What is professionalism? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)
Questioner (Q): What is the meaning of being a professional?
Acharya Prashant (AP): What is meant by being professional? What is this thing called professionalism about? Is it just about serving your profession with excellence, or is it something more than that? Whenever we hear this word, ‘professional’, an image comes to the mind. Is professionalism that image?
Clearly, there are two layers to this question. One, can professionalism be defined by a certain code of conduct, a certain personality, a certain way of carrying yourself? That is the first part, and that is how most of us know professionals to be. So, this first layer is very important. Is professionalism about that? Second part is about the profession itself. If professionalism is about being excellent, then being excellent in which profession?
Let’s look at the first layer.
What do you do when you walk into an interview room? You start wearing clothes that look like the clothes of a professional, right? You aren’t the professional yet; but because most of us have confused professionalism with the image of the professional, so we think professionalism is nothing but this image. You talk in a particular manner; that is called professional. You wear a particular kind of clothes; that is called professional. You carry yourself in a particular way; and that is called as professional.
Surely this layer, the first layer, is a very superficial layer, very very superficial layer. A code of conduct or a way of carrying yourself or a certain persona does not even mean that you are excellent in the profession, whatever be the profession. We are not yet taking that question; that is layer two.
Whatever be the profession, wherever it is coming from, it may be an altogether external influence. But no one can know the depth of your excellence by the way you carry yourself. All this can be manipulated, and it is used mostly for manipulation, nothing else.
People work totally substanceless. They would prefer to walk and talk in certain borrowed, copied ways, and the world is deceived, the world is duped. What does the world think? “Oh, these must be professionals!” Because the world has no eyes.
It is a stupid world that we live in. It has no eyes to look at the essence of the person, the individual, and it is too eager to judge everybody. And how does it judge? By your appearance, by your words, by your looks. And so words and looks have come to hold an unreasonably important space in our mind. They do not deserve that space.
The very question of how am I looking, what am I wearing, how am I speaking, is not at all a very important question. At least it can’t be the central question of your life, “How do I look to others?” And that looking is not only physical looking; that looking is also about your image in the eyes of others. Unfortunately, this has become a very very central question in our lives, and that is also how we know that “professional”.
It is none of your fault. Since you were this small, all you saw was, you know, P for pilot. And who is a pilot? He is wearing a particular cap and a particular uniform. Now, does that cap and the uniform make a pilot? But then, you are so small, and the message that goes to your mind is that anybody who can wear that kind of a cap, looks nice and smart, is a pilot.
This is a totally erroneous relation that is established in our minds. But it is alright. A child’s brain is not yet fully developed, so it is alright if this kind of an erroneous relation gets established there.
But none of us are kids now. How come our minds are still deceived?
Have you noticed how you become respectful the moment you come across someone wearing a particular kind of dress? Someone walks in, in a proper professional coat and a tie and the rest of it, and you are impressed. It is no wonder you would be taken for a ride. Coats impress you! Is that all you have learned in your life, to be impressed by coats and turncoats and neckties? You don’t have the eyes to look into the man; the coat is all that you can see.
So, professionalism has come to mean a certain way of behaving, a certain way of talking, relating, expressing. And when you say that you want to become a professional, the image that comes to your eyes is of that. “I am an engineer,” and the image that comes to your eye is not of someone who is deeply engrossed in an analytics equation, but of someone who is wearing a particular dress or is being found in a particular place.
So, C.S. (Computer Science) students, they are imagining themselves in some office in California. Now, what does the office have to do with software engineering? The office is brick and mortar and glass. What does brick and mortar and glass have to do with software? But that is the image that comes to your mind. If you are a civil engineer, the image that comes to your mind is: you are wearing a yellow helmet with a torch, a lamp on it. Now, what does this lamp, this optics, have to do with civil engineering? Nothing. But that is the image that comes to your mind.
And that is what little kids do. Little girls, they will wear these long coats and they will say, “Doctor, doctor!” Haven’t you seen them? For them being a doctor is all about wearing that coat and writing a prescription. We still haven’t grown up.
You know what? Most of us, given a chance to work in a place, in an organisation which is housed in a not-so-impressive building—the building is shady, it may be a software startup. It doesn’t look like that great office of that great MNC company listed on NASDAQ. We will not work there even if the actual software engineering work is better there.
You would rather work in an office that looks like a software office, even if you are doing utterly clerical work there. But then, you will feel more like a professional in that Bangalore or California office, even if you are nothing but a clerk there, because in your mind being professional is so much about the external, the thing that is outwards.
It is a beautiful word that doctors and lawyers and even architects use: ‘practice’. What counts is where the thing can really be practiced. Practice means doing, practice means done. What counts is where the thing can really be done, not the appearance of the theater.
Practice means: a surgeon is actually able to conduct a surgery; that is practice. A lawyer is actually able to fight a case; that is practice. Or is practice about wearing that black coat?
Q: No, sir.
AP: But very soon, one year or so, you will be standing in queue for employment, and you will forget all this. You will totally forget.
Have you ever wondered how a company can come to you and show a grand picture of its office in its presentation and impress you? Because none of you are intelligent enough to get up and ask, “But this is brick and mortar. What does it have to do with software or electronics?” None of you will ask that. “Why are you showing this civil engineering work to us? I mean, if you want to impress us, also show us a photo of a five-star hotel; we will be all the more impressed. But what does that have to do with the work that I will be doing?” You don’t ask about the work, and that is why the company shows you the picture of that office.
You don’t ask much of that because you have been trained to think a professional only in terms of his personality.
The second part. What is a profession? Profession is livelihood, right? The question of what is profession is the question of what is work, what is worth doing in life. It is actually the question: What is worth doing in this life?
I ask you, have you ever wondered how much of your waking time you are going to spend working? Up to 70 percent. In your waking hours, you would be investing up to 70 percent of your time working. This is the most critical question of your life. What is worth doing in these hours, this 70 percent of my waking time? This is your life. Work is your life. It is going to consume so much of your time. It is life.
Have you ever bothered to deeply enquire? Do you love yourself? Do you love your life? If you love your life, don’t you want to see what can be made out of this life, what is worth doing in this life? Don’t you want to find out? You must find out.
Your work is your life, your life is your work. If those working hours are boring and full of conflict, what will become of your life? What will be the quality of your life? Tell me. Life will be boring and dull and sapped of energy.
What is worth doing? What is not worth doing? You surely cannot pick a profession just out of an influence cast on you by somebody or some force. Unfortunately, that is how most of us pick up a profession or a trade; unfortunately, that is how most of us enter into a particular stream of studies: being dictated by somebody, not really knowing ourselves. And if your profession comes to you not out of your knowing but out of a social factor—your family telling you something or it being the current trend—then you are in for a life of confusion and conflict.
I used to ask, how is it possible that a particular organisation visits the campus and three fourths of the campus wants to apply to it? How can the same company be the dream company of 400 students? Where is individuality in all this? Where are you in all this? I only see a flock of sheep! Same kind of job, same pattern of higher studies. As if the script has been written beforehand for you; as if it has been pre-decided for you that this is what you will do. Oh, you will have a little bit of choices, alright; but all that has been settled well in advance.
That is how our profession comes to us: decided well in advance, with a little bit of tinkering here and there. “Don’t want to do M.S.? Do M.B.A, alright. But that is it; don’t try to cross the boundary!” “Don’t want to go into Electronics? Alright, here is IT. But that is it; don’t jump the fence!”
Is that how profession must come to us? Or is profession something lively? If profession is my life, then do I need to look at it with greater care, deeper enquiry? Does the topic deserve more investigation? It does, yes? Are some of you seeing that you need to look at the question of profession with great sincerity, with great clarity?
You cannot just keep drifting, and at the end of a particular day you find that “I am in this profession.” You will be inviting a life of great suffering and boredom. Our world is full of such people who entered into professions for just the wrong reasons. Somebody told them that a government job is wonderful, it gives you security and respect, and they entered it. And then you wonder why they don’t want to work. They while away all the time; lazy, clumsy, dull, bored. Because that is how—or somebody got it from his father. “I run a shop. Now I will give the shop to you; you take it forward.” That is how his profession came to him. Now, any wonder the man is always irritated? He will be irritated.
Want to live a life of irritation and boredom and frustration? Do you? Then find out.
Q: Can we say that if there is a tea entrepreneur who sells more tea than anybody in the area, then he is a real professional?
AP: See, profession is not about doing good in terms of sales or this and that. Please listen to this very attentively.
The quality of your profession is defined by the quality of your life in it; not by the amount of sales you generate, not the kind of respect society gives you for being in that profession. And quality of life is not just about how much money it gives you. It is about the love with which you can come to it, the energy that you can give to it.
Want to know whether you are in the right profession or not? If you prefer to stay in it even if it does not give you any money, then you can know that you are in the right profession. If there is something that you can give your life to, then you know that you are in the right profession. “It does not pay me well, I do not make much money out of doing this, and yet I want to do this, and there is nothing else that comes to me,” then you know that you are in the right profession. And only then life is worth living.
