Saturday, February 20, 2010

Questions Pertaining to Success Answered


For everything you wanted to know on building leadership and management, refer Shyam Bhatawdekar’s website: http://shyam.bhatawdekar.com/; it's the Management Encyclopedia at one single site

For more articles, blogs and knols of Shyam Bhatawdekar, refer: (Home Page for Writings of Shyam Bhatawdekar) http://writings-of-shyam.blogspot.com/

Questions of Previous Post Answered

Is it really possible to achieve success in every aspect of human life in superlative degrees (i.e. more success)?

The answer is “yes” and “no”- both. It will entirely depend on each person as to what and how much and how well he does in each aspect of his life.

That is the reason why for achieving success in all aspects of life one will have to set out his goals in each of these aspects on a timeline in terms of quality and quantity to be achieved, plan out allocation of his resources (most importantly his time) accordingly and most importantly, actually deploy them accordingly. Also, review from time to time as to what is his progress against the targets and is he deploying the resources as planned. He may have to carry out mid course corrections on all of these, if required.

In addition, it is equally important for one to carve out the correct value structure. Getting tremendous success in any field by flouting these values in fact is no success; rather that is a failure. An extreme case could be that a chief of a state declares an undeserved or unwarranted war, under some external compulsions, on the other state though his value structure does not permit him doing so. Now achieving the status of the chief of a state by fair means is definitely a success of very high order but as a president declaring a war that he personally does not believe in, is an utter failure. Under such circumstances, a successful chief of the state may prefer to resign rather than wrongly declare a war that kills millions of military and civilian people.

If getting success like this in all the aspects of life is possible, then, why a large section of people do not achieve this? The answer is: imbalance. Some people tilt too much on trying to achieve quality and quantity of only few aspect of life forgetting or giving less importance to other equally vital aspects of life. The resources (including one’s personal time) by and large remain the same. Now if you use too much of these limited resources only on very few aspects of life at the cost of other important aspects of life, you cannot achieve success in all of them in equal measures (quality and quantity wise). Thus, because of such imbalance, your overall success remains lopsided.

Is it then really good to have such lopsided success? Answer is common sense: it has to be a “no”. If you give too much importance to your professional work and therefore, do not spend from your limited time, appropriate quantity and quality of time with you wife day after day, month after month and year after years and then, if she disappears from your life by falling in love with someone else who cares for her or by taking divorce, will you call yourself successful?

Will it not be more appropriate in such situations to achieve even moderate successes in all the important aspects of your life rather than achieving tremendous success in just about few areas at the cost of being a hopeless failure in most of the other equally important aspects of life?

However, one need not aim at only moderate successes in all the aspects of one's life under an excuse of the balancing act. It is true that balancing your resources and particularly your time over various important aspects of your life will mean spreading them thin and so the achievements may not reach their maximum possible or potential limits. Yet, if you are willing to think of ways and means of increasing your effectiveness and efficiency and implementing them in your day-to-day life, more and more quality and quantity successes can be achieved in large majority of all your important aspects of your life without neglecting any one of them.

(Also refer our High Quality Management Encyclopedia at:
http://management-universe.blogspot.com/)