While young stars are struggling to make an impact, superstar Rajnikanth, a septuagenarian, is not only able to bring crowds but also make them go crazy with his dapper looks and swag on screen. “I do every movie and every scene as if I am performing for the first time in front of the camera,” he said in an interview once. He has done more than 150 movies over four decades, but still when standing in front of the lens, he does not brush it off as another day at office.
Most of us do the same thing again and again for years together. A chef cooks for customers in a certain pattern every day. A maths teacher teaches the same chapters every year. A specialist surgeon performs the same type of surgery every day. A pilot follows the same flight path. Similarly, the computer engineer, lift operator and so on have the same routine. It is natural that boredom easily clings on and a certain level of automation and monotony sets in soon.
We start working at a sub-cortical level with a middling mindset. Like a stray cow that follows its way back home after grazing, many perform jobs in a repetitive and monotonous way. This has several serious repercussions.
The other side
Unfortunately, in several such jobs, the customers are new and keep changing every day or every minute. A teacher gets every year a new batch of students who are put off by his banality. An anxious patient is disappointed by an unexcited doctor treating his 10,000th patient with a stomach ulcer. A needy customer is put off by the monotonous bank manager. I recently met a tour guide in Singapore who has been doing the same day trips every day to the same place for the past seven years. I was surprised by his enthusiasm and genuine smile on his cheerful face. When I gently probed him, he said, “For me, it’s one of those thousand trips, but for you guys, it is your first trip and probably the only one. You may not come again. So, every day, I imagine myself as if I am taking my dear friends for the first time to this place, and kinda make it interesting.”
The seasoned Sachin Tendulkar once revealed that he could not sleep in the night before big matches. He would be working out in his mind about the bowlers’ probable strategies to get him out and how he would fend off. Every match and every ball that he faced was new for him. This attitude of starting every day’s work as if it is the first day of one’s career can improve our performance and most important, decrease monotony at work. After all, it is one great life and it is worth spending every day of it with excitement and energy.
And a simple mantra for this is, “Do it every time as if you are doing it for the first time.”
rishiortho@gmail.com
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