Take An Inventory Of 2024

Can the Harvard Business Review Experts Help?

Being candid about areas where you could enhance your skills shows realism and a proactive approach to self-improvement. Here’s how to go about it:

· Self-reflection: Before you put pen to paper, take some time to think about the past year. Reflect on times you could’ve performed better or faced challenges that revealed gaps in your skills or knowledge.

· Be Specific: Instead of general statements like “I need to improve my communication skills,” provide details such as “I aim to articulate my ideas more succinctly during team meetings, ensuring clear and concise communication.”

· Focus on Growth: Phrase your areas for improvement as growth opportunities. Instead of “I struggled with time management,” say “I aim to refine my time management strategies to handle multiple projects more efficiently.”

· Connect to Future Goals: Tie areas of improvement to your future goals. For instance, if you want to lead bigger teams but recognize you need better conflict resolution skills, make that connection.

The above are four tips from world renowned experts in taking inventory at the end of a year (ideally now but it can be done at any time of the year).

This got me thinking about the importance of two things:

a) Time management in life, and

b) What Sri Krishna describes in the Bhagavad-gita as the mode of goodness, or sattvika lifestyle.

The great Indian moralist Canakya Pandita advised his disciple, the great King Vikramaditya: “Time is so valuable that if you pay millions of golden coins, you cannot get back even a moment.”

What is lost is lost for good!

The thing you cannot get back by paying millions of dollars, if that is lost for nothing, how much you lost, just imagine.

The great devotee Prahlada Maharaja says that to understand the real goal of life is so important that we should not lose even a moment. We should begin right away. Why? He says that this human form of body is very rare. It is obtained after many, many births. In modern civilization, people do not understand the value of this human form of life. They think that this body is meant for sense enjoyment, as cats and dogs think. Cats and dogs also enjoy life in four principles: eating, sleeping, defending, and mating. So human form of life is not meant for wasting, like cats and dogs. The human form of life is meant for something else. And that “something else” is Krishna consciousness or God consciousness because without human form of life, no other body can understand what God is, what this world is, what I am, wherefrom I have come, where do I have to go. These are questions we need to ask. 

As the year comes to a close, it’s easy to get distracted by deadlines and miss out on valuable opportunities to accelerate our growth. If we don’t take the time to reflect on what’s gone before, we’re more likely to make the same mistakes and less able to apply what we’ve learned going forward.

Thus, in order to fully grasp the tips given by Harvard management experts we need to understand three concepts of the art of work:

(a) One who performs his duty without association with the modes of material nature, without false ego, with great determination and enthusiasm, and without wavering in success or failure. Such a worker has no expectations for the result of the work entrusted to him, because he is above false ego and pride. Still, he is always enthusiastic till the completion of such work. He does not worry about the distress undertaken; he is always enthusiastic. He does not care for success or failure; he is equal in both distress and happiness. Such a worker is situated in the mode of goodness.

(b) The worker who is attached to work and the fruits of work, desiring to enjoy those fruits, and who is greedy, always envious, impure, and moved by joy and sorrow, is said to be in the mode of passion.

(c) The worker who is always engaged in work against the injunctions of the scripture, who is materialistic, obstinate, cheating and expert in insulting others, and who is lazy, always morose and procrastinating is said to be a worker in the mode of ignorance.

One might claim that it is actually very difficult to find someone working in the mode of goodness. That is right. And that is why we see so few happy people around us. Happiness in the mode of goodness is like poison in the beginning but nectar in the end. And happiness in the mode of passion is exactly the opposite. And that happiness which is blind to self-realization, which is delusion from beginning to end and which arises from sleep, laziness and illusion is said to be of the nature of ignorance.

To summarize, when you read your Gita every day without fail, practice some meditation, you are paving the way for a mode of goodness lifestyle. But when you boot-up your brain cells with caffeine, soda, alcohol or recreational drugs, you are deliberately sliding down into passion and ignorance. And in that environment, no expert advice will take effect unless you consciously choose to do so.

 —Syamananda Dasa