"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that is enough" - Robert Heller
Let us say that you arrive at a splendid idea for the next path breaking app in ecommerce. You immediately show it to your friends. They dissect it to the core and tell you it will not work. Hmmmm Now you face a tough decision. Do you go with your guts or your friends’ scientific reasoning? Do you want to go with your gut? Why not? When you look at your statistics, they split the data exactly in the middle. Your gut has worked 50% of the time while the other 50% times it has got it wrong. So what should you do? This analysis, which is based on the past events, certainly seems to be sound and justified. Just wait ... Your gut has only helped you in making many of those dicey decisions which, at some times, looked unsound. When you look at the history, many of the unsound things have only become disruptive hits. Sound ones never do disruption. Dhoni going to Joginder for the last over, Netflix and the other OTT options, Ola taking on the unorganized taxi market, to name a few. So what am I finally saying? The challenge is not in trying to convince those who are in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to only ask them to do a complete gut check to decide whether they should defend their instincts and then do it. Agree with me, what’s your gut feeling?
1 Comment
It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change -- Charles Darwin, Scientist We live in an era of constant change. Take, for example, even the virus CORONA has changed itself so many times in the last 18 months. Business, economy and materialism are always on the change. As they change, expectations are that the actors in the system also change seamlessly. How is that possible? Yes, if you don’t, you perish. Thus everyone tries to change. Is that change easy? My straight answer is No, it’s tough. Why? What they are demanding is a change which is very personal. Competencies that are all quiet, innate to oneself. We refer to it as “Soft Skills”. What are they? Soft skills include your ability.
The list is endless. I know most of you would have heard all these comments at least once in a financial year. Yes, during your appraisal feedback. The underlying problem is that everyone understands that importance but does nothing about it. Neither the education system nor the society framework nor parental guidance act. They do nothing to inculcate these skills during the formative years of the person. I am tempted to blame the education system at large for this mess. They take pains to make me understand Newtonian physics. Also, Einstein’s relativity, the structure of Streptococcus. In fact, who killed Aurangzeb and when did the battle of Plassey take place. Yet do nothing to improve my soft skills. They need to invest in improving one’s soft skills at school or college level. It’s left to the student’s responsibility. In the rat race of marks, these obviously take the back seat. OK, I got the problem, but how do we solve it? Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shores -- Andre Gide, French Novelist Men have always been perceived as people who are uncomfortable or who don’t share their emotions. But they have always felt that sharing emotions is not masculine. Call them as egoistic, unwilling to share, inconsiderate or what not. It seen many a time, men have to console themselves all alone. I am not blaming the other sect, but the ecosystem has portrayed masculinity differently. Crying, compassion, emotional feelings etc as not masculine. Men have a large barrier to overcome to seek help for the problems. For men, sharing their personal issues with a friend or a family is a great hurdle. Leave the therapist for now out of the picture. Why go any further than this classic example. Imagine a male in a car and lost. By lost let me say he has a little direction orientation disability. I mean hopeless and utterly lost. Even in this situation, the person is incapable of stopping his car and asking for directions. Men always feel they should know how to get to their destination and get embarrassed when they don’t. Men have always felt guilty to accept problems. Even when they knew someone else is having a bigger problem than theirs. What rationale is this? Men use the rational that unhappiness is not comparative. The Old Arabic proverb which states “I complained that I had no shoes until I met a person who had no feet”. Even after knowing this, men still do not share. Is there hope? Men have always been termed as people without compassion or with very less. Might be the currency of compassion is a limited resource, with the woman as a finance minister. [Not talking about the current regime at all]. One of the main reasons men don’t share according to me is the pride. The pride will turn angels into devils and it is only humility which makes men as angels. Even after so many years of evolution, some men have misplaced their priorities. They have hung on pride and left humility at bay. The only provenance that I have is that I am also a male. So is there no way out? The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be. -- Marcel Pagnol (French Dramatist) I'm sure that everyone in their recent past would have listened once to their father's story about his childhood and how they struggled but still was far better enjoyable than it is now. I for one never cared about those stories and it was a repeated storyline for me. Cut to the present day and I am almost doing the same to my kids. I have started telling them stories of how I used to play till 8PM on the streets and not watch TV. It was great with only the Black & White DD channel for TV. The wait for seeing cartoons on Sunday, Malgudi days or ஒலியும் ஒளியும் (Oliyum Oliyum) and how friends used to talk for hours face-to-face. I still feel that how TV and entertainment were destroyed by the 24/7 satellite channels, Now I see my kids doing what I did to my father's story. I can see now where the dissent and disinterest come to them. There is no connection for them to what I am saying or experiencing. It's nostalgic for me but for those who have not even seen it how can I expect them to feel it? What's that got to do with the topic - Just hang on for a short while. Being bored, I decided to open up FB after a long time and I saw countless posts on the dangers of social media and why we should go back to times before WWW was found. I find a strange contradiction that those people who are shouting against it or in fact using the same channel to propagate it. Much like the advisory warning on the cigarette packet. This made me think for some time if it is really true that as one goes old, they seem to feel that their childhood times look far better than the present? A likely answer to it would be that during childhood there is no responsibility and hence the time looked great. Come beyond childhood to job, managers, marriage, housing loans, EMI, etc then the same period looks crazy. This is what I think maybe a plausible reason. A couple of days back, when flipping on channels on the TV I stumbled upon an old movie of Woody Allen named "The midnight in Paris". This movie is the one which is credited for coining the concept called "Golden Age Syndrome" So what is it? The greatest wealth is to live content with little. -- Plato Every one who has passed 40 would be able to tell you that all of them have only one aim in life from now on - to have a simple and happy life. All of them would be frustrated with this current dog raced complex and fast paced world. There are many blogs that tell us how to be happy but not many are there when it comes to simplifying your life. First let us see why do we need to simplify our life? Just for a moment, try and think what would be the most happiest place for you to be and it would never turn out to be our metros or cities. It is always a far away hill station, a clam and quiet remote place or your ancestral village home. What do these place have that the ultra modern cities do not have? Simplicity. The modern day life has turned itself into a complex machine where each day there is an ounce of complexity being added into it and we only try to adjust with that. We have never resorted to see how to reduce this complexity and make things simpler. Making things simpler is not a simple task - but certainly we should start somewhere. Extravagance is often a picture of an unsatisfied life. It is often in the most simple things that we actually find true happiness. As a young boy (back in the 80s) it would have just been that small cricket bat or the colorful top - பம்பரம் or the free flying kite which we used to chase and get hold of it. When we look back at it, we find that it bought more happiness than the crazy 128GB iPADs and Bose stereo headphones. Why? The answer is still the same - it was uncomplicated and simple then than now. If we already knew the answer then where is the toughness in it? It takes courage to admit there is the need to simplify our lives. It cannot be achieved by all and very easily. There are efforts which needs to be put to get it but let me assure you that once you get there, you will never want to return back to the current complexities. |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
June 2023
Categories
All
|