Not happy with your growth? Blame it on “Not my Business” Firewall

It never ends – the bombardment with stuff that we don’t know or don’t understand.

Right from the morning news paper headlines, to college classroom, to an office meeting, to the screaming news debates on TV in the night, this stuff chases us.

In fact in the times of transitions – new class, new job, new place etc. – this stuff increases manifold and sometimes even gets on our nerves.

But we seem to have evolved a firewall. It’s called – “Not my business!”  firewall or ” Who cares?” firewall

This firewall has a temporarily soothing effect on our minds. It also saves a lot of time for us. Above all it keeps us going – although without acceleration.

So it is good that we have this firewall; at least for those of us who love status quo.

But most of us want to challenge the status quo and grow. And grow fast. To grow fast we need to learn fast which is not possible with this comprehensive firewall in place.

It’s so common to see people struggle at workplace. Struggle to cover-up their insufficient and fragmented knowledge about the product or the service they are dealing with. I know lot of people who know as much about their field today as they knew 1 -2 or 3 years back. Who sometimes falter at answering a very basic question about their field or domain or even their key performance area. At the same time we also come across people who seem to grow, adapt and evolve fast. They often impress us with a refreshing and insightful point related to the issue at hand. They could be from the field of medicine, technology, management and even politics.

We often attribute academic and professional success to intelligence with a rider that intelligence is a genetic factor. Rarely do we try to focus on the fact that learning is a function of eagerness to learn. Most of us end up learning whatever we really want to. People of all age groups have taken to social media with relative ease.

Because of the “not my business” / “who cares?” firewall, the edge of the desire to learn is rendered blunt. To enhance our learning ability and intelligence we need to sharpen this edge by lowering the firewall.

What I am trying to suggest is although by trying to learn everything we might overburden ourselves, we would do well to selectively ease our firewall or to have a selectively permeable firewall.

Why should we do this?

1. To improve our understandings of your workplace thereby pushing your performance and enhancing our image at the workplace.
2. To improve our academic grades and also our impression on the faculty. This in turn can have tremendous intangible benefits.
3. To move ahead of our competitor in business or profession because knowledge is the real power.

This is how we can do it.

1. Try to observe the words/expressions/terms that you come across very frequently but you don’t know about them.
2. Also, observe any terms, expressions, which your boss expected you or any subordinate to know but you were not aware about it.
3. Shortlist 3 to 4 of these terms and give yourself a week’s time to refer to the readily available online resources.
4. If the target is met in a week’s time, go for the next target; else push the deadline by 3-4 days.
5. Remember this should be a continuous process

If we want to know a city well, we can do so by visiting and familiarising ourselves with different parts of the city one at a time. If we want to complete a jigsaw puzzle we need to first have all the parts.

Similarly, if we want to a get a grip on any functional or theoretical domain, we can do so by lowering our firewall and gradually allowing different conceptual blocks to enter our consciousness.

Frustration at work place or college etc is partially due to wanting to grow at a pace that our existing knowledge cannot power.

I sincerely hope that you bring out your true potential by allowing your consciousness to grow. Your academic and professional growth are bound to follow.

Thanks for your time. Your feedback is extremely valuable.