On choices and consequences

One of the many things that I appreciate about my parents has been one of the most important lessons I have learnt in my twenty-eight years of existence. The lesson was that when you are given the freedom to make a choice, you need to understand that you are responsible for the consequences. With that little bit of wisdom, they let me make my choices (with certain restrictions).

I did not begin to understand how valuable this was until I was 19 and a few months from coming to the US for my undergraduate degree. It was then, at a party at a relative’s house, the moment arrived for me and my dad to have a father and son moment: my first drink with the old man. I was not naive and this was not my first drink and something tells me that my parents were well aware of it.

It was not so much the moment though but the realization afterwards that made me aware that now I have been given the freedom of making a choice to drink in front of my parents. With that choice, now it is my responsibility to make sure that I do not lose the trust that they had in me to give me that freedom. Granted I was not too crazy with booze, after being given that choice, I found that I was more responsible with alcohol.

Unfortunately, my college did not have the same faith in me and other 600 hundred or so students that were of age to drink. It was a dry campus and I am sure the people who made that decision thought that this would help students not be distracted and focus on their education but they were sadly mistaken. It clearly did not help me because since alcohol was prohibited, whenever there was any around, people would try and drink as fast as they can so they don’t get caught. Clearly not a responsible behavior.

I was not smart enough to understand it then but now I see that where my parents got it right and the school did not was in terms of ownership of the choice. In the case with my parents, they made me own my choice and made it very clear that I was responsible for the consequences of my actions. By making the choice for me and my friends, the school however took the ownership and indirectly (and most likely unintentionally) sent the message to everyone that we are no longer responsible for any consequences of that choice. If anything, it’s the school’s fault.

The message here is clear: Treat people like adults and they will behave as adults but if you treat them like children, they will behave like children. Unfortunately, a lot of people make this mistake. I know I have made similar mistakes myself and probably still am. You can see an example of this in cases of companies where face time is more valuable than your output at work. What companies fail to realize is that when they focus on whether the employee is there between certain hours, they are unintentionally sending the message that your job is to be here between certain hours and not so much as produce awesome work.

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