Take the lead!

‘Hey people, let’s hang out someplace nice, say Juhu Beach’.

The response to this depends a lot on who’s asking the question, doesn’t it? Read on..

This post isn’t about personal bias, but it’s about how effectively some people can take the lead. These are the people who have mastered the art of persuasion. They are the ones who by one way or another refuse to take no for an answer and manage to get people to agree with the plan. This works even in situations where you thought ‘no’ to be a definite answer. Convincing comes so naturally to them.

I’ve never been good in this department, but have always observed the modus operandi of people who are good at convincing right from school times to college. They work in myriad ways, but the end result is the same. Being a good persuader and eventually a leader requires a lot of groundwork; it’s not an overnight process. There are many phases to it, first one being recognition. Unless you have recognition in the place where you want to influence your ideas, nobody’s going to listen to you. So, basic communication with everyone is a must here.

Next step would be activeness. One has to be very much active around the place where he or she has to aspire to be a leader. You can’t expect to come to college on time, leave right when the college is over and hope that one fine day when you plan a trek, many people from your class will come and join you. You can’t expect to hit the target right the very first time you try.

Bonding together with people who like to take the initiative is the next step. You gotta be amongst the planners of the group. It’s again necessary that you be involved in the plans these initiators make, then only can you expect them to join in your plans. Another vital aspect is building a bubble of trust around you. You can become a good persuader only if people trust you. This trust comes from small things like living up to the tasks that you took up, confining to yourself the personal stuff your friends tell you about their lives, helping your friends when they are in need, consoling them in their grief.

Getting the plan together gets a lot of patience. You have to listen to the tantrums of lot of people around, you have to clear everyone’s doubts, be ready to spend a lot of money on phone calls, sending reminders again and again and most importantly, not giving up despite the obstacles. Many a time, it also warrants to make big last minute changes to suit maximum number of people involved, keeping your own comforts aside for the sake of others.

It’s the satisfaction of a successful venture keeps you going through all this trouble. The joy of being together is more pleasing than relishing the happy times alone.

The thing I feel about leadership is that you don’t always have to be a leader, but you have to step up when nobody’s there to take the initiative. When few people are working towards a plan, we needn’t demonstrate our planning skill. After all, if everyone needn’t be cooking delicious food, sometimes we need to look forward to tasting those delicious dishes too!

À la carte

I like cooking. I’m not saying I’m great at cooking or whatever, but I like cooking. They say, in life, you should do what you like doing. I heard them and joined a 4 year professional cooking course at a reputed institution. As my course is coming to a conclusion, I wanna say, liking something is one thing and obtaining a degree in what you like is a completely different thing. I also want to elaborate on my journey in the cooking institute.

I expected to cook many delicious dishes in the process. But they hardly ever tested my cooking skills. All they kept asking were the recipes of famous dishes, that too more than a decade older. Now, you could not make up fancy versions of these recipes. You have to write the version which your instructor cares about!

Sometimes, we had the task of making some of these delicacies ourselves. We made them with great effort in the beginning. But our instructors never really tasted the food we prepared. They just saw the outer decoration of the dishes and the aroma and judged us on that. Smart people that we are, we did things differently the next time. No one cared about the contents of the dishes, but we always, always decorated with the best of the toppings from then on! Another rule, all the preparations taste the same as all of them are prepared with the same gravy.

If you like the food in a restaurant, you complement the restaurant manager for that. Something similar happens with us. If our dishes are exceptional, the credit is taken away by our instructors who portray it as their own work. It’s cheating, but as a trainee, you have little to complain.

Now when external examiners from other institutes came to test us, they mostly asked us about the dishes we didn’t make or study. Being a chef in a restaurant, they expect us to know the current wholesale and retail price of soyabean. Despite this system, some of my colleagues do manage to get all answers right.

A good cook has to cook whatever that comes his way in the syllabus, even if he is nauseated about some of the things in it. It’s about completing the task, whether it suits you or whether you like it is a different story. You are not the one who decides the menu.

Every semester the menu changes, the specials change, but the approach remains the same. We have adapted to the system really well. Make everything and try to add the spices. Don’t forget to add the pinch of salt otherwise the food will lose its taste.

It will be a different story henceforth when we join a restaurant as a chef. Practical life teaches you a lot doesn’t it. Degrees do not actually imply what we have accomplished. It just tells that we are familiar with the field.

Replace cooking by any other profession in the post and it’ll work fine.

Powertoni

If money is the thing that drives the world crazy, I think power is not too far behind. So many people directly and indirectly crave for power. Now, ‘power’ here is not ‘power in the political sense’. By ‘Power’, I see at it as an ability to make things work as you want them to work. No-one can deny their love for power!

Why are the ‘Reasons to Hate your boss’ type e-mails so often sent and enjoyed by people? Most people tend to dislike the people who issue authority over them. So many stories you might’ve heard about two great friends, one gets promoted and the friendship no longer remains the same. I’m not saying this is always the case, but most people do like to have equal or higher power than their peers.

There are various ways of showcasing power. Take the simple example of viva. Why do many of our internal profs like to screw us up in our viva. The simple reason is they want to signal that they have the power to make or break your life (Hardly do they know stupid vivas don’t constitute our life!), so you better suck up to them to get good marks. It’s a way to say that you execute your freedom to bunk lectures, I’ll execute my power to screw you!

Police in India are very measly paid, live in uncomely living conditions. Still, so many students give the police force exam every year. The applicants are never excited about the money or living conditions, but mostly in the powers the police officers can exercise.

One of the benefits of having many friends and contacts is the ‘power to get things done’ that comes along with it. Let’s take a simple example, apart from a handful of friends that call you regularly, remember the ones who call you less frequently. Recollect the last 10 such people who called you. I bet most of them would’ve called to ask some favor from you. (Unless you are a hot girl who is remembered by almost everyone you ever met!)

While shopping, even if we aren’t going to buy most things we see, we all like to have the power to buy them. College elections also see the play of power games, so many students resort to unfair means for the love of power, to be the most influential person in the college. Luckily our batch didn’t have such students for GS and CS posts.

Another example of power is when you alone have the expertise. I remember my father telling me about the early days of ball pens. The technique to prepare the ink which didn’t flow freely and dry up was known to a very few people. These people were so much in demand that big companies were ready to pay a fortune to hire them. Power of capturing the market was important to these companies.

One more thing you must have observed that previously, the name of inventors of new theories and products were made famous. Like the Aeroplane, the TV, steam engine and so on. Now-a-days, you see so many products, but hardly ever come across the names of the people who were involved in the discovery. That’s because discoveries and advances in many fields are held secret by companies so that they aren’t copied by anyone. They want to have the power to manufacture those products all by themselves. No-one can replicate a MAC Thin Air book!

I can go on and on, but I shouldn’t be using my power to bore people by writing long posts.