Suraj's Blog [Sharing Knowledge & Inspiration]

If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you are right!

Sometimes a simple little snippet can point to larger life lessons. Sample this:

‘Aoccrdnig to a rseearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosnt mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a  taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.’

The road to success in life too is quite similar. Getting started is key. And learning to finish tasks is
priceless. The rest is, well, commentary.

I like the old saying that you don’t have to be great to get started but you have to get started to be
great. You can have the most fabulous ideas, some great plans, and the intent may never be in doubt.
But all that is worth nothing if you don’t get started. We often hesitate to get started, waiting for
everything to be in place. But remember that everything seldom falls into place!

Unfinished tasks are the biggest contributors to stress in the workplace. Learn to finish tasks. Get
them out of the way. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly at first. Successful people
make it a habit to finish what they have started.

So if you have a big idea or a secret dream, take that first step. Today! Want to become a bestselling
author? Write the first chapter. Today! And take a look at your unfinished tasks, your to-do
list. Resolve to complete at least one of those tasks. Today!

Do that and see the difference. Life will begin to make a lot more sense.

It happened some years ago on a deserted street in Rome. It was a hot, sunny afternoon. A woman was walking down the street, shopping bags in her hands, whistling a tune to herself, when she noticed a group of labourers breaking stones by the roadside. Clack-clack … clack-clack … they went as their hammers pounded on the stones, splitting them into smaller and smaller bits.

Intrigued, the woman went up to one of the workmen and asked him what he was doing. ‘Can’t you see?’ came the rather terse reply, as the man looked up and wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘I am breaking stones.’

Walking a little farther, she saw another man, also breaking stones. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him. ‘Me?’ he replied. ‘Oh, I am helping build the world’s tallest cathedral!’

Think about it. Apply this analogy to your workplace. How do your colleagues in the organization perceive their roles? As mere stone breakers, or as the builders of the world’s tallest cathedral?
Does your frontline salesperson see his role as just a ‘sales rep’? Or does he pride himself on being part of a world-class team that is aiming to be the best in the business? Does the woman in your front office see herself as just a ‘receptionist’? Or as the ambassador and the first point of contact of an organization that is aiming to be the best in the business? The difference in the way your frontline members—your ‘stone breakers’—think can spell the difference between a terrific organization and an ordinary one. It can mean the difference between achieving your vision or falling short of your
targets.

And how do successful leaders ensure that their organizations comprehend and share their vision? How do they get individuals to see their roles clearly as indispensable to a larger, grander plan? They do that by articulating a vision for the business. By spelling out a dream that the entire organization can identify with and relate to. They then make sure that every individual understands his role in helping the team realize that vision.

And they also make sure that there is respect in the organization for every individual, for what he brings to the table. For his unique contribution in helping the organization realize its dream. Thus, every individual focuses not only on delivering the best in his assigned role but also on being a fruitful part of a larger winning team. And he basks in the glory of knowing that in his own way, he makes a difference.

P.M. Sinha (popularly called ‘Suman’), former CEO of PepsiCo India, was a master at such vision sharing. He created what he called an upside-down organization. And his favourite slide in any presentation was the organization chart, which showed the frontline salesmen right on top, with the rest of the organization under them, supporting their efforts. The CEO was right at the bottom of that inverted pyramid, his role being to support the entire organization.

There were other practices too that helped foster this culture of togetherness. There were no bosses or ‘Sirs’. Suman was called Suman by the entire team. Everyone wore identical shirts to work, with the Pepsi logo emblazoned on the pockets, right across their hearts. In every visit to the market, in every conference, Suman made sure that he projected his frontliners as his heroes. In fact, the Pepsi salesman was immortalized in a popular TV commercial featuring Sachin Tendulkar. Remember the genial sardarji scolding Sachin for smashing a ball into the windshield of his Pepsi truck, and then cooling down to say, ‘Oye, relax yaar … have a Pepsi!’?

It isn’t surprising that Suman succeeded in creating a first-rate sales team, where every salesman and every route agent who drove a Pepsi truck saw himself as a hero, out on a battle, ready to kill the enemy (a.k.a. Coke) and make Pepsi the number one cola in the country. In fact, if you stopped a Pepsi truck and asked the salesman what he was doing, chances were high that he’d say he was helping Pepsi win the cola war. Not just ‘selling Pepsi’.

Once, on a visit to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to review the progress on his grand vision of putting a man on the moon, charismatic American President John F. Kennedy saw a janitor eyeing him shyly. ‘What do you do here?’ J.F.K. asked her, to acknowledge her presence and strike up a conversation.

Pushing her hair back with her hand, she replied: ‘I am helping America put a man on the moon.’ Indeed, some time after Kennedy ‘shared’ his dream of putting a man on the moon, Neil Armstrong was taking ‘one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind’. And in India, Pepsi took on the world’s most valuable brand, and won.

Behind these successes were armies of salesmen and janitors—stone breakers, if you please—who saw themselves as part of a larger mission. They saw themselves as builders of the world’s tallest cathedral, as people who were making a difference.
And what a difference that made!

‘How do you and your colleagues in the organization perceive your roles? As stone breakers? Or as builders of the world’s tallest cathedral?’

The loudest noise today is the ringing of the wake-up call. When you hear of a young friend who’s had a heart attack, you know it’s a wake-up call for you to start that jog, to get on to the treadmill and to get back into fitness mode.

When you hear of the crash of the biggies on Wall Street, you know it’s a wake-up call for Indian banking majors who’ve been busy spamming mobile phones with ‘please may I offer you a noquestions-asked loan’ calls.

When you hear of smells-like-Enron controversies, you know it’s a wake-up call for company boards and CEOs to take corporate governance seriously.

When you read about how the distance between an argument and the divorce court is getting shorter in metros, you know it’s a wake-up call to pay more attention to your relationships, to work on making your marriage work.

And when you hear about the New York i-banker (he of that fancy fat bonus last year) suddenly going into depression following a pink slip, you know it’s a wake-up call to get your priorities right and find balance in your life’s goals.

But hey, wait a minute! What do we do when we hear these wake-up calls? Our typical response to all these signals is something like this: We talk about it animatedly with our friends. (Oh yes, these make for excellent bar conversation!) We then resolve we must do something about it immediately. Soon. Tomorrow. And, of course, tomorrow never comes. Yet, despite the constant blaring of all these wake-up calls, why is it that most of us don’t really do
anything about them? Two reasons, I suspect. First, a false sense of invincibility, the ‘it-can’t-happen-to-me’ syndrome. We always think it only happens to others.

The heart attack. The bankruptcy. The pink slip. The broken marriage. We don’t realize that ‘they’ too are people like us. Or were, at least.
Second, ‘hit-the-snooze-button’ syndrome. The temptation to put off action until a bit later. And then a little later. The exercise regimen you promised yourself doesn’t quite get started. The day you hear about your friend’s heart attack, you say you will start the next day. That doesn’t happen. You then promise yourself you’ll do it after the Diwali binges. Then, after you come back from that business trip. Then
from the first of January, promise! It never, never happens. Until it’s too late!

CEOs and company boards are like that too. Must set it right next quarter, they say. Not this one, the next. One good quarter, and we’ll take care of it. Next financial year … And so on... . The truth is, we’ve all got used to the wonderful snooze button on our alarm calls.

To get up at 6.30 a.m., we set the alarm for 6 a.m. We wake up, stretch hand, reach alarm, hit snooze …6.10 a.m. We wake up, hit snooze … 6.20 a.m. Ditto 6.30 a.m. Finally wake up. Research shows that those thirty minutes are a complete waste. You don’t really sleep in those three ten-minute intervals. And you don’t put that time to productive use either. All that the snooze button does is to give us a feeling that it can wait. And we start thinking that everything can wait. Our minds develop their own versions of the snooze button.

So what happens is that every time we hear a wake-up call, we reach out for the snooze button, which isn’t really there. But it’s taken permanent residence in our minds.

Do yourself a favour. Cut off the snooze button. From your cellphone, your alarm clock, your mind, your life. Get up when the alarm rings. Don’t hit snooze. When you hear a wake-up call, wake up.
Make it a habit.
You’ll find many benefits of this one change in your behaviour. You will sleep well. You will create more time for yourself every morning.
And most importantly, when those critical wake-up calls come along in your life, you’ll take action.

You’ll wake up. Before it’s too late.

Take this simple test. Read the sentence below, and see how many Fs you can find:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

So how many did you count? Three? Four? Or five? If you counted six, congratulations. You are a genius. In fact, you’ve done as well as an average seven-year-old. Truth is that when this test is administered to grownups, less than 5 per cent get it right. (And some among them have probably seen this before!) There are indeed six Fs. And here they are, highlighted for you!

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

So why do adults get it wrong, while kids can get it right in a jiffy? Experts reckon it’s got to do with the way the adult mind gets conditioned to reading the F sound. Our minds tend to miss the F in ‘of’. It’s there but several years of reading fast—and latching on to F sounds in words like ‘finish’ and ‘files’, and missing it in words like ‘of’—result in adults not counting the Fs accurately. In trying to read faster, we notice a few Fs and miss out on the others, which our minds take for granted. If you think about it carefully, it’s not just F words that we take for granted. There are several things in our lives that our conditioned minds miss out on. As we spend all our waking hours chasing Fame and Fortune (Ah, F words again!), there are some other Fs that we take for granted, ignore, lose sight of …
Like Friends. Family. Faith. And Fun!

They are there, all the time. But in our scramble for Fast cars and Fast cash and Fame and Fortune, the mind loses sight of them. Important as they may be, the mind takes them for granted. And ignores them. Perhaps it’s time to bring back the innocence of a seven-year-old. Time to rediscover our real strengths. And as you notch up the points for Fame and Fortune in your personal balance sheet, it may be a good idea to check the real score. And look hard for those other Fs—Family, Friends, Faith, Fun —that are there but probably being taken for granted.

Years of neglect and of being taken for granted may make these Fs hard to spot but they are there. Waiting to be seen. And savoured.

So the next time you look at yourself, count the Fs carefully. And never mind how many you can count the first time, remember there are many, many more.

Friends, family, faith and fun—these are just some of the things in our lives that our minds take for granted and get conditioned to miss out on.