“Winners
don’t do different things. They do things differently” - one of
the most repeated phrases when it comes to inspiring people into
being successful. When it is about sharing the secrets of winning, we
can expect a fully packed class brimming with eagerness. Almost every
single one out there would have their own little definitions of
winning and reasons for wanting to be a winner. That is probably the
reason why we all imbibe such motivational lines quite
enthusiastically. What really facilitates the real life ‘winners’
to almost consistently do things differently? What helps them think
in a way most others, with almost similar inspirations and reasons
don’t? Well, let us be very clear about one thing before we start.
You would not get all your answers here. Those who are looking for
the magic pill to success might better look elsewhere.
Knowledge
is one of the inevitable ingredient when it comes to thinking of
doing things (whether different or not) and working towards being
successful. It is the knowledge we have that gives us the confidence,
courage and capacity to pursue things further and deeper. And the
further you pursue knowledge the more expert you become. Logically,
this expertise should eventually escort us to success. How easy would
life have been if things were so simple! Go to school (or somewhere),
gain some knowledge, be a little persistent and you’re done!
Unfortunately the sad reality is that things don’t work that way.
Once you start your journey you would realize that there are a very
large number of literate people out there who never became experts;
there are a large number of experts out there who never realized
their success; and there are quite a number of successful people who
never really became winners.
Let’s
try to be a little persistent here. Let’s dig a little further and
deeper.
Over
history the human race has been successfully trained to send their
younger siblings to a place called School. Even today this is thought
to be the only place to gain what could be called the ‘structured
knowledge’ that is considered essential to lead a successful life.
The concept of schooling has been so much implanted into us that our
logic makes us believe that success and schooling go hand in hand.
Pratham, an NGO working in the education sector, says in its Annual
Survey of Education Report (ASER) that 96.5% of primary school aged
children go to school in India. That seems like quite an achievement!
But where are the success stories! Where are the winners! Does this
mean that somewhere down the line the probability of loosing your way
is very high?
Education
in India finds its roots in the Hindu and Buddhist centres of
learning and the teachings under the guidance of the Guru’s were
closely related to religion. Knowledge was imparted based on caste
and the related duties that one had to perform.
The ‘Brahmans’ learned about scriptures & religion,
the ‘Kshatriya’ gained knowledge in the various aspects
of warfare and the ‘Vaishya’ focused on commerce. The
education system as we see it today is more or less an outcome of the
industrial revolution. The human race realized that it needed to
prepare itself for the mass production mentality. We needed a ‘fine
tuning centre’ to give people a basic knowledge about almost
everything and an expertise in one specific area so that they could
fit into a specific block of the industrial development puzzle.
In
line with the employment opportunities that the industrial era
unfolded, an education pattern evolved. If you look at it, there is a
specific hierarchy of what and how we are taught. We are educated in
a variety of subjects at the beginning of our educational life and
then we start focusing to a particular area as we move up. Every
place around the world follows a hierarchy with math and languages at
the top followed by the sciences, humanities and then arts. At the
lower bottom of the pyramid you will find that art and music gains a
higher position than drama and dance. No matter where on earth you
are, this very same hierarchy is followed. Have you ever thought of
having it the other way round? Learning the way you like to learn and
doing what you love to do at the early ages and then getting to know
about other possibilities and opportunities as you grow up. How
interesting would such a childhood be?
Picasso
ones said that all children are born an artist. The problem is to
remain an artist as we grow up. That’s probably one of the most
truthful statements ever. As kids, we all love to wear costumes and
behave like others; dance with our whole body to our favorite tune;
sing along with all our might; and draw all the crazy things we could
imagine of on the walls of our house. Why didn’t most of us nurture
those skills? Why were we not taught dance, art and drama just like
math, language and science? The result is that most of us just
outgrew those skills with age. Rather we were educated out of those
skills or to be more precise we were educated out of creativity!
The
pattern that evolved in education surely helped the people lead
successful lives during the past era. Till a little over half a
century ago you could be sure of getting a job the moment you walk
out with a graduate degree. And though not at present scales, you
could surely lead a decent enough lifestyle. But recent times have
seen things changing drastically. We now have quite a large number of
highly educated people not being able to make it anywhere close to
successful in life. Though we are highly literate by the academic
standards, most corporate houses complain that the present youngsters
do not have the skill sets required to work effectively and
efficiently. Most major business houses are thus forced to spend
millions of rupees re-training these academically qualified resources
before they can be put into the system. This is just proof that the
educational system was somehow unable to catch up with the changing
requirements of the industry. Probably we got so immersed in ‘fine
tuning’ the individual blocks that we lost sight of the whole
puzzle changing.
An
interesting reality is that, in any industry around the world, we
would find quite a number of inspiring winners who never really
completed schooling in a way we all are expected to. That really is
the paradox of the concept of schooling. Think of people like Bill
Gates, Bryan Adams, Dhirubhai Ambani, Henry Ford, Mark Zuckerberg,
Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Wright Brothers - the list could go
on. What are their educational credentials? Are they successful
people? Are they inspiring? Are they winners? If the answer makes
you think that dropping out of school / college would make you a
winner it would be nothing more than certifying that all the efforts,
over all these years, that went into imparting knowledge into you
went futile. If you really need motivation on the other side, just
try compiling a list of winners who completed their formal education.
I’m sure you’ll get an equally long list. Or, if you are a little
more persistent, try making a list of drop outs who no one ever heard
of again!
One
common trait of almost all of these successful winners is that they
creatively pooled their knowledge of different domains and made
something that was of value to the human race. Take the case of the
some of the creations that changed our way of life. The wheel, the
personal computer, the internet, the facebook, the walkman, the ipod
and almost every other new trend that took over the human race was
about creatively modifying knowledge that already existed. Or for
that matter take any of the invention that we are proud of. You would
realize that they were almost always a creative amalgamation of
knowledge from various domains to create something of extra ordinary
value.
What
we need to keep in mind is that every one of these new ideas, that
changed the way we live, was worth laughing until someone really went
out there and made it happen. A hundred years back, how many of us
would have believed that we would want to walk around with wires
hanging out of our ears playing music, or putting updates of our
personal life out there for the whole world to see, or to walk around
with a computer in a bag! Today, can you think of having just two
small pills each for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Or getting into a
cubicle in your house every morning and getting out at your office
room? How about A.R Rahman performing live in your living room at the
press of a button? How many of us can vouch all our savings on the
thought that any of these would not happen in the next hundred years?
Being
able to dream is one of the biggest gifts of mankind. Just like
reasons for winning, we mentioned earlier, almost all of us have had
our own little dreams about what we want to do and be. We were never
scared of norms of the society or limitations of mankind. We were so
creative in our dreams. Our dreams gave us a platform to think very
differently. But just like we grew out of our creativity, we slowly
grew out of our dreams and got so engaged in the realities of the
moment. One of the main reasons for this is that we started getting
scared of failures. Somewhere down the line we forgot to appreciate
the fact that failure gives the human race a much higher degree of
experience than success. The more we tried to move away from failure,
we lost our ability to think differently and be creative. If you
understand the demand supply equation this would probably explain why
Ideas are now a million dollar business.
Unfortunately,
our present schooling pattern stigmatizes failure on one hand and
sidelines creativity on the other. In an age where knowledge is at
our finger tips and information is no more stored in our brains but
on hard disk space, our educational pattern badly needs a creative
change. The human race badly needs to inculcate the ability to think
creatively and to understand and manage failure. And we need it fast.
The result of not successfully being able to do so is that the jobs
of therapists and psychologists are increasingly becoming in demand.
A
child who enters schooling this year would start his career by around
2035 and would retire by about 2070. At the pace the world has
developed over the past half a century, how equipped are we today to
teach a child to be successful in the next half a century or more?
How much justice can we do to him by making him literate (as per the
present definitions) with the limitations we have today? We surely
have kick-started the change and our schools have recently shifted to
a system of comprehensively and continuously evaluating the child.
But at the ground level, it seems that it would take a decade or more
before we really take in the fact that the focus should not really be
on evaluating. It should be on understanding the qualities, nurturing
& instilling the talents and preparing the child to face the
challenges successfully.
Every
child needs to develop the skill sets – to think, to dream, to
fail, to learn and to cope with life. In the process of shifting the
‘gurus’ and ‘shishyas’ into the classrooms we actually
shifted focus from sharing ‘finite life skills’ to ‘structured
knowledge’. And over the past few hundred years we successfully
managed to overdo things that the new generation now fails to
inculcate most of the required skill sets either for life or to add
value to the humanity at large.
In
an era where we do not need to physically go to the place called
school to gain our share or ‘structured knowledge’, we really
need to rethink our pattern of imparting, assessing and using
knowledge. We need to treat creativity at par with literacy and
failure at par with learning. And that is when one would truly start
exploring his capabilities of being a winner.
If
you are still looking for the magic pill, I’d rather give you the
ingredients. It is almost always about your desire to dream; your
persistence to seek knowledge; your ability to think creatively; your
willingness to fail and yet rise; your aptitude to fully absorb the
experience; and your maturity to manage success. And on the path
always keep in mind that the guys who brought down the World Trade
Centre were successful too. But to be a true winner you need a virtue
that no one can really instill in you – ethical benevolence.
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