Emotional Debt > Financial Debt
I was watching an interview with an e-commerce leader named Arjun Purkayastha this week 1. Arjun has been in the industry for more than 2 decades and has been extremely successful in his career. While he was talking about his biggest failures, he mentioned an incident that made me stop for a while, and think about the concept of emotional debt.
Image generated with Stable Diffusion & PlaygroundAI So, here’s how the story goes. About 10 years ago, Arjun joined a multinational company named Reckitt in Korea as a marketing director. He mentions that the first few quarters after he joined the company were just a series of failures. Nothing turned out as expected. This was also the time when he faced one of the worst quarters in his entire career. In that quarter, Arjun was responsible for a loss of $10 million dollars for the company!
Arjun was leading the team, so he took accountability for the loss. He immediately thought that he’ll soon be fired from his company. But what happened next changed him forever. His one-up manager, instead of firing him, said to him that this is the most expensive executive MBA that this company has sponsored and that he hopes it has taught Arjun how to fail.
This story has a lot of things to uncover. Especially with regard to the importance of failure and being a great manager. But what’s beautiful about this story is how financial debt was transformed into emotional debt. It’s an easy decision to fire the person and it would have not meant anything to the company. But the decision to continue the relationship with trust has put on a huge burden on Arjun to give back to the company. This debt is not easy to measure and give back to the company or the person. It is beyond the $10 million dollar loss for Arjun.
This is what fascinates me. Emotional debt need not just come from discounting the money that one needs to repay. It’s much more common that that. The unselfish actions that were taken by people around me during times I needed them, can never be repaid.
Emotional debt is the result of situations where people went the extra mile to do something for you. They could have easily avoided doing it, but they consciously decided to do it for you. Not expecting anything in return.
In that sense, I’m indebted to so many people in my life. And the only way I could repay the debt is by being the same way to other people who come across my life.