Welcome to the Deploy Yourself Newsletter. Every two weeks I share about what impactful coaching and leadership look like. I also share the most insightful lessons and stories I encountered in the last two weeks. You can also read this issue online.

Do More Of This, Less Of That

I am sure the below points will help you be a little less busy, and appreciate the wonder of this moment a little more.

  • Praise people more, criticize them less
  • Give people credit more, blame them less
  • Make your decisions yourself more, give advice to others less
  • Use both emotion and reason to make wise decisions more, make only rational or only emotional decisions less
  • Listen to others more, ask for others’ understanding less (or later)
  • Say Thank You more often, Gossip less
  • Appreciate what you have more, feel envious about what you don’t have less

If what you read above made you realize something deep, hit reply, and share the insight that you had?

Articles and Stories Which Have Fascinated Me

One

It Is What You Leave Behind That Defines Success.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

From Go Kiss The World – A Wonderful Commencement Speech by Subroto Bagchi in 2006

Two

You Are Not The Work You Do; You Are The Person You Are.

Author Toni Morrison shares a lesson from her father:

“…one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.”

Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

  1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
  2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
  3. Your real life is with us, your family.
  4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.”

From the article The Work You Do, The Person You Are by Toni Morrison

That’s it for now. If you have any questions, just hit reply. All the best,

Sumit

(Twitter) @SumitGupta
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