One lesson that I have learned recently is about cleverness after discussions with my mother. There is no point of humbleness when you are dealing with ungrateful and unruly people around. But cleverness does not win ever. You have to deal with it; that work ethic is not just continuing to play your cards daily.
People are clever enough to stick to their noble professions, disguising them as spirituality when in actuality they are just another act of cleverness. These days influence is more important than the quality of work.
Meanwhile, you are only viewed as a contestant despite your capabilities. You cannot feel settled, as this contestant mentality is consuming workplaces and swiping all participants with a wave of mental ill-health.
Livingston et. al. published their narrative review in July 2025, titled “Dignity in mental health—examining the dynamics of mental health stigma.”
They put up a case study describing Switzerland as the happiest country in the world, not because there were fewer mental disorders but because the patients weren’t deprived of their dignity with such diagnoses. They could take care of themselves better and be happy despite psychological distress being 29% in diagnosed women, with studies also reporting about 77% of Swiss employees suffering from a mental health concern.
According to Ivbijaro,
Every individual instinctively recognizes a violation of their dignity.
At workplaces most people deal with their problems with cleverness to uphold their dignity, which I interpreted to be a short-term solution. Perhaps one should not participate in a dirty game of influences and influencers. We can have a word and explain why we took a particular step, playing with the team a game of productivity.
I always had a problem with the fact that no one gives an “over,” a briefing of their duty to the next person who takes up the job in one’s absence. I was never given that brief, but when it was my turn, I briefed the concerned person following this very important work ethic among medical practitioners. I have several anecdotes, but those would be unnecessary here.
In my country, if someone is a doctor, it is not taken humbly but flamboyantly. We work with diseases. That’s it. But it is highly misunderstood, and even the least knowledgeable among us has a lot of attitude that will melt an iron rod with its heat in an instant. I am not saying that we should not have confidence or always put on a smile; I mean that certain procedures that we perform within a team must be discussed. They are stealing opportunities most of the time deliberately; moreover, they bypass hierarchy. It is dangerous, which a typical Indian medical practitioner will realize very soon.
I am not a spoilsport. We have to bow down and change our outlook as if it were an emergency. Times are changing, and the new generation in the field will not carry a fake identity or cleverness. They are upfront and intelligent. To work with them would be quite challenging.
In one of my lectures, a student interrupted and told me that the concept that I was teaching was not listed in the competencies supposed to be taught for the subject. I had to explain the context of must know, good to know, and best to know, but she wasn’t convinced. Thus, to stay abreast with such minds, one has to be careful, honest, transparent, and possess brevity in communicating without having a clever agenda in mind. One must be straightforward and ask questions in exams that will screw or dodge in a medically relevant context and not to check if a student is absent-minded. It takes some persistence and training for a few years to consolidate certain concepts; it is not a pleasure giving time to our egos to detain someone for their absent-mindedness if the concept is well understood. Demonstrating a procedure well is better than naming the instruments correctly if it is their first time experience. Repeatedly, things become familiar. We need concepts, and no one that sits in the examination chair, even if not a doctor, is without knowledge nowadays. You cannot grade a 15-year-old and above with zero knowledge by default, unless the person is mentally retarded.
That said, I want to convey further that cleverness isn’t all that bad. It is a two-edged sword if used wisely, as in the words of Francois de La Rochefoucauld,
The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.
One cannot be a victim of their own egos. They have to balance their individuality and environmental triggers without undermining themselves.
We have to keep some room for lightheartedness in the midst of all seriousness. For this reason, one should have the ability to lead.
If you accept the call to leadership (even if you lead yourself), you must be willing to be misunderstood, criticized, opposed, accused, and even rejected.
To be such a lead, one has to have some amount of cleverness and be able to value time, revenue, and human force and take decisions that might not be accepted by all people. One needs an outlook, and for that, one needs to be clever enough to follow many examples and choose one. It depends upon you if you follow openly or in disguise. We cannot expect a leader to be all transparent. There are people whom the leader needs to protect for specific reasons.
This is not corruption. It is the duty of the leader to take a stand. The decisions can be wrong, but things get corrected. We cannot simply burn alive women to death if the society calls them immoral. We cannot point out at someone’s modesty just because our voice is heard, in which case the leader saves the victim.
At the end, coming back to the work ethic, most of the teams support the work, the work done ethically.
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