No short cuts and substitutes please!

Picture courtesy: www.geraldine9.blogspot.com

I used to write wishing cards to to my friends for their exams. One phrase that I often used was, “there are no short cuts for success and substitutes for hard work”, without actually understanding what it truly meant. All of us want to be successful and in a very short span of time but we don’t really want to put any strain on our shoulders. We hesitate to get our hands dirty. There is no such thing as free lunch. Everything comes at a cost. But things started to change and in fact some age old conventions are challenged.

Work is the mantra for mere existence. Work is just another element of life. It just indicates that there is life. We are all dead man walking without work. Just like a scarecrow in the wind. From my personal observation I see an interesting pattern.

Most of us work not because we truly want to work but because we were made to. We have a stomach to fill, back to cloth and a family to raise, therefore we work. Work is a duty imposed on us by a higher authority in the organizations that we work. There is no choice, anyway we have to work. we work and learn when it is a dire necessity. We are no less than a beast. We are perverts because datelines drive us.

We often console ourselves saying that Bhutanese are last moment geniuses. And majority of us fall into this category. If you seriously think over it, that is just an excuse. We are no geniuses rather we just ignored the underlying meaning. In fact it meant other way round and said we are “fools who wait until the last moment”.

Some of us are wiser. We have realized that work is the bottom line on which you are judged. We have tried to like what we do and in the due process we started loving it. We work hard either to prove to our immediate boss or there is no choice but work.

In order to avoid unnecessary troubles we work as per accepted norms and according to the rules and regulations. We work within the framework of our terms of reference. Beyond that is none of our business. We always take the longest possible route thinking that this is the best way to say that you work hard. We take the longest route saying that its Himpsons choice. We are no  perverts, we are the ones who are successful in the long run. We flout no rules and don’t take short cuts. It rational that it takes a long time to become successful.

However we also have another small group of people. Who are not bound by rules, not afraid of walking unbeaten path and always hungry. They have exceptional intelligence and more importantly the motivation. Within a short span of time they get the bigger picture of their environment, therefore they find it uninteresting. They start experimenting new methods, therefore they encounter new ways of doing the same thing. Thus they discover ways of doing things in less time.

Mark Zuckerburg became a billionaire when his contemporaries were struggling to land jobs. You don’t even need age and experience to be successful. You build a fortune banking on your passion. As Steve Jobs said “you better start finding your passion”. These category of people are not conventional hard workers but smart workers. These smart people are outlaws, drug doers, drop outs and workaholics. One simple fact is that they do not stop and rest when they get stuck, they only stop when things are running fine. They keep their eyes and ears open all the time.

What we believe to be true for a long time is now disintegrating. In fact there is short cuts to success and substitute for hard work. Work smart and trace short cuts to success but not through unmindful means. It is not necessary to follow the long worn path to reach the similar destination. We have to accept the phenomenon of change as it comes. Who knows green bag might give way to yuan. Communist ideals might rule the world democratic principles. Its simply fantastic to observe these sort of patterns, especially when you see with inspired eyes. Just my whimsical account.