I Am Good But….

You must have heard this phrase form your friends, colleagues or candidates, while explaining the reasons of why they have don’t have success.

I am for sure used these excuses during early days of my career, before I realized my mistake.

So what are the excuses I am talking about?

Well, here they are

1. My company is not good.  yeah sure, is my response to this. I really don’t understand this excuse, after all how a company is related to the program I write.
2. My project is not good. This basically means that what  I am doing, is not what I want to do. Sometimes in professional life it is possible to get stuck in projects that we don’t like, but I have always believed that even a boring project can be made challenging and all exciting by simply setting some higher standards for  yourself in the project.
3. My clients are not good. This one I understand and relate to, but looking back I can say, I have learned maximum while I was working with these not so good clients. Their near impossible demands(at that time) helped me stretch my ability, which might not been possible with if I had only worked for good clients.
4. My Seniors are not good. When someone say this to me, I always ask them why should they. After all sooner or later you will be competing for their positions.
5. My Team mates are not good. They never are, accept this fact and consider your self very lucky if you get good team mates. Again the reason is quite simple, only one among your team can become next team leader. I am sure you want to be that person, but so does other members of your team. Now you tell me, will you help your team mate in his quest to become next team leader? understand what I am trying to say.

Now to answer the inevitable question that these people ask after giving these excuses

What To Do?

You have two choices.

One, leave the company and join the one where every thing is perfect. If you follow this route you will soon realize that you are switching companies every few months.

Or second options is, stop giving excuses and start doing something to improve the situation. Let’s see the excuses one by one and see what can be done.

My company is not good, well so what. Who cares about company, what we should really care about the work that we do.  Just make sure the work you do is best and everyone know about it.

My project is not good, well then go ahead, set higher standards for your self in the project. Let’s say project involves writing lot’s of html files, why not build an engine to do the stuff automatically. If you need to do something on regular basis then, may be you should do it in less time then you did it last time, and spent extra time you got doing some personal project, or contributing to open source projects.

My clients are not good, and that is good(!!!) as I mentioned earlier. From my experience developers call only those clients bad  who demands, quick response or to build something difficult or more time consuming. While one first look they do look bad, but if you do what they are asking for and build those complex app’s you will get the experience that would be priceless later on.

My seniors are not good and my team mates are not good, both these excuses are almost similar and they basically mean that seniors/team mates are not helping you to solve a problem or they are dumb. I have always believed that projects that I am part of is my project, and I will do whatever it takes to make sure it see the light of day.

So it does not matter if seniors are not helpful or team mates do not do good/quality work. You should keep your standards high, and you should help your team mates to increase their knowledge and quality. Which will ensure that quality on project increases and so does chance of project’s success, which will eventually increase your chances of becoming a team leader.

What I am trying to say is that, if you are good then you should be able to deliver your project successfully despite all the problems in the world, otherwise why would any one need you?

I am done, now you can have your say in the comments below.

PS: Image you see above is created by my colleague Dhanesh.