the red queen

Now that we all are professionals, whenever we meet old friends back from the ole b school, the conversations usually moves on to our respective jobs
Starts of with the innocuous ‘hi buddy how’s work’
Then every body starts bragging,
“I just am working in this new product launch”
“Oh, yaar very busy in these campus recruitment drives”
I also pitch in with “nothing much yaar, just a M&A deal’s keeping me busy”

And so on and so forth

The conversation I had this weekend was also identical

But then it got me thinking,
When we were in the B schools, poring over case studies, cramming for exams, everybody was so enthusiastic about their future careers
The marketing guys used to think that they will make some out of the box suggestion for the new product launch, the finance guys used to think that they will use derivatives to hedge the forex risk of some fortune 500 company and save a couple of hundred million for the company………………….


Then we started in our jobs with the same wide eyed curiosity, the desire to do some thing different and be counted.
I had the same desires too

But now 8 months down the line, I get the feeling that I am just keeping time , just counting the seconds before I can jump to another job, just doing enough to keep up with the minimum required of me.

And then I see that I am not alone, my boss is doing the same

And his boss

The freaking company is full of people keeping time

Then we move on to another job, with a honeymoon period of a few degrees of enthusiasm, and then settle into another period of keeping time

Is that what our life has come down to??


There is a phenomena called the red queen phenomena

It means a situation where you have to run as fast as you can just to be at the place where you currently are. We are just doing that, running at a speed enough to keep us where we are.