The Imperfection of Chasing Perfection !

 

Ask any movie expert, and they will point out that the first “Avengers” movie(the highest grossing Marvel movie back in 2012) had the most continuity (i.e., logical) mistakes in it.

 

 

Alludes to the point how imperfection is more profitable than perfection.

 

 

“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in”- Leonard Cohen

 

 

Sure you don’t want to be on an airplane with a pilot who announces that we have a 90% chance of landing and taking off perfectly. Nor be at the mercy of a heart surgeon doing your bypass saying that he was content with doing an adequate job. You would know the classic interview line when the interviewee is asked about a weakness and the response is “my greatest weakness is that I am too much of a perfectionist“.

 

 

Perfectionism is what prompts people to appear to be living their best lines online but hide their physical and emotional scars in shame. This malaise started well before the advent of social media(a generation before superbly air brushed images began to be posted on Instagram). In a hyper competitive world, the pressure on kids from their parents to be the best and to be the receiving end of harsh criticism when they were not, meant that kids began to judge their worth based on the absence of inadequacies. What an exacting standard to live up to!!

 

 

Let’s go back to another example from the movies. I read this in the mercurial Ben Settle‘s email newsletters. There is a fascinating book called the “Backstory 1”.

 

 

It’s the first of four volumes of interviews with screenwriters for Hollywood’s “golden” age. And the insights & lessons inside are not only extremely thought-provoking, but can be extremely profitable, too. Take, for example, an interview inside with screenwriter Richard Maibaum, where he dropped a zinger about a conversation he had with Alfred Hitchcock.

 

 

Here is what he said:

 

 

[Hitchcock] said to me, “Did you read what we’ve got?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What did you think about it?” I replied, “It’s not very logical.” He grimaced and said, “Oh, dear boy, don’t be dull. I’m not interested in logic. I’m interested in effect. If the audience ever thinks about logic, it’s on their way home after the show, and by that time, you see, they’ve paid for their tickets.”

 

 

Too much logic sucks out the drama, rinses out the ‘effect‘.

 

 

The Japanese tea ceremony is indeed a ‘thing‘. Back in the 16th Century it underwent a seismic shift. Immaculate dishes were replaced with chipped bowls. People drank from pottery that was worn and weathered. The Japanese called this practice ‘wabi sabi‘. Wabi sabi is the art of honoring the beauty in imperfection. It’s not about creating intentional imperfections- it’s more about accepting that imperfections are inevitable and recognising that they don’t stop something from becoming sublime.

 

 

One of the all time great songs from Bollywood ‘Chingari Koi Badke‘, sung by Kishore Kumar and composed by the seminal R D Burman, orginated from a misplayed guitar chord. You may want to know more about it here https://youtu.be/0rMT-d1lAKY?si=snJPw_lF87T4nZxY

 

 

We grow by embracing our shortcomings, not by punishing them. Look no further. The wealthiest place on the planet is just down the road. It is the cemetery. No, I am dead serious. And it is a matter of grave concern. The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was far too obsessed with waiting for the perfect time, the perfect place, the perfect partner, the perfect market…

 

 

There is a reason why it is coined ‘cause and effect‘, not ’cause and perfect’. Striving for social approval(read perfection) comes with a cost. Extrinsic factors like popularity and appearance rather than intrinsic factors like growth and connection exudes a case of lower well-being. Seeking validation is a bottomless pit.

 

 

Makes imperfect sense?

 

ENDS

 

 

 

 

Are You People Pleasing? Please Don’t!

 

 

Hello there to most of us driftwoods in the ocean. Yes, that is an appropriate way to address most of us who in the quest to conform, comply, fit in, appease, not disappoint, give up (sacrifice is more like it I reckon) a part of the authentic us to please the other. Voluntarily short changing ourselves. And, in a lot of cases, not even being able to wallow in self pity about it (lest it displease the other side). The consequences of this on our state of health is immense. And there is nothing positive about it.

 

 

So, rather than be the driftwood in the ocean, the goal is to become a sailboat with a rudder that is influenced by the wind, but charts its own course. The willing allies of our inability to say no include anxiety, stress, depression, poor health and last but not the least sub optimal self worth.

 

 

A lot of us are in this boat. Where our middle name is ‘people pleaser‘.  Time to seek out the discomfort and have these hard conversations. Purposeful confrontations. And by hard conversations I actually mean radical candor where you are caring personally while challenging professionally. And this can be done without being aggressive or insincere. Radical Candor really just means saying what you think while also giving a damn about the person you’re saying it to.

 

 

For example, in work teams there are functional and dysfunctional staff. Several leaders intentionally scope the talent and temperaments and then “exploit the best, who carry the rest“. Excellent workers are often strategically groomed to burn out and those employees who “coast” simply watch and laugh.  Setting boundaries with an employer is critical.

We are so busy caring more about how to show up so as to be accepted. That we don’t show up at all. With our real self and with what we really want. Among other fallouts, add Fibromyalgia to the mix of diseases that can be caused by people pleasing. When your mouth can’t make your true state of being overwhelmed/exhausted be heard and your body starts with all the pain to protect yourself from the outside and forces you to hide within. Studies have shown that parts of the brain that register pain react differently if you have fibromyalgia. This means you feel pain when other people just feel uncomfortable or stiff. And the vicious cycle takes you back to what you think is right(which is actually wrong) i.e people pleasing!

 

 

You might like this single by Cat Burns( an artist who speaks about personality traits, mental health and interaction with others, so beautifully). You can listen to the song here https://youtu.be/uPkuTVQAIiM?si=WkZLYAUABUnB2vmC 

 

 

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do. There’s more rewards in leading the crowd, than pleasing it. Don’t burn yourself, to keep others warm. Don’t be afraid of losing people, but be afraid of losing yourself trying to make everyone happy.

 

 

So, please do as you please!

 

 

ENDS

 

Are you in need of a culture sock?

 

By ‘sock‘ I don’t mean the sock you wear with shoes. Here ‘sock‘ means a hard blow, a lethal upper cut from heavyweight boxer. Well, I mean metaphorically.

 

 

We have moved on from the famous adage ‘Culture eats Strategy for breakfast’ to  ‘Culture eating Strategy for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between ‘to the more finite yet all encompassing ‘Culture is Strategy‘ .

 

 

A few years ago, we received an RFP( how I hate the term) from a leading University in the region asking us to pitch our branding, strategy & creative services and submit a quote. The deliverables were very much what we do for a living but what was most disconcerting was the frequent use of the word ‘vendor‘ every other line amidst the sea of largely unneeded legalese that such documents are ‘expected’ to have. Taking umbrage, I called the CEO then(himself from a large MNC technology company earlier) and requested that the word vendor in the RFP document be replaced with something more respectful and appropriate. I told him that if he expected our organisation ISD Global to bring in its experience, knowledge, insights, time, intellect, effort and emotional labour to this project, we better be perceived as far beyond being a ‘vendor‘. Though he got defensive at first saying that is the norm and the culture that prevailed at his organisation over a long time, he was gracious enough to make the change.

 

 

Don’t you feel sick and tired of the dreary ‘accounting department‘ or the ‘purchasing department‘ or the ‘finance department‘ or the ‘procurement department‘ or the ‘logistics department‘. Instead of thinking & functioning like cost centres and accumulators of ‘overheads’, what if you are adding value, creating intellectual capital and becoming cool and in the process becoming awesomely, fabulously exciting. WOW. That will be a sea change in the culture. And yes, that is the culture ideally we would like to see.

Designworks/USA is BMW‘s US design operation. The powers that be at BMW‘s HO in Munich decreed that 50% of the unit’s activities should be revenue producing stuff…more importantly it should be done for companies outside of BMW.

 

 

The idea goes like this: if you are creating fabulous chairs designed for a top notch brand like Steelcase, then that culture and creativity will find its way into the design of the interiors and seating for BMW‘s next model. And if you can’t make it in the ‘real world‘ with ‘outside clients‘, then you should not be in business. Wow. Balls, guts, gumption, all rolled into one!

 

 

So, some guard rails, if I may:-

Culture change is not ‘corporate

Culture change is not a ‘program

Culture change does not take ‘years

Culture change does not start ‘today

Culture change starts ‘right now

Culture change ‘lives in the moment

Culture change is ‘entirely in your own hands

 

 

The mantras to try with IMMEDIATE EFFECT:

We will do WOW work

We will seek out and work for pioneering clients

We will focus on the things that make us special and distinct

We will push to the hilt the things we are BIP(Best in Planet)

We will start now. Right this minute

 

From enterprise efficiency to enterprise transformation. From cubicle slaves to proud professionals. From performing tasks to creating WOW projects. From minimising expenses to maximising value added. From procedure-centric to client-centric. From minimising payroll and consultancy fees and hiring cheap to hiring superstars and valuing them by what you pay. From going through the motions to tolerating nothing less than excellence and coolness.

 

 

A lot to be accomplished, isn’t it? Let’s get started?

 

ENDS

Won of a Kind!

 

I am unaware of the origin of this story and hence not able to offer appropriate attribution. That said, the story is uplfting and worth sharing. So, here goes.

 

 

This is the story of two neighbours, one very well off and with all the good things in life and the other not so well off and just about getting by. Often the less fortunate would be at her better off neighbour’s door and asking for things be it milk or oil etc. And all requests were met with grace and politeness. Once, in a reversal of trend, the wealthy neighbour went next door to ask for some salt. The son surprisingly looked at his mother because there was enough salt in the house and wondered what his mother was upto. On his mother returning from the neighbours house with a tumbler of salt, curiosity got the better of him and he asked what prompted her to ask the neighbour for salt when there was enough salt in the house. To which the mother responded, “I don’t want her to feel that she is the only one always needing us. I wanted to convey to her that we need her too so that she feels good about herself”.

 

 

Kindness can be shared in small doses. And one need not be well off to make that a character trait. Though it is said that if you want to be rich, then be kind. And when we’re enjoying our days of being kind, we’ve created a posture that spreads.

 

 

Being kind may seem like a moral imperative. And, surely in some ways it is.Kind interactions are significantly more productive. When we leave opportunities and pathways for others, they can move forward with less friction.

 

 

Kindness is wisdom elevated. In these days when we are so disconnected and afraid, the answer might be to showing up to do the difficult work of connection, of caring, of extending ourselves when it is least expected. Kindness, generosity and possibility are all cogs in the same wheel.

 

 

ENDS

 

Prepared to look foolish is NOT being foolish!

 

In our quest to be the perfect version of ourselves, we over index on the idea of ‘ appearance ‘. To present & look good in front of others. And that default becomes a drag and devil as time wears on. The race for mastery in this ” Republic of Not Enough ” seems perennial.

 

 

Borrowing from George Leonard‘s masterpiece of a book ‘Mastery‘, imagine doing a very elemental task such as touching your forehead with your hand. Have you lost it? You may ask because it is so simple. Now, go back in time when you were a mere toddler and you tried doing the same simple act of touching your forehead with your hand and you had to indulge in all sorts of calisthenics to do that successfully. While coming to terms with different parts of your body and their points of reference which was a mere illusion in the tiny toddler head. At that time, it seems like a total non pianist trying to play a Beethoven sonata.

 

Back in the day, amongst the multiple aspirations I held, one was to become a musician. And I took the plunge to learn to play the Congo (image attached above for those might not have heard about it before, pardon the pun). The first few days I was a disaster and my prolific master was making it look like a walk in the park. Not just out of sync, I felt very out of place as well. Foolish is a better coinage for that. But I hung in there( lot of credit to my coach and my friends who were there too learning the guitar and the harmonium) till such time it began to strike a chord. As both hands and fingers began to rally around intent and tune.

 

 

To learn something new of any significance, you have to be willing to look foolish.

 

 

Imagine the best fielder on the national cricket team dropping a catch in front of thousands at the stadium and with millions watching! The willingness to go there and do it(or undo it) in front of your most precious audiences be it teacher, coach, teammates etc is an absolute must. If you’re always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that’s necessary for effective learning and top performance.

 

 

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. So stay hungry, foolish, stupid. Learning about learning begins there.

 

 

ENDS

 

 

In a Professional defense of the Amateur!

 

Some dictionary meanings first:-

Amateur: a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity.

 

 

Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.

 

 

To go with the above, there is a supporting cast of synonyms, antonyms, and words related to amateur, such as: abecedarian, apprentice, aspirant, beginner, dabbler, and dilettante.

 

 

It is obvious that there is no quest anywhere to crown the word amateur in glory. The world needs perfectionists and professionals, the ones who have been there done that.

 

 

The word amateur doesn’t get a lot of love these days. When we hear “amateur,” we think of a dabbler—someone unskilled and undisciplined who flutters from one hobby to another.

 

 

Now, let us take a look t the origin of the word amateur: it came from the Latin word ‘amare‘, which means to love. To do things for the love of it. And, there is(gratefully) an audience that is coaxing and encouraging us to love what you do, and do what you love. Follow your heart, without wanting to hang onto the coattails of outcomes. Small, consistent progress is what takes the amateur to professional status(if she so chooses to).

 

 

So, amateur is NOT a dirty word.

It comes with almost unabashed freedom. The best time in your life to create, take the plunge, begin a new chapter, following your heart without the rabid pressure of expectation. Don’t overlook or undervalue the gift of this time. And still we use amateur as if it’s a dirty word.

 

 

Being an amateur goes hand in hand with having a beginner’s mindset, when you are fanning your childlike curiosity, exploring, discovering and taking those small or big leaps of faith. Once we are established, we are governed more and more by outcomes and that comes with rigidity, close mindedness, the enemies of creation. So, hang onto that phase of your life where you edify your amateur self. Create, ship out. Rinse, repeat!

 

 

Never be afraid to try something new.“Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic”Dave Barry

 

 

Considered “a man of colossal genius” by George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton was a prolific writer— publishing 80 books, 200 short stories, and over 4,000 essays in his lifetime. And in those prolific writings, Chesterton gave special meaning to the amateur over the professional, to the generalist over the specialist.

 

 

In his AutobiographyChesterton writes of his father:

 

 

” To us (children) he appeared to be indeed The Man with the Golden Key, the magician opening the gates of goblin castles . . . but all this time he was known to the world, and even to the next door neighbors, as a very reliable and capable, though rather unambitious businessman. It was a very good lesson in what is also the last lesson in life: that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole, I am glad that he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career—his private career.

 

 

Take the tech industry, for example. Google, Microsoft, Facebook—all of these big companies were started by amateurs. And then there’s Wikipedia, which, despite being run (almost) entirely by amateurs, has replaced the eminent and professional Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

 

 

The internet has shown us there are people willing to make things with no immediate benefit at all. And they do pretty damn good job of it.

 

 

The amateur is back.

 

ENDS

Have you enrolled into the University of Curiosity?

 

CURIOSITY SKILLED THE CAT 

Curiosity is that strange human trait that got us out of the cave, across the globe, and onto the moon. A trait that has led to communication and collaboration.“Why” has the X factor!

 

Albert Einstein quoted that a mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.
All research come to think of it is ‘ formalised curiosity ‘.
Doubt and inquiry are the two pillars of progress.. So, it makes sense to ‘ Start with Why? ‘
Scott Shigeoka is an advocate for the power of curiosity. Scott delves into the ABCs of our habitual thoughts – Assumptions, Biases, and Certainty – and how they shape our world views. In the age of digital information overload, he emphasizes the need to make room for new insights about ourselves and others.
If you are like me, we are all a failed by-product of our education system that does not encourage, respect or recognise individual curiosity. It is mostly about what there is and what has to be conformed to.
An interesting aside can be extracted from the movie ‘ Accepted ‘. After receiving his latest college rejection letter, senior Bartleby Gaines ( played by Justin Long) devises a novel way to fool everyone into thinking he is college-bound: Open his own university. Bartleby and his similarly stymied friends take over an abandoned building, create a fake Web site, hire a friend’s uncle to pose as the dean, and — presto — a school is born. However, they do their jobs too well, and soon many other rejects try to gain admittance to the nonexistent South Harmon Institute of Technology.
So these 1000 ‘ admitted students ‘ turn up at the supposedly non existent university on day one and there is Lewis Black, the Dean. And he asks, ‘ so, well , what should we teach them? Because he said he didn’t know but offers a solution- lets ask the students what they want to learn. The student reactions are truly telling because nobody has ever bothered to ask them what they are interested in. So, the Dean says, let’s take this students’ tuition and appropriate it towards something that she’s truly curious about. Could be a not so real and immediate possibility but can you imagine the first university that actually creates a pilot program to test this approach driven totally by curiosity? They will have students going to them in droves, needless to say.
Real curiosity is just truly open-hearted, open-mindedness. Like I’m here to just understand you and where you come from and to understand your experiences, to understand the person you are. We live in a society where people are flattened to their identities. You are Japanese or Indian. You are brown or white. You voted for the Democrats. But there’s so much more nuance and beauty and messiness and complication and contradiction. And the only way we can learn about those things is if we ask these really powerful questions and, you know, engage in a deeper form of curiosity.
If our cup of ABC( assumptions, biases & certainty) is full to the brim, often without us even noticing, leaving little room to absorb new information about ourselves and each other and the world around us. This gets in the way of deep curiosity. We live in a world which reinforces the biases that we have. And social media and the echo chambers that it wields the megaphone on, are not helping.
We need to enter this age where we reclaim our curiosity and really practice it every day, inspire others to do it knowing that it’s contagious.
ENDS

Dear reader: How big is your anti-library?

 

An anti-library is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by seminal writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

 

 

Unlike the plague of ‘stuffocation‘ that has us owning far more shoes, clothes, watches or food than we need, and a lot of times unused, this is a happy problem to have. Having a pile of unread books in your book shelf or library. Without getting into the spiel of ‘curse of knowledge‘, it is a not so subtle realisation that the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. Sledgehammer blow and much needed when we try to defy gravity and get too floaty for our own wings!

 

 

You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku.

 

Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders from Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.

It is said that nothing is more important than an unread library. These might include what are politely called ‘classics‘- classics are those books which people praise but don’t read.

 

 

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote in his beautiful 1925 essay. Piercingly true as this may be, we’ve known at least since Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that “most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”.

 

 

But how do we face our inadequacy with grace and negotiate wisely this eternal tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable, and the unknowable? That is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores in a section of his modern classic The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable  — an illuminating inquiry into the unknowable and unpredictable outlier-events that precipitate profound change, and our tendency to manufacture facile post-factum explanations for them based on our limited knowledge.

 

 

There are some other compelling works that will beautifully complement The Black Swan and they include astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in a culture obsessed with certitude, philosopher Hannah Arendt on how unanswerable questions give shape to the human experience, and novelist Marilynne Robinson on the beauty of the unknown.

 

Welcome and embrace the unread so that we don’t dread the unknown!

 

ENDS

NOT In Awe of….Optimising!

 

Contemporary life and ‘ modern management ‘ have been fixated on the optimise everything on the horizon for quite some time now. The jury is still out on what the compelling reasons are for such kind of a shiny object chase, but then, that’s the reality.

 

 

Good enough is never good enough and only the best would do. It’s like the millennial sporting the T Shirt captioned boldly in front saying “BROWN” and in very small font below it mentions ” Though my heart is in Yale “.

 

 

In the quest for maximising, ironically what ends up happening is you trade off on happiness, which was the original intent when you wanted to optimise. The dark side of wanting to optimise everything.

 

 

Human beings are not search engines. SEO Strategy conventionally would have had us going for keywords that the search has the best potential to throw up high in the pecking order. But, that strategy is passe. You are not going to win that search. You are not even going to figure in page 30 of the search results. It seems as if most of us have lost the key to the keywords in the battle of the search. 

 

 

Probably an ideal situation to pivot to doing something remarkable. How do we own our word? Do things that make people search for us by our name, our work, our projects. Showing up with the right work, at the right time, in the right places. Do the hard yards, the slow deliberate work hard of earning permission, building a tiny circle, the smallest viable audience. Over time, the tribe embraces you, the word (your word) becomes the shortcut to get more of what you offer.

 

 

How about substituting SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) with another acronym? FEO- Find Engine Optimisation. Because it’s more reliable to seek to be found by people who were looking for you all along.

 

 

The chasm will get bridged at its own pace. That’s fine. Let’s take our word | commitment | generosity for it!

 

 

A couple of years ago, a trio of Stanford University professors-philosopher Rob Reich, computer scientist Mehran Sahami, and political scientist Jeremy Weinstein released a new book titled “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.” 

 

 

The book argues that it’s the programmers themselves — and their focus on optimization — who inevitably combine with society’s larger “aspiration to maximize profit and scale” (and the accompanying tech monopolies) that ultimately are creating a slew of unintended problems.

 

 

It is true to say that efficiency has run amok. Where shaping our future begins by directing our attention to “the distinctive mindset” (and growing power) of technologists —and specifically, the mindset of optimisation. The book has a quote from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World”: “In an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

 

 

As a valuable contributor seeking to build a career, a business, or a body of work that matters, you benefit when you develop a unique asset, because that asset gives you the leverage to choose a niche in a system that respects optimization instead.

 

 

There are so many things that you can optimise- recalibrating your work out and diet to lose more weight, your presentations so that you can close more sales, optimise your website for better and more website traffic, your ads for better impact, your sleeping patterns to get more rest in less time, Cosmo(and so do a lot of other magazines) even says you can optimise your sex life…

 

 

Sooner or later you realise that you are spending your best energy and time on optimisation NOT creation!

 

 

This perennial cycle of optimisation is the impediment for new exploration and discovering, going into the unknown which is where your best solace and happiness resides.

 

 

So where do we go from here? The rabbit hole of optimisation? Or creating things better? Give me the latter any day!

 

ENDS

Resume…With An Anti-Resume!

 

Contrarian /noun/: A person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position opposed to the majority view, regardless of how unpopular it may be.

 

 

We’re genetically programmed to follow the herd. Thousands of years ago, conformity to our tribe was essential to our survival. If you didn’t conform, you’d be ostracized, rejected, or worse, left for dead.

 

 

Continued success in the modern world requires continued innovation. The ability to disrupt established methods and find new ways of looking at old ideas is one of the most sought-after qualifications in all fields. It’s a super power that allows you to be right when others are wrong.

 

 

The Anti-Resume is an idea floated by seminal writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan. Here’s how Nicholas puts it ” “People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced…but it would be nice if they did.”

 

 

This borrowed thought from Hareb’s book was one of the things that I shared with a batch of over 150 students recently when I had an opportunity to pick up a conversation with them. Being in final year, and all set to embark on a career path of their choosing(though not always), the purposeful provocation was to be a contrarian to stand out and get noticed.

 

It’s such an interesting idea as Kent Blumberg puts it: imagine the hiring manager reviewing resumes and then going ” we have reviewed your resumes and see how your education, skills, achievements and experience could be relevant to the role that is on offer. That is the reason we are keen to meet you. Now, we would like to now know from you your approach to life and work. So, before we meet, could you submit a one page anti-resume from you that will articulate the relevant education and skills that you are yet to have, the relevant experiences that you are yet to gain and the accomplishments that you are yet to achieve. 

 

Now let’s look at the prognosis of such an experiment. The scenarios could turn out in multi faceted manner viz:-

 

– candidates who might not be able to fill up a one pager show either of the two- a lack of self awareness or they feel they are over-qualified

– the perception of interpreting their future roles kicks in. For eg, some candidates might talk about their lack of sales experience as the role demands it. While some may ignore mentioning that bit

– you get to discern the wheat from the chaff- candidates who believe their development is in their own hands while some others see it as an entitlement and a gift to be had from others- you get to see who plays victim and who plays victor

– you get to see the candidates who are intrinsically motivated to bridge the delta in education, skills or experience and others who are not

 

And why wait until you are looking for a job. Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask yourself every few months, “What haven’t I learned yet? What haven’t I experienced yet? What haven’t I accomplished yet? And what am I going to do about it today?”

 

 

Quoting from a feedback letter by Steve Roesler:

At the risk of getting a bit “jargon-y”, this goes to the point of Conscious Incompetence.

On the great learning curve of life, we revel in reaching a place of Unconscious Competence in things that we do. Auto-pilot, if you will.

Yet to excel, we need to pull back and take conscious look at what we do, how we do it, and the results that we’re getting.

I like it. Now I’m thinking “Anti-Auto Pilot.”

 

 

So, shall we resume..sorry anti-resume?

 

ENDS