We are all works-in-progress!

Everyone who comes into your Life is teaching you something, somewhere, all the time. The learning may not be always packaged as one, but if you are tuned into Life’s experiences, you will pick up the learning nevertheless.

Yesterday, I had to request for a service to be delivered to my home by a reputed brand. The company sent me a service representative who was impolite, impudent and, to top it all, was inexperienced. He was a young man who had little patience to understand the problem that he had been sent to solve, let alone solve it! Predictably, I had to turn him away. But the urgency to find a solution to the problem we were facing and my own desire to provide feedback to the company’s management, led me to escalate the matter to the brand’s senior management in my city. The person who took my call was apologetic and immediately sent me a more diligent and experienced representative. The man, in his mid-30s, fixed my problem in some time. And when he was taking my leave, thanked him and I narrated my unfortunate experience with his younger colleague. He apologized, and then, sheepishly smiling at me, he said: “Sir, to be honest even I was like him. I was very ineffective with customer service. But I guess you learn from each experience – good or bad – in Life. As long as you learn, you are growing. I take your compliment as a sign of my personal evolution. Thanks!”

His mature and profound articulation blew me away completely. He was the most unlikely candidate to extol the virtues of learning from Life. Or to be honest about his own learning curve. Yet what sets him apart are precisely those two factors – that he is a learner, and he is not afraid to either make a mistake or own up one!

We are all works-in-progress. No one’s born perfect or experienced. As long as we can learn from each experience in Life, we will grow. Our personal evolution is truly a function of how much we are learning – no matter who we are learning from!