Insights of an Employee of the Year

I won best employee! Okay, sorry if this post seems so 2016. I’d intentionally refrained from posting this feat to avoid being branded as a boastful brat. But good things are really worth sharing, right? Besides, I deem it better to share this with insights rather than merely tweeting a shoutout. So, allow me to wrap up 2017 and start this year by sharing this learning, hoping that in one way or another it may ring true this 2018.

1. Success is a bad teacher.

When I heard this quote, I was 100% sure that it defines exactly what I experienced. The whole quote says, “Success is a bad teacher. It teaches you that you cannot be beaten.” In daily life, there are wins and losses. It doesn’t matter if you are Employee of the Year, Popular Girl, Miss Congeniality in the office, or whatever title you may hold. Just because you are titled doesn’t mean you are always right and you are entitled to everything you want to achieve. Humility, humility. Nothing turns people off more than blind arrogance.

2. Your work is your integrity.

A trophy is something you receive onstage, but a testimony is something you have to live out each day. Some people mock the thought of awarding someone as best employee, because they know every single person in the office has imperfections. But once you realize that your work reflects who you are as a person, you’ll do your best each day. You’ll keep doing better because that is you. And you don’t have to keep pressuring yourself to live up to the title.

3. You cannot please everybody.

Some people will like you because you’re excellent, but others will hate you even more. Haters gonna hate, they say. Haha! While it became tempting to believe that it is possible to get everyone’s approval, it just isn’t possible. I learned to be comfortable in my own skin, because “those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter won’t mind.”

4. Teamwork is not cliche.

And the thing is, just because it is one of the most discussed topics doesn’t make it easier to achieve. Our team, for one, is made up of at least four different personalities with different perspectives and priorities. There were times when we misunderstood each other and ended up bitter toward one another. If we don’t agree to disagree, we’ll all end up exhausted. I am proud to say that despite our differences and petty fights, we are able to work together and produce creative (yes, creative) output and outdo our previous accomplishments. Our team was the set of people who overlooked my crazy moments, believed in my abilities, and encouraged me to keep doing better in new grounds. For the Best Team Ever, I am truly grateful.

Partners in crime since 2013. 🙂

Can we also have an award for Best Manager? haha

I would never have won Employee of the Year if mam Leah hadn’t nominated me.

They say you can find family wherever you may be. We tend to agree with this when we look for people who will nurture and support us all the way. But when these same people check on us and correct us, we reject them. One of the insights that struck me most is the truth that the victories we win, we achieve with the help of people around us. The more we gain momentum, the more we should humble down and listen to the people who helped us. These are our mentors and leaders in life. They deserve our respect, trust, and admiration. Because they give their best to lead and manage us, we can do better. And we certainly can do even better as we honor them by continually achieving works of excellence — with or without the title.

I find it energizing to work for a boss that is fun-loving and generous. Onstage with our CEO, Sir Maynard, my boss Mam Leah, and our HR manager, Mam Cindy.

3 wisdom nuggets from the 3 Idiots

On a day after making sure that my soulmate friends and I would graduate on time, we took a night off to Kimmy’s house. There we had some good laughs, had our stomachs filled with good food, and settled down to watch 3 Idiots, a wonderful movie I never knew before existed. A Bollywood film with a twist done by what I believe to be a great scriptwriter and an awesome director, 3 Idiots will make you laugh out loud one minute and get you teary-eyed the next, and altogether you would never notice that two and a half hours just passed by so quickly. According to a review by Sarita Tanwar, 3 Idiots conveys so much impact it stays in your mind hours–for me it took days–after you’ve watched it. There are a lot of things both new and repackaged to be taken from this film, and I don’t want to spoil the ultimate fun of learning them as you watch the film. There are just some personal learning I just cant resist to share in this blog. Hope you’d find them interesting the way I did.

1. Learning isn’t all about being grade conscious.

It’s not about mindless memorizations of names and dates, getting to pass an exam without really understanding what the concepts are. Learning occurs when one becomes excited about discovering something new and applies it. It never stops when one finally graduates from school, or when one finally receives a worked-hard-for  degree/title. As people would always say, learning never stops. I personally think one would know whether she is actually learning or just going through the motions, i.e. mindlessly memorizing. Oftentimes though, it is easier to act like a machine than take the risk of challenging conventions to discover and apply new things.

2. The heart scares easily; so, you would have to trick it to believe.

I would always remember the tag line, “All is well”, the one main character Rancho would whisper to himself when a challenging situation gets his heart to thump faster. He said that making yourself believe that all is well does not actually solve the problem, but it gives the courage to face what lies at hand. If the heart is deceitful, why not try to deceive it back to get it focused on what it is supposed to feel? That is a question I have yet to digest and answer.

3. Pursue excellence, and success will follow you.

Excellence here is defined not as being the best among all the others, but being at your best–all that you can be. It doesn’t matter what rank you land into, or how your work fares compared to others’. What matters is whether you have given all that you can give, whether you’ve done all that you could have done. And to be able to do just that, you should give all that you are into what you do. I remember Ptr Gher saying that your work is your integrity. It shows who you are as a person, as a maker. To achieve excellence, you have to incorporate passion in what you do.

Personally, this film comes dear to my heart as it makes me reflect on what spending roughly 17 years in school really contributed to my life. Have I truly learned, or have I just learned how to act like a machine, bringing that kind of mediocre, lifeless habit into the workplace? Now that school days are officially over, and the “season to earn” sneaks fast into my life, 3 Idiots leads me to think whether I have been trained enough to live in honor and excellence in order to assure success in the coming years. The thoughts can keep rolling on and more and more insights can be produced with just this single film, but definitely all of these good thoughts will amount to nothing if they would not lead to one thing: application.

So what do you think?