When is Good, Good Enough? By Jeanisha Wan

When is good, good enough?
Is it:
When someone tells you have done a good job?
When your boss pats you on the back and gives you an award?
When you get promoted and is given a raise?
When you get a new car every year or month?
When your kids score straight As in school or come home with Phds?
When you win a beauty pageant or an Oscar award?
When you win the Nobel Prize?
When you become a best-selling author and your book is made into a movie?
When you become a famous celebrity, actor or singer?
When you are knighted and given a title by your country or state ruler?
When your business makes you a multimillion or even billionaire?
When you can retire at 30 and never have to work a single day?
When your company becomes the largest and most well-known company that ever was?
When everyone admires you and make way for you as you walk past?
When you marry the most handsome guy or beautiful woman in the world?
When your kids become well-known high-ranking people in their careers?
When you can have everything you wanted and more at the snap of your fingers?

But perhaps when you have all the above, you may still feel it is not good enough.

Is not good enough, just:
To be blind and then able to see?
To be lame and be able to walk again?
To be poor and have the ability to work for a living?
To be suffering from cancer and live to tell the tale?
To have lost everything and then to gain something back?
To have friends and loved ones around us?
To be loved and being able to love?
To have done wrong and be forgiven?
To live in a free country and given freedom to choose?
To have a roof over our heads and food on our table?
To see our children grow up happy and healthy?
To be able to let go and let live?
To have peace in our hearts when there is war everywhere else?
To have the ability to give regardless of how much we have?
To have done well, and right by our conscience to our fellow men?
Perhaps to be good enough is simply this.

To be thankful for everything that we touch, feel, see, breathe, hear – the people, things and circumstances we take for granted for everyday.

Jeanisha Wan is the Founder and Managing Consultant of J1 Consulting, www.j1consult.com. A passionate marketer, Jeanisha loves coming up with brand new, especially unconventional marketing and business ideas.

So you grew
Strong and hard, firm and resilient
Characters that you have developed to protect the inner you
Others around you admired your strength and yet feared the coldness of your appearance
But will they ever know?
Will they ever comprehend?
Despite of the hardness of your bark, that tender sap that runs in your veins?
Perhaps they will never know. Because it is unseen.
And you are a solitary tree.
As time passed, your branches helped to provide shades for those who are spite by the sun
And for those who needed shelter from the storms of life
As the wind blew, your leaves swayed with the wind to provide a rustling melody
That cools the spirit of the wearied ones
And you tell a story
No longer about your existence but the One who caused you to exist
And the One to whom alone belongs all glory
And you were no longer silent.

But how will you remain then, O tree?
What will be your legacy?
Perhaps you will be like a dream
A dream, that comes in the night and is forgotten with the rising of the sun
And if a dream you are, will you be a sweet one?
Or one that is casually forgotten?
Because after all, you are but a tree, just a tree.
Just a tree that provided shade and shelter.
Nothing important.
Or perhaps you will be like a legend
As with all legends
They are only remembered when they have ceased to live
While they lived, their existence went by unnoticed
Nor were their uniqueness appreciated.
It is when they are no more, they become a legend
And their works applauded.
So what will you be, O tree?
A dream, a legend or a silent tree?
The tree remains silent.

~~~ About the contributor ~~~

Jeanisha Wan is the Founder and Managing Consultant of J1 Consulting. A passionate marketer, Jeanisha loves coming up with brand new, especially unconventional marketing and business ideas.

Do you work well under pressure? When you go for job interviews, you sometimes find interviewers asking you this question. What are they thinking? Of course, no one in their right mind will answer in the negative. So how can the interviewers really tell?

The experienced interviewers will perhaps ask you to give an example of a time where you have performed under pressure – what was the situation and what you did in the situation. If you are that real smart candidate – you will of course, offer an example that paints you as the ‘hero’. You will most likely share a story where a project was at a critical moment, all your other colleagues failed to performed or meet deadlines, there were some mess-ups by other moronic colleagues, your bosses were in a state of panic, but you, YES you, remained undaunted and unperturbed by it all. You calmly steered the project to the finishing point, achieved the results wanted and emerged as the ‘savior’ of the day.

If you used a lot of charisma to share your story, you will hold your interviewer transfixed or mesmerized. Some will buy in and be convinced. No doubts, no questions. Actually, they do not really care whether it is a true story. Although some of them ‘trained lie detectors’ would be able to tell if you are speaking the truth. They just need you to understand what performing under pressure means. Right? Wrong.

The truth of the matter is pressure is everywhere and how a person reacts to the pressure will reveal the real person behind all that fame and glory. Some people do not respond well to pressure – they crumble, get emotional and they will blame everyone and everything else but themselves. Some give up, walk away and abandon ship. Then, there are those rare breed who actually prefers to work under pressure because it is only when they are under pressure, they bring out their best. Don’t believe me? Well, see if you buy in to my story.

I have a bad habit of getting bored if things are too simple, too straightforward and too easily done. I also have a bad habit of procrastinating if there is a lot of time given to complete a certain project. I am not the 1-minute manager; I am the last minute manager!

Case in point, some years back I had to submit a thesis to complete my MBA which I undertook via distance learning with a UK university. Many of my course mates and I were working full time while pursuing the course so the university gave us several months to prepare. My other friends who had completed their MBA encouraged me to start working on my thesis early. They told me it would require at least 3 months to complete. But being the last minute person that I was, I did not do anything until the final week of the deadline.

I took a week off from work, hid myself in my room, surrounded by all the research books I have borrowed from the library and worked on my 10,000 word thesis. I worked on my thesis for 4 days and nights. I only stopped to take a quick bite of food delivered to me and get a quick shower. I did not sleep. On the fourth day, I submitted my thesis but was utterly exhausted. I shocked my friends when I told them I completed my thesis within 4 days. And I shocked them even more when I told them I had scored a distinction in my thesis.

This streak is with me throughout my work life as well. I found that the tighter the deadline was, the better I perform. The greater the challenge, the more I would push my brain to work. So if you are to ask me whether I work well under pressure, my answer would be no. I actually work better under intense pressure. At the end of the day, it makes me a better person.


~~~ About the contributor ~~~

Jeanisha Wan is the Founder and Managing Consultant of J1 Consulting. A passionate marketer, Jeanisha loves coming up with brand new, especially unconventional marketing and business ideas.

As a young child then, I did not understand what floods meant. To me, it was a time for me to fold my paper boats and set it to sail on the dark flood waters while my sister and I sat perched upon our half-immersed furniture. My parents had planted a star fruit tree at the garden of our home. The floods did not help our poor star fruit tree and almost every day, you would see our garden littered with rotten star fruits that had dropped off.

As a young child of about 6 or 7, I was given the task of picking up the rotten star fruits to be thrown away. It was not a pleasant task. The smell of the rotten star fruits was one that I could particularly remember (although most of my childhood was a state of blur). The other thing was that the rotting star fruits had also created a thriving eco-system of worms, centipedes and snails in our garden. These creatures liked to introduce themselves to me particularly when I pick up the rotten star fruits, as they were either in or on the fruit. Sometimes, they tried to make an exodus to my body while their fruit of choice was transported into the garbage bag.

So you can imagine that every time my tiny asthmatic frame was sent off to ‘labour camp’ in the garden, it was with such great fear and trembling. I was not given gloves or a spade to remove the decomposing fruit – bare hands and a plastic bag were all I had to do the job. And there were no maids around to help either, not like what the young generation has now!

So I armed myself with the fact that the job had to be done and had to be done fast. With gritted teeth and half-closed eyes, and a speed that was almost as fast as lightning, I would complete this distasteful task every morning. I was very glad that when my family moved to our new home when I was 10 years old, there were no star fruit trees planted in our garden. Our home was now on a hill slope and we never experienced floods again.

I had this flashback of the star fruit experience while I watched a documentary of children being put to work and as I reflected on my own work now in entrepreneurship. Indeed, not everything that was handed to me was something I enjoyed to do and not every proposal I sent out ended with a closed deal. Some experiences were almost like that of picking up a rotting star fruit. It left a bad aftertaste in my mouth and it was something I wished I never needed to do.

Sometimes, apart from the ordeal of the task itself, it is also facing and confronting the ‘fauna’ that comes with it. This could be the people I needed to deal with in the course of getting the job done or deal closed. Not all are beetles or butterflies. And to rub the salt in, the whole process did not seem to end, just like the litter of rotting fruits in my garden that always needed to be picked up.

But of course, we get to enjoy the ‘fruits of our labour’ – I remembered enjoying the juicy star fruits in the evening with my family. We would not be able to get to eat those fruits for free if we did not have the star fruit tree and everything that came with it. Life goes on.

~~~ About the contributor ~~~

Jeanisha Wan is the Founder and Managing Consultant of J1 Consulting. A passionate marketer, Jeanisha loves coming up with brand new, especially unconventional marketing and business ideas.