Month: September 2022

Heard this in an amazing speech recently. A man was struggling with his child’s habit of scribbling on the walls in his home.

When the man caught his son doing it the first time, he shouted and said, “Are you stupid or what? Don’t you ever do that again!”

Sure enough, two days later, the boy was back to scribbling on the walls.

Why? Because his pride didn’t let him give it up. Nobody likes to be intimidated, not even a little boy.

The next day, the father tried a different tactic. When he caught the kid drawing on the wall again, he called him near and said, “Sweetie, come here, don’t do that, you are big boy now.”

And the boy never did it again.

What we say matters. But how we say it matters more.

In a recent podcast on analyzing the traits of successful people, there was a radical point of view.

Everyone says successful people and especially leaders, need to be humble.

The common question is, if someone is humble and soft spoken and down to earth and approachable and all that, that’s great, but does such a person have what it takes to really be aggressive and win in life? Effectively, this can be rephrased as, “Ego isn’t good for relationships, but ego is critical to success”. Because ego is what pushes people to succeed, so they feel like they achieved something, or that they achieved more than others and such.

Our scriptures say we should lose the ego altogether, which is important of course, but from a spiritual point of view. Would this work in the cut throat world we live in? Maybe not, especially if not used properly, because we can’t expect everyone in our work-environment also to have read the scriptures and abide by it. Hence the interesting view in the podcast, that successful people have egos. However, they keep their egos hidden. So it super charges them on the inside, while still keeping them approachable and down to earth!