Don't Give the Fish, teach them to catch it

Don't Give the Fish, teach them to catch it

Today I visited my bank in order to deposit a cheque for a due payment to a company. The procedure was quite simple but I thought of cross checking it with the teller so as to avoid cheque bounce back. The teller being a fresh employee (I judged it from the face look and the communication approach) wasn't sure about it. She called her manager for assistance. The manager, a nice ethical young man, elaborated the details about the form filling which I understood and thanked him for. However I noticed that while the manager was explaining to me, the teller got busy in something else and didn't pay attention to her manager neither the manager asked her to listen vigilantly to understand the procedure.

Well, I completed my work in bank and ponder that the manger had taken the corrective methodology instead of preventive methodology. Hence there is a big time chance that the teller would call her manager again in future and every time the manager will have to leave his desk, come to the teller point and explain the same procedure to more customers in future which he could have avoided by teaching the procedure to the ‘right person’, the teller. This extra work would cause disturbance in his routine work and waste his precious time to complete the jobs which he has been primarily hired for !!!

This whole situation reminded me of a good quote which says, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day; Teach a man how to catch a  fish and you feed him for a life time” And this is why I said earlier, that the teller will ask her manager again (asking for the fish) because the manager didn't teach to'catch the fish'

So my friend this is where the power of being visionary and proactiveness come into play… that is to see the future now and make the right moves … and this is where Stephen Covey suggests us ‘to begin with the end in mind’

A Young Sad Lady

A Young Sad Lady

The old Master instructed the unhappy young lady to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it. "How does it taste?" the Master asked. "Very bad" Said the lady.

The Master then asked the young lady to take another handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and when the apprentice swirled his handful of salt into the lake, the old man said, "Now drink from the lake."

As the water dripped down the young lady's chin, the Master asked, "How does it taste?" "Good!" remarked the apprentice. "Do you taste the salt?" asked the Master. "No," said the young lady.

The Master said, "The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount we taste the 'pain' depends on the container we put it into. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things..... 

Stop being a glass. Become a lake!"