Work for yourself, not for your employer
I did a lot of trainings for a big PSU bank. Entering a training room was no great pleasure, but it was work!
In a class of 50 people, about 42 would be present. On the second day about 37 would be present. However this 37 would include 8 who were not there on the first day.
After a couple of trainings, the conversation went as follows:
Me: How did you get a job in the bank?
Class: We wrote a competitive exam, it used to be very tough…..blah blah blah
Me: What are your children doing?
Class: Engineer, MBA, CA, CFA, is working in US….etc.
Me: Does it mean your kids are smart and doing well?
Class: Of course, they are smart.
Me: They are YOUR children, so does it mean you are smart?
Class: Yes. (However the vigor was lower).
Me: Now let me explain what happened. You were smart when you joined, then you stopped LEARNING. Your rationale was “My salary is fixed. It is in a band. Even if I do some other courses, MY SALARY will NOT go up. So even though the bank benefits by my learning, THEY will not pay me more.
Class: Grudgingly yes.
Me: So to PUNISH the bank, you stopped learning, so you stopped growing. Who LOST? The bank or you?
Moral: Learn and work for YOURSELF. Even if your employer does not recognize your efforts, the market will. Your immediate boss may take you along to another company. Your competitor may want you. Your customer may want to employ you – this constantly happens to good salesmen.
Work for YOURSELF, not for your employer. Growth will happen, if not immediately it will happen in some time.
Dheeraj
Good one.. I also made mistake for not adding skills for long time… But doing it for past 1 year and feeling lots of confidence in myself as compared to 1 year before.
One should never stop learning.. and keeping studying.. it will always be useful..
Just a small incident.. one my of friend’s father was in semi-government org. which was closed as it was non-profit making.. All employees went to court to get their jobs back.. my friend’s father had done Master of Science and he started taking tutions to keep things running.. With that tution fees.. they went past that troubled time..
Sreedhar
Very good article. No age bar for learning and one needs to learn not to prove anything to anyone!
T S Ashok
Human beings become dead when he stops learning..
Atul
Hi Subra,
Absolutely right. I stopped grude against my company for not giving hikes and promotion. Else I have added certifications and degrees to my portfolio and that too with my own funds.
Regards
Atul
mani
That’s true. I have learnt noticing my father doing that mistake. Doing with passion and perseverance will pay off sometimes if not today. Keeping always updated ourselves helps a lot.
Sriram Narayanan
This is a nice post, Subra.
I can tell you that I have lots of colleagues who have stopped learning because they feel that they’ve “arrived”, and that they’ve “been there, done that”.
I’m going to post this link on our company’s internal discussion forum.
P.V.R. Somanadha Sarma
Nice post. Should be read by every employee
sudhir
Great One !!……………for inspiration
rohit
very true quoting Munger
” Be a learning machine , I have seen people who grow much bigger in life -they are not very smart , not always very hard working , but they are learning machine ,every night they are more smarter than the previous morning , that definitely helps in long run “
ritz
so true. Learning helps you to grow. people seems to be satisfied with their jobs, their routine work.