During my last job, I had kept a picture in my Microsoft Office profile, which was about 6 years old. I kept the same picture after I joined my current job and one day I noticed it and felt that I needed to update my profile picture. I tried to take few selfies and realized a magical fact that our photographs turn out to be worse along with time. After struggling to take a good enough selfie, and selfie was a bad idea for a formal looking picture anyway, one fine morning I just took few selfies after taking a bath and wearing my favorite tshirt, and I felt it was good enough. I resized it to make it smaller, cropped it, blurred it just enough, and uploaded it on my MS Office profile picture.
My colleages immediately took note of it and spoke about it in the team meeting. I told them that my earlier picture was about 6 years old and hence I changed it. They seemed to like the new picture. During another call, my manager joined and other team members told him about my new profile picture and he mentioned a few words trying to be polite and happy, but including something like “at least some of us are getting old”. From that, I realized that I was looking older in this new picture; and it was completely fine for me since I was indeed getting older with time and there is nothing wrong in it. I remembered one manager from one of my previous jobs and she had loaded her college picture in her profile picture and never updated it despite completing 10 years on the job; and she said her inspiration was to keep looking like her college picture! Did she actually look like her 10-year-old picture? In her 10-year-old picture, she was laughing cheerfully like young people do, and perhaps the picture was cropped from a large group photograph from her college days. Everyone is happy in college days, even the bad people. In her current age, she was not really like her old days, but who was going to tell her that?
Coming back to my story; I was aware that the picture was not very good, and I was fine with it. Then one day while talking to my niece who was looking at how I was working on my laptop, she noticed my profile picture and said, “this is bad”. I was taken aback for a moment with her blunt honesty, but since she was right about it and I am not too touchy about my looks anyway, I just took it as honest feedback. I am planning to change my profile picture now.
End of the story is that I was touched with my niece’s raw honesty.
There is something very good about “simple honesty”.
- Rahul
