Answer your Call!

It’s better to be exceptional than to be acceptable, to stand out than to fit in, to be productive than to be popular. – Dan Sullivan

If you look around yourself, you would find two kinds of people: one who are busy keeping up with the Joneses, and second who do what they know they are interested in and capable of. The former make the vast majority in this world, the latter makes up a tiny percentage who are usually masters of their art, whatever it is they have chosen for themselves.

In the times past, things were not so straitjacketed. The vast mass of people were not factory products like the engineers, doctors, MBA’s and CA’s of today who dress alike, talk alike and think alike. So if you have two MBA’s in your team, you will not be doubly as wise as one, because their education has ensured that they regurgitate the words that were fed into their CPU when they were at their MBA factory (aka management institute). Because we have people who have been fed similar words from kindergarten (A for apple etc) to MBA (SWOT analysis, market survey, consumer behaviour etc), spent their leisure time doing similar things (watching TV, most of all) and taught by similar people (who themselves were, the products/victims of the mass mediocrity movement), it’s the rarest of the rare individual who still has some individuality left. In fact not just through formal education, the mass media most notably the TV, the movies and the newspaper have ensured that the informational inputs of the vast mass of humanity is similar. And also that it is substandard, as it must, being governed by the dictates of commerce more than of art, science or morality. So in an organisation or a family, when you ask someone else for an opinion, he invariably mouths what you yourself have been thinking, being a cognitive clone of yours, unless of course he has a vested interest, in which case his opinion is worse than no opinion at all. So the safety of nos is nothing but a mass mirage.

This is the horror of conformity. When we are no different from anyone else, we are both individually useless and collectively dispensable. No wonder, though we have more graduates than at any other point of time in the whole of human history, we don’t produce geniuses like Newton, Shakespeare and Kalidas any more. Only mediocrity can be mass produced, not genius. Worse, mass production of the mediocre has come at the cost of nurturing of the genius. It is as if one man’s genius has been divided and distributed a hundredth each into a hundred individuals.

Fortunately for humanity, in spite of these odds, a minority still has the heart to go after what they feel is right for them, mauled as they sometimes are by the pressures of conformity. They know their heart lies in something and they can not be happy unless they pursue the life of their dreams, whatever may be the commercial viability of their venture. Fortunately also, such people develop an uncanny knack for doing excellently what they choose to do, thereby often earning enough and sometimes, much more than enough. You would often find these people are trend setters and leaders in their field.

The lesson is, try to find out where your real interest lies and try spending more time in sharpening those skills. Do not give up your current vocation in huff, but keep trying to hone your skills in your chosen area. A year or two may give you the break to put your idea into practice thereby giving you both the confidence and the money to stand on your own. And then sooner than you realise, you may be floating in a deluge of money and fame. In addition to the happiness that was yours the moment you embarked upon the venture.

The world is calling you. Life is calling you. Now, and all the time. Get up and get going. Answer your call!