Human ResourceFUL
Understand Your Potential
iLeader – What Steve Jobs Taught Us
Oct 9th
Steve Jobs has died. Apple lost a creative genius and the world lost an amazing human being. I first came to knew about his personality in 2008. After my MBA I was searching on YouTube for CEOs talks and there I found this Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Address and I said Wao! What a guy. From that time onward I used Steve Jobs as an example whenever I talk about Leadership, about Innovation, about Belief. His example of connecting the dots, is the best lesson i learned from his life, his struggle, his determination after so many failures, and the strength of his personality is amazing. This guy not just inspired me but millions of people around the world. Here are some of the lessons we can learn from Jobs.
Stop Blaming the System
It’s a human nature that we blame somebody else for our failures. We blame our parents, our teachers, the whole society for what life hardships we are facing right now. But shifting the blame from here to there will not help us any further. This is always a debate when people arguing about the economic situations and hardships they are facing in career or chasing their dreams, but just wait a second, I am not saying that accept or settle for a bad system. All I am saying is that accepting it as it is and start moving further.
Lets here look at the life of Steve Jobs, he not only started with difficulties but also lived his life through difficulties, his parents put him for adaption, he got bankrupt, he was kicked out of the company he made, Keep in mind that Jobs started from Zero. He wasn’t born at house of some billionaire; he decided to drop out from college as he saw no value in the college tuition for what his parents were paying. As jobs said in his speech “It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna Temple“.
Keep Growing
As Jobs left the college he started taking calligraphy classes at Reeds College. Although he didn’t knew what practical application would be of learning those serif and san serif typefaces but he did it as it fascinated him. He didn’t learn it to get a job; he just learned it as it looks beautiful and artistic to him. As Jobs said “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography”.
Believe in Yourself & God
Always have a strong belief in God and yourself. Most of the times we are doing what others say us to do. We fear failure and we fear our decisions. We decide our careers as what our parents wants us to be or what this or that guy is saying. Listening to your own voice and understanding it smartly is very important. As Jobs said “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Plan Your Life but Never Give-up on Failure
As it is said life is not a bed of roses and life is always unpredictable. This doesn’t mean we stop planning. There are two approaches to live your life. Either live life with apprehensions, always fearing the failure or actually start making some goals in life, to plan your life, step by step even it is a small step but that’s life is all about. People who don’t take step number 1, never take step number 2. Use your resources to the best you can in your life. As Jobs said “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice”. There is not a single successful person in this planet who never failed, so never fear failure. It’s not a mistake that leads to a failure but the response to that mistake that can lead to failure. Take failure as a learning and keep moving. Look here is how Jobs took his failure when he was fired from Apple “It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife:. Steve Jobs also said: “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year… It’s very character-building.”
My friends, Steve Jobs death has brought a wave of sadness around the world. Nobody can avoid death but we can sure make a difference the way we live. His words and his work is an inspiration for us. Here is what Steve Jobs said about Death “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true”.
Steve Jobs, you will surely be missed…
A Day without Caffeine
Jul 8th
Yesterday I attended a very informative session on “Sleep Management” by Timelenders. Sleep undoubtly is one of those activities on which we spend most of our life time yet very few people have awareness or try to manage their sleep.
The main objective of the workshop was to find the optimal sleep level and avoid stimulants or routines that disturb regularity of body systems. Our body is just like a machine, if you know the machine well and care you will have the great results. One major factor which was discussed is the use of Tea and Coffee in Pakistani office environment. People are so addicted to drinking tea that they cannot even start the work without having tea. Black tea has between 40 and 120 mg caffeine per eight ounce serving. Here are some of the findings of my research about Tea /Caffeine.
Caffeine is a stimulant that affects Central Nervous System (CNS). Caffeine is present in tea, coffee, chocolates, colas and many energy drinks. Mountain Dew is famous for its high caffeine content (54 mg approx). Most of us are addicted to caffeine but are unaware of its harmful effects or maybe we think it’s not harmful as everybody is using it in daily life. So here are some harmful effects of caffeine you should know:
Caffeine has Diuretic properties
Just because a cup of tea is a liquid don’t think otherwise. Due to its diuretic properties caffeine elevates the rate of urination and over dosage can lead to dehydration.
Half-life of up to 6 hours or more
A drug’s half-life is determined by finding out how long it takes a medication or drug to be eliminated from blood plasma by one half of its strength. The half-life of caffeine is about six hours or more. That means that if you consume a big cup of coffee with 200 mg of caffeine in it at 3:00 p.m., by 9:00 p.m. about 100 mg of that caffeine is still in your system. You may be able to fall asleep, but your body will probably miss out on the benefits of deep sleep.
Build-up of Tolerance
Tolerance refers to a decrease in responsiveness to a drug after repeated drug exposure. After long term use caffeine consumers build a caffeine tolerance, thus causing more caffeine to be consumed so the user can feel the effects.
Disrupts Sleep Architecture
Studies have demonstrated that caffeine disrupts sleep. When caffeine is consumed immediately before bedtime or throughout the day, sleep may be delayed, total sleep time reduced, normal stages of sleep altered, and the quality of sleep decreased.
Caffeine no doubts either through tea or coffee increases alertness for a small period of time but afterwards it propels us throughout the day. It does not give us energy; it stimulates our nervous system and adrenals. That’s not energy, that’s stress. The side effects of caffeine are much more than its benefits.
Today is my first caffeine free day. I used to have 4 to 5 cups daily, so by suddenly stopping it I feel a little headache but believe me I am happy and feeling fresh. After a long time in my life I think I have made a right choice. So goodbye to tea, I will now experiment different herbal tea flavors (ofcourse ones without caffeine).
For more information: Sleep Management Workshop
Understanding Skill and Potential
Aug 29th
Have you seen somebody saying “Well that guy has a lot of potential” or “I don’t see any potential of growth in him”. HR people are usually confused with this term and as this confusion leads to a wrong hiring decision most of the time.
So what is Potential?
Potential is the power, capability or possibility to do something. Apply this definition to a machine (motorcar), and then the potential of the car would be the horsepower or the engine of the car.
What is Human Potential?
Let me define what we call “Human Potential” not by definitions but by using the same example of a machine in relation to another concept which we call the “SKILL”.
Do you find any relationship between “Intelligence (IQ)” of a person and his “Thinking”?
Intelligence is the potential of the brain. Possibly the speed of transformations which take place along the neurons in brain. Intelligence is the Potential of the mind; Thinking is the skill with which it is used.
Motorcar and his Driver
The Horsepower of the car (The Engine) is the potential of the car. But the way a car performs does not only depend on its potential (the Horsepower). The performance of a car also depends on the skill of the driver. You may have a very powerful car but you cannot get the peak performance from that car (in case you are a bad driver). So Potential of anything is affected by the way (skill) it is used.
Computer and its Software
If you buy a computer suppose Pentium 4, you cannot go home and say “Woo I have got the best computer” but you also have to have the best available software to get the desired or maximum performance out of that computer. No matter how efficient the computer you have, you cannot get the performance out of it until you have the software to use that potential of a computer.
The Most Important Computer
The most important computer we have is “The Human Brain” and the software we use human brain to function is our Thinking (the software for human brain).
How can we measure Human Potential?
We can’t measure how much potential a human brain can have, you might have heard that people like even scientific researchers or great philosophers and thinkers used even less than 10% of their brain. You cannot find someone and say “Yeah he is the guy who is using all his potential” But yes we can only judge a person’s potential by how much great ideas he have, or how much he is using his thinking to improve his potential or how much successful he was in overcoming difficulties in past etc.
It’s like someone asking me how much weight you can lift with your arms. My answer would be around 20-40 Kg but if you ask the same question with Arnold Schwarzenegger the answer might be very different as Arnold at very young age reached the top of his muscular development (potential).
Human brain unlike computers (where after certain storage the hard disk gets full) have unlimited capacity to learn and store. So if any person claims that he can well judge the human potential is actually not possible. No human or machine can judge the potential, intelligence, creativity of the person. We can only have an idea about a person by looking at his past success, failures, learning, the way he perceives things, his willingness to learn etc. Brain can continue to learn and develop throughout life. We should refresh ourselves apart from the narrow boundaries of our old experiences and try to learn about ourselves from nature, religion or any other source.
So keep on exploring your potential.
Please do write your comments or views, I want to know what you think.