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The Circles of Life

What I am about to tell you is nothing new, in fact there are probably a thousand other books which tell you the same thing. Prioritizing your life is crucial, knowing what you want in life is one of those rhetorical questions pop stars sing about and screenwriters write about. It is a question which you can’t just ask yourself once every few years, it’s a question you need to deal with on a daily basis. From my own experience, we can pretty much divide our lives to the following circles:

Career

Family (immediate ie your wife, kids, parents, siblings)

Health

Friends

Spiritual (Religion, well being of the mind and soul)

At any given time we need to juggle with these circles and we would need to focus on different circles throughout our day, month or year. But giving yourself a highest goal or priority is crucial in building and finding out what you want. Placing importance on an all important circle in the long run gives you a path to take in terms of timing, focus and actions you need to do to juggle all  the other circles to direct you to the circle in which your ultimate objective resides in.

Setting goals based on the circles will help you plan a strategy on what you need to achieve and what steps and anticipate the kind of challenges you may face

Learn like Will Hunting – Anyone can learn anything!

I have always believed that if you have a brain and you use it efficiently and train it for positive purposes, you can learn almost anything subject to physical limitations of course, I mean you can’t exactly learn to be a professional snooker player if you’re colour blind – if you get my drift. But my point is very clearly inspired and illustrated in the movie Good Will Hunting – yes the one where Matt Damon plays the prodigy janitor at the MIT who solves math lecture puzzles from just learning on his own. All he needed was determination, structure (which was provided by the lecturer’s notes) and resource ( the library) and he became a genius. I have adopted this approach to learning and have branded it the ‘Good Will Hunting Learning Methodology’ and have applied it in my own career. 

To give you a little bit of history on my background, I had a law degree but I loved computers and I then decided to be in the technology business. What I did was I bought books and learned programming on my own and then got a job at Deloitte Consulting doing software consulting. I then applied this methodology again when I decided I was interested in investing in Technology companies but I had no idea on how to read an income statement of mess around with excel sheets – today I am partner in a regional venture capital firm.

In setting your path in dealing with a career, we all need to do one thing effectively – that is to learn and learn quickly in a way we can execute well enough to have people PAY for it!.

From this standpoint, let me lay out the four step ‘Good Will Hunting Learning methodology’:

-Pick a skill set you would like learn

-Model yourself after a person who is already successful in what you plan to do.  You can measure yourself to (or if possible learn from directly)

-Set a timeline for you learn the skill

-Determine the resources you need

-Just do it and throw yourself in the frontline as soon as you can (quickest way to learn is to learn on the job, work for peanuts if you have to)

-Maintenance and refinement until you’re an expert.

Is getting an education important?

The word ignoramus is not a word you would you want yourself to be associated with. Nobody wants to talk to an airhead who knows nothing but depending what you deem as knowledge – you really need to be knowledgeable in things that matters. If you’re as good an expert as you are on how many tattoos Angelina Jolie has as you are in investing in stocks- you’ll see a difference. And so it matters on what you read and your time spent on reading. Reading for pleasure may be a good thing – but reading something that adds value to your ability to earn – would be a much better of investment, don’t you think?

The word education is one which is usually attributed to ‘formal education’ like a university degree or some sort of qualification. Real practical ‘Education’ of course  is derived more often than not in one’s career through work experience, the school of hard knocks, the blood and sweat. Not to say swotting through textbooks did not give you bed sores on your backside – what I mean is true value in your education really comes in when you’re thrown into the real world to communicate with people, make decisions, win people over….selling.

I went to do an MBA and was shocked to find out that the best business schools in the world did not teach its students the most important part of any  business – SELLLING. The irony of it all. That’s because people who can sell are most unlikely to stick around in Harvard business school pushing pencils and writing case studies. They’re out there making money selling opium back to the Burmese government. That’s one fine example of what you really can’t learn in a classroom. It’s theory – which you will forget if you don’t apply it. Application is really key. Not having application is a little like playing golf on the computer, you know what a hole in one is but to do it in life is virtually impossible. So it took me while to realize the guys in Investment banks and management consulting companies were really looking at hiring people who could best understand, analyze and visualize – true academics in many ways. That was the requirement of the profession. As opposed to being an entrepreneur where doing is key – thinking is not enough – so you can’t really make money by just thinking hard, you had to do something – unless you’re one of the X men of course. So being number 1 in class without the penchant of doing  weakens your value proposition as a whole as a person. So you’re if a bookworm, I suggest you start taking responsibility, lead a team, start  doing to see tangible, physical results – it’s all about building courage and knowing how to be proactive. These are keys to being able to stand up on your own two feet and putting food on your own table. You cannot be relying on others all the time. Self reliance and independence should be your goal as an adult.

The path to being independent has been traditionally been one which takes on the following route:

1, Building enough ability to fend for yourself

2.once you’re able to feed yourself, the next goal is to feed others including your own family or if you’re more ambitious other people’s mouths and their families.

Step 1 usually takes the route of educating yourself (in modern times) you would need to use your brain as much as your physical ability to eke out a living. Conventional wisdom dictates that you the higher the level of education you achieve, the more you’ll earn. I can safely tell you that this is completely untrue.

My basic philosophy is this:

-Core skills – you really really need to only read, speak, write well and count. Really just master these four basic skills (which you learn lots of in school but is still shocking to see many, including scholars failing miserably in basic things like these) and you can eke out a living. To be honest whatever you learn in formal education is pretty useless if you don’t apply it. The crux of any level of education really revolves around these 4 skill sets. Thomas Edison is a fine example of this – he never really have PHD or anything like that, all he had was curiosity and very good library. Charlie T Jones, the personal development guru once said you, you’re the same person you are today 5 years from today except for the books you read and the people you meet. Invest in your library and meet and learn from as many people as you can. You’ll have a truly rich education.

- Be a continuous learner and curious nerd. Yes, become a nerd in something, this can be anything. I am sure you’ve seen how nerds are, they are train spotters in anything that is of their interest and they become experts in specific things. To excel in anything you need to have a passion, understanding and detail of a nerd!

- Preach your expertise, sell yourself as the expert- that’s how you get a job or get someone to pay you money for being knowledgeable and for being an expert in something you like to do.

-Practice what you preach – this is the most important aspect –ie getting results – that is executing what you know to perfection if you can. If you can practice what you preach – you can’t really go wrong. Whatever you conceive in your head  and it’s something you want to do, take the effort to finish it. Half hearted efforts are as good as no effort.

What does having a career mean?

Is having a career to you to put food on the table? Is having a career about having lots of money? Is having a career about focusing your energy on things you think are important and good at? Is a career about being successful and recognized? All of the above?

Ultimately, we hope to achieve all of the above. More often than not, we look for ideals which are unrealistic and we end up dissatisfied with our path to making a living.

The first thing you should look at in choosing a career is:

-Do something which is natural to you, do something YOU know you are good at, it’s not something someone tells you. If you DO not know what you’re good at. Go get your ass off the chair and start doing things, get a part time job, try something until you find out.

-Once you know you’re good at something, consider if you can do it better than most people out there. For perspective on this, you can obtain feedback from third parties on this of course.

-Consider if you really can do what you’re doing for the rest of your life.

If you can answer the affirmative on the above, you can pretty much have a plan to make a living. Whether you can become rich from it depends on how you can succeed in what you do and how you apply the laws of success to your own life. I will not go into aspects on motivation or the law of success in this book but I will instead give you an idea on how you can have a framework to plan our your career and identify key aspects  of your life you need to really understand.

Ambition – the fuel of success and compass of your life

I was not very clear with the concept of ambition. It was always a case of what someone else told me was good and if given encouragement think (the operative word here is think) I could excel in it. At the end all ambition stems from this very idea – and the more you understand and grow this idea or mental picture, the idea becomes habitual and everything you do veers towards achieving your goal of realizing this idea  – the idea now becomes a vision – this is my interpretation of ambition.

And so, I really knew next to nothing about what I wanted to do – and without much guidance and also a lack of understanding about myself – I did something I should have not have done (and also what thousands of kids do nowadays) – I outsourced my career decision making to my parents. With all due respect, they were probably the best people apart from myself who understood what my strengths and weaknesses were. But I was too young and carefree to make decisions and too stupid to realize that my future lay not in my parents hands but my own.

So if you have picked up this book – it’s likely you probably know jack shit on what lies ahead of you. That’s ok because this affliction affects probably seven out of ten people. That means 7 out of 10 people are living lives according to what others tell them not what their hearts tell them. Trust me, you don’t want to be one of these people.

 This series of articles is really for people who are probably still in school and have not really figured out what vocation they should choose, if they should get employed, if they should start their own business or become a priest for that matter. Whatever your background – this book is really a sharing session – it’s not meant to be a guide or a textbook but really an experience I think could be useful for young people who are unsure of themselves or people who think they’re sure of what they want to do but are really not.

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