As I approach what is effectively the twilight of my working years, I find myself often reflecting on things. I ask myself if I would have done things differently. Let’s face it, I’m a far cry from where I wanted to be when I first started. I had this vision of hot shot banker (Assistant vice-president at Citibank by the time I hit thirty) living a glamorous life.
Instead, I found myself in the SME/ Micro enterprise
end of the industry everyone thought I’d be a rock star in and then, I found
myself working for a firm in an industry that I never imagined myself in for
over a decade. Although I’ve since overcome the stigma of not working anywhere
for more than a year (celebrated 11 years with my current employer this year)
and I have a fancy title (Director of Business Development) I’m still not where
most would have imagined me to be at.
So given that many would argue that my lack of a
career is suffering from youthful mishaps, my advice to the kids should be –
don’t be like me. Stick in a place long enough for people to recognize that you
have a skill and build a track record. Then look at doing your own thing.
However, as a look at myself, I believe the advice
that I’d give myself would be – embrace who you really are as soon as you can.
I was so focused on wanting to be part of the banking-corporate crowd that I
never took time to recognize that this wasn’t me. I didn’t actually like being
in an office and sitting in front of a screen. I remain dreadful at
administration and the nitty gritty of processes.
As such, I failed in PR agencies but somehow, when I
had to work on my own, I did work that I was proud of. I was, as a Chairman of
an Academic Body I once pitched to, a proud one-man show. Never worked for the
big multinationals like Webber Shandwick but managed to do
government-to-government work (Saudi Embassy during the visit of the late Crown
Prince Sultan to Singapore), covered the entire IMF Conference in 2006 (got my
byline in Arab News 16 times that month) and met some of the more brilliant
minds around (Raghuram Rajan former RBI Governor comes to mind).
Sure, I struggled financially for allot of those
moments and I do wish I had discovered restaurant work earlier and it would
probably have made me a bit more stable. However, despite the financial uncertainty,
I was actually happiest then. It’s not that moving into restructuring and
insolvency was a bad thing. The job came at a time when Kiddo was coming into
my life and I needed the stability. However, I should have accepted way back
that I was never meant for a normal career path.
I think of this after seeing a post by Standard Chartered’
s Global CEO Bill Winters on Linkedin, where he talked about encouraging people
starting out to grab the chances for riskier moves if the rewards were higher.
Mr. Winters has a degree in “International Relations” and by his own admission,
thought he would be a diplomat but ended up in banking instead:
https://www.sc.com/en/campaigns/now-is-your-time/
I do regret allowing myself moments of complacency,
where I let go of relationships after a job. When Bruno’s came into the picture,
my restaurant and PR work complimented each other. Yet, I never got round to
selling myself and delivering more aggressively. It was only when I moved into
liquidations that I realized that I could cross the class divides and get
things done.
It took a while for me to find my talents. I’ve been a
disaster at monetizing them and now, as I approach the final years of my
working life, I’m now at a situation where that’s become something I need to do
urgently (hence, do subscribe to my Substack). My advice for anyone starting
out – find out who you really are early – go and fail often until you find your
talents and milk them for all their worth.
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