Life Lessons from X....

I am going to talk about a person I know. Let us call him X.

This story is not about X. X is just a referral in this story.

He was in a senior role in his company that he joined early in his career. Having graduated from a prestigious institute and done the post graduation in Management from one of the top 5 management institutes in the country, as far as his career was concerned, let us say that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

He was definitely looking at occupying a very senior role in the company, probably even the CEO in the next 10 years.

Then something happened. He left the company. I don't know why. Then I lost touch.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about this gentleman. I asked him what happened to X.

"After he left the company", my friend said, "X co-founded a company. Soon he left that also. For a few years after that he took the role of 'Corporate Trainer'. Recently I heard that he has left that and taken up some other work"

This news got me thinking.

How is it possible that a highly qualified person, one of the elites in the country, lose his way like this? How does this happen? What are the lessons that we can learn from this?

First lesson is that it is very easy to lose control on your life. All it takes is one or two bad decisions, decisions taken mostly in isolation and probably in an emotionally charged state to derail the direction of our life. I remember taking multiple decisions in emotional state, decisions that I regretted in retrospect. It is very important that our decisions are taken in the right context of our overall life objective.

Second lesson is that in our life, it is important that we have a guiding beacon, a sort of light house as it were. It helps us stay rooted and helps us take correct decisions in case of any course corrections that will invariably happen, mostly around the middle age.

The beacon can be our goals or our values. For my dad, the life beacon was his strong set of values which guided every decision that he took. For many of us, the beacon could be our goals.

Goals can be of three types. If you are very fortunate, you could identify a single long-term goal at a relatively young age that can guides and shapes your entire life. It is like a fully constructed house and all the aspects of your life are well integrated throughout your life time.

Some of us do not have long-term goals. We have a set of medium term goals and we move from one medium term goal to another. In this case it is important that the medium term goals are consistent and move you forward and helps you tell a neat story.

In this case you are building your house of life as you go along.

Medium term goals are like Prefab structures that you assemble together to build a house. An inconsistent set of medium term goals will lead you to building a disjointed house with rooms here and there without them being inter-connected.

Mind you, each room may be beautiful and complete by themselves, but are not integrated to become a beautiful house. The life will be like a set of discrete events rather than a beautiful story.

Most of us have only short term goals. We move from one short term goal to another without them being consistent with each other and with the overall perspective to life. Inconsistent short-term goals are like bricks haphazardly lying all over the place. We invest a lot of our life effort in meeting these goals, but they were not guided by an overarching set of goals or values or objectives.

There is no house, there is only an ‘intent’ to build one.

But spare a thought for those who do not have any goals at all. They are potential beggars in the journey of life.