"It's character and not your looks that make you look beautiful...."
While some may agree readily, chances are that many friends will laugh at you for being a starry eyed idealist. Some of them may reason that while character may be important, it is an invisible attribute, while if you have an impressive personality, people will be attracted to you and give you all the attention. Some may be amused at your Stone Age mindset. The discussion may drift to the fact that in this materialistic age, you are out of place if you adhere to old fashioned values. In today's fast paced information age, things are changing rapidly; hence you have to change with the times. Invariably you will hear the wisdom that money and power is everything these days, and one has to be selfish and willing to adopt any means (fair or unfair) to succeed. Hearing such reactions, you may conclude what a big mistake you have committed by talking about character.
Similarly most coffee table discussions about good and bad often conclude that being good is no longer beneficial in today's age. You should not expect any goodness from others and it is no use wasting your time helping others. Everything sells today with a price tag attached to it and there is no free lunch. Even if you give away something for free, people do not value it, making it worthless. Such discussions leave you wondering - is goodness out of fashion in today's society?
If you take a closer look, it becomes clear that goodness is a time tested principle that will never go out of fashion. Look at successful people like Bill Gates, Ajij Premji, Ratan Tata, and Narayan Murthy. Even after acquiring great success and wealth, these people are driven by the desire to do some noble deeds and help others.
WhatsApp started out by providing free mobile messenger services to its subscribers and over time managed to grow its user base to a billion. While they were busy helping people, their act of goodness made it such a compelling company that Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a huge sum of $19 billion. Can we not see it as a story of a company that did good and reaped the benefit?
Take the example of Google that defined the web experience for us with their search engine. Did they charge users for this service? Did they start out with a plan for making money from their compelling product? During initial years, their focus was just to delight their users with their product, and their lack of business sense often got their investors worried. Over time they reaped huge reward for their good deed. The company became a huge commercial success and continues to deliver value to their consumers free of charge with services like Google Maps.
At a time when Software products were licensed at a big price, the open source community worked on sharing their software products free of cost with people. Over time, the movement was able to overcome concerns about the quality, and today many volunteers contribute towards and many companies utilize a wide variety of open source software successfully. Linux itself is a perfect example of freely available operating system that has left all commercial operating systems behind. In a way, this is a win for goodness.
No one would have imagined that an Encyclopedia would be available free of cost some day. Wikipedia has emerged as most frequently accessed source of information on web which has been compiled by contribution from millions of people worldwide.
Look around you and you will find many more examples in everyday life that supports this theory. So, don’t worry, principles of goodness, character, and contribution are very much alive and will never go out of fashion.
Do you agree with this opinion? Let me know with your comments.
The idea of writing this post was triggered by my colleague Himani who said on Facebook, "Itz character and not your looks that make you look beautiful....".
Thanks Himani for the inspiration for this post.
Thx Sanjay for picking this up n elaborating. Hope ppl read n understand. I see a lot of ppl around who continuously try to achieve good looks n forget that all this is shortlived....they start conpeting on looks. Which seems funny n immature to me.
ReplyDeleteThanks Himani for the insightful comment.
ReplyDeleteOn a lighter note, there is no harm in having both character and looks :)
Another post related to this topic:
ReplyDeletehttp://bbepositive.blogspot.in/2011/08/what-is-all-this-stuff-about-private.html