Commandments for Success: A Guide to Personal and Professional Growth

My Ten Commandments for Success
Navigating Success: Insights from an Alumnus

1) Socialize — I have been an introvert all my life. I detest
socialization. I always like to be the least noticed person in the room
be it in a personal social setting or in an office meeting. Introvert
people are rarely successful unless you are a person of the caliber of
Albert Einstein or Newton. So if you are like me, change yourself. Don’t
be afraid to talk to people. Take yourself out of your comfort zone and
start mixing in circles where you may initially be looked down upon and
even be ridiculed. Soon you will be part of them. To be successful, you
need to make connections. Utilize the college alumni network. Join lots
of meetups and be an active speaker/participant. Don’t think “The quality
of my content is not bar-raising so people will ridicule me”. Believe me,
the average quality of most presentations is below par but the people
presenting have one quality that the people not presenting do not have
and that is “They are not afraid to fail or be ridiculed”. They are in a
sense shameless. They don’t care if people will laugh at their English.
They are just out there and get noticed. Everyone remembers them. Don’t
be afraid to ask influential people to be your mentor. It will boost
their ego and they will help you. It is almost impossible to be
successful completely on your own merit. You need help from people who
are successful themselves. Most of those people may be perceived by you
as complete assholes and many of them probably are. But don’t be afraid
to reach out to those so-called assholes. Don’t let ego come in between.
Don’t ever feel I am better than them so why should I demean myself and
hang out with such people? The truth is that these people have the keys
to your success and you have to get in their circles to be successful. So
don’t delay. Start socializing. Start getting close to extremely
irritating but influential people. Start today. Set yourself a goal of
becoming very good friends with 5 of the most irritating but popular
people at college whom you hate the most. Believe me, it will be the
hardest thing you have ever done in your life, much harder than cracking
IIT JEE. But this habit that you develop today against your wishes will
reap you more dividends than what your IIT degree will. Develop this
habit of being comfortable talking to unknown people as if you have known them
for years. By the end of the conversation, you should have that person’s
phone number and email in your contacts list. Also, be comfortable talking
to people of the opposite gender. Never have any gender, age, language,
nationality, etc barriers. You never know who is going to be helpful to
you. Sometimes help will come from unknown and unexpected quarters so the
more people you know the more likely you are to be successful. Regularly
call your old friends and people you met at some social function even if
it is for a few minutes. Don’t be like me, a person who likes to hide and
believes that only hard work will get success. No, it never works that
way. Social skills are as if not more important than work-related skills.
You should be a person people feel comfortable to talk to and approach. A
close friend of mine once told me “How will you ever get a girlfriend?
Girls feel like they will need an appointment to come and talk to you”.
Don’t be like me.

2) Management Skills — When I become a manager from an Individual
Contributor, one of the mistakes I made was that I tried being too nice a
person. I tried being a manager whom every sub-ordinate would love to
work under. And I was very successful in what I wanted to become. My subordinates loved me. They said I was one of the best managers they had
worked under. But that’s not how the leaders in my organization felt.
If you get too close to your subordinates and become like friends, they
start taking advantage of you. There is nothing wrong with being a nice
person to work for. But you have to be very firm. Your sub-ordinates
should never feel they can take it easy because you are such good friends
with them. Nice people rarely if ever make good managers. Your company
pays you as a manager to get work done. You have to be ruthless if the
situation demands. I am not saying be a slave driver and be a complete
jerk. But be firm with your team members. Maintain that distance enough
to be able to ask tough questions if they are not meeting your and the
company’s expectations. And always be on top of your team’s work. I have
seen many clueless managers who go to a meeting and cannot comfortably
provide a status update on their team’s work. Meet regularly with your
team. Be completely up to date with what the team is doing. You should be
able to sell your team’s work confidently to levels above you and defend
your team vehemently when others try to belittle the work of your team
and you can only do so if you are fully engaged and on top of what your
team does. If you are macro-managing at a very high level, you will not
do justice to your team and they will start taking you for granted. You
should never let personal friendships come in the way of running your
team. Be sure to be very firm with your team and at the same time fight
with your higher-ups to make sure your team gets duly rewarded for the
good work they are doing. If needed go 2–3 levels higher but do not
accept anything less than what your team deserves. That’s how you will
gain your team’s respect else they will see you as a manager who only
cares about their own career and that will hurt you sooner or later.

3) Politics — Politics will happen whether you like it or not. A lot of
people including me believe politics is evil and should be avoided at all
costs. Believing politics is evil is the first step towards mediocrity.
You need to be extremely political to grow in any organization. Whoever
says that is not true is plain bluffing. You have to be willing to fight
for resources, fight to get good projects, fight to demonstrate that your
team is doing good work, fight to ensure your team gets rewarded, and fight
to ensure you are growing and getting rewarded for your hard work. There
is an old saying “A Squeaky wheel gets the oil”. The corporate world is
very mean and very unforgiving to nice, simple people. You have to be
extremely political to survive and grow as a manager. If you believe your
manager is coming in the way of your growth never hesitate to build
friendships with a level or two levels higher than your manager. Everyone
likes information. Be a supplier of relevant information to senior levels
of management earn their trust and get in their circles. If your
manager is not pulling you up as they go up, closeness to higher levels
can be very useful for you to grow. Always back powerful horses. Do not
waste your time backing horses that you think are going to lose.

4) Be prepared to do not-so-enjoyable work — As you go up the
organization, the work becomes less sexy and less and less of what you
learned in college. If you are someone who enjoys doing hands-on low-level work, you will remain at low levels. You have to start to enjoy
work that is more about people management, resource allocation,
budgeting, monitoring, understanding data, and
making decisions. These types of work may not be very enjoyable but if
you want to grow, you have to start liking such work. To get to the top,
you have to pass through lower and middle levels of management and those
jobs may not be enjoyable to everyone. If you do not enjoy those jobs
then be happy at lower levels and curtail your ambitions. You cannot have
the best of both worlds. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You
have to make difficult choices in life and this is one of the tough
decisions you have to take in life.

5) Accept responsibility — If you are someone who blames others and
circumstances for your failures, you will never succeed. Always remember
you have many crossroads in life where you took a decision to go one way
or the other and it was you who made a particular decision and it is you
who will bear the consequences of your decisions. So thoroughly evaluate
before taking any decision but once you have made a decision, accept the
consequences. You will do yourself a big favor if you accept the
consequences of your own decisions. People who blame others and
circumstances rarely do well. You lose credibility if you get into the
habit of blaming others. Bad managers talk bad about their own team in
front of others just to avoid blame for failures but good managers scold
their team members in private but always accept responsibility themselves
in public for failures.

6) Don’t let your past mistakes ruin your future — To err is human or so
they say. Everyone has made at least a few mistakes in their lives. But
the biggest mistake you can ever make is to keep regretting the mistakes
you have made and let those mistakes define you. Never look back. What
has happened has happened. No one can change that. What you can
definitely do is to undo the damage those mistakes have done to your life
to the extent possible to the best of your abilities. You can never be
successful if you keep regretting and let past failures overwhelm you.
Then your life will remain a story of what could have been.

7) Don’t get married to the organization you are working for — Any
organization won’t even think fifteen seconds before replacing you if
they think they don’t need you anymore. Unless you work for yourself, you
are just a row in some spreadsheet. So never settle into a comfort zone
and keep working at the same company even if you are not growing. Trust
your intuition. If you get the feeling you are not growing in your current
job and not learning a lot, it is a signal from within that it is time to
move on. Pulling oneself out of the comfort zone is never going to be
easy. It will put you and possibly your family through a lot of
discomfort. But it is necessary if you have to grow. Be prepared to pull
yourself out and look for a new job every 3 years or so, unless you are
Growing.

8) Take risks — The best job is one where you are your own boss. Nothing
can beat being an entrepreneur. But it is the biggest risk you will ever
take in your life. The comfort of getting a steady paycheck every 15 days
is hard to give up. If you put yourself in that situation, you can either
come out a winner or you can fail miserably. But one thing is for sure,
if you don’t put yourself in that situation, you will always work for
someone else. If you fail, remember the story of King Bruce and the
spider. But also remember that the younger you are the easier it is to
take risks. With age, your responsibilities increase and it becomes that
much more difficult to take big risks. So don’t be afraid to take big
risks and fail at an earlier age. But never give up. Chances are very high
that you will fail in your first attempt. Chances are you will fail even
in your second attempt. But keep trying. Never give up if your dream is
to be your own boss. It will be an extremely difficult path but one
cannot see the Himalayas by standing on Mt. Everest without going through
an incredibly difficult climb. Else one has to enjoy the Himalayas from
very far. Be paranoid in your 20s and 30s that life is running by you and
you are missing out because life is and you stand every chance of missing
out unless you act soon enough. Don’t let the asking rate become too
high. Treat life like a T20 match and not like the second innings of a
test match because in life there is no 2nd innings.

9) Travel the world — It is an incredibly enriching experience to travel
and see the world even if it costs a lot of money. Keep a target of 50
countries by the time you turn 50 and then don’t stop. Take care of your
health. Eat well, sleep well, exercise well. Never compromise on these
three else it will be too late once you are past 50. Don’t leave it till
you turn 50 to start taking care of these things.

10) Read a lot and discuss a lot — People who do well in life are very
well-read and have a lot of knowledge about things either by reading
about them firsthand or hearing it from others. So choose your circles
wisely. Move around with people who can give you useful advice and share
useful experiences. Don’t waste your time with people who are not adding
value to your life and helping you become a better person.