The secret of my "success"

I am asked this question sometimes… Before you start grunting oohs and ahs, please read through…

Success is a very relative matter. A certain Stuart Charles Glyndwr MacGill might be seen as an unsuccessful player because he did not get a chance to play enough for the great Australian team… only because the MacGills decided to copulate around the same time certain Warnes were doing the same and were able to produce a much better offspring (when it comes to cricket!) named Shame, sorry Shane, who made sure that MacGill stayed out of the Oz team for most of his career. Had MacGill been in any other country or was borne at a different time, he would have played at least 100 test matches… he ended up playing only 40 odd while Shame played 140 odd… Playing 2 spinners in an Oz team is unheard of (Btw, Has anyone seen Cameroon White bowling? Someone rightly said that he won’t be picked up as a spinner even in Zimbabwe team… with this kind of quality, no wonder Aussies are losing)… Coming back to success, while a Stuart MacGill is more or less a loser, a relatively senior one-of-100 in one-of-100 company might be genuinely seen as successful by some… it could be naivety (some of my relatives think that I am the 2nd most powerful person in my company after the President… I don’t try to break the delusion of obvious reasons) or for some 1-of-100 is still 1-in-100 and hence good enough (alas! that’s a very low benchmark!!)

Sometimes I wonder if the other person is trying to take my pants off (in an intellectual way) when he/she is asking me that question… Or may be they want to make sure they don’t do the things that I did or do to be successful!!

In any case, I play safe. My standard answer is “Act Busy”. The answer is both genuine(I will come to the point soon) as well as funny and serves both the classes of people. The naïve ones think I am being humble while the smart asses (the ones trying to take my pants off intellectually) get beaten in their own game.

I strongly believe that one can’t be too busy in his or her life… if someone says s/he is too busy, there could be only two things – 1. s/he is lying or 2. s/he is trying to achieve impossible (for example, if someone wishes to jog a marathon every day, they would be “too busy” in other things to achieve this or something similar)…

I always have time on my hand. Time is never an excuse for me. Some examples – I always get time to watch 8 hours of one-day cricket match; I slept for 3 hours last afternoon; and I always get time to write this stupid blog…
At the same point of time I ensure that I look busy – impresses the boss, impresses the colleagues, impresses the team, impresses the family… essentially I can get away by doing less in professional as well as personal life…
Trust me – “Act Busy” works if you are a mediocre like me and don’t have very high goals…

In case you are still with me, here are some tips on how to “Act Busy” –

1. Don’t sit in the headquarters. Be stationed in a different city. The boss is smarter than you and will figure out soon if you are very close to him physically. I have been able to achieve this with last 3 of my bosses and it hasn’t hurt.
   
2. Don’t pick up all the calls. But make sure you call back and call back at some unexpected hour (i.e. between 8pm and 8am). Btw, make sure you pick up the calls from unknown numbers – else you might miss the chance to get that credit card or that home loan that you have been waiting for since you were borne.
   
3. Make sure you do pick up some of the calls – especially when you have given X the time for a call and Y calls. When X calls, switch over between X and Y several times. This is bound to show you as busy and important!
   
4. If there is call scheduled with your boss, make sure you call a friend of yours just before the boss is about to call. Apply #3 when boss’ secretary calls at the scheduled time. This is bound to impress secy as well as the boss (remember to explain that you were speaking to a prospect for that 100M$ deal)… and I can’t tell you enough about the importance of impressing boss’ secy (that can be a separate blog in itself!).
   
5. Don’t reply to mails… WRONG! If someone gave you that stupid idea, don’t follow it – it would only end up showing you incompetent. Trust me, it does not work. Do reply to some of the mails. There are some rules here also…
   
6. Reply to the most unexpected mails.
   
7. Reply to the group mails.
   
8. Reply to the mails in the evenings or early mornings (there are ways of doing this without actually working in the evenings and mornings).
   
9. Make sure a glut of mail goes out of your mailbox in a span of 15-30 minutes (“mail diarrhea”). Two things – the other person remembers getting mails from you at unearthly hours (“brand recall”); secondly, because of the mail diarrhea, some of the mails would be missed which means less trouble for you (in terms of return mails and action items)
   
10. Make sure you keep lot of unread mails in your mailbox. Allow others to peek in (or in a meeting, project it on the screen by “mistake”). People are bound to notice.
    
11. Do not settle your expense accounts for long periods and when you do, don’t forget to write a blog cribbing about the red-tape in your company.
    
12. Don’t take vacation when most of the people take i.e. Diwali, Christmas etc. Make sure you work “hard” during this period. Trust me, scarcity is very valuable.
    
13. Travel! You don’t need to work while traveling and you still get to log “on-duty” hours…
    
14. Spend lot of hours in the office. The hours logged look good and you get away from doing mundane domestic chores. Thanks to internet, there are enough things you can do to kill time. For example – last week I found this great website called www.wikihow.com... It covers pretty much everything from “how to survive a fall from an airplane” to “how live in a car”… The latter would definitely come handy if I am fired from my job or thrown out of my house or both if certain influential people in my life stumble upon this blog…
    
15. When the boss calls unscheduled and hence you are not able to apply trick #4, make sure you put the boss on hold and tell the empty table and chairs in your room – “Guys, urgent call from the boss. We will have to reschedule the meeting” (Caution – Don’t try this trick if you are on video phone).
    
16. Keep your calendar busy. Create some dummy entries so that your calendar seems full on any given day. (Caution – Don’t “open” your calendar completely else one can figure out that you are playing around)
    
17. When you walk around (mostly aimlessly), walk briskly and look worried… very worried as if tsunami has struck the city and its your duty to save it… avoid smiling at people…

In a nutshell, successful or not, if you want peace and at the same time want to feel and be seen as important by others, follow my mantra – “Act Busy”… It’s also one of the surest paths to “success”…