“I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”
~ Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Young students or recent graduates are only on the cusp of life. Sure, you may have already achieved plenty, but the next decade is really going to dictate how the rest of the story plays out. As a young job seeker (or even a manager or company leader) you have the opportunity to make your own movie – or write your own novel – in which you are the star. The people around you are your cast, and you act your way through challenges, events and opportunities, as do your family, your boss, your peers and even the company you work for. Your circumstances write the script, but you are the director.
In case you haven’t seen it or read the book, Life of Pi is about a young boy from Pondicherry named Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, who survives 227 days shipwrecked on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with an orangutan, a spotted hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and a Bengal Tiger, named Richard Parker. It’s an incredible story about fear, spirituality and practicality, and even though the story is not a new one, I believe it holds a huge amount of relevance today. We can learn a lot from young Pi and his adventure as we try to break down barriers, drive change, and succeed.
Weathering Storms: Do you Fear the Thunder and Lightening?
The tiger in Life of Pi is named Richard Parker – rather an odd name for an apex predator, don’t you think? But the tiger’s human name is no accident. Richard Parker is the external manifestation of Pi’s fears. He’s alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean. He’s lost his family. He has no food and limited water, and he’s just realised he’s sharing his temporary home with multiple hungry, scared animals. He’s fighting a storm (literally and figuratively) and suddenly Richard Parker appears from the base of the boat. His fear becomes very real, very quickly.
If you let fear rule you when facing challenging situations, the fear manifests beyond your mind. You feel it, you interact with it, and you project it onto other people and situations. You believe it is real, and so it is. This is where your battle begins. In Life if Pi, fear is represented via the different animals, which are (spoiler alert!) slowly eaten away until just Richard Parker is left – aka, your biggest fear. Whether you’re scared of failing a paper at university, struggling to overcome a daunting situation in the office, or you completely blew a job interview, letting your fear manifest itself is dangerous. Like a storm, the nature of fear is to consume and engulf us – it plays on our confidence and makes us question ourselves.
Fighting the Fear (aka Your Own Richard Parker)
If you asked most people what their biggest professional fear is, I would bet the majority would say, “to fail”. No one wants to be a failure, and yet it’s something we all inevitably have to deal with. Absolutely no one is successful 100% of the time. There are two ways to deal with your fear. The first is to acknowledge it and suppress it through knowledge. For myself as a business leader, I do everything possible to ensure my chances of failure are reduced – I look at business metrics, analytics, the competitive landscape, and more. By empowering myself with knowledge, I can suppress any potential to fail.
The second option to deal with fear is to say, “so what?” So what if I fail? So what if I lose? When you take this approach, you take the power away from fear. Suddenly, fear becomes your ally because it’s no longer holding you back. You’re accepting it and forging ahead anyway. If you can internalise your own strength and turn your fear into your best friend, you’ve already won a war. Your very own Richard Parker will cease to exist. This does not come easily – it takes practice to overcome any phobia – but it is worth doing.
The Will to Live: Adapting Through Disruption and Change
Life is Pi is about surviving through the odds. The characters fight to live – from Pi abandoning his life-long vegetarianism so he can eat, to the orangutan’s incredible fight against the hyena, and even the wounded zebra who battles for days to stave off death. Humans (and animals) will do extraordinary things to survive – some heroic, others inconceivable and barbaric.
One of the biggest things we have to deal with today – especially young talent coming up through the professional ranks – is dealing with change. For example, the biggest disruption to our world by far is technological. The way we live, conduct conversations, socialise, interact, buy, sell and market has all changed via technology, and we have had to adapt with it to survive. Some people and businesses take a short-term approach to adaptation – opting with the fastest, cheapest and most convenient ways to make change work in their favour to turn a profit. Others have a bigger vision.
Take the Indian FMCG company, Patanjali Ayurved. This business is set to beat out the giants – Nestle, Colgate and Unilever – in the future. Thanks to co-founder Baba Ramdev, the company uses brick and mortar principals to adapt to changing consumer behaviour and preferences. Their number one business objective is making change through healthy living, and they are driven by a belief that 10 years down the line, health will be the number one scarcest commodity on the planet. So they adapt through sustainability – it’s a long-term goal to disrupt and manage change, not a short-term one. Being able to survive through change relies in sustainability. Whether we’re talking about the broader baseline of a business, or simply overcoming an obstacle you’re facing at work – fight to survive, but do it with sustainability in mind.
Slow Down to Succeed: Get off the Grid
We live in a two-minute noodle world – a place where too many options are available right now, through the click of a button. There’s too much noise, clutter, instant fame, opinions and demands. Trillions of tectrabytes of data flow around us everyday, giving us what we want, when we want it… but sometimes you can’t get what you want without stepping away. I’ll give you an example. At Monster, about five years ago social media for business had taken off in a big way, and we were looking at how we could harness this through integrating a professional career app with Facebook.
Everything was moving in the right direction, but suddenly something told me that maybe this direction was wrong. I took a step back to consider our options (not lightly – if I pulled the plug it would be two years of investment down the drain) and ultimately decided there was too much noise for it to succeed. Instead, we integrated the idea on our own platform, and it has successfully taken off as our Professional Networking Tool. Personally and professionally it is important to step back and assess things. It’s easy to get sucked into the whirlwind or fall victim to groupthink, and you need to give yourself time to re-set, re-think and relax. Take care of that super computer you have been blessed with and slow down.
What Kind of Hero Do You Want To Be?
So, you are the main actor of your story – but are you the hero in it? To finish up, I have three pieces of advice to ensure you remain the hero of your own narrative:
- Do what you love. I know it’s easier said than done, but following a passion will create an ocean of opportunities. If you can’t find a job in the sector you want, then start something of your own!
- Address your fears. If you deal with fear in the ways we have talked about, then you will feel free to pursue what you love. You won’t feel held back by expectations or worries.
- Adapt, sustain, and slow down. Address change, focus on wellness and take plenty of moments to take a good long look at the highlight reel of your life. Is your movie going the way you want it to?
Like Life of Pi, the way your story ends is open to interpretation. It’s up to you. How will you become the hero?
This article was published in Read, a Sunday magazine in UAE.