Give it your best, then improve upon it

FY2019-20 was one of the hardest ones of my professional career. Heading Mumbai has always been a challenge due to the myriad of challenges, a lot of them being external and hence providing the leaders with limited control.

We started the year well with a steady Q1 and then the Rain Gods unleashed their fury. We witnessed the season's highest rainfall, Mumbai had seen in almost a century. My entire supply chain was deluged with orders from wanting customers and lack of supply due to the difficulty in movement due to the heavy downpour

"Give it your best and let Fate handle the rest"

To make matters worse for us, we had planned to move our mother warehouse to a new location to plan for future capacities and get better cost structures. The resulting action was pure chaos. Unserved orders kept piling up and my ability to handle the same was under serious strain. My guiding philosophy of life, which was to "give it my best and let fate handle the rest" didn't seem to be working. For the first time in my life, I felt like "My Best" was not "good enough". I generally see myself as a very confident person and hence this rare moment of self-doubt was very unsettling.

It was demotivating me further and I was sure it would eventually start to impact my performance. I reached out to various sources for solutions and inspiration. They tried their best to motivate me and guide me. While most of the advice received was very good and was helping me sustain myself and keep working hard I was not able to overcome the cloud of self-doubt which was looming over me. It was in this moment that I found a solution from my spouse. My wife is (in my opinion) a perfectionist. Nothing ever seems to be "perfect" for her. I feel at times she is too hard on herself because of the same. I have seen her dishing out great work but never calling any of it to be her "best work". Me, on the other hand seem to come across my "best work yet" every few months. The topmost praise from her would be to call some of her output as "One of her best work yet". In her mind even after dishing out something great, she knows that she can outperform herself and deliver something better. I reached out to her with my conundrum. Her advise was what finally got me motivated. As per her "Everyone of us, though unique is but a tiny insignificant speck in the Universe. However, the universe itself is unique like us and hence each of us represents our very own super-tiny, inconsequential, universe. It is impossible to measure and identify the dimensions and limits of the universe since it is ever expanding. We as individuals also have to continue our expanse. The day you reach your potential is the day you stop growing. The day you stop growing is the day you start dying. While you may feel a sense of exasperation at my feelings of second guessing myself and being too hard on myself, it is this very feeling which motivates me to keep growing and be better everyday than the last. This philosophy might not work for all since one strategy doesnt fit all scenarios. You drive your self belief from your confidence of "being the best" while I drive mine from the confidence of "being better everyday than yesterday". There are times when this pressue gets to me and I start feeling drained. Those are the times when I look at you for motivation. I think right now you need to enjoy the "Pursuit of Success" rather than worry about success itself. Whenever you get stuck, remember that the only one who is pressurizing you is you yourself. It's empowering to gain that control."

"The fun is in the Chase"

It struck a deep chord with me somewhere and I resumed with a renewed sense of vigour that my "best" is way far and "yet to come". I can't give up now. My team worked really hard to keep improving and made drastic strides. We had a solid Q3 and even better trending Q4. Towards the end of Q4 though, Covid-19 struck India. My best-laid plans were shattered to say the least. Right now me and my team are trying our best to help out as many people as possible. I am getting motivation from many quarters with so many friends, colleagues and at times strangers coming ahead and appreciating our efforts. In this sea of appreciation though it was hard to ignore the sharp rocks of censure. I think its human nature to not finding it easy to let go of criticism. I sum up my feelings in two words, "it hurts". For every ten people I help out individually every day, I know there are hundreds who I am not able to help. Among those hundreds, a few rightly get vocal about their condemnation. What hurts me, even more, is that I can see everyone in my team putting out more than 150% effort with many (including me) even putting in 16 hours of time to resolving issues and achieving only 50% of the result of what we would normally achieve. While it tends to get to me at times, overall I feel that the lessons learnt by me in the Monsoons are helping me tide over these hard times. We work hard as we realize that the country needs us in these hard times. We will continue to give it "our best" and then come back the next day and do it even better.