It is a Monday morning and I am in my office at 10:00 am. My schedule is full of meetings with potential clients and colleagues just like any other start to the week for all of us. I want to take sometime and share with you something really important this Monday, I know it is very difficult to wake up, do your daily chores and get to work but we follow the same cycle everyday.
Have ever tried to step back and ask yourself- What drives you to follow the same sequence of events on a daily basis? Well, the answer lies in a simple math equation, no kidding seriously.
p = y(x)
Here in this simple linear algebraic equation ‘p’ is passion and ‘x’ is the time function. Now, ‘y’ is actually the question we need to ask ourselves everyday when we wake up. There have been times in myself when my passion for work and my moral was down. I have been working for more than 15 years now, I am a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur and a CEO. I have seen ups and downs in my personal and professional life but the questions is how to you explain when things do not go as you assumed? moreover, how do you explain when people from the same settings as you achieve great heights and you are still finding your way.
I realized there are only 3 questions that are the basis of everything that we do and that happens around us and they are
What? Why? How?
Most of are aware of What are we doing or What are we trying to achieve? That is because of a simple human tendency to set goals and self-reward on achievement. We are also aware of our capabilities and the path we will take to achieve that goal and the uniqueness that we will add to the winning recipe. But what we forget to ask yourselves is Why?
Why is -your purpose,your cause, your belief?
Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
Everyone wants an out of the box idea but to get an out of the box idea you need to know what is inside at the first place? Similarly most of organisations I work with think from outside in, the first questions we try to answers is what do we want to create, produce, achieve and how do we want to do it?
Let’s take a simple marketing message from Apple that helps me charge a premium for their products — if they were like every other electronic product company there communication should have been like — “We make the best computers, with the best technology that is user friendly” Would you buy one? Probably not! Instead Apple came with a campaign called — “Think Differently that celebrated all biggest minds and innovators that have challenge the status quo of that generation” so the marketing message of Apple is — “We believe in thinking differently, as a company our goal is to challenge the current and create the future. Would you like to be a part of it? Buy our product!” Voila — Apple is now a trillion dollar company.
Similarly, in life as well answering the Why question is utterly important for you to be motivated and stay passionate about your work. Whenever someone walks up to me in office or in conference and ask me how am I able to manage all of it, I only have a simple answer to give them — I am aware of WHY am I doing it!
So as in the equation above invest time in answering the WHY question and it will help you stay motivated and will help to take an inside out from fuzzy situations to clarity of thought.
Don’t forget to write to me with your WHY’s?
