If you had parked your money in mutual funds or bought a second home as an investment you would, once in a while, check how much your investments were worth, won’t you? And if things were not going the way you had planned, you would take remedial steps.
But do you do the same with your career— your biggest asset? Have you ever thought in these lines: Am I in the right place? Do I look forward to going back to office when retiring for the day? Is my career headed in the right direction?
A barometer to use would be to see whether you find yourself exploiting your potential, feel a sense of passion and commitment in the work you do, experience the satisfaction of engagement and coherence, and believe that you are able to pursue your own goals while fitting well within the organisation.
In the journey of our careers, there are times when we realise we are going wrong and a sense of failure overtakes us with an unsettling element of disconnect. Is this a cause for gloom and despair? As an investor you are not baulked by market crashes or the plateauing of realty prices. Instead you rejig your portfolio, exit from some instruments while entering others. The same should be your attitude to failures in your career.
Don’t let failure be a career-limiting move. Let us reflect on the life of Abraham Lincoln. Failure, during most of his early life, was his constant companion. But what was remarkable about him was his ability to pursue, persevere and even persuade himself to push ahead in the direction envisioned as the purpose of his life. Just take a look at how Lincoln enbraced failure after failure to finally succeed:
Failed in business: 22 years
Defeated as he tried for legislature: 23 years
Failed in business second time: 24 years
Suffered nervous breakdown: 27 years
Defeated for Speaker: 29 years
Failed to become Elector: 31 years
Failed in his bid for Congress: 34 years
Defeated for Congress again: 39 years
Failed to become Senator: 46 years
Lost bid for Vice-President: 47 years
Defeated for Senate: 49 years
Elected President of the US: 51 years
Why does failure evoke such trepidation in our hearts? I have yet to see anyone whose life is so unexciting as to have had only success. If you’re headed in the wrong direction, does it really matter how fast you are going?
When careers get derailed, the failure is not in falling down, but in staying down. If only one has the resilience to seek the silver lining behind the dark gloomy clouds that so easily block our perspective, failure is bound to fail.
Some of the ways to manage a career disconnect is to try adapting by changing yourself and your expectations to suit your workplace or shape the environment to suit you if you have the ability. If neither is feasible then move on to a new environment. Adaptability is the key to success in all the places. Be prepared for reskilling or role reversal at the new place.
Thomas Edison, the great inventor, sums it up well: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Get going, and you will find the caterpillar of failure turn into the butterfly of success.
N S Rajan, Partner, Human Capital, Ernst & Young
