Emotional Labor

I'm not happy because I've had a fight and now I have to deliver a presentation to a valuable client who can give my organization some good business. What do I do ? Wipe of the anger on my face and give the presentation. Just Fake it!

Now comes the dilemma. Do I fake the emotions required by my job or do I genuinely feel it. Research has shown that deeply acting and internalizing the feelings leads to less amount of stress due to conflicting emotions(Emotional Dissonance).

Check out the presentation below.

Emotional Labour

View more presentations from Sushant Kumar.

Who is the next richest person ?

Who can be the next richest person ?
a) An Engineer/Graduate (pref IIT) + MBA (Pref IIM) + Work Ex -> Looking for meaty job
b) An actor/singer (celebrity)
c) Scientist/researcher/Scholar
d) Entrepreneur

Ans - d) Entrepreneur
He would make the rest 3 work for him.
So if they become rich, they'd automatically make him richer.

But what does a person have that makes him an entrepreneur -> A vision, an idea!.

If you check out the profiles of the richest people today, they were one among a,b,c, but had the vision and a bit of business acumen.
And entrepreneurship is the greatest social service. you are creating jobs and inspiring many more.

Is modesty, dishonesty ?

Old people always advice you to be honest and modest. But are both possible ? OK lets start it this way. Modesty gives you options and honesty leaves you with none. The new set of high fliers, I've interacted with have loads of modesty. The kind of modesty that'll make you feel that Mount Everest was left on ground floor. The new bunch of high fliers, although have options.

Now I debated about it with a friend of mine and he justified modesty. You underplay your thing. As a listener to a modest individual you would believe him.

If say Mr Sham said that his project is still going at snails pace (although it ain't) he is modest. Now you've gone to mr Sham to check your project status with his project. He is honest in this case because pace is subjective term. Snails pace to Mr Sham might be lightning fast for me.

Now rather than the above statement, Mr Sham said my project has still not got over the planning stage, although it has reached the final stage, it would again be an example of modesty. But it would be dishonesty too!

A Lot of the high flier crowd, the elites or future elites are falling into the Mr Sham trap.

At the end of it Why would I trust a modest individual ? or Can I trust people like Mr Sham ?
The thin line between modesty and dishonesty is being blurred as I feel people are preferring to go up by putting others down using the weapon of modesty. The result is that my trust over such people is decreasing.

My Advice : Think twice before trusting a seemingly modest person.

Mediocrity to Greatness

I always felt the difference while I sat in an interesting class that prompted me to do the assignments to a boring class, which was like taking sleeping pills and fighting the enemy on border. Anyways Peter principle elaborated it.

Just going through the first chapter of "Why Things Go Wrong" gave me a sense of why mostly people crib about their jobs, work place and then go for a higher degree ( like an MBA,M-Tech,Msc etc. or diploma) to get into a job that would probably satisfy them (finally). But does it satisfy them? That's another debatable topic.

Coming to mediocrity, chapter one of "Why Things go wrong" made me bump into a quote by William Arthur Ward and I am splitting and spilling it below.

The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.

Inspiration to perform and outdo is what drives out the pending sleep and lethargy to make us perform. The same goes for work.

But whatif a mediocre guy comes our way ?
Bad luck!

It is a test that has to be passed with greatness. Being Mediocre with a mediocre guy means you sleep, get caught and are penalized. Serious bad luck!

So what is being great with mediocrity ?
Its the first principle of the seven habits of Stephen Covey. Being proactive.
Take interest in the subject and ask any damn thing that pops in your mind and move your mundu consistently to give a feel that you're awake and understanding the concept.

We all have our phases. If we reach our level of incompetence, we might not achieve greatness and be stuck in the vicious circle of mediocrity. It is important we climb the ladder to greatness and not incompetence.

Email Overload

I attended a seminar by Ashish (of Minnesota State University) who showed his findings on Email overload and how we could curb it. The astonishing part was the figures that had come out of his research. $588 bn annually were being lost in the form of unproductive man hours because of continuous email checking by managers/corporates.

On an average his findings showed that a person who continuously checks emails for the whole days wastes 28 minutes of productive work.

Slotting your email send/receive time slots actually saves productive time since the switch between emailing and work is less frequent. Continuous check means a lot of switches, which adds up to unproductive man hours. This further increases if the work we are doing is long and complex. Severity of the switch decreases with decrease in complexity and longevity.

Hence an organizational email etiquette and schedule can seriously improve productivity.