Recipe to Success: Ingredients for The Perfect Spice!

Pandemic has touched everyone. Fear of being COVID positive is impacting psychology, more than actually being COVID positive. More than physique it’s breaking the psyche. It has not only impacted the economy, and the way we work but has also altered the behaviour.

Pandemic or not the success mantra remains the same!

Nothing tastes better than ‘success’! 

However, the big question is how you achieve success, and the bigger question is how do you retain! 

Who does not want to be successful? I guess all of us but how do we reach to the top of the success ladder is the main question, and more difficult is how you behave and what you do once you reach to the top.

You need to be ‘PAGAL’ to be successfully successful. In the Hindi language ‘PAGAL’ translates to being ‘MAD’, which certainly you need to be to pursue success; however, in current context ‘PAGAL’ is an acronym for 5 key ingredients: Presentability, Applicability, Group, Agility, and Learnability.

Five key ingredients:

1. Learnability: There are 3 aspects of learning you must always remember:

• Hunger: You need to be ravenous when it comes to learning. At no stage in your professional career (or otherwise) be complacent and think why you need to learn more. Learning acts as a lubricant to your professional engine. Keeping it oiled, is ensuring it does not betray (does not breakdown) you when you need it most. Learning acts as feed to the frontal lobe of the brain which helps in assessing risks and associated rewards.
• Information to Knowledge: One of the biggest aspects of learning is to learn as to how to assimilate information and process it to gain knowledge. Information is of no use unless you put to application and that’s where you can categorise it as knowledge. 
• Reskilling: Greatest skill or ability you can have is the ability or skill to ‘Re-skill’. This requires an open mind, self-awareness and self-belief. Open mind: so that you are receptive of feedback to understand the gaps and openness to improve. Self-awareness: you must be aware of the surroundings, events and be able to realize what gaps to be bridged. Self-belief: so that you trust yourself that you would be able to learn and reskill yourself. Many times, we undermine ourselves because of existing roles or age or technicalities and don’t attempt reskilling, and that is where self-belief becomes paramount important. For eagle to fly high, while the ability is important but equally important is the fact that its blissfully unaware of limitations on how high it could fly. 

2. Presentability: How you present yourself and what vibes you people around you draw from you play a critical role in your professional success. Like Learning presentability also has 3 aspects to be taken care: 

• Grooming: It’s not that the ‘first impression is the last impression’ but surely it requires more than double the effort to change the impression and perception people build about you. Your attire, hairstyle, demeanour and other aspects like these play a very subtle and silent role in image creation. You can always correct and prove people wrong with your merit but not everyone gets a chance to prove. Be in your best presentation mode ??
• Communication: It’s one of the most misunderstood traits which often gets associated with your linguistic skills. Please listen more, understand the context and then speak succinct yet complete in the message. Irrespective which area you work in or for which organization you work for, it’s very pertinent to develop & improve your communication skills to ensure greater success.
• Empathy: Yes, you read that right, Empathy is one of the most powerful tools and part of presentability. When you come forward to present an idea or a product in a manner that takes care of customers objectives, emotions and needs then you have a very high degree of being seen distinctly and people would be able to identify with you. 

3. Applicability: All the traits associated with learning (hunger, information to knowledge, reskill) and all the facets of presentability (grooming, communication, empathy) hold no value if you can’t put those in action. Our learning must be used to create solutions to real-life issues and presentability must be used to best sell the solution. This holds the key to success. 

4. Agility & Humility: why is ‘agility’ important? Well for the sheer reason that the world is changing so fast in terms of ‘technology’ and the ‘need’ that if you are not agile then by the time you come out with a solution the problem statement or the need for the solution may itself change. There is always fear and chance of becoming irrelevant if you not being agile and if you not quickly adapting & upgrading with technology. Equally important is to be humble irrespective of how much you achieve in life. In fact, up the ladder of success you go, the humbler you should be. Life is sinusoidal, you can never have only Up Curve or Down Curve; ups and downs are part of life. Another reason for being humble, when you are at the top of your organisation, is that people look up to you as an example and try to apply your behaviour as a template to achieve success. When you must infect people, why not infect with positivity and right values. One can achieve success but to retain it, assimilate it and be relevant you must be ‘agile’ and you must be ‘humble’.

Well, there are only 4 steps shown above while we discussed earlier that for sauce for success to be tasty and worth, we need 5 ingredients, so what’s missing?

It’s the 5th ingredient, ‘Group/Tribe’: pertinence of your environment or group or tribe to which you belong, is very much hidden and is so subtle that we never realize, how that missing ingredient is shaping us on daily basis, it’s the group you belong to, the people who surround you. 

Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”.

Which is so true, we all get shaped by the environment we all grow and by the people who are around us. They influence us, inspire us, shape us!

Each of these ingredients for spice to prepare (achieve) success are equally important. If anyone of these is missing, then it won’t taste as good. While ‘Learning’ & ‘Presentability’ help to create a sound foundation, ‘Applicability’ helps to achieve success; ‘Agility & Humility’ helps to retain it and your ‘Tribe/group’ shapes you and propels you to raise the bar and catalyses the process to achieve success. 

You need to be the architect of your social environment which would propel your skills, attitude and the mood to be positive, constructive and successful. Choose your ‘Tribe’ wisely. 

Don’t get shackled by statistic, toil and aim to rejig the status quo. 

Don’t be a statistic, define it!