There comes moments in your life that leaves lasting impressions on your mind and soul. These moments either make you or break you. Sometimes, they do both.
I can count at least three such moments in my life so far, off the top of my head. One of them lead me to focus on and prioritize on gaining work experience over getting a higher CGPA. The second moment was when I decided to continue working in startups up to 2017. The third was when I chose to continue to write consistently since the last year and focus only on that and my applications for Master’s.
Not all of the decisions I took based on these moments worked out for me. But I have always trusted my gut instinct and tried to follow my own compass; so far, it hasn’t led me astray.
Here are some of the mindsets I learned to adapt over the years that helped me get through rough patches in my personal and professional life. Here’s the tl;dr one liner for those who feel overwhelmed already: persistence and consistency are key to performing well in whatever you want to do.
You Need to Work for Years to Become an Overnight Success.
Having perseverance is key. When you first join a full time role, you will see that things are a lot more different than they were at business school. Deadlines come and go at the blink of an eye. You have to learn five things at once while handling a dozen projects. Your colleagues might be nice- or they might just be faking that- but you won’t know eitherway for sure until you have already put in three months or so into your role.
There’s a nadir that most of us reach when grinding away our first few years after college.
It’s when you feel overworked, stuck in your role or feel like you can’t find anymore room to grow professionally and personally. Your colleagues are just as overworked you are, and you can’t find enough time in your schedule to talk with your significant other, let alone meet them for dates.
This is the make or break point that you need to go through, no matter how tough it feels.
Once your limits are tested as much as humanly possible and you start getting used to it, something amazing happens. Your work starts to click together.
You can see how your team and teams from other departments come together to deliver a project on schedule. Your productivity increases and before you know it, you are up for a promotion.
This period of high growth that I mentioned? It’s not possible without you going through that one or two years of utter drudgery in your entry level position. For others, it may as well be four, five or ten years until this happens. You may not even want to work in someone else’s company for your entire career: maybe you want to open a startup and grow something from scratch.
In all of these cases, you can’t get closer to your goal without suffering for it. Many of my bosses call it paying your dues.
It’s something that you see in other industries as well; for instance, pro wrestlers often start out as jobbers (wrestlers whose ‘jobs’ are to lose to other wrestlers frequently) and then they climb their way up the ladder methodically, growing and evolving into better versions of themselves.
There are no shortcuts to getting there. If you want to be good, let alone great, you need to be open to the possibility of suffering. And once you have suffered enough, things will fall into place for you, slowly but surely.
To Develop Expertise, You Must Invest More Time than the Required Average.
For the last point, I talked about how to get good at your work. Getting great is another matter entirely.
Malcolm Gladwell used this rule of thumb called the 10,000 hours rule, where in people can gain mastery in a subject if they invest 10,000 hours into it. The rule has been disputed by many since Gladwell first wrote about it in Outliers (2003), but it speaks a fundamental truth to how you become great at something.
My long term goal for writing is that I need to get less shitty at writing every year.
That means I have to write consistently for as long as I can. And that doesn’t just mean writing an article or a story, it also means doing the necessary groundwork for your writing too. This includes research, plot outlines, character profiles, beta reading and critique workshops, and much more.
I have been writing consistently since 2009. I won’t say that I am a good writer now: just only that I became less shitty at it by remaining committed to writing over the last ten years. That required a lot of personal sacrifices, and I won’t lie by saying it was easy. And truth be told, it won’t be easy in the future either, if I want to get published and then keep on creating publishable pieces of writing.
The only reason I became less shitty at writing is because I kept on writing articles on a wide variety of topics, and also because I allowed myself to write things that I felt shitty at the time, but have since been polished considerably after several rounds of editing.
I don’t know if I have a talent for writing, because honestly, I don’t care at this point. Gladwell put it best when he said that ‘achievement is talent plus preparation’.
Understand What Work Means to You, and Work Accordingly.
Obviously, work means different things to different people. However, beneath this simple statement lurks a much more complicated range of possibilities.
For some, work is a way of gaining social recognition, along with increasing their standing relative to the people they know. This is the kind of motivator that drives people to work in MNCs, or at least, important local (or public) companies.
Some people feel strongly about certain causes or sectors. That might be why someone chooses to work in a field like social work and counseling, where they get to work closely with people suffering from various kinds of trauma and help them get better over time.
Some people might feel strongly about the need for financial inclusion, and also the modernization of financial transactions, and that might drive them to work in Bkash or other fintech companies.
For others still, work is the primary source for making money, and thus they work according to their pace, which may surge or decline based on what the person concerned feels is necessary to make money. Someone who wants a lot of money, either to hoard or spend on cars, houses and vacations, will be more likely to work harder than someone who feels more comfortable with their current salary.
For me, work is a crucible. It’s a forge where I can craft a better version of myself: a good video game analogy would be that work presents me the opportunity to level up my playable character.
Accordingly, I have always leaned towards fields and roles that give me significant exposure to my peers, clients and a variety of issues and opportunities to work on. While I would like to work in an environment where I can make a difference, I rather prioritize work where I can utilize my strengths to the fullest.
As helpful this kind of mindset has been to me over the years, I also suffered several times because I neglected my health while I was busy with work. That came to bite me in the behind a couple of years later, when lack of sleep and irregular eating (along with my back pain) forced me to find some time off from work and reevaluate my work life balance.
Right now, I try to take care of myself so I can work without much interruptions. It’s working well for me so far, but I will let you guys know if anything comes up in the foreseeable future.
Work Definitely is a Zero Sum Game in Some Contexts.
The most obvious zero sum game situation in a work context is when you are interviewing for a limited number of open positions. In this context, someone else’s failure or success in landing one of those positions directly affects your own chances of getting that job. Similarly, being a driving force in a project as opposed to being a hanger on who coasts by without much effort directly affects your chances for a raise or a promotion.
This might seem obvious, but it’s a stark departure from how things usually are in college.
Yes, there is a valedictorian and a salutorian, but in theory someone else could also get grades in that range without that outcome being affected by the valedictorian’s own grades and performances. There isn’t a set number of possibilities that decline everytime someone succeeds.
In work life, however, internal politics and other kinds of infighting leads to ‘winner takes all’ situation.
While it’s possible to work with more conciliatory and collaborative mindsets, in fields and companies where competition is not only valued, but encouraged, there is no substitute for ruthless aggression.
In this context, you need to figure out very early on if you want to take part in office politicking. If you feel that it’s not to your tastes, then you need to understand the possibility of more ambitious and go-getter individuals running rough shod on you or your project sometime in the future. If you are, on the other hand, one of those ambitious types, you should be careful as not to trample too many colleagues on the way to personal glory.
Remember, you work with these people for at least forty hours per week. It’s not a good idea to piss them off; they can make life very difficult for you if they are ever so inclined.
Don’t Freakout if Your Priorities Change.
When I was fresh out of undergrad, I was intent on working in a startup environment because I was familiar with that kind of pace through my previous internships and part time work experiences. However, after around one and a half year of full time experience, I saw that I wanted more stability and certainty in my work life. These things weren’t easily found in a startup environment. This lead to a stream of thoughts that eventually lead to me taking a year off to work on my blog and writing in general, before applying for Master’s programs this year.
At the beginning, I was freaking out constantly about how this was a pretty big move. Moving to a country and getting used to everything from scratch meant that I also had more anxiety to deal with than I expected.
But when I learned to accept things as they are and tried to go with the flow, life itself became more simpler for me, allowing me to multi-task comfortably and take things as they came to me.
We don’t remain the same people over time. What we value changes, as do the things that give you meaning and a sense of purpose.
Sometimes, we need to become other people on the journey to becoming the kind of individuals we want to be.
When I accepted that change, I could see a whole new strain of thoughts and opportunities that I didn’t notice before.
As I kept writing and sketching, I developed a newfound love for books, buying over ninety new books throughout last year. I looked for discovered great places of bargain buys; and before long, I was scrolling through ebay a lot more than Amazon.
I am still learning, truth be told. But one of the great things I discovered was that, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, you can’t connect the dots by looking forward. It’s only when you look back that things seem to make sense.
Most of us aren’t going to become Steve Jobs. and that’s perfectly okay. Allow yourself to become the best version of yourself, the version that you can love conditionally and be proud of. Trust in yourself, and put in enough time into self care everyday, even when you feel tired as hell and too exhausted to get up from the bed.
This excellent video talks about how you takes small steps to improve (or ruin) your life in your twenties, and after a while, you notice how far you have come. There’s a quote by Will Smith that I often look towards when seeking guidance.
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period.
You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple, right?”
Have faith in yourself and your path. What you are seeking may just be around the corner. All you need to ensure is that you are the last person still running that treadmill.