The first movie that came to my mind while starting this write-up was Band Baaja Baaraat not because I like that muscularly portrayed chocolate boy or I have a hidden love for his female counterpart, but because it exhibits the immense planning and the rambunctious nature of a true raring-to-go professional. And yes, as per my knowledge, organizing such an event did not require any application of mind and it was merely a task of coordination. But fortunately, my last assignment at work proved me wrong.
I am a Developer, not Real Estate, but Software. My usual day consists of going across thousands of lines of code and trying to derive an end result that stood hypothetical at the beginning of the day. You may call me a creator.
My last assignment was a random thrust of adrenaline brought in by co-workers of another team as a challenge to my team to develop a customer-worthy marketable product in a span of 10 days. What do you call a creator who avoids challenges? Unequipped with an answer, I said BRING IT ON.
I knew how to make a product. I knew how to deliver results, but what makes it tricky job is to understand what the end user exactly wants? Believe me, the end user only wants ease of access. And Ease of Access can be defined in any number of alphabets ranging from 3 to 3 million. I realized i needed to know my customers, my competitors, my product, its viability, its future, its market and everything that could go within.
Having outlined the key aspects of what we were going to build and provided I had only 10 days and the time was already running short, we had to segregate the team into two parts – one part understanding the market (this might sound the easiest , but believe me this was the most difficult for the kind of experience I held) and another part designing and structuring it.
Before we could realize anything, we were already at the 6th day and the number of roadblocks we had hit was more than the number of hours we had slept. The process of getting work done by ourselves was made so simpler by now and we could understand that we needed to boil out the monotonous nature from our work and constantly needed to switch it within the team in case of a dead end. Time, was understood, as a resource that can be conserved, not generated and hereby we tried saving every bit of it.
Heading towards the penultimate day, the atmosphere was absolutely tensed as deadlines had to be met and use of phrases like End-of-Day held no sanctity for our cause. But even through all that we were able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The task now was to align and integrate everything that the different units amongst our teams had been working on, keeping our fingers crossed that they would work collectively the same way. But bugs are like marriages, hard to avoid. We literally spent these last hours in extreme anxiety trying to figure them out. This exercise simply made me understand that I should never criticize Dhoni when he’s unable to score the winning runs in the last over. I could see my colleagues emptying cans of Red Bull and tirelessly pursuing the dream which started as a challenge. Two hours away from presenting the miracle to our judges, I could reinstate the belief to myself that passion for achievement never leaves any gap between you and your goal.
Having outlived the expectations from ourselves, we had delivered. We had tested our boundaries and left them behind. Far behind.
I do not wish to run into more pages, but shall want to detail the intricate happenings and the innumerous memories carried by us through this in my next post, but I briefly want to summarize a few thought invoking learnings I harbored:
- We do not know our limits until we put them to test
- Time manages you, you just need to be in control
- When at a roadblock, you need to experience a shift otherwise you are just banging your head on a wall
- We tend to make mistakes under anxiety and the only way to curb it is by experiencing it frequently
- The only person who can motivate you is you.
I have understood that we build ourselves with every new and different task that we undertake and writing this blog is one such of them for me. The next time my name appears here with new words, I am positive they would be better than my previous ones.
