by Fear is an emotion that arises out of anxiety, nervousness or an uncertainty about survival and the future . It can make a person go crazy , unstable and irrational and lead a man to do almost anything. Most acts of injustice or violence arises out of just fear and nothing else .
If one learns to master this and keep oneself calm despite any adverse situation , once can easily overcome fear and rather emerge victorious not just out of that situation but rather claim victory in your life too . Almost everyone has gone through a dire situation that has battled our wits, created fear in our minds , tested survival instincts and finally gotten out of that position successfully ,unscathed and risen out of fear .
There is one such situation that happened in my life which I would like to describe below .
Working in a multinational, projects , deadlines , tight schedules, technical challenges are a plenty. We face a barrage of questions, emails and escalations almost on a daily basis on the status of the project and how do we propose to plan , design , execute and finally test it completely. On one such day, came across a very important project that could basically make or break us .
The project was a rather complex one if not impossible at first . The project involved using new advanced tools and creating an automated set of dashboards that can aid the business in providing key insights almost on a daily basis , as compared to the current manual processes which took several days if not weeks to do the same .Despite a sizable team , fear was always in the back of their minds asking questions like , What if we failed, What if we couldn’t complete on time, What If we couldn’t generated desired results , What if we don’t have the technical knowledge to take on such a complex project. The questions became even louder as the deadlines drew to a close and fear literally drained through our faces almost facing a bleak future.
During the final two weeks of the project, we were asked by the client ,if we were still planning to take the risk and continue with the project and complete it on schedule or give it away to different agency who had the manpower and knowledge to have it completed ,while we would be given a rather support function and backend process work . At this point of time , it was like an easy way out. Giving away the project meant, no more hard work, no more longer hours and restrict ourselves to a simple no brainer of work as well as keep the job secure . Any statistic inference would have asked us to quit and take the easy option out.
The team huddled together over a bottle of mountain dew. The energy grew in us. We were in no mood to give up. This was a huge calculated, if not crazy risk, we were willing to take. It was all out from this point of time with no looking back of a point of return. We stretched ourselves to intensive training, sometimes even during the weekends, gathered every bit of support we could from our peers and began completing the remainder of the project. We took one step at a time breaking down the work into simpler smaller modules which was fairly easy to implement. Then once the fragments were complete , it was just a task to put it all together. There was a final hurdle there, nevertheless we took it upon us to get this thing going and had it up and running by the end of the week
The final demo to the client couldn’t be any better as he was more than happy to commit to all future projects to our team itself . The risks actually paid off for a chance , mainly because of hard work and our strong grips of determination. This actually led me to think ,despite the rise in blood pressure or mental stress one has went through , the situation actually teaches us a lot of life changing experience and helps us in the future to tackle such situations very easily and become Captain Cool .
Check out the below video to see an interesting ad by Mountain Dew on rising above fear and claiming victory
