I have never been an extraordinary achiever, someone who excels at everything he does. I have been very mediocre person, failing at each and every point I could have failed. Always followed the traditional path everyone followed around me, did HSC with Science, prepared for IIT, landed in a Deemed Engineering college(Where education means Business),Got an IT job, Prepared and failed in bringing a good percentile in CAT twice.

Life becomes so boring when we keep on doing same thing again and again. And when I do the same thing again and again in my IT job, It just makes me feel sick. But, Jobs are meant to be taken seriously, specially these IT and call centers ones where recession has proved that you can easily be jobless depending upon market situation. My manager always rated me only on two qualities however hard I work, they were communication skills and pro activeness, Strange that they always rate you on strange factors even if you got good comments from your client.

I was so disappointed with the comments that I started working harder and spending lots of time in office. Probably that’s what most of the managers want you to do, to work like a donkey. My aim was not just to get a rating or show my manager that I can work like this, but to explore myself to know what goes wrong and why I am rated less than others. I have always been a person who believes in working hard in official timing of 9 to 6 than hardly working in the official timing and then sitting after that to showcase that I am working hard. But in IT industry, the latter option works well ,at least with all the watchman type managers who just keep track of the time you enter and you leave.

Something strange happened in last 2 months. I never spoke much in my meetings earlier, but now I was roaring like anything in most of the meetings, the reason being the functional knowledge I acquired by staying till late. I knew more than the others and I did not have to try to speak much as I was naturally speaking and answering client queries. I started raising issues which went unnoticed earlier and everything started getting better all of a sudden. I never thought I can ever improve on these qualities. But, somehow things started working well.

That makes me remember something which someone told me long ago, when everything goes wrong, just be quiet and start working harder. Never decide the destination of your efforts or think I would like to achieve till this much because once you set a limit you will start working with that limit in mind and once you do not set any limit and keep working hard, you can do wonders, sometimes more than anything you ever imagined. When you start believing in yourself and work with conviction, an unknown hand just makes all your efforts stronger than they are. I always wondered what that unknown hand was….and I found answer in this quote…

“The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.” -Vince Lombardi