Monday, May 28, 2007

What does Virendra Sehwag need?

This is a classic conundrum of all successful people. When they are succeeding, they do not want to take a pause, reflect and understand ‘why are they succeeding’. At that time, if someone stops them to reflect, they claim that they are too busy and occupied with success. They argue that ‘explanations do not help’. However, when they encounter failure, they are unable to chalk a course of action in a limited time-window. With limited time at their command, and even more free advisors to suggest, they cannot figure out ‘what went wrong’. They are stuck.

You will find that all sportsman face this problem one time or another in their life. When they ‘rebound’ in time, we never understand what happened. But when they cannot rebound in time, we mourn their failure; such as we are doing for Virendra Sehwag, Irfan Pathan and now perhaps Munaf Patel. In the past we have heard about cricketers like Akash chopra, Vinod Kambli and others who never rebounced.

During my 18 years of research on careers, I have found that all successful individuals are afflicted with this ‘virus’ some time or another. In professions like sports, failure gets noticed because it is visible to everyone. In corporate life this failure is not visible. It is therefore unknown to most people. But I have seen many careers ‘derailed’ due to this virus: some never recover, few recover and chose different paths, few become superstitious because they are confused, while few others blame bosses for their affliction.

But the root cause is somewhere else. It is the lack of framework to succeed. Without a ‘framework’ of how one succeeds, one can never figure out the role of 'output system' in excelling. Only a framework can help us understand our real 'skills' and take preventive actions, if required, to gain the requisite skill. Only with a framework (which I call as model) can one diagnose and not react to low performance, because it could be due to improper designed output system. On the other hand, one may respond quickly to 'low performance’,  because skill-gaps are within us. Please see this blog to understand this better.

This is why you will find Enlight, the first career building model, useful to take charge of your life. You will find an introduction to this model, both on this website, as well as in the book ‘The five great myths of career building’, published by Macmillan

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