I was having a soul-searching discussion with one of my
childhood friends who is associated with one of the premier organizations whose
tag line says “Imagination at Work”. This friend of mine has joined them as a
Management Trainee around 20 years back and is still continuing with flying colours.
In an era, when continuing in any organization for long seems to be cliched,
our discussion eventually centred around that point, “what made you stick to a
single employer for so long?” He proudly proclaimed, “my everyday at this organization,
is a new day”.
Are all professionals equally lucky to enjoy a ‘new day’
everyday or get entangled in unavoidable mundane routine stuff? While strategies
and putting the thinking-cap happens sometimes, most of the professionals find
themselves in spending around 70% of their time in routine staff. Gone are the
days when people used to have assistants, secretaries, short hand experts under
their command, more of self-help is the trend today. So, professionals like me,
eventually end up doing so called routines and crib at the end of the day, “oh,
another fruitless day”.
I remember having a big poster in one of my previous
offices, which used to read “No Job is Interesting, it’s We, Who Make it
Interesting”. Easier said than done. For example, I really don’t understand how
to make the job of authorizing heaps of travel bills everyday can be made an
interesting one ! Confusion creeps in and so creeps in frustration. Apart from
other career related issues, I believe, this mundaneness in work is a major
contributor for mid-career-crisis. Most of us end up sitting in the same old
office for days, meeting the same old colleagues for days and doing the same
old stuffs for days. Frustration is sure to build up.
There is no doubt that variety is the spice of life. There
is something in everything. But human minds are programmed to miss out those ‘somethings’
under normal circumstances. Shri Aditya Birla once said “choti choti baaton se purnata prapt hoti hain, aur purnata koi choti
baat nahi hain”, small things amount to completeness of life, and
completeness is not a small thing. So true, so relevant.
Let us try couple of tricks. Lets us loudly say ‘thank you’
to the office boy the moment he serves us for anything, let us greet the
security guard in the morning even before he can greet me with ‘good morning sir’,
let us smile at atleast one unknown person everyday during our morning walk,
after lunch let us call and thank our better half for the delicious food she
packs for us, let us narrate a small fable to our child every night before
going to bed, let us sing some bathroom songs….and so on and so forth. Let us
do something new everyday, small changes can really change the monotony of
life. This needs a conscious practice till it becomes a habit. Let’s fake it
till we make it.
No one, except ourselves, can make our everyday a new day. Hidden
treasures are there for all of us, only a little bit of digging is needed. Small things can really make BIG DIFFERENCE.
Let's dig !!
Good going
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