Nurturing Desire

"There's a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. They aren't just like that because they want to. Something in the past created them, and sometimes it's impossible to fix them."

                                                                                                                                                             - Unknown

I love a story, be it the one I read in a book or the one I hear from someone. And over time it is interesting to note that some people tend to be great storytellers, while most prefer to simply indulge in the few sentence gossip. Though I feel that what most people don't realise is that we are all walking novels, with lives filled with enough drama, joy and everything else. Just that, either we forget them, we don't observe them or we feel that there is nothing much in it to tell.

In the internship that I am doing at an insurance company, one of the noteworthy thing that is included in the programme is the sharing sessions with the young and successful agents in the company. By the time most of these people are 30, they are already in possession of the 5 C's. To most people, that tends to be the highlight of the story. But to me, I love to listen to the parts before that, the part when they were a kid like you and me. 

After a few stories, I realised that the stories of most of these extremely successful individuals were united by their low income and under privileged background. They had anything but a normal childhood. Parents were usually hawkers, most of the time during their childhood was spent roughing it out with other kids in the neighbourhood and academics were not really their strength. Most importantly, they all wanted, very strongly, to make money, to elevate themselves to the level of their more privileged peers and they were wiling to go all out for it, do things that kids born in the middle and upper income class considered too embarrassing or not worthy of their dignified backgrounds. 

Like sell insurance. It was not the most respectable of jobs to society. It was a job where rejection trumped consideration, but where in the event of a consideration, the subsequent reward more than made up for the rejection. They saw it and they took up the challenge, worked hard at it and got where they are.

What I asked myself then was, despite the obvious rewards why were there not more people in sales and business, the two main sectors you had to join if you wanted to make money? It came about as some form of epiphany. 

At the heart of it, I believe that it depends on what we truly want. For the majority of the middle class and well-to-do kids out there, we want to make money. But we want security and stability more because that is how we have been brought up. Money was not really an issue for us and we never really valued it as much as security. Which is why we aim for a stable job, the higher paying the better (banking), rather than the opportunity to make more money at the expense of greater unpredictability and rejection. 

The issue that arises from this is when one wants both security and money, one usually ends up not knowing what one really wants. Maybe that is why many of us roam around clueless about what we want to do, about what we want to be. Our priorities are but as murky as the polluted water of the Ganges.

Which is why I do harbour a respect for the ones who made it. 

They knew what they want.