The Most Powerful One Line Story

Most of us have grown over hearing proverbs and one-line stories. Some are witty and some are so philosophical.

My all-time favorite is:

“The Fool didn’t know it was impossible, so he did it”.

I find it so inspiring and powerful. Countless inventions or discoveries have been made in this world by only such stupid geniuses who never paid attention to history and only believed in their logic.

All of us would have at some stage experienced this for ourselves or with people around us.

I too have experienced this many a times. On most occasions, it has been when I was challenged by myself or by someone else with some crazy goals or ambitions. Being challenged positively works so well for a team or an individual that it pushes one to cross all levels of logic to stretch innovation and efforts.

“So when do I see your region becoming number one region in the business?”

It was one such challenge by Global Head of one of the businesses I had earlier worked in. This was part of just 2 minutes, very polite but challenging corridor conversation between me and him. However, it pushed me to such an extent that I gathered all my Sales Managers the same day and we set an ambitious 100,000 units target for next month versus an ordinary 35-40K units we were doing in our region at that time.

And we did that number in the following month. We were the number one region for the first time in the history of business. We remained number one for that entire year. 100K was a dream number for entire business. We knew that we had set a new benchmark.

The power of a positive challenging is immense.?

I again experienced this last year. As part of last quarter planning, all the senior sales leaders and other functional heads decided to go for an audacious volume target to deliver on our annual ambition of 50 million Lives Transformed in India. This was illogical considering the pace of business. We stretched ourselves, planned with inventory and having faith in our dreams. I think some outer world powers came together to help the team and we delivered the target number in the last hour of 31st March.

Again, a new benchmark had been set. The same team now delivers 200% of that number and has even bigger ambitions.

This is one of my biggest learnings in my career and it helps me to stay positive even in the toughest of the times.

“When dreaming big, never pay attention to historical trends. Stay Stupid”.

The ambitions must remain way ahead of resources. And the ambitions must be topped by mindful Initiatives & Actions.

You would always discover success on this road in one form or another.