There is always a way out!
You want something, go get it. Period.
Recently, I needed some data for one of my tasks from a different team. Luckily I knew a friend in that team. The data was more of at business level so developer helped me by giving relevant point of contacts(manager). The developer is of the view:
I hate it when people disturb me in my work time. Hate it even more when they disturb me in my free time.
What a dilemma! When to contact the developer? Then I came up with two timings:
- When you reach office in the morning, people check facebook, twitter, mails and then plan for their work. Believe it or not this is a must thing to do before you start anything: “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
2. Its 4 O’ clock and you have worked for 4-5 hours, took coffee after lunch. But now your operating system tries to put you in sleep mode.
In both the above cases, you are not ideal and you are not working. But since I was also busy doing the above things at these times, the question is when to contact the friend. The answer is ‘anytime’.
Now manager asking you the data is one thing, and you requesting the data from a senior manager is a whole new thing because manager might say
Thanks to my friend, I got the data needed for my task.
There is an interesting told story about Mr. Coolidge, 30th US President.
An important hostess at White house dinner : “You must talk to me Mr. Coolidge. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.”
Coolidge told her: “You lose.”
These days, I am on to a new project at work which is still in requirement phase.
Hopefully, the above will not happen in my case. Thanks to the awesome team I work in. I call this phase of new project as ‘honeymoon period’. Because in both cases:
- You have just started your life with your new partner(project). Although the period is short, you will feel little relaxed as lot of things depend on your PM, and there are no strict deadlines for you.
- You will do lot of ‘new’ things in this honeymoon period and your learning curve will increase a lot.
- Your ‘future’ will be decided on the ‘new’ things learnt and researched in the above step.
Last week I got a feedback from a reader of my blog “What are we waiting for”:
I used to belong to the category 1 mentioned in your writing. I was a little frustrated with my work as no challenging work was there for me in the future. On the way back to home, I met a person in flight, we started discussing about an idea and now I am working on a startup with him after quitting my job. We have got the funding also. I think you were right we have to embrace every opportunity and work for it.
When you have tried everything , just take inspiration from the following image and you will get a new way — a way which will make you more smarter and achieve your dream and happiness. Never lose hope. My all time favorite line from the movie The Pursuit of Happiness:
You want something, go get it. Period.
When surviving even one more day is doubtful, what happens to their dreams? Help them to fulfill their dream.
