Because bad enough demands that you stop cutting corners, overcome your fears and push yourself harder than you have ever done in the past.

This scene from The Matrix, when Neo meets Morpheus for the first time and is presented with the option of either choosing the red pill or the blue pill, is one of my favorites from the movie.

Neo at this time has no idea about what is going on, but is desperate to know what the Matrix really is and hence chooses the red pill (which signifies the painful truth of reality about the matrix) over the blue pill (which represents the blissful ignorance of illusion living within the matrix).

And though his choice might look so obvious, choosing the red pill is harder than it seems. The red pill is asking him to do away with his idea of reality, step into something totally unknown, something that he hasn’t experienced ever before. His beliefs about what he sees around him and what appears to be so real in the form of the matrix, will end as soon as he decides to eat the red pill.

It’s a predicament of sorts, when all that you know of, all that you depend on is about to become part of an illusion and that’s what makes it so special.

And while so many people are dissatisfied with the job that they go to, they do absolutely nothing about it, either because their job pays for their college loans or that college has made them so single tracked that they are too scared to try something new.

It has always made me wonder if getting a job had nothing to do with going to college or having a degree, how many of us would still sign up to go to college?

College it seems is the differentiating factor, at least for now .

A friend of mine shared a story about something similar today, a college degree, a high-paying job and that tinge of dissatisfaction.

An excerpt form the post highlights what college is really about and what it is not, it runs something like this

Easily. College, you see, is not really about preparing you  for the job market. It’s about gaining the knowledge and skills you need to seize opportunities — and that includes knowing when to walk away from something that makes you unhappy.

There’s a lot of talk these days — well, all days, I suppose — about what good it is to get a liberal arts degree, what majors are most likely to lead to the best-paid and most stable careers, and the importance of building your resume while you’re in school so that you have an edge when it’s time to enter the almighty job race.

That’s all true, mostly. Obviously, you have to eat. But maybe the goal of college shouldn’t be so closely linked to employment. Actual life isn’t that different from the game of Life, in the sense that there’s a point where at the start we all have to choose the college path or the career path. You can earn the same money either way, and the same good (or bad) spins on the dial can send you into a tailspin of debt or misery: illness, accidents, divorce, tornadoes taking your house. College is no guarantee that you’ll be rich, or even middle class. In fact, there are some arguments that suggest technical training is a better bang for the buck.

(A handy example: my younger brother never finished his four-year college degree, yet he makes ten times more money than my other brother and I do, and we both have master’s degrees.)

College, if you’re lucky enough to get there, is really about figuring out your friends and your values as well as your dreams for the future. Nobody — well, almost nobody — finds a top-paying position right out of college. Most of us have to pay our dues and climb a dozen different career ladders before we find one that has rungs we can reach — and a place at the top with a view that suits us. If you land that seemingly “perfect” job with a salary worth boasting about, but then you hate it and are afraid to quit, your wings are clipped. That “safe” job will kill your creativity, drown your enthusiasm, and smother your ability to get up in the morning with a bounce in your step. Why stay?

]]> http://sajeelsud.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/whats-college-all-about/feed/ 0 Sajeel http://sajeelsud.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/willingness-to-grind/ http://sajeelsud.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/willingness-to-grind/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:23:51 +0000 Sajeel http://sajeelsud.wordpress.com/?p=1381 Continue reading →]]> Ishant Sharma may not have been at his bowling best in the last test match against Australia, and with the luck too not favoring him you could say that he was having a bad test.

But his bowling was not as bad as his body language, and with fifty odd tests worth of experience you would expect him to do better. One could see it in his follow through that he was expecting a strike with each ball, and when he didn’t get the wicket, you could visibly sense the disappointment on his face. While on the same track the Australian bowlers were sticking to their plan, working hard for the Indian wickets, Ishant was just hoping for wickets without even putting in  half the effort.

And today when an injured Kim Clijsters came back from four match points down to beat Li Na at the Australian open, one couldn’t help but think about the contrasting difference in the attitude of the two players. There’s no doubt that both players are talented and adept at their respective sports and what ended up determining their success/failure was their outlook and their willingness to toil .

If only Clijsters could remind Ishant that “The only guarantee to success is a players willingness to grind it out in the center.”

When the canary yellow three-inch square paper slip was initially thought of, the challenge was to come up with an adhesive which was good enough to hold the slip on any surface and that once taken off it could re-stick on another surface with ease. Detractors hardly gave the post-it a chance as a product, understandably so, as it wasn’t too popular in the beginning.

Today post-it has become a successful brand and we find use for it at home as well as the workplace for a variety of purposes. It helps make quick notes, set reminders, create to-do lists, shopping lists, serve as bookmarks and to effectively brain storm ideas with a group. And while technology allows me to do all of this using a computer or one of several other electronic gadgets at my disposal, there is something that makes the post-it the preferred option.

Having replaced the blackboard at universities and offices, the whiteboard is the other product that have developed a liking for. Doing essentially the same thing that the blackboard used to do, it‘s a neat, tidy and colorful replacement to the dusty blackboard at school which the teacher would often ask us to clear.

And while both are examples of products built with minimal complexity, who would have thought that I would end up appreciating the simplicity and effectiveness that they bring with them.

It was only when we started interacting with business for the to-be requirements, did business realize the value of indulging in a top down business process approach. Hence came the shift, the project now from being just an IT exercise, came to be blown up into an enterprise level business process analysis exercise. Business also saw this as the right opportunity to drive a few other strategic initiatives and hence pushed for the new process centric approach.

The advantages of taking a business process approach are many fold, for one it increases the understanding of the work processes and two it helps expose inefficiencies  which creep into the day-to-day operations over a period of time.

It is in fact important for organizations to constantly review their business processes and keep them in line with the developments in their market environment. For e.g. government legislation, technological improvements, changing customer expectations and numerous other such factors come to define the business environment and directly impacts how the business processes get altered.

In lieu of the constant turbulence in one’s business environment, businesses tend to becomes reactive and do their best to adapt as quickly as possible to the change happening around them. And though speed is of the essence, in trying to adapt too fast, the changes to the business processes don’t get analyzed thoroughly,  providing room for efficiencies to creep in.

The impact of constant changes on the business processes of an organization can be minimized in two ways. The first being a proactive approach, where an organization is on the constant lookout for changes in the marketplace and analyzes the impact of these changes on its business processes real-time. As soon as such a situation is picked up by business, initiatives are set in place to ensure that the impact on its processes are analyzed and the risks clearly highlighted to the concerned departments.

And even though the on guard approach is ideal, at an enterprise level businesses tend to fall behind the changes in its environment. And hence the second approach, which calls for a recurring(quarterly/half-yearly) review of the processes to ensure that the inefficiencies are weeded out before they start hampering the business.

Clear visibility and analysis of the business processes ensures that they can be used as an asset, helping improve how the organization operates in an ever changing environment.