‘Bachcha, kabil bano, kabil… kamyabi
toh jhak maarke peeche bhagegi’ (become capable, my
son, become capable… success will follow you no matter what).
Even after ten years this line still strikes
a chord in my heart. It got me thinking that our minds from an early age are
conditioned to believe that completing the task at hand quickly leads to
success. As professionals, do we strive to build our capabilities, or do we
just aim to be successful at the task at hand?
In these past ten years I have transitioned
from being a student to becoming a professional. As students, we must get the
best scores to get admissions in good colleges. As professionals, we should
perform and deliver results in order to be ahead of others. As students we work
towards building our capabilities so that we would be successful in our chosen
area of work and in our chosen profession. However, as professionals do we
constantly keep challenging ourselves? With easy access to opportunities, the
world today has become far more competitive and everyone is in a hurry to climb
the ladder of success. We are concerned only with achieving the outcome – that
is, success.
Students want
to score good marks and are not keen to understand concepts; so they end up
mugging up from textbooks. Many of us are comfortable submitting work which is
80% good quality work instead of 100%. Striving towards completion of the work
rather than striving for excelling at the work often decides the quality of
work. In both these scenarios we choose quantity over quality. But would it be
wise to choose quantity over quality? An 80% good quality work might come back
for a re-work; however, a 100% good quality work would not require re-work and
thus would give us more time to take up more work. So, wouldn’t it be wise to
work towards building our skills to do error-free or 100% work in one go rather
than otherwise?
One of the topics in modern management
training programmes is, ‘Do it right the first time’ – meaning, it will save a
lot of the time and energy required in setting wrong things right. Or, as a
previous generation believed, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. One can achieve
this by proper planning and focused execution.
As
professionals or as students, we should not become complacent by just
completing the work at hand, we should constantly strive at completing and
excelling at the work at hand. One of the quotes sums it up very well, ‘Success
is a journey, not a destination’. And in this journey of success we must
constantly keep working on our capabilities and skills (kabiliyat) to
achieve success (kamyabi).
For each one of us it is an individual
choice – whether we want to be wise or otherwise!
