A few thoughts and observation about career. How the people move around and being successful in their life. Its merely my perception, you may have different view on this.
Well, the first question came on my mind is why do we need good career?? and immediate answer for this is, for being successful in our life. What is the meaning of being successful? How do we quantify our success? Is it mere happiness through out our life? If so, you may not find many successful people in the world !! . Having million dollars savings make you successful person??..Its really difficult question and also it is bit difficult to define the success. According to me success is becoming a brand, that means when you will be identified as unique personality in the world who can influence and make good changes in the people’s thoughts or living standard or anything else. For example, lets take first hundred most influential people in the world and how they acquired the power to influence the world. It is through their career. So you have to be successful in your career to become one among them.
How can be successful in our life. The conventional method of being good in life is getting a job immediately after a decent degree in hand and continue in that for years to get a promotion. This will not really make successful anyone,but will help them in moving forward in life and to blame their fate whenever they face a hindrance!!. So what differences we should make to become being successful in our life??
Lets think about a few successful people in the world. Firstly, Steve Jobs: founder and CEO of APPLE Inc. It is quite visible his remark in technology Innovation and how he influenced the way people live. Then about, Larry and Sergy made breakthrough in search engine and introduced GOOGLE. Zuckerberg tuned existing idea to make people more social.. All the above are the icons in the tech world and people aspire to become like one among them. There are few well-spoken qualities needed to become successful. 1). Follow the passion 2).Be optimistic or get hold of good belief 3).Focused Hard-work and Risk taker. Anyway, it is not worth to think about their success/qualities and many had discussed it hundreds of times. But it is worth to analyse our thoughts in prime time of life..
Let me start from the college days, How students perceived this world, their career, and priorities in life. During college days, their main priority and motto would be to get-through campus interview and work for the company for many years, and planning to become innovative, smart and fast learner. Unfortunately most of them will end up accompany with people who has different view about their life. For the sake of being social with them, they will compromise their earlier activity plan. The couple of years after, they will realize life become more generic and monotonous, not much difference from who did not get through Campus. After a few years of experience, will look back and wish for change for getting good perk..
Another interesting aspect is how we rate different profiles. For example, development job is always considered better profile than validation/testing. In one perspective, it is true if you look at the caliber required to complete the task and also comfort zone provided by validation/testing makes the people lazy. According to me there is nothing called bad profile. But some of the profile appears bad if you don't find scope in your business group and some of them need more attention and steady hard-work to reach next level. Most of the time, we will never get patience to put extra time/effort to reach next level..So we often tend to drop off from it and search for better profile.. But do we really need best profile to reach top of our career or being successful or become a brand??.. Na really!!
So what might be the stepping stone for being a brand? It is VISIBILITY. Visibility on your efforts. Visibility is the major concerns in technical field. Employees hardwork will be known in product/organization name. So brand value of the company rises and visibility of employees will be with in that company/organization and also amount of appreciations/motivation getting for your hardwork is limited to strength of the business group, validity of this appreciation exists till you leave the organization. The end of the day, one man judges your capability and performance. It may not be right always!!. As your career depends on him, you will always nice to him/her and dream for better tomorrow.These are the possible reasons employees are not as motivated as entrepreneurs. In tech-world, mainly entrepreneurs are visible and appear successful.
Look at the other profession or industries like Film or Art or Band. Here you can see the performer/individual is more visible and also capability of the individual is judged by thousands or millions of people . So the judgement and feedback often will be true and also influence of the motivations from thousands make him to work harder than ever. This lead him into Success and being unique in the world.
So techie should make them-self visible to become a brand. There are many ways techie can do this. Write/publish/present papers on renowned consortium. This will give visibility among many tech-leaders, industries and brings many opportunities to take leadership on cutting-edge technology projects. It would also help you to get appreciation or feedback or questions from thousands, which would help you to understand the domain well and motivates you to do much deeper research on your domain. This way, you will gradually become a brand and successful in your life..!!!!!
It is very interesting to see some of the well-known techies like Linus Torvald, who hardly known as VP of Transmeta Corp., but well known as founder of Linux. Klaus Knopper: founder of Knoppix, he came up with new linux distro for implementing his idea, instead of integrating his idea into existing linux distro . This made him famous. There are many examples you can see in the techies-world, how the people make themselves visible to become a brand.
Cheers
~VKK
