A great career involves twists and turns before one discovers the true vocation‍

The year was 1985. The newly minted engineer from IIT Madras arrived at Jamshedpur to take up his first job with TELCO as a Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET). Surely a dream job for a mechanical engineer in India those days. Sadly this engineer was soon to realise that his dream job was a bit of a nightmare waiting to happen, just as many of us did with our first jobs. He found out that what it took to succeed on the shop floor at Jamshedpur was not the analytical skills that had got him into IIT, but the ability to manage and motivate workers, which nobody had cared to teach him at IIT! It was no fun when he found himself to be the butt of jokes even as he tried speaking his textbook Hindi with the workers, who were more conversant with local dialects of Bihari. It was even more demeaning when he found himself making tea and samosas for workers as a caterer’s strike hit the morning chai supply and threatened to stop the production line! Stressed and disillusioned, he did what many others in the GET programme have done before and after – prepared hard to escape from there by applying to every school in India and the US that would deliver him from the throes of depression he found himself in. And deliverance came in the form of admission to IIM(A) in his case.

But wait a second…this story doesn’t end here. Years later, after his despair about his wrong career choice had vanished, he realised that the experiences in those two years were surprisingly responsible for shaping his future successes. His baptism by fire taught him more about life than the 20 years before at home and school. He owed his newfound ability to laugh, have fun and enjoy life to his Bihari colleagues whose attitude towards life was refreshingly different from the Chennai TamBram culture with its 1001 rules. He had learnt that the art of people management was as critical as the science of designing machines, and this helped him in building great organizations when he eventually set out on his entrepreneurial journey later in life. It humbled him to know that he was never going to be as good as the engineer from Bihar College Of Engineering when it came to mingling with the workers on the floor, and getting them to accept him as their boss. A great ego check and a key learning on the kind of jobs he should avoid. So it came to pass that years later, well after he had run miles away from mechanical engineering and shop floors, he could connect the dots and reflect on the learnings from that mistake he had made early in his career. Steve Jobs put it very well when he said, “ Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future……because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Following his heart was exactly what Barack Obama did when he decided to embark on a career as a Community Organiser in Chicago. The path eventually led him to a successful political career and the office of the President of USA. But was it so obvious when he started out? What was crystal clear was that he was admittedly making the mistake of forsaking a six-figure salary in a law firm of his choice, which his Harvard degree would have granted him. “I always felt that the value of a really good education is you can take more risks,” Obama said in November ’07 on Charlie Rose. “Ultimately, if I really need a job, if I’ve got to pay the bills, I’m going to be able to find one.”

And that point really hits the nail on the head! What is the sense of pursuing a great education, if at the end of it one does not earn the luxury of making mistakes and picking oneself up? As many of you may know, Harsha Bhogle, India’s leading sports journalist and broadcaster, did not start out as one. He first tried his hand at chemical engineering even as he pursued sports commentary as a hobby in the background. He quickly moved away from engineering to business, perhaps realising that he was not cut out to be an engineer. His next move took him to IIM(A), and that was followed by a short stint in advertising before he took the plunge into television. It is not like we can write off his initial forays as missteps in an otherwise stellar career. It was surely this unique background that gave him the advantage of lending a completely different perspective and depth to his sportscasting, and thereby made him stand out in the crowd. In Harsha’s own words, it is his varied exposure and training that have led to his excellence in his chosen field… it is what makes people remark, “Wow yes! Hang on! This guy has more than just cricket in him!”.

This ability to try different things, which perhaps look completely foolhardy on the face of it, is very critical when we plan our career. It is the only way we can figure out our true calling, as the false starts tell us what we would, and more importantly what we would not, enjoy doing. Most of us in India spend our entire schooling in an education system which expects us to know what we want to become by age 14. As if this is not enough, our social set-up is so straight jacketed that our parents and extended family members insist on drawing up our future to the last “t” even before the namkaran is done. The net result is that while we come out as engineers, doctors, and lawyers at age 22, we actually have no clue as to what it means to be one. Now imagine if we shied away from taking any chance with our career where would we end? Career is not about drawing boundaries and walking in a straight line. It is about self-discovery and life long learning. A great career is characterised by the twists and turns that one takes to meander into the untrodden path to finally discover what will make us truly happy. That is when we get motivated or charged up to do our best. Many a times it is about realizing what will not work for us. Failures and mis-steps are so critical to this process of self-realisation that avoiding or side-stepping them would be tantamount to short changing oneself. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” said Albert Einstein and that sums it all.

Published in Business World dated 13 Nov 2010