WHEN MY 77 year - old mother met with an accident recently and fractured her hip, during one of her "dark nights of the soul", she expressed the view that people like her had already lived out their productive lives and had nothing more to contribute to society. She recalled that in the olden days, people had a much shorter life span and did not usually have to contend with the spectre of degenerative diseases that would render them increasingly frail and dependent on others. She also mentioned that once one got to that point, it was a frightening situation because while some people were lucky to be well taken care of, many others were treated callously, as burden.
Since then I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be productive. If my mother in her late seventies worries about being productive, I need to worry too. Often as I buy and read business magazines at airports and railway stations, I realise that one of the features of today’s knowledge-based economy is that often, the people needed are youngsters, who bring with them the latest technology and domain knowledge. It is of course another matter that today’s young people become tomorrow’s middle-aged and today’s emerging platform is tomorrow’s obsolescence.
I have noted though that in the manufacturing industry, experience carries more value than youth perhaps because technology does not evolve as rapidly there. The trick is in reinventing ourselves at every age, every decade, so that we remain productive forever.
But how to we define productivity? Is it all about moving our hands and feet and being seen to be agile and mobile? I think that is how youth defines it - speed is everything and you ought to be always seen as doing something. Being productive is being active; being productive is being proactive - being there before any one else has got there. Of course these attributes are important - doing the right thing, at the right time and at the right place is a sine qua non of being strategic.
There is a trait, a quality, that we use everyday all our life but it is one that is forever hiding itself in the shadows. It is called wisdom. Wisdom is never a part of the curriculum of any management school or institution but can only be learnt on the job as one goes through life in its many shades. And the longer one lives, the longer one is engaged with the world, the sharper its nuances as it is expressed out and lived out in life’s diverse situations.
Sometimes, I feel that we have not quite learnt to value and evaluate the weight of experience, wisdom and the value addition they provide. This explains our propensity to regard the gifts they bring and the insights they provide as the obsolete thinking of senile minds. Because their understanding and practice is often not expressed in the here-and-now jargon, we often look upon their opinion and insight with a dismissive air.
Wisdom and its importance cannot be ever weighed on a scale. Its power is subtle and its influence nuanced. It cannot be easily captured on balance sheets; nor can its astuteness be easily encashed as dividends. Yet this is the one commodity that our senior citizens have in abundance and is on tap; and yet it is a resource we rarely remember to tap as we busy ourselves paying obeisance at the altar of youth. The spring fountain of youth is indeed enthralling but can it match the depth of eyes and ears which, having seen off spring, have witnessed, summer, autumn and now winter?
By Shantanu Dutta
Source : http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=126361
Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.
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