Above & Beyond

Last decade’s most successful NFL organization is without a doubt New England Patriots (Pats). Even though their Super Star is Tom Brady, but Gem of New England Patriots team is Kevin Faulk. First of all, why he is called Gem of Pats?

1.    Loyal to his team, 11 years with Pats.
2.    3,550 rushing yard.
3.    16 rushing TD
4.    424 receiving and 3,667 receiving yard.
5.    Receiving TD 15

Based on his statistics, one can easily jump into conclusion that he is all-round player; hence he is qualified for Gem of Pats title. But the truth is different, Kevin started his career as Running Back, he was an excellent running back. During his tenure with Pats, over a period of time, his coach asked him to do other jobs also like full back, punt return. Those are not glamorous position in NFL, but Kevin took those jobs without any hesitant rather than quit to join other team as Running Back, which made him a Gem of his team with his astonishing all round performance.

Kevin’s success story makes me think something else which is very important to our changing world and lifestyle. Now we are living in a flat world where the luxury of doing one task per one human is gone. We can’t say “my job description is XYZ and you are asking me to do ABC”. The tasks outside of job description also have to be done as long as we can do it with or without some self-learning. 

There is nothing wrong that a developer tests an application, a architect helps developing some small piece of code, a manager runs some test scripts, a QA engineer debugging a code, a store manager checkout customer while sales clerk out for an emergency.

Advice – It’s all free

If advice is a commodity then it is mostly freely available/exchange commodity in this world. We are all ready to give advice to others about many things. In fact, based my unscientific research, 70-75% of our communication is advice but without advice one can’t reach our goals also. Because most of us inspire with someone who are capable or scholar and their advice are sermon to us. But the point is what to take, what to ignore are real challenge.

Advice from following topic from unprofessional can be ignored straight-out.

1.     Medical: This is no brainer, whenever we seek advice from a group of people, say 10 people; we would get 10 different advices from 10 different people.

2.     Investment: We all know about this, we had bitter experience again and again but we need to follow advice as is from professional or let them handle our finance. Most of us burnt our money because of half-cooked professional advice.

3.     Office politics: We should not take other’s advice anything related to workplace politics. Because workplace politics are very unique and no one in a position to determine what exactly happening inside a private organization, hence outsiders can’t fathom exactly what is happening to us, to make a judgment or advise us for better.

4.     Kid’s Education: This is also similar to Medical, 10 people gives 10 different advice. But we should about our kids and we have to make plan or assist them to choose their future.

5.     Time Management: We all have our unique way of doing our day by day activity hence we should not take other’s advice what to do what when how etc. We have to use our instinct to perform our activity.

6.     Shopping: Each one has their own opinion about what to buy where to buy and when to buy. Getting advice won’t help much. There are some instance where i bought some stuff based on my wife's advice but later on i wasn’t satisfied with it but i couldn’t throw it away because she might feel bad and i couldn’t use it because i didn’t like it. 

7.     Web sites: There are one trillion web sites are there now. Each of us comfortable with some, taking advice which one is good and what to read are not good.

Bottom Line

Any advice from spouse, parents, siblings, close friends, and well wishers (personal level) peers and supervisor (professional level) are considerable. We have to make fair judgment based on their advice, all others can be carefully consider if we are not sure about it, ignore it.

Cheer up

As soon as we are into New Year 2011, we are all some kind of jubilant mood and after some time it fade away. It is very natural but based on my research New Year is the one which creates lot of enthusiasm but won’t keep up. One of main reason is, weather wise January is dull month and most depressive day of the year falls on January 25^th that is exactly a month after Christmas, to add salt, all credit card bill start arriving on around last week of January which has most of our Christmas gift shopping.

As a blogger my job is to encourage all of you to keep up your new year resolutions and cheer up during these depressive days. 

Here are some tips.

1. Normal people set 1 or 2 goals and try to achieve at least 80-90% of end result. So don’t set some aggressive goals.
2. The average times before people to quit smoking are 9. So believe me, if you couldn’t keep up resolution please don’t depress try again and again.
3. Do most of fun activity during first months of a year. For example, i started blogging regularly from a January month which was very relaxing moments to forget weather and mind concentrated on one activity, now i’m helping my son to complete his Star wars Complete saga Xbox game, again believe me his yelling at me when i screwed up anything is really fun.
4.  Plan for spring and summer during January and February. Whenever i say plan that doesn’t mean that step by step project plan kind of thing. All we need is, if our resolution is weight less, and then read about bicycle, trails information’s,explore groups and get a complete picture of bicycling.
5. Resolutions are not made for New Year’s only. We can set resolutions any time of the year like birthdays, father day and anniversary etc.
6. Resolutions aren't final either, modify/add based on our own choices.
7. If your resolution is related to money/saving, then please use good money management software or use your bank’s online services.
8. Donate money to charity or volunteer during these initial months A) this time of year elderly and poor people need more help B) the satisfaction from that keep on us to roll this entire year.