Sometimes accept nature’s ‘redirection’
There are things that as human beings we tend to be comfortable with. Many of them. For purposes of our discussion today, I will list the relevant examples. We love certainty and predictability. We like stability and easy things. We like to keep to plans. We love routine. We hate surprises, unless they are extremely nice and immediately beneficial. We don’t like risks or uncertainty. And all this is true also when it comes to career planning or career progression.
Most determined career people will have anything from a basic to a very well thought through career plan. We know what we want in our career and what we desire. We don’t want to settle for less or for something different.
You want to be a marketer, you will not like to pushed into procurement or human resource management. You want to be a medical doctor, you will not like to be pushed into becoming a lawyer. You want to be a pilot, you won’t like to be pushed into sales or engineering. You want to be a teacher, you won’t like it to be pushed into real estate management. Even location-wise, you want to work in the capital city and your employer sends you to the district, you will surely hate it.
But life can be interesting. I have plenty stories of people and friends who got pushed into a direction they didn’t want and they were later on surprised to find that they enjoyed what life gave them. Sometimes, in fact often times, they ended up doing even much better than they expected to do in their original plans. In my more than fourty years too, I am been redirected a number of times and most times those life’s surprises have tended to be very profitable.
I remember a few months ago when we had the Awards Ceremony for the ICT Association of Malawi (Ictam) and the Malawi Telecommunications Limited (MTL) chief executive officer (CEO) Harry Gombachika was given the ICT Lifetime Award. In his acceptance speech, Gombachika made a big impression on us all, with lots of wise words and points in his speech. One of the stories he shared was of the time he graduated from the University of Malawi’s Polytechnic, now Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences, in 1990. He was being recruited as a lecturer.
His dream was to specialise in power engineering and to lecture in the same speciality. At the time, power engineering was quite developed and prominent in Malawi and in the world, but telecommunications was not as developed, but was possibly blossoming. After the interview, the authorities told him that he had done well and passed interviews but that according to their plans, they wanted him into telecoms.
He narrated to us how disappointed he was but with a positive attitude he took it and accepted the new challenge. He accepted the ‘redirection’ , he accepted what nature gave him. As it turned out, he became a very successful and prominent telecom expert in Malawi and the world. And, telecoms blossomed and became a big industry. In fact, he taught me and was my role model that inspired me to also choose telecoms as a speciality like did many of his students. He has trained many prominent telecom experts in Malawi.
He has also done very well for himself. Apart from a very illustrious academic career, Gombachika rose to the rank of CEO of MTL. As a recognition of his contribution to the telecommunication and ICT profession and industry in Malawi, it was no surprise that Ictam recognised him with the Lifetime Achievement Award. And this happened because he accepted what life gave him in 1990.
Do you sometimes accept, wholeheartedly, what life gives you? Or like other people, do you always reject and frown at some of the surprises that life brings to you along the paths of career, business or other exploits in life?
This is the time to rethink this. Let us adopt an attitude that sometimes accepts what life brings us. There could be something bigger lying behind the surprises that life brings to us. Good luck as you rise and shine by accepting what life brings to you!
