I have a great liking for my friend and CTO of UPilot, Srikanth. We make sure we spend time meeting and talking every day. This is by design to ensure we stay aligned with the vision of the company. Too many friendships and partnerships fall apart because they stop talking after some time.

Having spent 15 years working for a company like Infosys, servicing Fortune 500 companies, he has a unique experience, and I am always curiously digging out insights. After so many years one start to see patterns that are sources of great lessons.

So the other day while walking, my question was ” What is the biggest challenge you faced when managing people from a service delivery perspective?”

His answer was “boundaries” – when people start thinking their job is just limited to what is defined in some piece of paper and refused to step outside even to help others. He went on to give examples of experiences where multimillion-dollar deals were at stake, and the cause was “boundaries.”

The last couple of days I have been thinking deeply about this concept I learned from him, and suddenly I see this pattern everywhere and at every scale.

We put subconscious boundaries on everything.

Oh, I could never be that successful.
I cannot climb eight floors of stairs to the office.
I am a back-end developer – that is CSS work I cannot do that.
I am a surgeon whose expertise is limited to three cms of a nose
He is not reporting to me, so that is not my problem.
On and on and on.

When you look at the old times, things were various:

René Descartes: French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist.
Isaac Newton : English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist
Archimedes: Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.
Galileo Galilei: Italian astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician.

I could go on and on. Where are the mental boundaries for these people?

In the modern world, we look up in awe someone who can do a little more than his job title.

It is possible industrial revolution made specialization a profitable factor for companies to squeeze out every ounce of productivity by making people specialists, which is not wrong in itself but somehow established a boundary on what you cannot do.

The key would then be to distinguish boundaries of focus and boundaries of learning.

Have a focus on 2/3 subjects and have no limits on what you can learn or willing to do to help achieve the goals.

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