Does your current job have an impact on your future life?

That was a rhetorical question. Instead of answering that one, please read the story I picked up from one of the teachings of Osho.   

A retired army man..he had fought in the First World War and he was honored; he was a brave man. And now, almost twenty-five years had passed. He had a small farm and lived silently.

He was going from the farm to the town with a bucketful of eggs, and a few people in a restaurant, just jokingly, played a trick on the poor old army man. One of the men in the restaurant shouted, “Attention!” and the man dropped the bucket and stood in the position of attention.

It had been twenty-five years since he had gone through the training. But the training had gone into the bones, into the blood, into the marrow; it had become part of the unconscious. He completely forgot what he was doing-it happened almost autonomously, mechanically.

He was angry. But those people said, “Your anger is not right, because we can call out any word we want. Who is telling you to follow it?”

He said, “It is too late for me to decide whether to follow it or not to follow it. My whole mind functions like a machine. Those twenty-five years simply disappeared. Attention only means attention. You destroyed my eggs and I am a poor man…”

I don’t want to analyze the story. The key takeaway was fascinating. Things that we deeply get involved in on a daily basis get into our unconscious level.

Think about your job and your daily life. What messages are you sending to your permanent storage? With the accumulation of these messages, how do you see your life unfolding a few years from now?

I was there in India very recently and got an understanding of the way BPO industry operates. The pay is good and the short-term money is great for several young professionals. The short-term prospects are forcing several people out of college to opt-out to these kinds of jobs and they are keeping their brains in the cold storage for a few years. The price they will pay later for the additional money they are getting today is very high. Hope some of them will realize this TODAY.

I think when the story is re-told a few years from now, the key character will not be an army man but a former BPO employee 🙁