Author: Sonali D'silva |
I have been giving a lot
of deep thought to excellence and commitment recently. I have asked myself a
few key questions - what makes people excellent at work? What stops them from
being so? Why is it often so difficult to find excellence such that it fills
your heart with joy and a special magic to just watch something meaningful done
flawlessly?
Easy answer is, it takes
a lot of effort and hard work to excel and not everyone is up to it, and we are
at times plain lazy to excel. Easier to watch TV than read a book, for example.
Then again, we must have seen plenty of folks over the years who are sloggers,
let alone hard workers, and yet the magic of excellence is missing. So
probably, I reached a simplistic conclusion to the conundrum & there is
more to it.
At times I’ve heard that
my salary doesn’t merit excellence. They want me to excel? Fine, pay me more
and I will. Now that’s a disturbing one for me personally! The day we begin
weighing our salary v/s the excellence we can bring to our work, know that we
are in deep professional trouble. Truth be told, which self-respecting
professional doesn’t want to be paid some more? Almost everyone does. I can turn this argument on its head and
propose a very different theory....frankly, no company can afford an
exceptional professional if they tried paying them for all their worth. So one
can say instead, let me not break my head on the pennies and crowns and just
get on with why I stepped out of my home so many years ago to begin with to
have a career. In the larger scheme of things, life has a way of leveling out
rewards and punishments...what I craved for in one phase of my life became lack
luster in the next and what I took for granted earlier is now a deep regret. So
either ways, don’t sweat it too much.
Which brings me to
another obstacle in the path to excellence - Losing sight of the forest for the
trees. Which is to say, we might be sweating it too much. We don’t realize our
career just got blindsided as we micromanaged and fretted endlessly about the
here and now. There is a reason why it’s joyful to look in to the horizon and
looking too hard and long at our immediate surroundings generally ends in
disappointment. That we are nurturing and growing our career is not an organic
thought. The more natural conclusion, thanks to the daily grind of coming and
going from work, is that we have a job! Career is a cultivated mindset. We need
to decide to have one; at least no company ever hired me on the promise of a
career, I decided each time to opt for one nevertheless.
The daily routine of
going to office each day, completing tiny tasks, finding the smaller pieces of
the jigsaw and returning home to other pressing priorities is enough to lose
sight (and on some days, lose our mind) that our job is driving a career.
Fairly easy to forget that the task is part of the big exciting project and
that without the smallest piece of the jigsaw, the big picture will remain
incomplete. A job well done propels our career; big difference, but hard to
spot for most of us. Jobs are not inspiring. Period. Careers are exhilarating.
That’s why I come to work each day and want to keep coming all charged up every
single day. I know I am crafting my career – every single day. What I do or
don’t, for the better or for the worse, shapes the organization.
Then comes the slippery
issue of willpower. Most professionals fail to excel not for lack of skills I
feel, but because it is so hard to deeply commit and not settle. Commitment is a muscle, so is willpower.
Don’t use it, you lose it. Commitment in turn takes physical and mental energy.
Not managing energy is the easiest way to lose willpower and therefore
commitment. Tiredness is not the greatest springboard for excellence, it’s more
a foundation for just getting stuff done, somehow. As we grow in our career, we
need more energy than we need more skills. Protect your energy.
The more I think the
more I feel convinced that excellence is not a soft issue to do with
philosophical and elusive platitudes. It is not about a vague and dismissive
conclusion that some have it and some don’t, and some are just plain lazy.
Interestingly, IQ doesn’t have much to do with it either. Excellence is a hard
skill that takes a lot of practice and deep commitment. It demands daily
sharpening of an ability that we all have to go deep into a task, be agile, be
alert, be timely, love details, deliver only the best and produce spectacular
results with the same ingredients that might be enough for someone else to
produce disappointing ones.
A dangerous trend is to
find easy answers and scapegoats for lack of excellence. These reasons vary
from the mundane like, ‘I don’t have the time, I am too busy’ to the more dicey
ones, ‘I was waiting for something to happen or someone to do something, so I
could be excellent - I kept waiting, therefore I am not’. Hmmm. Whom are we
convincing is a debatable point, that requires another blog altogether :)
To end this one I can
say – Excellence is not dependent on what we have at the beginning, it’s not
even what we lack right now, it’s more of what we gather on the way and what we
can turn it into so it no longer remains ordinary. There is a magic to ordinary
because you touched it, that’s excellence. And others see it more clearly than
we can imagine.
Excellence doesn’t ask
for much, just an unwavering resolve to be diligent, ferocious tenacity,
unstinted self-belief, deep commitment, a hunger to outdo ourselves and a pride
in a job well done that is very personal and little to do with anyone or
anything else. Excellence is personal. Others and us benefit from it is a happy
by product.
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