Life is all about adapting yourself, some people are good at it and others just don’t know how to.

When I lived in India I had my own store, an Internet/LAN gaming cafe, in partnership with two other guys.

On this one particular day the cable guy was coming to hook up the TV. All he had to do was to get the wire to go through a hole in the wall to get it into the premises so we could hook it up to the TV. This task involved getting a ladder so he could get to the appropriate height as the hole in the wall was over 10 feet up.

He asked us to call an electrician to do that.

Now clearly something was amiss here, either he was just being lazy or he simply didn’t have the ingenuity in him to get a chair on top of a table, which were available, or travel with a ladder, as you would expect a cable guy to have, to get the job done. But instead he asked us to call an electrician as the task of putting a wire through a hole in the wall was far too technical for him to handle.

Clearly something was amiss here. I noticed this behavior in many people with whom I worked with from 1999 - 2004 {I went solo after ‘04}. They either felt that a certain task was above their pay package or that they simply “thought” they could not perform a certain task, because they were described their job duties in orientation and everything else seemed alien to them.

Here is where the nature of a person comes into play and the difference between someone getting a promotion, or going on there own, or someone just staying a technician that travels in a bus to install cable without even a pair of pliers in his backpack. But the bill book firmly in their hand.

Adapting is key to survival, every species on Earth does it. So if you say to yourself that you are able to do one thing and one thing only, guess what? You will be left behind doing that one thing for the rest of your life.

So how good are you at adapting yourself?

As for the cable guy, I placed a chair on top of a table got up on it and slipped the cable wire through the hole. The “cable guy” just stood there looking on in amazement as I, an “ordinary guy”, did that.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.