Lessons from a zigzag career
April was birthday month.
Making 41 trips around the sun has given me a chance to experience multiple industries, cities and teams. A unique journey with many lessons and the chief of them being: “The only straight line in my career has been the learning curve”. From starting as a management trainee trying to decipher how to package and promote English movies to heading marketing teams aiming to sell Electric Vehicles across India!
I’ve been shaped to who I am thanks to all the people I’ve met and experiences along the way. I’d like to believe I’m a unique snowflake who has traversed farther distances equipping me with a different world-view than most others. With the pulpit offered by LinkedIn, here are my reflections from my professional journey so far.
The zigzags have taught me more than any designation: Looking back, I’ve had to jump into a new challenge every 2-3 years. No playbook, no instruction manual, no safety harness. Mostly survival skills and the burning pressure to deliver results. Maintaining processes, documentation hygiene and building strategy first before jumping into execution has helped me make sense of chaos.
Kindness compounds: Everything is a people’s business. It’s silly to think otherwise. Empathetic and kind leaders have always won the longer races. The warm words used by others when they’re not around is a big green flag. This is a result of giving first and asking later. With zigzag careers, one never knows when you’ll be crossing paths with someone that you may have met a long time back. Why spend this short time on the planet burning bridges when you can forge friendly bonds?
How to listen deeply to users…. not just metrics: Understand consumers as humans first and not just another excel formula. Speaking and knowing the consumer makes one feel secure and confident about their strategies. In uncertain and chaotic environments with no rulebooks, it’s important to build processes that address customer first. And that comes by prioritising consumer research before anything else.
Curiosity keeps you sharp: Upskilling knowledge and learning constantly is the only way to survive evolving markets. Investing in one’s own education is a skill that will always reap rich rewards.
How to scale without losing soul: Experimentation and hypothesis testing is the bedrock of strong growth frameworks. When there’s too much turbulence and one has very little capital to expend, the only method to scale is have teams work on streamlining growth frameworks rather than opinionated and disjointed processes.
Now as an independent marketing consultant, I find the sum total of all my past lessons coming to my rescue. Forever grateful for the zigzags!
If any of this resonates with your own journey, let’s connect. Always enjoy conversations with fellow zigzaggers.
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