Year in review ( A personal report card)

School taught us to work for a report card.?And employment made us obsessed with appraisals.?Then society, of course, conditioned us to follow a rulebook.

If I do ‘this’, it will show up as ‘that’ at the end of a predefined period.?And if I don’t, even for good reasons, there will be consequences.

Which is a pity. To borrow Seth Godin’s analogy, the industrial age has thrown us in this ‘Factory Model’, which is a setup that thrives on interchangeable parts & interchangeable people. A play of commodity, of cheaper and faster volume. A model that needs people to ‘fit in’, obey rules, follow orders without questioning & deliver profits for the factory in form of an output that is a multiple of their inflowing labor, and paying them a tiny fixed remuneration in lieu , maybe with some adders thrown in as alms. ?Just do your job and you are not accountable for decisions, a promise that successfully seduced our risk-averse ‘lizard brains’ for over two hundred years because it worked, as it followed the ‘rule of ordinary people’ with lowest possible skills to fulfil functions and to keep people dispensable. ?And while nobody was looking, machines started replacing us, ordinary people, and we were forced to become more and more like machines – cheaper, faster commodities perched on varying levels of manufactured hierarchy, each of us wearing a collar that gives us a sense of self-importance for presiding over lower collars and a secret scowl when being ordered around by higher collars . Meanwhile, someone else was getting better by hiring?cheaper collars, or outsourcing collars to a low cost country, or cutting a few collars in the headcount to do their math every quarter. The collective paralysis in most organizations today is because people fail to move the needle . For, they are?designed?to wait for ‘instructions’ . They don’t understand accountability and are petrified of?risk ownership. They then devise complex survival games to hold on to their jobs. They snub meritocracy, shun originals and build fiefdoms for themselves which they fill with other like-minded sheep who will listen to them, laugh at their stupid jokes and ‘Like’ their silly social media posts. Meanwhile, some rookie newcomer in the field kicks their ass and they have no clue how to play defense, let alone offense.

The last few years, for the lack of a better word, have been lukewarm for me, where I have been doing?similar roles in different business lines. While I have been exceeding on my work deliverables every year, this new consistency?has grounded me. After an initial internal resistance, I have learnt to acknowledge the bigger picture, and understood why we need such phases in our life. Fast paced success makes us happy and feeds our ego. Often, it also makes us vain and arrogant. Looking back, I feel I perhaps needed this slowing down to shed my cockiness of youth. More importantly, this has made me realize the importance of having an internal score-card that goes beyond the objective KPIs defined by someone else, because, as Taleb said - “ People whose survival depends on a qualitative ‘ job assessment’ by someone of higher rank in the organization, cannot be trusted for critical decisions”. So yes, for the past few years, I’ve stopped taking my job appraisals seriously. This is not out of disrespect towards my peers or managers, who’re all very competent people. It’s just because I have voluntarily chosen to run my own race. It’s not a ‘sour grapes’ thing. True, I’ve not made any amazing strides in my career in recent years, but I have started ticking off from my personal bucket list– not just in terms of my professional or social identity, but also in terms of an inner scorecard of virtue & vice , my report card as a human being. For every twelve months that go by. Because, to be consistent with yourself after the applause subsides, is what character is about. And because, when no one picks you up, you need to pick yourself up. And keep going. Here’s my 10-point report card for the past 12 months. Some may find it drab. But I’m good. I sleep well at night.

• ( The ‘not-so-important’ part first) : Delivered yet another set of great numbers at work, finishing 120% of my assigned numbers ( & having tripled the business in the past 4 years). But I’ve long stopped taking pride in job performance, for two reasons – a. I believe your performance at work is not your individual contribution alone, but an intersection of efforts of many people &, of course, elements of randomness that worked in your favor ; b. Professional excellence, no matter how ego-massaging it is, is fleeting. I’m grateful when I do well. I try to be graceful when I do not.
• While I did not manage any accolades for myself, I made sure that I threw my weight behind good performers in my team. Two of my DRs got promoted this year, a fact that leaves me immensely proud.
• Published ‘Once upon a someone’, a collection of 57 short stories, my 3rd book in the 3 years of the pandemic. Obviously, none of them are perfect. Just like me, and like life. But I’m good. Some years down the road, I won’t have a regret that I wanted to share something, but didn’t do so. When I receive personal messages from my readers every other day that some random passage from one of my books touched them in a positive way, that’s reward enough for me. I was also super-grateful when my 2021 book( ‘Life-ing it’) broke into the Top 50 on Amazon India, and later, into the Top 3 in its category. A big deal for a small town guy like me.
• Did my workout for > 340 out of the 365 days. Obviously, this is not for vanity. I’m getting older & this is my personal way to stay fit within the limits of my genetics & be physically strong to face life as it brings it on.
• Kept up with my ritual of trying to help at least one person every single day. Maybe I wasn’t successful on all occasions. But I know, and they know, that I tried. That’s good enough for me.
• Put out a blog post every single day. Of course, I am no ‘influencer’ who changed the world with my insights. But in my humble little way, to my humble little audience out there, I tried to bring some positivity & cheer without being scared of trolls / haters. I also refrained from contributing to the online noise & toxicity for the lure of validation & a few ‘Likes’.
• In my small way, I mentored a few dozen brilliant professionals through the year. Obviously, this is not because I am better than them in any way. It’s rather because I may have some more experience than them & because I may have failed more than them in life, so I can coach them on paths to take or avoid.
• I tried to stay connected with my old friends and I made some amazing new friendships during this year. I was overwhelmed at the love & support of my friends through the year, whether it was someone picking me from the airport during a personal crisis & someone else making a trip from Mumbai to Calcutta to be beside me at my hour of grief, or so many helpful souls who came forward to help me settle down my daughter.
• I got an opportunity to speak to several ?bright teams of some leading organizations, each interaction leaving me a little wiser & humbler. The most rewarding aspect of these interactions was that I was invited on an individual capacity & not because of some business-card that I carry. ?One of the highlights for me was an opportunity to share a stage with a great sporting legend of my era & a personal role model, thanks to my dear friend Jay Prakash Mohanty who invited me.
• Last but not the least (& the most important ?for me) : I lost my mother in April’22 & failed to keep my promise to go see her before that, a promise I kept making during the pandemic years. As we go about playing life, wearing masks & enlisting in wrong races to chase wrong trophies, our parents are packing up, our partners are getting old & our kids are growing up. Finally, this year, I came back home. I spent 3 months working from my parents’ flat in India, now throbbing with their absence & yet, a period of time that was needed for me to finish some conversations & close some ends ( that included finally making that trip to the small town I grew up in & hug my roots). For once, I stopped prioritizing my career alone and focused on my wife’s career & cheered for her as she went from strength to strength. Finally, I tried to be behind my daughter as she took her initial confident steps into the world, firstly ?making us tremendously proud by doing so well in her first stint at a Top 3 consulting firm & then, cracking it in for Grad School in one of the best colleges of UK.

So that was the appraisal, friends. For a change, there’s nothing much to say. Like I said, it’s been some years since my trophies have stopped. I have plateaued, run out of career fuel, and have made peace with my ordinariness, no longer heartbroken at life’s curve balls . I know I won’t win a Booker, compete for an Olympic medal, become Chairman of GE or get that phone call from Stockholm in this lifetime. And that’s fine.

There are no long runs for me anymore. I know that my short run is my long run-in disguise. I try to make sure I do it right.

-------------------------------

(My Sunday post, 5th Feb'23) - Do leave your thoughts / comments.