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2019

  • in careers
  • 3 min read

Act Like You're 35

Don’t just network with people your own age

Beware the whiz kid syndrome. Smart, young people have a habit of forming communities of other smart young people and feeding off each other’s energy. Argghhhh. Are you not just making mistakes made by older people again? Make original mistakes

Youth enclaves can actually be restrictive. In fact their networking should be about meeting useful mentors and career champions who can open doors and fast track careers.

Some of the best functional leaders in India are now in their 40s. They built India’s telecom and Internet 2.0 (Flipkart, Amazon) and are looking for ways to give back. You at 20-something is ideal fire for them to light.

Learn to build a network. If you are in SaaS, Go to SaaS events.

Learn from your seniors at ChargeBee, CleverTap, Haptik, Freshworks, WhatFix, BrowserStack. Don’t be a moron on an island refusing help. Shout. Ask for help. If not, hustle.

Take the time to understand what your business does

I love the story of President John F. Kennedy’s visit to NASA during which he asked a cleaner what his job was. The cleaner replied that he sent rockets to the moon.

All of us should feel part of what we do at work. We might not have an exact wording or understanding yet. That is even better, we get to co-invent this on the journey!

Don’t wait for someone to tell you or lament that internal communication is crap. Find out for yourself.

Never sacrifice personal ethics for a work reason

If you work on something that compromises your personal ethics and values, get out of there as quickly as you can.

Good people will be unnerved by things that don’t feel right. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. Bad things only manifest when good people don’t take a stand.

Most success comes from repetition, not new things

Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book Outliers, promotes the idea that you needed to spend 10,000 hours on something to become truly expert at it. This applied to the Beatles and their Hamburg gigs and Bill Gates who, through a series of fortuitous accidents, ended up spending more time than almost anyone else on a computer.

I want to call bullshit on that. People forget that Bill Gates was among the best mathematicians of his age. Mark Zuckerberg was among the top 20% programmers and psychologists and CEOs of his time. The best idea is to be a triple threat.

The lesson here is to get good at few (greater than one) things before you try to move to the next thing. Genuine expertise belongs to an elite few. They seldom have superpowers. They usually have endurance, patience and take a long-term view. They also love what they do. If you find that, don’t let it go.

In the workforce, always act like you are 35

A recruiter gave me this advice some years ago. It is quite inspired. What she meant was, when you are young in the workplace, don’t act as a novice. If you are smart and competent, step up and do whatever you are capable of doing in a mature way. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Or help people aim for a higher quality.

Similarly, when you are an older worker, don’t act like it. Approach your day with youthful energy. To quote a famous Frank Sinatra song:

You’re 35 and it’s a very good year - "Frank Sinatra"

  • (Hattip Shane Rodgers)

End Notes

I barely follow 1% of this myself, and would consider it a major personal win to get to 5% in the next 10 years (when I’ll actually be 35).

If you think I can help you in anyway: making introductions to others as mentors, figuring what to do to unlock your potential, or how to grow - please know whatever you share with me, stays with me.

This is a contextualized essay, which riffs on and rips from:

Build your own playbook:

  • in careers
  • 2 min read

Thinking of Your Career as a Startup

Broadly speaking, it’s useful to think of your career as a startup.

Your profit+growth percentage should be a minimum 40%

So say, you join a big company like Microsoft and your skills grow at 20% every year, while your pay only grows 10% - that's bad.

You need to grow your skills and outcomes faster.

The other extreme is also fine: You join a small startup which can make great use of entrepreneurial DNA plus specific skills.

Your pay jump is 30%, and your skills grow only 10% - that is fine too

Your pay is profit. Growth is demonstrable skills growth.

Think of each career move as a Merger and Acquisition: Write a detailed document with the best reasons for making the switch.

Make the best argument possible. And then, red team it. Shred it to pieces.

I've done years where I grew by ~50% because of 15% pay jump and ~30% skills jumps - but doing it consistently is what matters. I’ve never done a 2-year streak of 40%+ growth in my career.

Most college graduates that I know - earn double of their starting pay at 30 years old. Which is effectively the growth rate of a fixed deposit. Fixed deposits are among the worst asset classes to invest in India.

  • Their gains come from savings and investments and the magic of compounding, not higher income alone
  • Your starting income should be high, or restart your career in some way e.g. moving to a new country

Charge more. Grow more

Assigning a % or $ value to your skills

The most common criticism of this approach is this: “I don’t know how to measure my skill growth - it’s intangible”

Saying something is intangible is a way of saying it has large error margins, it still has a minimum, median and a maximum.

Figure out all three, you don't need precision - you need worst case scenarios.

Look at any company's balance sheet: They've a "brand value" intangible and they assign a $$ value to it.

Millions of people pay millions of dollars for the Nike, Apple, Sony brand every year - it's a not a miracle.

The $$ values don't have to be precise. People always get lost in details.

I just ask them for the minimum, maximum and median - and people are like --- ohh, yeah, that makes sense - we can guess these with some work.

Do the work. Charge more. Grow more.

Mummy ka Raja beta, Nirant

Originally appeared at my newsletter

Diwali 2019: Annual Letter

I wanted to drop by and wish you a very Happy Diwali!

This is an annual email that I write to say thanks to mentors, friends, allies - everyone who has chipped in sculpt a better me.

So that is what I'll begin with: Thanks a ton for being there for me!

Also, checkout the 2018 edition of the annual email in attachment if you're curious :)

Moving onto the least comfortable piece, talking about myself:

Health

This has been a year of regression. For instance:

  • My BMI has slipped from 30 to 33 (higher is worse), gained about 7 kgs
  • Have worked out less than 2000 minutes (was 5000 minutes last year)
  • Have made tremendous unmeasured progress in managing my long term asthma, now I can frequently run up 2 floors without noticing that I did

Wealth

  • I was trying to invest in things other than mutual funds. Well, I've lost 25% of whatever I’ve invested in stocks (via smallcase) since then
  • I hired a financial advisor, which was a net loss making deal due to the fees, but helped me form better habits. Financial advisor in that sense are like gym trainers, more than the exercise - their main value addition is in following up
  • I’ve reduced my Fixed Deposit and Recurring Deposit investments to 0% of my savings
  • I’m diversifying my folio to a mix of index and bond funds now - this is still work in progress

Learning and Reading

Last year, I wrote how I was trying to think and dream better. Well, that has been a bust. The intent was to form a mental model, a scaffold of habits and information on which I could add new information and refine the scaffold itself.

This has been slower than I’d have guessed.

Intentionally, I read less books this year. I did read a lot more modern essays (blogs?) ranging from Peter Drucker, Marc Andressen, Naval Ravikant, and surprisingly boring, a former Coal India Chairman. I also re-read a couple of books like Courage to Be Disliked and Effective Engineer.

I also spent an unhealthy time reading beginner content on seemingly irrelevant topics like Policy making and Human Capital. Here is my favourite cross-topic discovery so far: Talent vs Luck: The role of randomness in success and failure.

Work

Since last Diwali, I quit Soroco and moved to Verloop.io - a really small, pre-Product Market Fit, loss-making business. I strongly considered a very enticing data science role at an investment bank. I finally leaned away from it, making a financially very expensive gut call.

The role here is challenging in two very important ways:

  • Autonomy: There is a much higher degree of autonomy on how I prioritize tasks and that has been scarier than I’d thought
  • Leading: I also hired 3 Machine Learning engineers who now work with me

The thing that could unlock 10x value? Technical and Learning-to-Manage Mentorship: Something I could really use a lot of help on, is critically missing.

The other welcome change is in how anxious I am about work: I am not! I am almost always excited to go work.

Work Adjacent

  • Public Speaking: I was invited to speak at PyCon India 2019 - India’s top conference on the Python programming language
  • Open Source: I’ve continued to maintain Awesome-NLP for years now. It now has over 9 thousand stars and 80+ contributors now. It’s officially recommended by Stanford to their Deep Learning students now.

What's Next?

  1. Writing and Tact

I suspect more knowledge workers in 20s should invest in learning how to communicate via either public speaking or writing. My chosen medium will probably be writing. I intend to write about a select list of topics: technology and how it has shaped our choices.

Owing partly to how I grew up, my default communication style has been confrontational. I'll incorporate a lot more tact, grace and consideration in the years ahead. Be more Kabira.

  1. Chase external validation

My professional and personal framework so far been focused internally. I did not value traditional credentials like degrees, grades, that exclusive college club and so on very highly. In hindsight, this was a bad career decision.

External validation is what sets apart sustainable, long term careers from short one-trick wonders. This mindset shift will be hard. And will probably be a long 5-15 year journey, and I’ll keep you posted - unless you want me to stop. Just let me know 🙂

Till then, Happy Diwali and a Happy New Year!

Best, Nirant