Thursday 6 March 2014

Holding the Balloon of Position with Strings of Humility

With great power comes great responsibility – Voltaire
The above phrase seems quite small but it contains deep substance in it. It talks about a possession that gives a direct reflection of an individual’s character and puts their conscience under test and that possession is nothing but, Power. Power weighs the Affinity of the human mind towards getting carried away against the self-restraint of the conscience.
Most of the times, position breeds power and it is not easy to handle the power, a position may offer. Position can be your wings to reach the sky but can also be the wheels rolling you to down fall. Let us understand how?

Power can be Catastrophic

Some people often get carried away by power of their position and each action that follows becomes autocratic. They then have no scope of giving an unbiased response to anything based on facts and reasons because their position takes place of their intellectual. They suddenly start feeling like emperors and the people under them as their slaves.
The frequent domination over matters elevates an individual’s ego each time, until it becomes a vicious cycle. The virtue of being righteous and fair becomes a heard-off-thing.
Peers soon start feeling the heat being poured upon them and feel victimized of the changed behaviour that defies common laws of intellect. Even a tiny mistake by them triggers the volcano and the erupted lava starts hitting on their self-respect.
The situations start changing and seeds of dis-satisfaction and rage get sown around. All this sooner or later results into the same individual cribbing about his powers and position.


A Beautiful Analogy

It is like a balloon, the more you push in the air, more it tries to come out. If you can make a wise decision where to stop pushing more, you can enjoy playing it, but if you cannot handle it, it either backfires or diffuses. Analogous to that, the more you try to use the power of position to take unjust decisions and deviate from the actual responsibility, the more rage returns from the leaf nodes.

Power can be Wondrous

Power isn’t always dreadful. It’s like the stock of water poured only during monsoon but will meet our needs for the whole year. If used too frequently and in access, it may bring hard days in future. But if spent carefully, using only when required, it can become useful for a long time.
Some people do exactly the same thing. They never forget that, to whatever height power may take them to, if they don’t keep their feet on ground, they will certainly have a free fall. They don’t let the power of the position get over the virtue of humility and that’s when they rise above the position they behold.
It is like the captain giving the players of a team an opportunity to play their natural games in lieu of regulating their each and every move. It is like allowing them to dive in the ocean and learn from their mistakes while keeping an eye on the basics.
We need to learn from nature that, as a flower doesn’t bloom unless it gets a perfect mix of soil nutrients, water and sunlight, it requires a healthy and motivating environment in order to bring out synergetic results.
And the position can give you exactly that, an opportunity to develop an environment where there is encouragement for innovation, acknowledgement for excellence and motivation for advancement. An environment where there is a smooth channel for communicating ideas and where there is no hesitation arising out of positional differences. An environment where there is respect for individuals and where each one can flourish.

It’s a Choice

So, position indeed comes with power, but it all depends on us whether we hold the balloon of position with the strings of righteousness and humility, or float around, where the balloon takes us to, and land somewhere we don’t want to.
 
Written by Mr. Kartik Suba,
A research focused professional having around 3 years of IT experience in development of applications in technologies such as Java, GWT, GXT, Vaadin, Spring and Hibernate.
His research career has also laid his footprints in the areas of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning with a publication on Hybrid Inflectional Stemmer and Rule-based Derivational Stemmer for Gujarati at the Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing (WSSANLP), IJCNLP 2011. Link : http://aclweb.org/anthology//W/W11/W11-3001.pdf
He started his IT career with Tata Consultancy Services as a Developer for more than 2 years and then joined the DSS family in December, 2013.
Presently working as a Senior Software Engineer in areas of GWT, GXT, Vaadin – Bonprix.

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