Gurulah Pelita, Penerang Dalam Gulita, Jasamu Tiada Tara

Kemarin saya berpartisipasi dalam kegiatan sosial Lions Clubs Indonesia yang dihadiri oleh lebih dari 300 guru-guru sekolah menengah di Jakarta . Saya menceritakan kepada mereka bahwa selain memiliki orang tua dan keluarga yang sangat baik, teman-teman sejati saya, serta orang-orang lain yang saya pernah bertemu dan belajar dari di perusahaan2 dimana saya pernah bekerja maupun di masyarakat, saya benar-benar merasa begitu diberkati karena memiliki guru-guru yang sangat berjiwa pengabdian sejak SD, SMP, SMA, Perguruan Tinggi dan bahkan di program master, Kepada guru-guru yang hadir kemarin tersebut saya berbagi pengalaman saya sendiri sebagai murid dari para guru yang telah mengajarkan kepada saya banyak hal bukan hanya ilmu namun tentang kehidupan..Melalui sebuah video berdurasi pendek yang menceritakan tentang bagaimana seorang guru selayaknya bersikap dalam memahami anak-anak didik mereka, saya mengharapkan bahwa mereka juga akan berusaha untuk menjadi guru-guru yang hebat seperti guru-guru yang saya miliki.

Cukup sering manakala kita melakukan tindakan yang tulus dalam hubungan kita dengan orang-orang lain, mereka kemudian juga memilih untuk melakukan hal yang sama terhadap kita. Namun, pernahkah kita melakukan sesuatu yang baik untuk orang lain tanpa mengharapkan imbalan apa pun? Apakah kita pernah sungguh-sungguh berusaha melakukan sesuatu yang terbaik untuk keluarga kita, teman-teman kita, rekan kerja, karyawan-karyawan kita atau bahkan untuk orang-orang yang baru saja kita jumpai tanpa mengharapkan bahwa mereka juga akan memberikan setidaknya perlakuan yang sama kepada kita? Apakah kita murah hati kepada orang lain? Ini semua adalah tentang memberi, bukan mengambil. Ini adalah tentang perasaan hati dan bukan pemikiran logika. Hal-hal yang sederhana namun membuat pengaruh yang luar biasa besar.

Seperti guru-guru yang dengan tulus melaksanakan tugas mereka, kita tidak pernah bisa mengetahui secara pasti dampak yang mungkin diakibatkan oleh tindakan yang kita lakukan ataupun tidak kita lakukan pada kehidupan orang-orang lain, namun mari mulai hari ini kita melakukan hal-hal yang berarti bagi kehidupan orang lain.

Who do you want to become?

How old are you? How old are your children? What is important to you? What is your status in the society? How is your relationship with your family? How many true friends do you have? What are those things that matter in your life?  Who do you want to become?

There are dashes/races/journey between the date we were born and the date we died. There are possibilities and opportunities and at the same time there are risks and threats. We must have a sense of what’s possible, a sense of what is it we would want for us. Ensure that those possibilities and opportunities are realized.

In these hectic modern days, priorities in our life often have been misaligned. How do we stay positive and have the right attitude? We need to ensure that we have the time, space and solitude for ourselves but still well connected and plugged with the world. Sound selfish?  Stop worrying and start living and make a difference with our life. Be courageous to acknowledge weaknesses and tap the unused potential. Leave footprints and legacy that others will follow.

Our future depends on many things, but mostly ourself. Though there is nothing wrong to choose successful people as our role models but at some point of time in our life we need to start draw our own, our chosen individual path. We are the ambassador, advocate and champion. Live the life we’ve imagined with a sense of purpose and aspiration.

2D

Dream and Deliver. We can and we must have dreams.  We are responsible for dreaming about what is possible for us, dream really BIG. Thinking and dreaming about the future is integral to what we do, so we must be able to translate dreams into tangible strategies and plans. We must also be able to deliver. Remember that making things  happen is as important to us as being able to dream.

There are things in life for which we’ll never compromise. Health is clearly one of them but we do also need to have a balance life by having all the other aspects of life beside physical and health well taken care of. In order to achieve a balance life we must set goals in every aspects of life - Family & Home, Physical & Health, Mental & Educational, Financial & Career, Social & Cultural, Spiritual & Ethical ((C) 1960 Success Motivation International - The Wheel of Life ^(R)). But we can’t achieve what we can’t aim. Goal setting enables us to aim and eventually achieve successes and happiness. Goal setting and tracking make us always know what to do next. Goal setting is the fundamentals for success in business as well as in personal life. John Goddard set 127 items that he wants to achieve in his life when he was just 15; he accomplished 103 items when he was 47 and 109 items when he was 74.

From sensing to sense-making, it’s very important for us to find time to think about our goals in life, and be very clear in our minds how we want to also push our personal capabilities forward. The past provides experience for us to learn. The future is what we hope to accomplish. However, what we are doing now in the present time is the most important. We need now to start making significant decisions about where do we establish the control tower to drive and manage our growth for the next five to 10 years. Crystalize your thinking by continuously doing self evaluation and setting priorities, develop plan of action, sincere desire, supreme confidence, dogged determination

In the business world, there are new activities, new growth opportunities and new growth directions. Business is fast changing because of markets, technologies and new business models. Look at the Fortune 500 list, it’s a completely different list from the one 10 years ago. In every industry there are many new players. Yes, IBM is still there, Microsoft is still there, but what IBM and Microsoft choose to do today are quite different from  what they were doing five to ten years ago.

In a nutshell, this would be how we characterize what we do. We must be very clear in our minds that we want to make sure that from our dreams to our strategies and plans to what we can deliver, we optimise ourselves by tapping our unused potentials and look at or create opportunities and possibilities for growth.

Footprints

Almost all of the people in business world and students at universities with economics and/or financial major must have heard the name Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most influential investors who in the last week of August through Berkshire Hathaway invested US$.5 billion in Bank of America, the largest bank by assets in the United States.

Another very important world news at almost the same time that week came from Japan, the third largest economy in the world that Naoto Kan, the prime minister of the country, announced his resignation.

Those two headline breaking news were somehow shadowed by Steve Jobs’s resignation as Chief Executive of Apple. Chief Executive Officers resign everyday, so why was this one so meaningful?

In 1985 Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, the company he actually co-founded  in 1976. He was once after being forced out ran an unsuccessful computer firm but during that exile he purchased a small computer animation  firm, Pixar, which he turned into one of the world’s most successful movie studios, later sold to Disney for $7.4 billion. In 1997, he returned to take over as CEO of Apple, which at that time was a diminished company producing mediocre products and might be only months from bankruptcy. Fourteen years later, the company is a highly profitable and the most  financially valuable.

Steve Jobs is always willing to take big risks on new ideas. He has never been satisfied with just small innovations. His persistance on producing high quality products is very well known. He is a very passionate person and a brilliant marketer as well. Many people want to be able to change the world and Steve Jobs like some other famous names in history undoubtfully has introduced the use of technology in so many different ways. Products such as iPod, iPhone, iPad which are just some of Steve Jobs’s footprints and leadership in the digital world are in fact have been changing the way hundreds of million people live since the past decade or so.

Would his resignation as CEO marks an end of an extraordinary digital era, not just for Apple but probably for the industry in general?  

He said that with the resignation from the CEO post he intends to be an active chairman of the board so he will remain be involved in the strategy and in developing major future products.

Steve Jobs has been battling cancer and related effects for seven years.   He steps back to fight against his pancreatic cancer. Though he is seriously ill, he is very much alive, and that’s why his resignation is not an usual one.

Moments of Truth

Watching how the runners started and recorded their best fastest time at the IAAF World Championships in Daegu reminds me its similarities with actions in the business world.

Months before the event all the athletes must have prepared themselves so hard through tireless disciplined practices but it will be the performances they delivered in an event that really be the measurement of their successes. It is not just how well the start but how the finish is somehow more or at least equally important.

On Thursday last week Bank of America, the largest bank by assets in the US, said that Warren Buffett would invest US$ 5 billion in the bank. The legendary investor during the 2008 financial crisis invested US$ 5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group Inc and it earned him the equivalent of more than US$15 in dividends each second, or US$ 500 million per year.

Warren Buffett is a shrewd investor and almost always gets very favourable terms in any investment decision he made because of his ability to swoop in at the last minute. Like wise, almost all those runners who finished in the first places, the last few seconds of the races were actually the most defining moments. We can see how the winners made their last few  split second efforts and won the races. 

Make sure that we exert out all our best in every race and make that extra effort required nearer the finish line and we will eventually reap success.