Deserve, Aspire & Achieve

It was last Sunday, I was having a chat with my child hood friend over the dinner table, and she started telling me that I shall get a life partner like the one I aspire for. I was so happy to hear that, I mean who wouldn’t.
But my next expression was why, She said,
”If you deserve something and then strive for it, and you will definitely get it”.

We need to deserve before we aspire....a take away for life

It was just another day in office and I was frustrated as usual. I was expected to do something that I thought even my higher ups would find it difficult to accomplish. But that’s life and sometimes you need to accept it as it is. This triggered me to think of what is that I could have done differently, in order to attain the same outcome. I could think of a few options but found none of them to be without its fair share of risk. It seemed that the decision was not to identify the correct solution, but to identify the solution with the risk that rightly matched with our risk appetite, not so easy exercise to do after all.
Life had taught me a lesson.....

So whenever I try to see myself in a position of importance I always try and analyse whether I deserve to be there, in terms of knowledge, expertise and experience of handling a similar situation earlier. If I don’t then, I should not aspire for it. To aspire for, is not just to have something but to deserve it and do justice to it . This brings me to the point that we all have aspirations of making it big in a very short span of time. We all aspire for profiles at work where we can apply all that we have learnt as students, but do we ever look back and analyse whether we really have the knowledge and expertise to do justice to the work that we crave for. Just the other day I met my friends over dinner when, in one of our discussions one of us was talking about having to wait for 10 years to be in a position to take the big decisions in her company. My immediate reaction to it was “can’t wait for so along’’, only for me to admit immediately that: yes it’s a difficult job and even my boss is unable to do justice to that. Patience is a virtue, but I am unsure why our generation has lost it.
When I look back, I realise how foolish I was to react......

Our aspirations should always stem from our capabilities and not from our fantasies

Does that mean we stop aspiring.....
The relationship: to deserve, then aspire and to achieve, seems unidirectional, but does that mean we stop aspiring!
Let us try to explore the possibility of a bidirectional relationship.....
We all dream, dream about what we want from life, what we want to do in life. To fulfil our dreams, we aspire. Our aspirations serve as the destination to reach and we do, all that is required, to build our capabilities and expertise, to deserve to achieve our goals and aspirations. This brings us to the point that the seed for all our efforts to built capability and expertise generate from our goals and aspirations and there exists a cyclic relationship between to deserve and to aspire. We aspire, build capabilities and expertise to deserve to aspire and then achieve, only to set higher goals and aspirations and follow the path of developing to deserve, then aspire and finally achieve.

Life is all about being realistic in terms of our strengths, setting goals which can stretch us that bit without creating unnecessary stress, achieve and in the process carve out an unique place for ourselves under the sun

To conclude.....
Most of us who have joined the corporate world after college, must have realised by now that our aspirations of an ideal quality of work may be too farfetched and many of us must be thinking of or tried to curb their aspirations to fit themselves in where they are, what they are doing, only to see themselves happy. But every time we do that, we should remind ourselves: it’s good to be realistic and be happy with what we have, but it’s our aspirations that shall be the seed to develop ourselves now, to deserve to aspire and finally achieve what we are all here for, in the future.