The importance of the Smile

Not so long ago I quoted in my "Adieu" e-mail from my last assignment that one is successful when he doesn't know whether what he is doing is work or play. Work- for me has been for most of the times- play. Even though life does play hard ball quite regularly, it's something that I never had to learn to tackle. It came naturally.

The way I have dealt with adversity in work place till now has been such that people who don't know the specifics and who do not have the chance to observe from close quarters, come to think that I'm having too much fun. It so happens that 'the smile' that I have on appears to be growing according to the difficulty of the situation. (Even though it is not easy and I have lost my cool in some situations, this is how it generally has been). The harder the situation to handle, the broader "the smile" would appear to be.

But this post is not a self congratulatory note about my prowess with what I do.

Let me come to the point. What I refer to by "the smile" is not just what you have to put on your face. It’s the cheerfulness that reflects on the outside when the thrill of tackling a challenge would be the driving factor. When you think of the innate satisfaction of achieving a seemingly impossible feat which you have set out to achieve and not think about how many hardships you'd have to go through, then it’s easy to have 'the smile'.

The trouble with such a scenario is that success in such situations begins to be the 'expected' instead of the 'outstanding'. But that is food for thought for some other post. This one is about 'the smile'.

It could be that after the daunting tasks that I set out to achieve at the beginning, many simplistic tasks don't challenge me enough, but of late the sheer tediousness of simple tasks is beginning to weigh me down, and I have been putting off work just because it’s not challenging enough. And the smile has been missing ever since.

I realize now that I have been trying to put the cart before the horse. It should not be the challenge that one should enjoy rather than the joy of completing a task to the best of one's ability, however trivial it may appear to the intellect. It's the smile that is important and not the challenge. The smile would always have to be the single unquantifiable factor and not proportional to the task at hand, simply because of the fact that a smile does not have degrees. There is no measurement to the amount of a smile. It is, to put it bluntly - a binary. It either is there or is not. There is no more to it than less.

To be successful one should not aim at achieving the impossible; or climb Mt. Everest every time there is a chance, but to look at the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s important to have 'the smile' and not to measure it. Success in the end is just to quote one of my friends, "Doesn't even matters" (improper grammar intentional). It's the journey and not the destination or the speed with which you travel that matters.