them. In the process, you lose sight of your final direction, you get disoriented. It helps to have a lighthouse or mountain peak so tall that you can see it wherever you are. Use it to get your bearings whenever you lose them. It sets you back in the right direction, even if you take a hundred short detours. In matters of business, the lighthouse is my clarity about what we are, what we do, and what we do not do. And business is a long trek through unfamiliar terrain with rock faces, walls, and boulders at every turn.
This, I said, was how I manage to keep my focus on goals.
“Defeat”
Then another young engineer spoke. He asked, “Tell us about your biggest defeat.”
I was stumped. I have not thought about the word “defeat” for any of the things which have happened to us. I have never thought of the word “victory” either. It’s hard to pay attention to one and ignore the other, right? I did not know what to say. What are my “defeats”?
I realised, standing before the room full of young engineers, that I have never thought about defeat. For me, it’s always been a journey.
I tried explaining this to the group. I told them that if I try to do something and it doesn’t work, is it a defeat? Or is it just one step in a journey of many steps?
When we see our work as winning medals, then victory and defeat are probably valid words. But when we see our work as something which leads us somewhere, we usually get one chance after another, provided we keep getting up and walking again after each stumble. If my aim is to get the gold in, say, swimming in the Paris 2024 Olympics, and I can’t get it, then I may treat this as a defeat. But if my aim is to be an Olympic swimming gold medal winner, then I get a fresh Olympics every four years. And in the larger journeys of life, one keeps pegging away at things, changing our approach and tactics, till either the target itself loses value or till we say it’s no longer worthwhile for us to keep trying.
In business, we are not competing for a podium finish. (Some businessmen are, I guess. Let’s keep them aside.) We are on a journey, taking each day as one more day to move in what we consider a good, sensible direction. I don’t know what “defeat” is in a journey, and I said so. Sometimes I start a day and reverse the direction I had decided on yesterday, because I changed my mind about what is the best direction. At other times, I keep walking. I know it may have sounded bombastic to some young minds — they may think that I am trying to claim that I have always won, and I don’t know what defeat is. I hope at least some of them got what I was saying.
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