Experiance Matters

I would be lying if I say that I like my work, nobody likes to do what they have to do. To me WORK is “War On Repressed Kinds” where we are the ones on the wrong end of the hammer. I am sure even the workaholics wouldn’t work so hard if they were not addicted to it. But sometimes good things do happen to you at work like hooking up with your Boss’s secretary. No kidding, usually people are not so benevolent towards praising their Boss behind their back but today I observed something which has made me admire him a lot than before.

For an overview, I would say that my boss is a BOSS by all normal conventions. Definitely not the tyrant ‘Hari Sado’ in the Naukri.com ad but yes he is a no nonsense kind of person. You just cannot mess around with him at all. Rest I would say that he likes to get the work done as best as possible even if it means that we grow roots after spending long hours at the workstation but in case we need some assistance he is ready to help us out. I think I have been flattering enough to get a few good points in my appraisal but I would better get to the point.

Today, a meeting was called to present our suggestions to the Boss to enhance a toolkit we have been using in our project. We all fresh joiners had prepared the draft guided by a senior colleague and I began to give the presentation. I was just not ready for that as we thought that the senior would be presenting the ideas and we will be there to explain and discuss it further if required but he just passed on the baton to me and said ‘start’. Usually I am not very short on ideas and hence I dived straight into it with one which was basically my brainchild. Soon I realised that maybe for some reason I was not going exactly where I wanted to and the examples I quoted weren't of much help either, but quitting is not something I am in favor of. Hence I stuck to my guns and kept selling my idea. All this while, he was there, so attentive and in the present that you can feel that he is grasping every word spoken and analysing it at a lot more finer levels than you would ever know.

As freshers, we are usually of the dreamy kind. We come up with all those rosy ideas and magnificent changes that we can bring in, but what we fail to realise id that our lack of experience makes us take off from ground reality, flying much higher than we should be and that’s exactly what happened there. Our ideas were original, some of them were good too, but they all lack the practicality and that is where Boss’s years of experience came in handy. He was there all the time listening and asking very brief and direct questions and expected similar answers. Instead we still had that college hangover on us and kept on answering the way we used to in our Viva exams and his expressions to them had ‘don’t-give-me-this-nonsense’ written all over it. But he was really kind enough to listen to us, and then he took charge and modified what ever we were presenting, adding things which were crucial but we had completely missed them. Once we thought about it, we realised that without those inputs by Boss, our ideas would have been quite absurd and no way would they have been approved. Somehow, we understood that no amount of intelligence or ideas can match up to an experience tested in fire and seasoned by time.

Its going to take sometime before we can have the skills of Boss and then maybe these things would come naturally to us as it does to him. Till then, I can say that even by observing a person like that we can know what we ought to be to get ahead and strive towards it one step at a time.