Gotta Put Something In Before You Can Get Anything Out

 

Sometime back, my brother [a licensed engineer] faced some career challenges.  Seeing his worsening 'downtime',  I gave a 'Take it OR Leave it' proposal WHEREIN I recommended for him to switch careers, moving into I.T. as an Oracle developer/programmer based on three non-negotiable conditions, namely:

• THAT he has to totally forget all the sweat & sacrifices he endured until he became a licensed engineer
• THAT he'll start his I.T. career as an entry-level trainee
• THAT as an entry-level trainee, for the duration of his on-the-job training, his salary will be 0.00

Today, he is a Naturalized Singapore citizen alongside his Singapore-born kids, of which the eldest is the youngest member of the Singapore football team.  Bottom line here is, to quote American Author Zig Ziglar:  You Gotta Put Something In Before You Can Get Anything Out.  Problem is, in this sort of 'instantaneous' world we live featuring EXPRESS LANEs and FAST LANEs, many of us get off-tracked❌❌❌

BUT I guess that's a no-brainer as everyone knows it.  WHAT leads to confusion and bedlam is the mix-up between EFFORTS versus RESULTS.  At the workplace, once I did witness our big boss pulling aside my colleague and told him frankly that his work ethic + effort were NOT in question BUT it's the results [or the lack thereof] were in question.  And I observed that my colleague was kind of shocked because he confided to me that he was viewing his efforts as a measure of his success versus weighing the results he was supposed to be producing.  I commiserated with him then as I sensed it was a difficult conversation💥💥💥

From my end, I've done a fair amount of efforts exerted to really WALK THE TALK for this principle and allow me to pause and admit that this principle has become the very core of my numerous annual performance one-on-one's with my team members BUT to ease things up, I proactively set expectations by laying down this principle up front, at the start of the fiscal year [and that conversation was documented even in our HR's performance system.  At hindsight, I realized that there is a plurality of people [NOT just @workplace] WHO may NOT be clearly aware of this principle, thereby struggling to differentiate between EFFORTS versus RESULTS😖😖😖

Our takeaway:  From my observation post up @lighthouse, this has been the huge disconnect across many of us [and that included me those years WHEN I was very 'raw' and a novice @workplace.  The first magic word I absorbed then was EFFORTS, wrongly thinking then that as long as I exerted EFFORTS, that leads me to be inching towards success.  BUT alas, that was a fallacity, NOT realizing that IF the results were NOT as WHAT I expected, all those efforts will go for naught.  YES dude, YOU GOTTA PUT SOMETHING IN BEFORE YOU CAN GET ANYTHING OUT.  Gets???