Have you made your statement?

Have you made your statement?

Many of our decisions are based on thoughts that arise within us influenced by our need to be recognized. It is our vanity at work. Once when I was a lot younger I was asked this question – What is the difference between Pride and Vanity? But that was then and I was completely foxed. The teacher then took the trouble of explaining it to me that that pride was what we thought of ourselves and vanity was what we wanted others to think of us.
Since then I have always kept a close watch on my thoughts about myself and would try to fit them into either “pride” or “vanity” category. It is quite a difficult task if we are sincere about it.

This leads us straight to the subject under discussion. A few stories will explain my point better. Let us use these stories to understand and put us on our guard.

Here is a young man; comes from an established industrial family and the only son. It is not difficult for him to think of himself as a cut above the rest. Then he goes to USA for his MBA. Eventually he returns home and joins his father to run the organization. He is allowed to run his own companies that he is allowed to form. His father had already a staff around so he was expected to use the same. This created a subtle two layer clash of interests as his father was keeping a strict control over the running of the company and the staff was not sure who to follow. The knee jerk of the son was to try and control more of what was happening in his companies. So every now and then he would call his executives and instruct them in detail about everything and confuse the issue; even going to the extent of dictating the letters on behalf of his executives and crossing the “T”s and dotting the “I”s as how situations should be managed in the field. This was not only annoying but time wasting as often he would keep his executives locked up in his office for hours in so-called meetings. He was, as I saw it, making a statements galore; some for his pride and some for his vanity. It was needed for his pride to show that he was running the show and not just a puppet around there; and for his vanity he needed to make sure that his executives recognized his talents, education and grasp of the situation. He would go to great lengths to show-off his inside knowledge even of the details of the field even though he never left the comfort of his office. An awful chasm would be created in what needed to be done and what the boss thought should be done. The poor executives were literally sandwiched in between the directives and at the same time under the pressure to show results. The mess his personality was in soon began to show in the results of the company’s balance sheet; a first class blue-print for fiasco.

So on further analysis what essentially needs to be understood is the question : are we making statements or doing things that need to be done?

One very good formula to separate the requirement based actions from the statement based actions is by asking the question: Am I trying to impress others with this action? Am I keeping at the back of my mind what effect it will have on others? A little introspection will do.

Let us say you go to the doctor for some pain in the back. Nobody knows about it and you are stoic enough to keep it yourself. There the doctor takes x-rays and advises rest and medication. You do all these and come to office the next week, refreshed and happy and when asked where and what you were up to, you smile and tell them that you had a holiday as you felt the need for it. That being that. This is a requirement based activity and nothing of statement-making comes into the picture.

In contrast I will tell you another story. A lady manager of a bank was required to go to inspect the veracity & genuineness of a client who had asked for a loan for a car. At first glance the address was from a lower middle class neighborhood and that too in an area not known for its nice ways. So she asked me to go along with her. There was really no way our car could go inside the colony. We left it out on the main road and went in. The streets were not more than 10 feet wide and cluttered up with shops spreading out all over the road. The client had asked to buy a Swift Maruti which had been launched recently and was quite the rage of the lot considering themselves as avant-garde. Here too, in this case, the buyers were relatively young people, quite evidently buying a swift more to make a statement than anything else as they were quite happy using a motorbike for ease of maneuvering in traffic. I could not contain myself and did ask where they were going to park the car. On the street outside they told me candidly. I kept my peace after that as it was really between the bank and them and of course the neighbors when they would find their way blocked by the wide-bodied swift.

Innocuous things like buying a tie, pen, lipstick or dress can reflect our deeper thoughts. Are we buying because we absolutely want to because the product appeals to us and complements our life-style and our comfort zone or there are other untold motives like making sure that others would notice how classy, super-selective we are? And often it may come to pass that nobody bothers at all and all the money spent and trouble taken comes to a disappointing nothing.


So when you take decisions just reflect also upon the reality factor; if you are doing something for making a statement or really and objectively it needs to be done. The yardsticks that we are judged by are small, very tiny actions and doings that give us away. When our actions become obvious statement-making ploys, we are only inviting derision and sometimes even trouble.