The Other Mango!

Stories are a great way to connect and build relations, however, in the hustle people often forget to tell stories and rarely get to know anyone. In this article, I am sharing a story borrowed from Shree Guru Gaur Gopal Das since I believe this story brings out the perfect inference.

If you have heard Guruji, you may already know the story, but if you don’t then here it goes,

Arnab was a little boy in school, he was attending his maths class. The teacher was conducting a session on addition. While the session was going on the teacher thought of asking a question of her students.

Fortunately, unfortunately, she pointed at Arnab and asked.

If I give you 2 mangoes and then again 2 mangoes, how many mangoes will you have?

Arnab replied — five!

The teacher was shocked, she thought maybe the boy didn’t hear it clearly, so she walked up to him and repeated the question and asked.

Arnab, please listen carefully and then answer, If I give you 2 mangoes and then again 2 mangoes, how many mangoes will you have?

Arnab replied — five!

The teacher was not able to understand, so she thought maybe she will give example, so she asked

If I give you 2 strawberries and then again 2 strawberries, how many strawberries will you have?

Arnab replied — four!

Yay! The teacher was a bit relieved and asked the question again, hoping this time she will get the correct answer.

If I give you 2 mangoes and then again 2 mangoes, how many mangoes will you have?

Arnab replied — five!

Now, she was furious, and asked how is that possible and seemed quite upset.

To which Arnab replied, Teacher I already have one mango in my bag. So when you give me 2 mangoes and then again 2 mangoes, I will get four plus, I already have one mango, hence I will have five mangoes.

Now at this point, let me ask all the readers, who is correct?

The teacher for expecting 2 plus 2 equal 4, since that’s the correct maths or Arnab since at the end he is left with 5 mangoes as he already had one.

So, both are correct in their own reality.

This is exactly what this story tells us, we don’t know the other persons’ reality and hence we should not Judge others until and unless we really know them and their story.

In my experience, I have seen many times leaders tend to judge people and form opinions which in the long-run impacts employees' growth or causes the employee to exit.

This is the reason, it's critical to learn about the why?

If you have an employee who is not able to join your meeting on time, try to find the reason what stopped them.

If you have someone underperforming, try to find the underlying reason “why”. You never know, they may have lost someone and are recovering or they are going through a bad relationship or maybe they are under bad debt and are being threatened for recovery — you never know what is causing them to lose focus.

Hence, the best solution is to partner with your employee, learn about them and then help with however you can. After all, we all are humans and faith is the only factor on which humanity survives.

So go and find the other mango…