Lessons for a father - What We Need

Image Courtesy: Flickr (Kathleen Ojo)

A couple of years ago, my wife and I started a rule. Before we bought anything we would ask each other "do we need it or want it ?". I did not expect for the little household experiment to succeed.

My reason was very simple: we were not suffering from, fortunately, any financial crisis, both of us work hard and have our own ways of unwinding and, lastly, like any right minded shopper in the world - of course everything we wanted was something we needed.

Mostly because my wife is a genius, and a little because I listen to her, surprisingly, we succeeded. Well, mostly succeeded. There are a couple of things that would fall under the "want" category. But by doing what we did, we were able to clear a lot of clutter from our lives.

Ever since we had our son, that particular rule has been set to the back-burner. Why? Well, try telling a mother that her son does not NEED the new toys or clothes, or the shoes. You will fail and wish you had invested in a better couch. 

Lesson to all fathers out there - never come in between a mother and what she wants to buy for her child. Make it a rule and stick to it.

What I decided to do, almost at the same time as we started following the rule at home, is to take it to work. The reason, again, was very simple. If I offered a service of telling people what they needed instead of what they wanted to hear, I would save them a lot of "clutter".

I did not succeed as much as I wanted to.

As much as we, all of us, pretend to have everything under control and know what is going on, we generally do not. We react to what happens around us and there is only a very small part of our lives that actually functions like we want it to.

So, for someone to tell us, even justifiably, that the project we were undertaking was going to fail, or that our way of handling a situation was rubbish or that we could improve in an area of our life that we thought we were perfect at, is a very hard task to undertake. What made it even harder was that the people had not asked for it. I was providing it, as a service, without them looking for it.

Lesson learned. You could have the capacity to make the next Google but if the people that you made it for are not ready for it, your project is going to be a failure.

When I got the opportunity to have my own team, I craved for and built a team that would tell me, without any hesitation, what I needed to hear. I know what I want. They, sometimes, know better than me what I need.

Now I have a great team at home and at work. What else could a man ask for? Hurrah!!!

Do you have a team that tells you what you need to hear? Let me know by clicking here.