Thread by @flaneur_a

A real life Case Study - The Roller Coaster journey from being a servant to a King

(1/22)

#Jobs
#lifelessons

Someone I know...

He was given an admin job in a small company. The promoter new his father. So, gave him the job & a place to live. He was totally indebted to the promoter (P) and dedicated his work & life for him. His job was to do whatever P asked him to do...

Over the years, he started having a feeling of non achiever...someone who was totally dependent on P. His life & profession was fragile. He wasn't in control of his & his family's destiny...he wanted to get free and take control of his life.

How did he do it!

He was too ordinary in terms of education & capabilities to start something significant. He needed something to take a first step. And he did...read on..

(4/22)

As admin officer, he used to deal with some real estate agents for the company's offices, promoter's real estate investments etc. Over the years he had built some network of real estate agents and small time builders. He picked that as his first step.

6 years back, he quit his job & became a real estate agent himself! As you all know, real estate has not been doing well. Secondary Market is dead. He was hoping it would revive, but it didn't.

(6/22)

In the absence of any traction in the real estate business, he opened a Vodafone gallery and planned to do real estate as a side business. For some reasons, even that didn't do well (He attributes it to the advent of Jio). He suffered losses of Rs. 20 Lakhs!

One thing business does over job is that it gives you time...time to think and network. Through his ever growing connections, he got an agency of Britannia Bread for a part of Mumbai. This was an established business and he started doing well. This also came naturally to him..

His experience of handling his corporate admin and all the people helped him deal with his staff well. He flourished. Recently, he has taken another distribution agency for all products of Govardhan Milk for an even bigger region.

As usual, my observations & Learnings follow..

Observations
He has transformed from
a fragile, dependent "servant" on someone's favours to a "King" controlling his destiny (leave along the day!)

dependent for his salary on the mercy of his saviour to giving livelihood to 50 people under him & becoming their saviour!

Forget, the financials for a bit, the sheer change in his body language is unmissable. It has made a huge difference to the way he leads his life!

He is now a King and runs his Kingdom. He's my live Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sachin Bansal!

(11/22)

Respect from society comes with success. But, to my mind, my friend's story is as inspiring as any big success stories we read in biographies. He refused to accept mediocrity, took calculated risks, dealt with failures, learnt from them, kept persevering & waded his way through!

Lessons -

Fear -Big lessons for all of us who are caught in a mindless, timid, fragile life of a job. We mindlessly stay in a dead end 12 hour job, refusing to take the bull by the horn. The fear of failure is real. He endured two failures before tasting success.

(13/22)

However, if you keep the losses capped, you must take a leap of faith. Because there's only one life.

B) Confidence / Capability - Through the rat race of education & job system, we tend to forget our capabilities. A lot of us start believing ourselves as worthless..

...who are simply not good enough to start and build something of our own; just good enough to carry out what we are told to do by our bosses. Trust me, this guy showed no visible signs of someone who could do more than what he used to do in that admin job.

That's inspiring...So, how do you start!

Take a first lead. Start from whatever you can. See what you are good at, what you like, what skill sets have you picked in your job, what connections you've built over the years.

(16/22)

"You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." - Martin Luther King Jr.

The beauty about real life is that each step you take leads you to 4 new staircases. You pick any one. If you make a mistake, come back, try another staircase !

"Boundaries grow as you explore them. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room which you haven’t visited yet....

(18/22)

...Those four rooms are adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually...

you”ll have built a palace." - Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

In other words, when you create one opportunity for yourself, often that opportunity will create more opportunities.

There is no one size fit all solutions. You start from whatever you have at hand and then course correct your way through. This is the formula to deal with uncertainty in any fields - business, learning, success, relationships etc.

Check out my Pinned Tweet for my own case study 👇

(22/22)

https://twitter.com/flaneur_a/status/1129355553442975744