Tag: career

Rules of professionalism

Some rules of professionalism that you will never be taught, yet are the most important ones:

  1. Respond.
    Yes, as simple as this. Bro, there is no point taking out the frustration of your bf / gf / ex on to your professional relationships. If someone is asking, it is professional to respond. If someone is sending an information, it is professional to give a thumbs up.

    People don’t work with people for product or services. People work for the care. Give them! Because it’s the right thing to do.
  2. Be on time.
    On time means on time. If it is a Zoom call, 4 pm means 4 pm. Not 4:15, stating 15 minutes is okay. No it’s not. So is the case with in-person meetings.

    The formula is again simple. People see how much you care about them. That will make them decide if they can refer you to others, or figure out a way to get out of this engagement asap.
  3. Do what you say you will do. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
    The line is maarofied from my boss, however, emotions are the same.
    You say you will deliver a report by 7? Keep an internal deadline of 5 and email it max by 5:30.
    You say you will come back? Be specific and tell by when will you come back. Not next week. Rather which day in the next week.
    You say you need time to think? Perfect. Can you please communicate by when will you respond?

    Repetition hashtag three: People care for people who care. It simply shows you are involved.

Living an organised professional life does not make you Monica from F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
It just makes you an accountable human being, about whom people would not think twice, before referring.

Letting go of a client

Letting go of 1.5 year old client at the end of this month.

We have grown together. In our business. And work. And maybe as human beings as well as our professional relationships.

However, as we grow, we change priorities.

For me, I need answers to work related questions to create content on personal branding. For him, he has just raised funding and maybe (rightly) does not have time. It is, thus, inappropriate for me to continue with inauthentic content.

The best part, which I also believe is the most mature part: He respected my decision instead of trying to stop me.

Btw, the reason for leaving that I have communicated to him is me not having time out of my day job. In reality, it is his lack of time for his own content that is making me make this decision.

Over the past few months, I have had several conversations with him about sharing his content, along with citing examples from other creators. However, since things aren’t changing much, it is better for us to part ways.

Still, he remains one of the most trusting and easiest clients I’ve ever worked with.

Bless him, with a better content writer, and the best business 🙂

Why is change so hard?

I returned to Delhi yesterday.
Was waiting for this for long.
Still, I miss Mom. And Papa. And kids. And the drama 🙂

Change is hard. However, change is what we must.
Maybe I will go back. Maybe I won’t.

Not pronouncing any decision as of now.
But really trying to spend time with myself.

And telling myself, “It’s okay. You will get through this.”

Open, by Andre Agassi

Sometimes I find myself walking to my bookshelf, pick up Andre Agassi’s memoir Open, and look at this back cover pic of Agassi.

The kid is quite confused.
The kid hated tennis.
The grown-up Agassi hated tennis.

But with the weight of that racquet too much to handle, he managed it for one of the greatest careers in history.

And perhaps even found himself in the process.

This kid gives me power, strength, and often vulnerability, to not resist what’s coming.

In what lies unseen, you will see yourself.
In what you don’t know, you will know more.
In what you hate, you will end up loving yourself.

I’d never thought I’ll do this!

Off-late I have started teaching Maths to my nephew and niece.
9th standard kids. Unable to understand it in Zoom classes. So we do another Zoom whiteboard instead 🙂

Here’s what few days of teaching have taught me:
Pros:
1. Be enthusiastic with kids and they will reflect that back every day.
2. If you clear their basics, they will we propelled themselves to go to RD Sharma (I know!) to do further.
3. Damn their innocent voice! Or maybe its my love for them <3

Cons:
I discovered one about myself: To accept everyone at their own speed instead of expecting everyone to be at the same one.

Life gets so much better when you hang out with the right people, in whatever manner 🙂

Excuses that shouldn’t exist

The world is filled with wonderful people. And I mean it!

However, it is heartbreaking to see those really capable not hold themselves accountable for everything in their lives.

For example, some of the excuses that are given that shouldn’t exist:

  1. I couldn’t find that influencer’s email:
    O c’mon Bro! Digging out emails, creating permutations and combinations, and checking if the email is right is exactly what uncle Google is your home page. We can find out ANYONE’s email ID, if we are willing to do the research 🙂
  2. You are strong, so you can do it:
    Strong people become strong on the pillar of tons of tears and wisdom of words from the right books to minutest minutes of meditation that we think are insignificant. Being strong is a choice, and this comes from someone who has been through valleys of weakness and now does not allow those weaknesses to touch her.
  3. I have registered this event in my mind:
    Someone does something bad to us once by mistake and we forget all the good they did to us as well as all the time we spent in building that relationship. Is that the value we want to place to the people we love?

We are a product of either of two things: the imaginations we create without a limit or the non-existent limits we place on ourselves daily.

It’s great that you’re not a laptop

My laptop turned ten this January. (Lol, looks like I’m talking about my kid. Haha, except that it is not my kid, I’ve just typed so much that it is just my therapist taking all the mental health issues outta me 😀 )

So, coming to the laptop.
It’s slow.
Can’t work on videos.
Since my work is primarily writing, we are still in a relationship.
But it takes time to download from and upload to the drive.
With too many tabs open, may even occassionally hang.
But it’s trying its best.

Here’s a fact: This laptop is a laptop. Which means it does not have a replaceable CPU. Which means it can only be replaced for a new one.

But here’s a bigger fact: You are not a laptop.
Your brain is not fixed.
You can change it.

Your body replaces itself almost every year.
You can change your body.

Your lifestyle isn’t fixed, no matter how trapped you are.
Your tiniest of changes can make the biggest of differences.

You are not a laptop.
Don’t live your life like one.

One question I get asked a lot

One question that I get asked a lot is:

“How were you able to make your career switch? Did you not face any challenges? Did you fail? How did you bounce back?”

This blog, is an attempt to answer that.

Well, to give you a background, I am a Chartered Accountant by profession. Worked in the corporate for five years, and kept writing on the side because I loved it.
In 2020, I quit my job and took up writing full-time.

How was it possible?

Before how, let me address the question of why.

I used to work as an Internal Auditor. Which meant on any given day my high rating would be a function of how many errors and how huge errors I detected. It, in turn, meant that someone else had to screw up badly in order for me to perform greatly.

And I kid you not, I was great at my work.

Sometimes people were fired because of me, sometimes people were issued warning memos, and almost every single time someone else’s annual rating was adversely affected.

With all this going on, I was not very happy. If wherever you go, you are welcomed at a superficial level yet at a deeper level people wished I didn’t come or went away quickly. The money that we earn brings blessings. For me, it came at the cost of many people’s career. My career, no matter how legit, was someone else’s nightmare.

And with my love for writing, it was just nudging me daily to make that move.

So here’s how I quit my job and made a career switch:

  1. Started freelancing part time. I had already been creating my content – so initially that and a few cold emails served as a starting ground.
  2. Over a period of time and some force of luck (that always shows up when we do the good old hard work) when I got good clients + I managed to save a year’s worth of expenses, I made the move.
  3. The expenses that were saved are not used yet, thankfully, and will never be used as an emergency. But that cushion keeps you from making bad choices.

Simple. That’s it.

I did not know this would be the process, I just kept creating content without any direction of where it would go, and soon it did lead to some good places.

As far as problems that were concerned, I solved them the way I solve all my problems – by surrendering them to God. The results are never short of epic.

Try it out! And reach out to me to tell how it was 🙂