Look inside Mirrors and don't look at Mirages

 

'Do not look at mirage and look inside mirror' - Dr V V Rao 

Marriage Ceremony: Last month I was invited for a friend’s son’s marriage ceremony. Welcome lounge decorated with white lilies, red roses and petals of irises with an artistic mind. Enchanting of classical tunes blended with a romantic rock music inviting the hearts of young to get married early and at the same time hearts of elder’s were going through a faded memory lane of their marriage music. Hosts were greeting, welcoming, feeding and taunting with relatives and friends. It looked like “All is well & awesome”. Suddenly clouds making noises with lightening we realized that ceremony was passing through a thunderstorm and heavy rain this was due to the cyclone ‘Phailin’ just crossed land shores of  India.

Now at actual scenes of mirages started, ceremony hall was leaking at many places, the place became wet and dirty in few minutes, guests were discussing seriously about

“Construction quality of the ceremony hall”,

“Inappropriate looting of business men”,

 “Yelling and murmuring about why did hired this hall”,

“Criticizing about how money was being wasted”,

“Talking about ceremony mismanagement”, and

So on and on and on………..

Slowly guests were squeezed to places where they were self protected from chilled droplets of rain. Mostly none were interested to bother about the marriage except parents of the bride and bridegroom. In span of 15-20 minutes the whole place was full of water and it looked like a flooded situation.

Then I saw a cute girl aged around 10 years was shouting at the guests “Help me”, “help me” with a towel in her hand, she was trying and protecting bridegroom from those Big drops which were coming at great a speed due to natural gravitational force. After that eventful shouting from the girl, complete scenario changed to a full scale help to each other, willfully everyone got into act and enjoyed the rest of the ceremony.

People started looking at the Mirrors and not at the Mirages.

In the present business and financial climate, many of us are striving to ensure our survival by measures such as energetically promoting our own subject matter expertise, technical innovation, carrying widespread leadership excellence and shutting down non-value added strategic objectives which are no more valid in this political and global environment. To cope with the future situation, as individuals we must perform variety of improvements such as:

1. Unite and manage teams and team work

2. Guide, help peers and educate yourself to improve your exceptional competence of problem solving

3. Eliminate non-value added objectives and work on excellence

4. Ruthlessly reduce all types of costs

5. Guarantee yourself productivity of every minute

6. Create reward and joyful moments

Mirages: If we want to do all of this we cannot be looking at mirages and brush away the reality and say that its someone else’s fault, blaming on colleagues, friends, bosses, wife and kids and on their shortcomings. We cannot be self-negating and convince ourselves that we cannot possibly solve it because we lack talent and self-confidence, we cannot be like an ostrich with its head in the sand and we think that the existing situation cannot be possibly be improved than maintain the status-quo.

Mirrors: We always must act with a specific objective in mind, actively churn out problems to tackle and get to grips with them positively and decisively, making light of difficulties.

Andrew Carnegie, once the steel king of the world, said that no matter what business you are in, it is important always to do your utmost to become the best. When at the age of twelve, he was employed as a winder in a spinning mills, he tried to become world’s number one winder. Then when he was delivering telegrams, he strove to become the world’s best telegram delivery boy. Whatever his job, he always worked with his reality and he reached the position he desired to.

Good problem solvers have their own objectives and they set these objectives little out of reach of the present abilities and have a burning passion to solve them permanently. To be able to do that objectively, one needs to avoid looking at the mirage, rather concentrate on the reflection in the mirror - at the glaring facts even though one may be tempted to look on the other side and imagine things are not as bad as they seem. No matter how much one wants to postpone facing the unpleasant facts, truth is, the problems needs to be solved and for that, one has to come face to face with the mirrors, acknowledge them  and then work on solutions.