For me, school was a traumatic experience. I could not relate to classwork. School demanded quick answers, quick solutions, and instant recall of facts. Fear of failure to answer correctly paralyzed my ability to respond. In stark contrast, sports allowed me to focus on temperance, patience, industry, and simplicity. It didn’t matter if shah Jahan was a poet, administrator, warrior, or scholar. What mattered were physical challenges, friendship, and security. Sports offer all that and still do.
We focus too much on academics, especially grades, and are unable (and, more importantly, unwilling) to move any mountain. In fact, most of us have not made any perceptible difference in the world in which we live. So much for good grades. It’s all very well to be articulate, write well, be witty and charming, and in general possess a great personality. But the stuff that moves mountains is sharing, caring, perseverance, integrity, and generosity.
Today’s society places too much emphasis on personality and not enough on character. We value people who look good, speak well, and are go-getters. Those with compassion, love, and commitment, meanwhile, are considered non-starters. For too long, the go-getters have had a free go at getting and have got nowhere. History is replete with such disasters. The worldwide conflicts stare us in the face. Somewhere along the line in our development, we have crossed over from being value-centered to being self-centered, from being austere to being over-indulgent. Instead of savoring, we squander our time living out pointless fantasies prepackaged at school with no consideration for our role in society.
In Pakistan, the media is filled with horror stories about the lack of scruples prevailing with in the Pakistani masses and leadership. It’s been too long a goodbye to the days when mothers would pack their boys off to the boy scout troops to learn first-hand about leadership, hardship, teamwork, and appreciation for the environment. Now, it’s fashion togs, shopping at brands, and discussing impending exams or buying expensive gadgets and flexing on social media. Imagine a whole being run by people who can add columns, compute ratios, and do creative forecasting but are unable to resolve conflict at home and in their neighborhood. These are the same people who have been under duress to achieve high grades and excel in exams. In the process, they have developed callousness and lost leadership skills.
The simplest form of leadership is to motivate people to perform to their maximum effectiveness in order to achieve the objectives they have set forth. Leaders today stand for competing incessantly with others, neglecting those who empowered them, and preserving power with no regard to long-term effects on society.
Now, competing has come to mean a conflict of interest, which is not what the Greeks meant when they invented the word competition, they meant to strive with, and not against, others. It was not winner-take-all. The so-called loser counted. He made the difference by pushing the winner to win. Without a loser, there can be no winner. That is contribution, the essence of competition. As a sportsman who has lost on numerous occasions, I feel the victory for me was in participating. The skills developed in sports are becoming more useful in leading a full and balanced life. Forget the courses in Business ethics and let’s look inward and compete with our own best efforts. Let’s leave admissions to leading schools up to the administrators and move on with developing our next generation with solid values and with a vision for the twenty-first century.