The Hindu Business Line : Lessons from the beach

My wife and I were in Goa as invitees to an off-site meeting in a company that I work with. It’s a great way to combine some work with lots of fun! The day’s work was done and we decided to take a walk on the beach. Like children, we wet our feet in the waves and felt a marvellous sense of peace and release from the pressures of life. We walked on and Chandrika, my wife, pointed out some very interesting pebbles that the receding wave had left behind. We sudde nly decided that a pebble collection would be a great replacement for the tired looking artificial flowers which we had made the centre piece of the decor in the living room of our apartment. Casting our dignity aside, we scrambled around in the wet sand trying to pick up as many colourful pebbles as we could find before the next wave hid them from us. When we set out on our walk we had no idea that we would be rooting around this way on the beach, but now that we were at it, we decided to give it our all.

The first day we could not collect much as we did not have a bag to carry the pebbles in. We felt that we had missed out on many interesting specimens and decided to come back the next day fully armed with bags to carry the pebbles in. When we came to the beach the next day, we found to our dismay that the high tide had set in and the waves were very rough and powerful. We stuck to our task and waded in.

We discovered that the weak receding waves were being overpowered by the incoming waves and most of the pebbles stayed buried deep in the sand. Once in a while we would glimpse one and we developed a technique to put our foot on it to mark the spot. Most often, we were disappointed that we could not locate the pebble as it was buried deep in the sand when the waves receded. We were obviously trying too hard to hold on to something; interestingly, what we wanted so desperately was something that was not even remotely in our mind when we had first arrived on the beach. We went back feeling a little depressed at our lack of success.

The sea, the sand and the pebbles can teach us many valuable lessons. In our professional lives, when things are going well, we feel fine. The momentum shifts and things don’t seem to go our way any more. The way things are today, this can happen even if we are performing well. It might just be that the circumstances can suddenly change for the company and our roles may get truncated or in extreme cases, made redundant. Naturally enough, this will be the time when we feel most deeply upset about the way life is treating us; the sheer injustice of it all.

Just like the receding waves revealed a great variety of pebbles which had earlier lain buried, we discover a lot more about ourselves and hitherto latent possibilities in our lives, professionally or personally, when the tides recede. Our natural tendency will be to hold on to the familiar things that have given us our strength and take comfort from them. This may not be enough in a world that is fast changing and when success lies in adapting quickly. We have to use our old strengths as the base and continue to build new ones as we face the future. When troubles strike and the tide goes out — this is the best time to look for those glittering new pebbles that can help change our lives. It is then time to rise above our disappointments and act to make our future happen. The low tide is a great help as it gives us the chance to recast our strategies and build a new platform to succeed again.

If there is one certainty, it is that this will probably happen multiple times in our working lives; much as the seas constantly wax and wane. Perhaps there is a lot to be said for being a beachcomber!

(The writer is advisor to 3i Infotech, Manipal Education & Medical Group and IDFC Pvt Equity.)

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