Our viral world has enabled the grandest illusion of mastering our problems, achieving success, and amassing wealth through shortcuts and quick-fix hacks. The reality is often only revealed once the curtain is pulled back and one realizes the strategies weren’t viable but rather sleight of hand. The gifts the wizard gave Dorothy and her companions weren’t real. The real gifts were realized and achieved along the journey. The lion became brave by experiencing fear and facing it. The scarecrow honed his intellect by having to work out solutions to problems they faced along the way. The Tin Man learned he could empathize, love, and be compassionate through his and his friends’ experiences and hardships.
We often search for a quicker way to run the race or climb the mountain. The core problem is that the learnings delivered along the way deliver success. The trials and failures endured during the long, hard struggle to achieve something meaningful in life, whether in career success, building solid relationships, or raising healthy and happy children, are the keys to unlocking the doors to what you want. This is no different whether you are striving to land your first MedTech role or reach CEO status of a medical device company.
These keys are in the learnings along the way. These keys are the emotional intelligence that comes with age and experience in business. Emotional intelligence, which is vital to counter disastrous rash impulse decisions, can only be learned through time, patience, and experiencing the highs and lows of the journey. Without allowing yourself to learn and fail and learn again, you will repeat the same mistakes once faced with similar situations simply because you won’t recognize pitfalls and have the tools to avoid them. You won’t have learned them. Envision launching a new medical device in the cardiac sector. Previous product launch experience includes a valuable understanding of how the medical field and patients will receive the device. There is no quick fix or shortcut for gaining this critical insight.
Learning to recognize other’s strengths and weaknesses can only be achieved through time and experience. Sure, you can say you have certain qualities in a resume or during an interview, but to validate these requires a multitude of experience and observation. Taking the shortcut can also be an expensive trip in the long run. Rushing to the endgame produces results that do not have the benefit of modification and improvement through learning and experience in the real world along the way. Fixing these issues down the road is almost always much more costly, if even possible. MedTech companies have learned this lesson the hard way when products are brought to market too quickly, or changes in production are not vetted. Costly, time-consuming recalls are often the result.
Achieving success the hard way through time, effort, successes, and defeats also produces a key component necessary to maintain success: confidence. Hard work and determination produce visible results, but the invisible result of the confidence built in attaining your goals through your efforts will drive you further in life than any quick gift a wizard can bestow upon you. Confidence gives you the belief that you can and will succeed. A wizard can gift you a quick fix of a shovel, but confidence can move mountains.
