He was short, very short. From a very young age, he was made aware that his height made everyone underestimate him. In school, his classmates bullied him and excluded him from games. His teachers, who should have known better, treated him as a slow learner. He learned to read, quietly, and by himself. And he learned the power of keeping his thoughts to himself.
In grade five, it all changed. A teacher went after a fellow student in his class. It was patently unfair. But the teacher was a fierce and menacing person and the class kept quiet. He did not. He discovered that day that he could not stand injustice and could not stand by quietly. He put his body between the boy and the teacher. The class looked amazed. They had never seen this side of him. He stood fearlessly before the teacher and in clear terms explained why he was wrong in going after the student.
The teacher was beside himself with rage and shouted at him. He never flinched once. He stared back at the teacher firmly, fearlessly, and spoke in an even tone. The more agitated the teacher got, the calmer he spoke. At one point, the teacher raised his hand to hit but at the very last moment held himself back. He huffed off uttering dark threats, by now forgetting that he was mad with another student.
Overnight, he became a sensation. Everyone wanted to become his friend. He found this new-found celebrity status enjoyable up to a point and overwhelming beyond it. But this surge in popularity boosted his self-confidence, and he began performing better in class. By the eighth class, he was not just popular but also considered one of the better students.
At home, his mother noticed his transformation. When his father and sister made fun of him he would take it. Not anymore. He gave it back to the extent that they began to back down. He was clearly growing in confidence.
In grade ten he meets his future wife. She was one year his junior, they fall in love, and remain inseparable. She was taller than him and bigger. But in his new-found standing, these differences didn’t bother him. He revelled, in fact, in his notoriety — the boy who bucked convention.
He passed school creditably, nothing more, and went on to an ordinary engineering college, one among thousands of names on an admission list nobody would remember. It was there, almost by accident, that he found he liked taking things apart more than he liked being tested on them. He spent his spare hours designing and modelling devices that solved problems nobody had asked him to solve, not because he needed to prove anything to a room that had once underestimated him, but because it was the first work he had ever done purely for its own sake, with no audience watching to be impressed or unimpressed.
He completed a postgraduate degree in management and joined a start-up tech company, where he designed three new products that gave great leverage to the company. In meetings he was often the smallest person at the table in every sense the room recognised — junior, unheard, his ideas repeated back to him a week later in someone else’s voice as though they had only just been born. The CEO, a big man who liked to lean across his own desk when he spoke, so that anyone sitting opposite him had to look up, took credit for the innovations in a complete volte-face, and excluded him.
Deeply distressed, he plans revenge. He sees that the CEO had built on the promise of innovation that was never his own to promise. His angered mind finds it difficult to forgive such treachery, and he takes it as a personal affront. Revenge, he recalls reading it somewhere, is best served cold. He plots and plans whilst showing a compliant face. He told his mother he was the smiling monkey looking up the tree at his boss. But the anger was festering, and a plan hatched itself.
He knew that plagiarisers need a constant source of inspiration. He banked on it, and developed a fourth product, except this time with a catch that only he had a key to. He showed it to his boss. His boss complimented him, took credit, and launched it. Precisely as he had anticipated, the catch surfaced, and the boss was asked to produce the key. It was a catch that could only have been unlocked by the innovator. The moment had come, and in considerable shame, the boss asked him to unlock it. It was now plain to everyone who the innovative mind truly was.
He had regained his standing. The boss had been caught out. It was the moment to go for the kill, a glorious opportunity to take the leadership role for himself. But our innovator was made of deeper stuff. In that instant he had the clarity of thought to recognise that his boss had shown leadership in encouraging him and others to be innovative, and had fallen in the well of insecurity.
He stood before the boss the way he had once stood before a teacher, calm, unflinching, except this time there was no rage to face down, only a man considerably smaller than the office he sat in. He said, simply, that it had been a privilege to work for someone who had first trusted him with the freedom to build something. Then he turned and left the room, and did not look back to see the boss’s face.