Note: Special thanks to Mukundan Seshadri, CEO of BlueFile for sharing this wonderful story with me.
Bank account of life
A 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud man, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with his hair fashionably coifed and shaved perfectly, even though he is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.
His wife of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, he smiled sweetly when told his room was ready.
As he manoeuvred his walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of his tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on his window.
“I love it,” he stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
“Mr. Jones, you haven’t seen the room, just wait.” “That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged … it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. ” It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice. I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away just for this time in my life.
Old age is like a bank account. You withdraw from what you’ve put in. So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in the bank account of memories!
PS: Thanks to all of you for your part in filling my Memory bank. I am still depositing!
Here are the headlines to consider for your next book, blog post or article:
1. Why your Boss sucks…
2. How to deal with a spouse who won’t understand you…
3. Why money is not everything…
4. Why most of your customers are dumb…
5. Why the rich may not be happy…
6. Why everything you learnt about sales is wrong…
7. How to win every argument…
8. The Ultimate Secret to get anything you want…
These headlines are guaranteed to catch attention. There are many reasons why they attract attention. I have given one reason for each one of them below. You can think for a few minutes and you will find a few more reasons:
1. Why your Boss sucks… It is better than reading an article that is titled “Why it is you who suck every time…”
2. How to deal with a spouse who won’t understand you… It is better than reading an article that is titled “How you are creating a living hell for your spouse…”
3. Why money is not everything… It is better than reading an article that is titled “Why you may not be really qualified to get rich…”
4. Why most of your customers are dumb… It is better than reading an article that is titled “Why you may not be smart enough to sell to all customers…”
5. Why the rich may not be happy… It is better than reading an article that is titled “How to be rich AND happy…”
6. Why everything you learnt about sales is wrong… It is better than reading an article that is titled “How to stop giving excuses and start selling…”
7. How to win every argument… It is better than reading an article that is titled “Why you can’t win every argument…”
8. The Ultimate Secret to get anything you want… It is better than reading an article that is titled “Why there is no single secret to get everything you want in life…“
My $.02: Watch what you are getting attracted to. If it is too good to be true, it probably is!
PS: Don’t take the title of this blog post seriously
Everyday I tell stories. If this is a surprise, let me say that everyday you tell stories too. Take your customers, friends, family members or your colleagues – all of these people are hearing your stories day in and day out.
Everybody in the world is telling a story – all the time.
It is also true that you are hearing stories everyday. Told by your family members, friends, colleagues, advertisers, newspapers, politicians, government officials etc.
If you observe carefully, most of the stories don’t register in your mind even after you listen to them many times. The simplest reason may be that they are not “relevant” to you. If you never played golf or not interested in the game, chances are that a story about a golf resort may not catch your attention. Let us leave those stories aside.
Let us look at those stories that are talking about products, services and news about items that are “relevant” to you. Even amongst those stories, only VERY few catch your attention. Other stories are weak or have a high “Story Ignorance Index“. Story Ignorance Index is a measure of how easy it is for the other person to ignore your story. The higher the index, easier it is to ignore.
If you want to see how a good story is told, please watch the TV show 24. It is the work of a master story teller and it is hard to beat 24 in that department.
When people hear your stories, they are not comparing it to another story by someone similar to you (or your company) but to the best story that they have heard of. When your story is farther away from this “standard”, the Story Ignorance Index will start going up and your message will be lost in space.
If you have the best (be it a product or a service) with you but don’t know how to weave that into a compelling story, you suffer.
As an exercise, compare your current story to that of 24? Does it measure up? If not, what can you do or whose help can you get to tell a better story?
Imagine you are hosting a party and inviting some of the most important people in your life as guests. You will prepare for the event with utmost care and want your guests to have a great time.
Now, imagine each of your blog posts as a party you are hosting for some of the most important people in your life. It is just that you have never met them before.
I wish that all of your guests will have a great time on your blog
Long back I read a quote that read something like this – “Problems come so that heroes can overcome”. The society and marketplace respects people who overcome problems. Even when you don’t encounter problems, you can go ahead and solve a problem for someone else.
If you don’t like problems, read this little quote. It will change the way you look at a problem.
“Problems are not the problem. Coping is the problem”
In fact, there are a lot of people out there who were very busy and they are not busy anymore. When they were busy, they didn’t have time for anyone. When they finally got out of their busyness, there is nobody for them.
Loneliness is probably the biggest unacknowledged problem today. Lonely people have a hard time accepting their situation. It is a matter of self-esteem. If you admit that you are lonely, it is almost admitting that you are screwed up. That is hard.
If you observe loneliness, it does not happen all of a sudden. It is the result of all the people decisions you made over the long term.
Two things to note:
1. The simple rule to remember is that if you don’t care enough for enough number of people over the years, there may not be enough people to care for you when you need them.
2. The corollary to that simple rule is that even when you care enough for enough number of people over the years, there may not be enough people to care for you when you need them.
That said, we both know that the first choice is always better than the second choice.
Now, whatever be the reason you are lonely, you can’t fix it easily. You can’t go back in history to fix all your people decisions. So in this case, definitely, prevention is always better than cure.
With that in the background, I want to make my point:
Have you looked at people around you who are already suffering with loneliness and not sharing it?
Sharing about one’s loneliness is the ultimate demonstration of vulnerability. Nobody wants to be vulnerable. But if you get the right cues, you can figure out if someone is “lonely” or not.
How about reaching out and helping those who are lonely before their loneliness turns into something worse – depression or sickness. I was told that America consumes 50% of the world’s anti-depressant drugs. Scary, yes but we can all join hands and fix the problem a bit.
If you are truly there for someone and make them feel that they are not lonely, you give them a new life. You give them new hope. You give them a gift that only another person can give.
“According to the sources, there is a move among
the BPO and IT companies to get their onsite and offshore employee to
work for 50 hours a week, instead of 40 now”
Background: Most Indian software companies depend on offshore projects. So the billing is dollars. The pay is in Rupees. When the rupee starts appreciating like crazy, the companies are caught off guard as the margins start eroding. They can’t reduce the salaries of employees without risking mass exodus. So they have to think of “innovative”ideas.
My point: This is a tough problem to handle. There needs to be fundamental shift in the way work is viewed. A shift from “hourly” rate to “value” rate. For God’s sake, we are supposed to be “knowledge workers” so isn’t the measure really the “value we pack in an hour” that counts?
What more “value” can a disgruntled employee add in the additional 10 hours per week.
On a lighter note, are companies thinking that techies are not even working 50 hours per week?
Valli Bindana is the president of a company called Kreative Vistas. I am fascinated by the kind of work they do. In a nutshell, they help companies explain complex things in a simple fashion via animation.
It is also a lesson for the rest of us on how to communicate powerfully. Here is an example:
This short blurb is about high blood pressure:
What is High Blood Pressure?
Each time your heart beats, it pumps out blood into the arteries. High blood pressure is excessive force of your blood pushing against the walls of your arteries. When left untreated hypertension hardens arteries as cholesterol and calcium builds up. High blood pressure usually has no symptoms, but it can cause problems with such as hemorrhage, heart attack, and kidney damage.
Now, this is the same thing communicated via Animation:
On a lighter note: I don’t have high blood pressure but if I watch the above movie a few times, I might be at the risk of getting high blood pressure just because I will be worrying so much about it
=== PS: Thanks to Kare. She reminds me in the comments section that I do have blood pressure. The post above is corrected to include the word “high”.
I should know this, shouldn’t I. Shows how dumb I am sometimes
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