One of my tested beliefs have been that-
"If you have to
get inspired, then don't look too far- your immediate surroundings would have a
lot to seek inspiration from."
I am a great admirer of Mark Templeton, the legendary CEO of
Citrix Inc. And this admiration has a lot less
to do with the fact that he is a
CEO (which is great in itself) but it stems more from the way he conducts
himself despite being a CEO. I recently stumbled upon one of his quotes on
Twitter, which said
"A lot of people
will have facts and information. I'm looking for wisdom." and he further
adds somewhere that he looks for "scars" while hiring.
My humble understanding of what he meant by scars here is
the phases of bad judgments in one's career, something we simply prefer to call
as failures. We, being humans can't
avoid scars and can only learn from them. As one of the quote I like says-
"Effectiveness
comes through good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience. And
experience comes from bad judgment."
So we are really looking at a cycle here. There is another
trait that makes us effective not only in organization but in almost everything
we do. To understand that, let me put forward another quote from Mark Templeton-
"People who are
curious will develop themselves, They will discover things, They'll invent
things."
So the skill that i am referring to here is Curiosity.
Moving away from quotes, and looking for inspiration around, i looked at my son
few days back. He is 4 and just passed Pre-Nursery. And as a part of his course
curriculum he was required to count till 30. I was working with him towards
that when he asked me a question, which meant- "Dad- Why does 15 comes
after 14 and not 12?". Let’s not get into what i answered him. My guess is
that my answer would have been as good as most of yours. J
But the main point that i understood from this instance is
that kids are not just "innocently curious" but they are
"passionately curious". I don't remember when was the last time i
questioned the reasoning behind the sequencing of numbers or for that matter i
probably never did. I think as we grow up, our life's experiences crystallizes
our thought processes and we form our own way to understand the world. And as our
thoughts get more solidified, we tend to compartmentalize things that we know
and the ones that we don’t know. And we never question things that we think we
know.
The whole essence of curiosity is recognizing a gap in
knowledge. Coming to corporate life, where we know we have to be curious like
Mark Templeton's above quote suggested but one way to measure if we were really
passionately curious is to count how many questions we asked ourselves every
day. Was it 1, 2, 10 or none? How many answers did we seek? How many answers
that i tried to find that helped me understand the technology better? Ok. Not
only technology but also my team members better.
I have heard people say that - As we grow higher, the skills
that differentiate us are not only the hefty technical skills but taking cue
from Mark Templeton, for most part are the skills that we used to exhibit so
effortlessly as a kids (Read: curiosity). Closing in on with Satya Nadella's
recent quote that he used to describe himself during the first communication as
a Microsoft CEO
"Many who know me
say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books
than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I
fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop doing
great and useful things.”
Since I promised that I will write about the work-place
behaviors in the coming posts, just wanted to assure that this post also
conveys some message about work-place behavior. If we start considering curiosity
as a behavior that should enable us to start thinking that this is something
that is within ourselves to change. And we can be better at curiosity by just
seeking more answers. And how do we seek more answers- by asking more
questions. First to self, then to the world around!
Note: This article is a modified version of speech i recently gave at a local event i was involved in.
Images source:
http://materialgirlsblog.com/losangeles/files/2013/03/be-inspired-1b.jpg
http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/man-behind-cloudstack-how-citrix-became-strategic
http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/study-curious-children-perform-better-academically/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-30/what-would-microsoft-be-like-if-satya-nadella-becomes-ceo
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