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Thursday, December 20, 2007 You Are Born With A PurposeOnce I had an opportunity to work in a non-profitable organization for a short period of time. As a temporary staff, I was delegated a task by my Senior Manager to issue leaflets to the members for an upcoming seminar. Single-handedly (and with the occasional help that my other colleagues from the other department sneaked in), I managed to post out more than 400 leaftlets. I was under a lot of pressure because I was running out of time but I had my task accomplished within the given time frame. Next, I was instructed to call each of these members that I had issued the leaflets to and ask them whether they had received them. Now, if their reply was "Yes", well good for them and if the reply was "No", I would not be issuing them another leaflet for I did not have the time for that. I could not rationalise the purpose of my calls to them. It was simply redundant work delegated to me by a higher authority. I had no other choice but to obey. And one day in the privacy of my cubicle when everyone had gone to an AGM meeting ,I broke down. It was amazing how I was in a better state of mind when I had sent out those leaflets though I had to beat the time, than I was when I had to simply make calls. What was the reason for that breakdown? Here's a story that illustrates that...... During WWII, the Germans had imprisoned many Jews and kept them in concentration camps. These prisoners were tortured, not given enough nutrition, made to toil and some were even used for experiments. Once, a selected group of prisoners were commanded to dig a huge pit and pile up the sand on the other side. The following day, they were made to return to the site and cover up the pit they had dug with the sand that they had piled up the day before. On the third day, they were made to dig a huge pit on the same spot and on the fourth cover up the pit again. They repeated the procedure for several days until many of the prisoners eventually succumbed and broke down in despair. Henceforth, the Germans had arrived at the conclusion that they had wished to derive from the experiment........  Humans cannot do meaningless work. We're just not made that way. Labels: Motivation |
