YOU own your report card

Last month, a younger colleague who was interacting with me after many years, blurted out innocently during the course of our conversation, ‘You know what Ayon, you used to be a big deal those days when we were starting out. I was really in awe of you!’.

Since I pay close attention my thoughts, I immediately detected two sub-conscious responses of my egoic mind to his words – ‘Of course you should have been in awe, I was indeed something back then !’. And - ‘Do you mean to say that I have become a nobody now?’. One was a statement of pride, the other was loaded with regret.

Of course, I didn't say either of the above to him. I am amused at these antics of the ego when it tries to provoke me & unsettle my calm these days. It keeps seeking cues to mock me about my ‘also-ran’ life, a life whose aspirations overshot its achievements by a huge margin. At least, that’s what it tries to remind me. That, if life had a report card, I didn’t really ace it.

Thankfully, I no longer pay attention to my ego. I smiled and acknowledged his kind words, and added that I probably did not deserve them, but was grateful nevertheless.

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.

What 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 some factory in form of an output that is a multiple of their inflowing labor, and which would in turn be 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 >100 years, because it worked.?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 hiring cheaper collars, or outsourcing collars to a low cost country, or cutting a few collars in headcount to do their math. 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 been building a tribe of young leaders by spending time with them and infusing in them the right values that shaped my life. True, I didn’t end up as something huge, but some of them surely will. There are enough complainers in the world today. I have just chosen to not complain, but to do my humble bit in leaving the world a little better than how I found it as, by 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. 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. Every day. You are your most important project.

So, my young friends - There will be a season in your life when you will discover your swagger ( trust me, I had one ?? !) Then there will be another when you will lose it. You shall get approximately twenty years between these two days. Make the most of them.

?Because, each day thereafter will see the replacement of your dreams with memories. And gradually, the replacement of those memories with other memories.

So when dreams get recalibrated & reset, make sure you’re making the right memories as you go along. When the ‘You’ of 10 years from today looks back at the ‘You’ of today, there should be ample content to feel proud of.

Your self-image is your own responsibility. Own it.

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