Ashwin Upadhyaya's Blog

Once in a while, you come across stories of ultra successful people. When you see their track record, it seems like they were born with success. But were they really much different from you when they started off? Consider these example:

• Until he was 31 years old, he wasn’t even sure what he would become. He wasn’t even able to pay for movies he watched with his girlfriend. Didn’t earn and yet he wanted to marry her. He planned to be a communist politician and open orphanages. Narayan Murthy ended up founding infosys at the age of 35.
• He used alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years. Until he was 24, he was a normal office goer at a big corporation. He did community work until he joined Harvard law school  at the age of 27. Barack Obama, president of united states.
• He lied about his age to get a job as an ambulance driver. He became a salesman when he was 20 and remained so until he was 35 years old. Then, he bought marketing rights for a mixer and went on selling mixers for another 17 years. At the age of 52, Ray Kroc bought a small chain of restaurants and turned it into McDonald’s as we know now.

Only in retrospect do we really see that they had all the qualities of greatness in them. During their own lifetimes before they tasted success, I am sure no one would have appreciated their efforts. They were not geniuses. They just persevered as non-geniuses and finally became overnight wonders. Its never too late to start because, in retrospect the date on which you started fades in comparison to the success you may achieve.

There is a major problem with techie-turned-businessmen. Almost all the techies I know (including myself in the past) typically are people-shy. I think it is because we spend day in and day out with computers; coding, debugging, testing, blogging, facebook, orkut and more. I got trained in watching computers for 30 months and it has definitely taken its toll. When I decided that I would quit software and do business and that too, a non-internet-based one, I didn’t expect that business is all about meeting varied types of people, sometimes all day.

The change has not been easy. More than a year passed and I am still working hard on getting used to meeting people. However, now I can easily say that the more people you meet in a day, the more successful you are in your business. Yesterday, I met a group of 30 people at some place and one of them turned out to be a potential customer. I went to some function and again found a few potential customers. Lots of such experiences are acting as an affirmation of my new found philosophy of showing up in front of people.

And it is not just about meeting people in real. Twitter and online communities too are useful in this direction. My friend seems to know so many VCs and angel investors all via these media. I haven’t yet completely found the knack of showing up at these places but I am learning this now.

May be I am just talking about something which is really very obvious and doesn’t need all this writeup. However, if it is not already obvious to you, then you need to think about it seriously.

Being on the other side of the table while conducting an interview teaches you so much about “how to face an interview”. When I look back now, I’ve conducted varied types of interviews, from posts for marketing managers to software engineers. Low salary jobs to high salary jobs. 15 year experience people to no experience people. I don’t claim that I have understood everything about this process. Yet, I think there is a basic criteria based on which you get that job or you don’t get it. It’s called confidence.

From the employer’s perspective, he has a job to be worked on. All he needs is a person who can say one of the following:

1. “Yes, I can do this job because I have worked on such a thing before and I know every single aspect of this job”. Advantage: Experience.
2. “Yes, I can do this job because I am extremely strong technically and can prove by solving any problem in a given time”. Advantage: Technically sound.
3. “Yes, I can do this job because I have learnt 10 languages in 3 years and have an example project for each”. Advantage: Fast learner.
4. etc.

Everybody has some sort of advantage and it is for you to find out what you have. When you have one, just show it off in such a way that the person on the other side of the table is overwhelmed with your confidence level. In fact, we have seen some people who have the skill to fake confidence and succeeded to a certain level!! Anyway, that’s a matter which  is of concern for the interviewer, not the interviewee.

For a funnier yet true description of what I just said, see this link: http://www.howtonailaninterview.com/