What are you becoming?

I often meet young professionals moving on the fast track up the corporate ladder. Sometimes during our workshops, we discuss about what each one would want to achieve in life. Almost everyone comes up with a long list of material successes like a house, a car, a vacation, a large bank balance etc. A great list indeed, and who wouldn’t want it! … Carrying this conversation further, they also measure their success by the size of their cars or the destination of their vacation. Some would also express frustration benchmarking their own visible signs of success against those of their peers & batch mates…There comes this itch to get a better job, higher designation and to buy a bigger car. In our rapidly expanding economy starving for talent, there is always the next job that is willing to pay a little more money.

While you’re aspiring for the material successes and getting them slowly & incrementally, you need to ask yourselves a more fundamental question. The answer to this might have the potential for a growth that is exponentially larger than the one you’re experiencing now. Instead of asking, ‘What am I getting?’ ask, ‘What am I becoming?’ To this, the most obvious answer people come up with is: ‘Every year I am becoming more experienced.’ Think again about the experience you are gaining. Are you becoming more experienced or are you repeating the experience gained during the initial years of your profession? Ask yourself, “As I’m becoming adept at my work, am I becoming less inclined to learn new things, less tolerant to other’s mistakes, and less accessible to others?”

What you get from your job is directly proportional to the value you deliver. The key question then is, ‘how am I becoming more valuable to my team, my organization and my society?’ ‘Am I able to deliver better value or am I delivering the same old value and expecting better returns?’ Better value does not come from doing the same job a bit better and a little faster, it comes from disseminating what you’ve learnt, making way for other to grow and learning afresh stuff required for meeting bigger challenges! If you’re not becoming more valuable then it would not be wrong to say that about 10 years of your experience is actually one year repeated 10 times over. Then why should any one pay you more than what a person with 2 or 3 years of experience should get?

Success then is what you have become and not what you have achieved or acquired. A common characteristic of some of the most successful people is that they are heavily focused on their own learning. Ponder over this. Invest in your personal development. Learn something new every year. Or take up an area and work at becoming exceptional in that. Simply put, gain more skills, become more perseverant, and evolve a more positive attitude. Finally, don’t hesitate from teaching or training others, it only adds to your expertise.
rajesh@peoplefactorindia.com
The writer is a management consultant and a leadership coach.