10 days ago
- copy link
N. Raghuraman, Management Guru
While addressing the first year SNA students this week, I asked them to prepare a goal sheet in which they had to tell how and where they see themselves after completing the next two years of the university.
I collected their sheets and read some of their goals out loud and helped guide them by giving them advice on how they could reach their goals and what they would need to achieve on the university campus in addition to their academic writing during these two years. What should be done?
One of the 45 students’ sheets caught my attention and I couldn’t read it out loud because I was sure the entire class would have laughed at it and might have been uncomfortable. He wrote, ‘I don’t want to do anything, but want to earn money!’ It turned out that the boy had enrolled in this course under pressure because most of his college friends had done so.
This reminded me of a book that I bought during my stay in America this summer. The book, titled ‘Rental Person Who Does Nothing’, released in January 2024, is an autobiography by a Japanese, Shoji Morimoto, and translated into English by Don Notting. It’s interesting to know what Shoji does for a living. He doesn’t really do anything. Here is an example of this.
Imagine you are at a social event that you couldn’t avoid going to, but now you want to leave for some reason – one reason could be that you are uncomfortable there. You tell a lie to the organizer that someone has come to pick me up because there is some important work to be done in the office.
The organizers agree and they come to drop you outside and if they ask where that man is, then how will you show that man? If you’re in Japan and have a similar lie, you can call Shoji and he’ll be there waiting, with whatever name you give him. You can introduce him/her as your friend, neighbor or colleague and get rid of that place. Shoji Morimoto casts himself as a simpleton who will only do simple tasks and offer no opinions.
In his post on
Shoji often takes on the role of a therapist, such as when a client confided in him that he had been jailed as a teenager for murdering someone. In such a situation he just nods or mutters ‘Hmmmm…’ or ‘Okay’. But this is also enough for clients who just want a neutral person to listen to them.
Shoji writes that ‘depth in conversation and depth in relationships are not always related to each other. ‘In truth, proximity often forces people to keep their mouths shut,’ he writes. Shoji helps the stranger talk to the neighbor who lives downstairs, in order to avoid losing the laundry left behind.
They share a Starbucks Frappuccino with anyone who feels like he or she can’t finish it alone. He sits and watches someone writing a novel. They make an appointment with someone, so that they can get out of that relationship without being caught lying/telling.
The bottom line is that If you don’t want to do anything, that’s fine, do it, because it’s your life. But remember, even for doing nothing you should have a plan, create such a platform, set goals and gain millions of followers. Then earn money for food and rented space.