We are always looking for the final result. The rank, the medal, the winner, the outcome, the hero triumphing over the villain, the underdog emerging victorious over the incumbent, we ourselves being ‘chosen’ over others and on and on. The endgame is what keeps us going. Or so we think. In this quest for clarity of the future, we often lose sight of the present. Especially when the present is a long journey and the future is just a blip.
Here’s something I experience often. My role at work requires some amount of selling and marketing. Maybe every role in every workplace does nowadays. We can’t be progressing in our careers without constantly selling something or the other – either our ideas, our work, our plans, or at the very least – ourselves.
Whenever I’m required to sell to a client, the majority of the conversation is about talking about our products and how we can help our clients with those. Of course we listen and ask the right questions and so on, but the meeting has been setup so that the client can understand us, so we would certainly need to be speaking and presenting for much of the time. And only right at the end do some of them confess that they are actually not in the market for a solution like this at all!
Sometimes I think, “Hey, couldn’t you just have told this to me at the start?” And then I realize, that if I’d known at the start, then I probably wouldn’t have been as sincere or as convincing with my pitch.
There’s a close parallel in life in general as well. Many times, we do not have all or even some of the answers we seek. But that is actually a very very good thing. Because this is what helps us take life sincerely. Living it by the second, smelling the roses along the way – rather than focusing solely on endgames.
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