Of late like an aging fisherman my thoughts have been turning to the ones that got away. Opportunity comes to most of us & I guess what defines us is our response.
I was a solid but unspectacular football player on the fringes of a very good class team. I remember an epic clash in a semifinal of the school tournament where the winner was overwhelmingly tipped to become the champ. As a defender I was assigned to man-mark one of the opposition stars & spent the game harrying him from end to end (get between him & the ball or between the ball & the goal). Suddenly I found myself at the end of a loose ball with their goal in sight & my brain froze. "I am not a star & no way I should be the one scoring" - I made a feeble pass to one of our forwards in a much worse position than I was & long story short we ended up losing the game on penalties. Some opportunities are like that - we don't grab them because we may not believe that we deserve that chance.
Forward a few years - I was accosting unsuspecting foreigners at a well known Handicrafts emporium in Bangalore for a tourism related summer project when I met an opportunity in disguise. A guy walked out with hands full of bags - I introduced myself as an MBA student on a survey mission & offered to help him with his bags as long as he answered my survey. He agreed & we talked on the way to his car. He then asked me about my background & interests & we talked for a fair while. I learnt that he was looking to start a chain of country clubs in India & wholly unexpectedly he then asked me if I would like to join him as one of his first people in India ? I did what I thought was the smart thing & rebuffed him saying that I had to complete my MBA & was not ready to start working yet. A few months later I saw a piece in a business magazine identifying him as the scion of a Hong Kong tycoon & talking of his grand plans for India. Clearly recognizing an opportunity for what it is calls for skill that I perhaps lacked at the time !
Around the time I completed my MBA in the early days of the internet I was among a couple of people from the class offered a chance to get on board a very small company that had visions of making it very big. At the time I had just snared one of the higher paying jobs on campus & this offer of a significantly smaller salary boosted by the promise of "ownership" did not seem to measure up. I was just starting out in life & had visions of my own - all of them with Re spends associated with them & I convinced myself that what I needed was cash in hand then & not at some indeterminate time in the future. Needless to say that company went on to become the definitive success story among Indian internet based businesses & I sometimes do wonder "what if ?". This is not necessarily regret - I accept that there are times when one is just unable to make that leap of faith !
I am hoping that instances like these have taught me to recognize opportunity when it knocks (or rings) & to open up. Oh wait, looks like someone's at the door...
Super like this post Sanjeev! Really thought provoking. This happens many a times with all of us. The key is taking the leap of faith at least sometime so that we don't have the regret "yaar ek life milti hai...karna chahiye tha" :)
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ReplyDeleteSanju nice article. I too have been presented with lot of opportunities and now I am glad that I did not take some of those. I would have been an engineer had I not dropped out after first year. After scrambling through graduation I joined for Law in a college at Mumbai. I quite liked it. In the second year I got a part time job in Xerox, the job was to do market survey and submit the survey sheets every day. I was quite an enthusiastic and effervescent character those days. 6 months later the RSM called me and asked me if I am interested in handling SAKINAKA-GHATKOPAR belt. This guy always had a poker face and he said without any emotion that this could be the beginning or end of my career with Xerox. There were few reasons for this warning. I was not experienced in selling. There were only three months left for the year end and most importantly three seasoned sales people had quit from this territory in a span of 9 months. I knew this guy was doing no favour and he had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Any way I said yes as this was a good opportunity with all the risk factors attached. I did badly in the first two months. Then I slowly started finding my footing. Next year ie 1996 I sold 104 machines at a healthy strike rate of 1 machine in three days which was a record for a territory in those days. I still feel its unlikely to be broken. I worked with Xerox for long 8 years before resigning as Regional Marketing Manager South to pursue MBA. Now had I taken those original opportunities I probably wouldn’t have come into sales, which is my true liking. I may also have been lucky to be in the right place at the right time. After MBA and settling down in a career nicely I took a giant leap of faith. About that may be in another episode.
ReplyDelete@Radha - I am starting to know exactly the feeling you are talking of. The time is coming when I absolutely will have to scratch that itch.
ReplyDelete@Priya - thanks
@Shyam - very valuable insights, especially since you have also taken the big step of striking out yourself. I can understand the thought - sometimes the opportunities presented to us are those that no one else wants but the other way to look at it is that maybe they were meant for no one else - like the goal that I missed !
Terrific! I enjoyed reading these instances and also Shyam's comment. Many would agree that losing an opportunity is lesson for future, but being too judgmental may not yield anything. Maybe little more courage overcomes the fear. Certainly, this is a place to read and learn.
ReplyDeleteA very good post.. I can relate to it well and I remember couple of instances where I did the same thing. But I have realised one thing now - taking risk sometimes and having faith in myself is good for me..
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