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Managing life

How one manages, particularly one’s life, is at the root of one’s success or failure. It is not just good enough to work hard.

Updated on: Jan 24, 2011 01:31 AM IST
Hindustan Times | By
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How one manages, particularly one’s life, is at the root of one’s success or failure. It is not just good enough to work hard.

HT Image
HT Image

Most of us work hard in our respective areas, but only a few get what they want. Why? Bad management, surely.

One thing more: It is not intelligence alone that can lead one steadily to one’s goals. A person who mismanages his intelligence is left out to repent as a failure; whereas one who is an average guy but makes the best use of his managerial skills gets to the goal post quickest.

It is in this context that I read an interesting book, Management by Walking by Dr A K Agarwal, a CEO of a firm. The author, to give just one aspect of managerial qualities, stresses on grooming your mind to take the right kind of decisions.

He quotes Mahatma Gandhi, “It’s unwise to be too sure of one’s wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”

“Once a decision is taken, and when you mentally shift gears from deliberation to implementation, from contemplation to action, it changes more than just the way one sees the decision at hand.

While mapping out the plan for implementation, you feel more confident and more invincible about yourself in general. That is because implementation is a cue for your brain to focus on how to get the job done and to tune out the self-doubts and vulnerability that inhabit action.”

At this stage, it is important that one must be fully confident that one can do and will do the task undertaken. One way, the author says, is to mind what Earl Gray Stevens had said,”Confidence, like art, never comes from giving all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.”

In other words, a confident person has an open mind and sees possibilities of a better outcome in every cue.

 
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