During one of my informal chats with young promising executives, we were discussing generally about planning one’s career and one’s future. Being personally opinionated more strongly about spontaneity and innovativeness, I am not a person who believes in excessive planning. A basic charter of workflow and then a journey of spontaneous decision making and innovation has brought me to where I am today, which is not exactly a bitter picture but quite a pretty one by God’s Divine Grace.
During the conversation, one of the executives asked me, how important was reading? He reiterated that his father, who is a successful entrepreneur, always advises him to read. I replied in affirmation, that it is extremely important to have a reading habit. That is perhaps the key signs of being not only a successful person but also a great business leader and visionary. To elaborate my point I very spontaneously started explaining the context with a small story.
I started with knowledge. Reading is but the accumulation of knowledge in any form and context. Not just restricted to books, but articles, advertisements, tagline, biographies, case studies, small stories, novels, business books and et al. Reading material are but means adopted by different people to put forth their thoughts about a particular context or situation and weave their thoughts with words and gradually reveal the outcome of such a process in a given situation or context. So in other words, if I have read two books in my life, apart from my own thinking, I will have two other views/opinion/approaches to a particular context or a situation. So reading is adding resources to my rationality and thinking and increasing the number of options with which I look at a particular context or situation.
I decided that it would be better if I would explain things with an example. So I started by saying that I had read about – What to do if I had reached a crossing of four roads each in North, South, East and West respectively, and didn’t know what to do next. My own gut would tell me to go straight ahead and my acquired pieces of knowledge would apprise me of the options to take the other four directions or perhaps take out a map and check the directions to curtail the complexity of the situation and get straight to the solution. But what next? The problem arising and then I solving it.
Knowledge in life equips one with the skill to look into a problem or a crisis or chaos with different perspectives. The solution is one perspective, not the only one. What about finding an opportunity in that chaos? What if I just let go of the solution and see if there is more to it?
An example of this would be identifying the underlying fact that this crossing was a point where similar instances like mine would have happened and would happen innumerable times in future. So what if I let go of the solution which was imperative and look at the problem with a new perspective? So I let go of the solution and re-look at the problem. I change my perspective of approach. Again the knowledge I had acquired through reading an incident or an occurrence or a business model or perhaps a case study or for that matter a fiction thriller, was that which made me change my perspective.
I suddenly discover an opportunity. I decide to forego my journey temporarily and focus on the crossing. I start learning more about the crossing, the places that it takes the various roads to, the nature and character of the roads, the demography, the different variables of safety, road conditions and every minute detail. I have the crossing and every road till their respective destinations at my fingertips. So my next step is, I station myself at the crossroad and wait for the next individual to cross. Sooner or later, as the routine would command, one after the other a passerby would come and stand there. I would apprise the person with the requisite details and in turn, take something to equate the value of the information. So here I have an activity of providing information of value, which is quite a lot, considering the stress and tiredness of the passerby and the natural urge to reach the destination at the earliest, and getting something in return equivalent to that value and both the giver and receiver are happy at the arrangement.
A business is born. Next, I would naturally think about the many other such crossings that may be vexing travellers and taking away the otherwise comfort of their journey and naturally having established a well trained and groomed alternative at the first crossing I start for the next one and the process goes on and on. That is business expansion.
I subsequently think about customer comfort and a high CRM quotient and naturally, I have a more expansive outlook in mind. My next effort would be to go across territories and offer the same solutions at different crossroads in those territories. Understanding the expenses at such a scale of operation, I immediately intend to automate the solution and try to convert the solution to something that may be available as a document or an application with both cloud and console functionality. I develop the application/document and now I am catering to crossroads across the globe. This is market capitalisation through business automation.
This is just one example I put forth to state the importance of reading. It must, and I repeat, must, be one of the regular practices of an aspiring professional, a working professional, an entrepreneur, a start-up planner, a business leader and each and every individual who wish to create a graceful picture of their individual careers.
