Obsession – Our Self-Imposed Prison
by Ravi Kathuria
This story is inspired by true events and illustrates how sometimes the things we pursue and excel in become like quicksand, trapping us.
A young store worker, Roger, was enamored by the retail business. Because his family couldn’t afford college fees, he’d started working in retail right after high school.
Roger’s parents had ingrained in him the values of hard work and frugality. Roger was driven to understand the retail business and do a good job.
The job didn’t pay well. Roger lived paycheck to paycheck, yet he dreamt of opening a chain of stores that would be the most profitable and cost-efficient in the business. He’d witnessed his employer incur a lot of product waste and engage in inefficient marketing.
Five years after he started working at his job, Roger got his break. A local government program funded his first store. It focused on products for special occasions, from birthdays and anniversaries to religious holidays and life accomplishments.
Roger soon got married and his wife joined him in running the operations.
Now that he was the owner of a business, Roger became obsessed with making it a success. He worked extremely hard to keep costs down and took great pride in watching every penny. He put in an extreme number of hours to make the business successful and so did his wife.
The hard work paid off. After 20 years, Roger had built a chain of 101 stores spanning several states in the U.S. It brought him north of $1 million in take home profit every month. He’d indeed come a long way from his days of living paycheck to paycheck.
Roger had achieved much more than he could have ever dreamed. But despite his success, Roger was trapped in a prison of his own making. Because he was cost averse, he never built a senior management layer. Every store had a store manager who reported directly to him. That arrangement had worked while he had a smaller number of stores.
After he acquired a rival chain of 70 stores, the additional work was killing him, but the obsession with keeping costs low wouldn’t allow him to hire more management layers.
His wife was exhausted too. She complained to him incessantly, but he’d only brush off her concerns. Evenings and weekends were spent arguing. They lived in a luxurious mansion and had wealth beyond their imagination, but the stress and anxiety prevented them from truly enjoying what they had worked so hard for.
Roger’s obsession with keeping cost low was ingrained in his DNA. Even if could send something by courier, he’d drive across town to save the $50 to deliver it. And though he was making a fortune, he insisted on paying the frontline store staff minimum wage. It resulted in high turnover in staff and store managers.
Further, his frugal ways created resentment. The staff didn’t know how much he was worth, but they knew he was doing extremely well. One day, one of the younger staff members scratched Roger’s expensive sports car extensively with a key. Because the employee’s mother had worked for him, Roger didn’t file a police report but he fired the employee.
After the anger subsided, Roger realized the employee’s frustrations were the same he had when he was young. It was a wakeup call for Roger.
Money had an outsized hold on Roger. Even though he’d spend it on personal items, in business he was a slave to his cost saving obsession. He was blessed with enormous success, but his obsession with working hard all the time was ruining his relationship with his wife and preventing them from enjoying life.
Like Roger, so many of us are slaves to our obsessions. Our perspective becomes jaded and we lose sight of what’s truly important. We create self-imposed prisons for ourselves and become trapped.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can wake up to our obsessiveness and find a higher quality life. It takes some introspection that involves:
1. Becoming mind-aware. Understand that there’s a difference between your mind and you. Fundamentally, you are not your mind — you are its owner. Learn to observe the mind and its thoughts. When you become a better observer, your discerning power will grow.
2. Looking out for obsessions. Observe whether you’ve become a slave to an obsession. Consider how the obsession prevents you from enjoying and relishing what you’ve already accomplished.
3. Broaden your perspective. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and miss out on the more meaningful aspects of life. Evaluate what’s truly important in the broader sense and prioritize it over other seemingly more pressing things.
Your life is the most precious thing you have. Don’t become imprisoned by your obsessions and prevent yourself from living a full and fulfilling life.
Ravi Kathuria is founder and president of Houston Strategy Forum, and of the management consulting firm, Cohegic Corporation. He is a recognized business thought leader, vibrant speaker, and executive coach. He is author of the highly acclaimed leadership parable, How Cohesive is Your Company? His second book, Happy Soul. Hungry Mind. A Modern-Day Parable about Spirituality, is a non-religious and practical tale exploring spirituality. Ravi has made spirituality stunningly simple and accessible for all without judgement and preconditions.å Learn more at SpiritualityWithin.com.
