Being Experimenting

Monday night one of my bosses pinged me and talked of an escalation by a customer I was working with. He said that they are complaining of not getting response and asked me to look into it. I had no idea of this and in fact was giving more than the needed attention to this customer. Immediately I got angry on this customer and told myself - 'Hell with him. I don't want to help him anymore.' and I left for home.

As I was heading home I ruminated on what might have caused the dissatisfaction. I thought about exchange of few mails between the customer and I in the previous week, where I did not agree to his suggestion. He wanted me to be the only person to send him mails and not let my team members directly talk to him. I did not want to be the bottleneck and while saying so I also added, - just to make it light - that I wanted to use my computer science background and avoid single point of failure. So while ruminating over this I thought if that last statement offended him and that may be I shouldn't have written that.

Then I realized that, actually, before sending the mail I had spent a considerable amount of time worrying about the content, sentence structure, tone, etc. In other words I was very cautious. Yet it seemed that it offended him. And the way I dealt with the consequence was being don't care (hell with him) and indifferent.

That's when it struck me that it was not the first time I had spent unnecessarily lengthy time to write emails. Almost every time, I spend a lot of time worrying about trivial things. Also I got present to the fact that even if it's simple math calculation - say of adding few numbers - I repeat at least twice. I HAVE to reconfirm my calculations. I always watched out for mistakes.

I realized that who I was for myself was someone who is prone to mistakes and one who goofs up inadvertently. Hence I had to watch out for mistakes and had to make sure that no mistake or goof-up creeped in. Hence I was always very cautious. Never took any chance or risk. Mistakes were just not acceptable - no margin for mistakes, whatsoever. Hence I always played it safe. I never ventured into unchartered territories. I always hesitated to take any decision. Hence always shied away from responsibility and accountability. Always paired with someone or played in team - that way I could let others decide for me. Most of the time it was 'fate' that I let to decide.

The impact of this way of being on my life was that I did not have enough confidence in me, internally. I was worried about the future when I have to start playing alone. I hated my indecisiveness. I kept procrastinating things and finished only when deadline arrived. And I was not content with this and this left me with a feeling of unfulfilled life.

I know that this conversation that 'I am prone to mistakes and inadvertant goof-ups' will not go away and hence no point trying to fix it by being bold or anything. As soon as I saw what was running my life, from nowhere the possibility of being experimental occured to me and called me into action. If I bring in 'being experimental' in life I can try out anything I want. After all mistakes are part of the experiment.

I am seeing that after I got this I started seeing many new possibilities. In the past even if I got an opening/possibility I doubted if it was the right one and in the process killed it. Getting this breakthrough was a BIG thing and I can see that it has made a huge difference in just last one week.