Hey, this is Rajiv Kumar Luv Trainer, Coach, Workshop leader, Author, podcaster, Youtuber and founder of The Personality Boss which conducts the Ultimate Personality Development Program, Course, Coaching, Training and Workshops in Mumbai. I help you design the life you want. The articles that I post on my blog also have one purpose in mind “Leadership through Personality Development” Now over to the article…
Let me begin by saying that I really envy you because you have som many things today which I didn’t have when I was your age. For example today you have HD TV’s, computers, smartphone, laptops, ipods, ipads, facebook, whatsapp, sms, videogames and youtube. At the same time, you also have competition, distractions, poor attention spans, poor time sense and poor work habits. I have been working a lot with young people. Every year, I spend 3 months conducting leadership camps for the youth. I have been closely observing them and feel they need to take care of some vital things to be more effective in life. There is a possibility that some of the suggestions I am about to make don’t apply to you, if so, you may skip them and go to the ones that apply to you and act upon them. So here we go - 7 vital suggestions for the youth of today.
1. A certificate or degree is not enough
I have a question for you. If you enrol for any course which is more important the knowledge and skills you get from the course or the certificate you get after the course is over? Most youngsters, I have found are more interested and concerned about the certificate rather than what is being taught in the course. Their first question is, “Will I get a certificate?” I agree to get a job you have to show a certificate or degree, but youngsters have started believing that just a certificate is enough, that thinking is faulty. That is why we have so many youth that have certificates but are not employable by companies, why? because they have not honed their knowledge and skills. I have heard MBA students boast that they just need the stamp of MBA degree and they will get a good paying job. Giving too much importance to degree or certificate has led to a lot of rackets of fake certificates. So my suggestion to you is don’t go for the certificate, go for the knowledge and skills, that way you increase your chance of being hired by a company but if you only depend on the certificate soon you may be fired from the company.
2. Respect time
I regularly go to a B-school to teach soft skills to MBA students. My first session starts at 10am and ends at 11.15am. I am usually in the class at least 15 minutes before the session starts. At 10 am there are only about 8-10 students where the full strength of the class is 55. After 10.15am students start trickling in one by one disturbing me and the other students. While in the class they keep meddling with their mobiles and by 10.45 they are after me to wind up the class as they are hungry. I found school students to be better than MBA students. Once I even locked the door at 10am and didn’t allow the latecomers in, they came and kept banging on the door disturbing the class. Later, I was summoned by the Head of the department who told me in clear words, “Mr. Rajiv we should be student friendly as the students have paid high fees for the MBA course” Now you can imagine what learning and what respect will these students have for their and others time. Do you think these students will do justice to their jobs in the corporate world? I doubt.My simple test for checking people whether they respect time or not is Are they punctual in keeping their appointments. So my suggestion to you is if you respect time, time will respect you. Don’t just spend time or just do time pass but think how can I wisely invest time which can make a difference in my life.
3. Work on one thing at a time
Thanks to the pace with which technology keeps growing bigger and bigger, your attention span keeps growing smaller and smaller. Most youth today are distracted by so many things tv, smartphone, facebook, whatsapp, youtube, internet and if you are online all the time your productivity will be badly affected. Recently I created a promotional video for my video training workshop and the duration of this intro video was about 26 minutes where I ty to sell and convince about my workshop. One young fellow calls up and says who has the time to wtch a 26 minute video. Now the way I look at this is if you want to learn a new skill that can have a major impact on your life you should be able to concentrate on one thing for atleast 30 minutes and if you can’t don that then forget about learning that skill, leave alone mastering it. So my suggestion to you is develop the skill of concentrating on one thing at a time and stay with it till it is done. Constantly work towards increasing you attention span specially for those things that can make a major difference in your life.
4. Get out of the job mindset
You are living in a time where opportunities are all around you. Job is not the only option available to you there are unlimited possibilities today.All you need to do is find out what you love doing and then work on it whole day long and excel at it. Then offer your services. My son operates from home, he attends webinars, online courses, he himself has created a few online courses. What is exciting about this is the money in his bank increases even when he is sleeping. And earning money like this is absolutely doable. You don’t have to travel long distances, doing work you hate doing, working with people who play politics, tolerating the tantrums of bosses in short feeling like a slave, you don’t have to live a life like that. So my suggestion to you is to get out of the job mindset, explore new avenues, see how you can be your own boss. How can you provide jobs to others. If you want more ideas on how to get out of the job mindset, please listen to my earlier episode Show #033 Five ways to get out of the job mindset.
5. Be emotionally strong
When I was a school going kid I remember my mother, she was no less than a hitler, she would yell at me, beat me with a bat, lock me in the bathroom and I too would say I am leaving home, I will never come back, then go to my friend’s place, play there the whole day and come back in the evening forgetting all what I had said in the morning. Today, the young are very different, you don’t know what can upset them. A mother scolds her daughter about something and the next thing you know is the daughter has committed suicide. The teachers in school shatter your confidence by comparing you with others. Everything starts with thinking, how you think is how you feel and how you feel is how you act. Thousands of thoughts pass through our heads whole day long some positive and some negative which create certain emotions in us. Recognise your negative thoughts and emotions are just like disturbances on a tv screen due to bad weather, there is no sense in analyzing these disturbances on a tv screen and there is no value in studying the disturbances in our own thoughts and emotions. So my suggestion to you is don’t let a hard lesson harden your heart. Be friendly with the opposite sex but don’t get into love affairs too early, that has ruined many a youth. Stop taking things personally. Explore healthy responses to anger. Look for the positive messages behind your negative emotions. Recognize stress and find ways to reduce it in your life.
6. Focus on Goal-achieving activities
Make a list of all the activities that you do in a day. Now go through the activities and write the alphabets P or G next to each where p stands for pleasure-seeking and g stands for goal-achieving. At the end of the day go through your list and check how much percentage time you have spent on pleasure seeking activities and how much percentage time you have spent on goal achieving activities. Average youth spends most of his waking hours on pleasure seeking activities, do I need to tell you what pleasure seeking activities are? well here they are - tv, movies, girl friends, outing, eating, facebook, whatsapp, gossip, you get the idea…. So my suggestion to you is spend more than 60% of your waking hours on goal achieving activities
7. Have a good work ethic
Young students who are preparing to become chartered accountants have this dream of making it big in life so they start using wrong means to achieve their goals. Even established institutes which give full page advertisements in the daily newspapers have poor work ethics they fool thousands of students by making false promises and cheating them, they charge a few lakh of rupees but don’t deliver the value. So my suggestion to you is avoid short-cuts, cheating, bribing and unprofessional behavior. Instead always focus on delivering more value than what you are paid. If you have a good work ethic it is like being a fortune 500 company.
I am Rajiv Kumar Luv. My passion in life is to make a difference in the lives of people so that they achieve their personal as well as professional best. I am absolutely committed to specially helping youngsters become leaders in their chosen fields. In the past 28 years, I have trained over 100,000 people from all walks of life. Through my two-day program “Leadership Through Personality Development” I help the youth plan their career, build confidence, make better decisions, manage time and develop their employability skills to meet today’s real-life challenges. You can learn more about me and the work I do by visiting: http://www.thepersonalityboss.com