17th November 2009
Develop Your Faculties
When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow
The dictionary meaning of the word `faculty' means mental or physical power. In order to succeed in life, we have to work hard. What decides the difference between success or failure is not how many hours we worked, but whether we got the result we aimed at. Success is also a factor of how much harder we had to work, to get the result we got. When it comes to achieving what we want to achieve, the quality of our achievement is also very important. This quality depends upon whether we work hard or we work smart. Working hard is not the correct way. We may not have all the time to devote to the task. Smart people know how to achieve the result with the least effort. For this we need to develop certain critical faculties. These include skills such as: thinking creatively, planning for the contingencies, developing inter personal relationship, building a team, motivating and empowering others, leading others, problem solving, etc.
Without developing these faculties, we will find the task on hand very difficult to cope with. In the normal course of our work, we may not understand how important it is to develop this aspect of our personality. We may be so much engaged in our work that we overlook this aspect. We may assume that we have these faculties already developed inside us and that we will be able to summon the same in times of need. This may not be so. Developing these faculties is like developing our biceps or triceps. They are developed by systematic work outs.
Today set aside some time to list the critical faculties that you need to reach the peak in your career. Then evolve an action plan to acquire and develop such faculties.
N C Sridharan
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