Woody Allen nails it as he says “80% of success is showing up”… It clearly sums up why Talent is not genetic… One certainly can’t bet on a Test Cricket gene or a Twenty-Twenty gene…It’s all about skill developed by intense, deliberate practice. Going by pure statistics, I guess one can safely say Talent = Hard Work. Period.

The basic trait that is required for hard work is often presumed as grit. But I would take a step back and think what leads you to be gritty. You look at a faculty and feel the excitement. You sense blood surging up your veins and your heart beating faster and beads of sweat bubble up on your leather. You want to do it now, not a second later. You make a few frantic phone calls and are not put off by the conditions they put forth. You say Yes, almost without a thought. You dive right in.

In the process, you’re sub-consciously ready to assume the risks that go with it. It could mean ejecting out of your own zones of comfort developed over the years of regular exposure. It may as well expose you to a new set of circumstances and people about whom you have no clue. They may be talking stuff that sounds near Greek to you. You don’t cower, you persist.

Then comes the big question… How long before you hit the right road to success…? It could take months or even years to be on the same page as those others you revered. The interlude could be cruel, your near and dear ones look down upon you as if asking “what made this guy go so very nuts..?”

That is one harrowing question you may find difficult to deal with because it is never asked. It is implied in their deignful stares and demeaning walk aways or even not so subtle whispers. Suddenly lights around you get turned off and you realize you are dithering in darkness of ignobility and contempt. You are looked at like a loser and it hits you hard even before you know you failed. Surviving this ignominy is so hard unless you have a balanced mind. The ethos to accept failure as well as success on an even keel may have been your asset, but you may not be so ready to accept early judgmental admonitions from all around, express or implied. This is one sphere where practice has to focus on, not just the attribute that you go after to master.
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“This is the mindset of the ambitious educational elite: You go to Harvard (or Stanford), maybe to Oxford (or Cambridge) for a Rhodes (or Marshall), then to Goldman (or McKinsey, or TFA), then to Harvard Business School (or Yale Law School), then back to Goldman (or Google), and on and on. You keep doing the thing that is more prestigious, opens more doors, has more (supposed) impact on the world, and eventually will make you more and more famous and powerful. Money is something that happens along the way, but it’s not your primary motivation. Then you get to Peter Orszag’s position, where you can do anything, and you want to go work for Citigroup? Why do our society and culture shape high-achieving people so they want to be executives at big, big companies that are decades past their prime? Why is that the thing people aspire to? Orszag wanting to work at a megabank — instead of starting a new company, or joining a foundation, or joining an NGO, or becoming an executive at a struggling manufacturing company that makes things, or even being a consultant to countries with sovereign debt problems — is the same as an engineer from a top school going to Goldman instead of a real company. It’s not his fault, but it’s a symptom of something that’s bad for our country.”

Here’s my take -

Terrible cliche. I see it as way too presumptuous of the squeaky critics that ordain a simplistic linear transition from domain knowledge to industry vertical, depriving the candidate of the range of options before him.

If it’s the creative mind of the engineer that is being seen as having been manipulated by the lure of a fatter wall street pay check, it’s the very original creativity of that mind choosing with little external prompt to apply its potential in a disparate dimension to experience a radically innovative if not a revolutionary outcome. After the meltdown, perhaps it’s a bit too off-putting to recognize the contributions of financial engineers in developing exotic derivative products like the ABS, CDS and so on, but let’s not forget that what caused the crisis was not the genus of these products, but its specie that got grossly misunderstood, misapplied and miscarried. Not in the least when the very products helped raise a significant portion of the billions of dollars for funding scientific and industrial research by the world’s major corporations that sustained several manufacturing innovations.

It’s ok to trim the flab, but don’t chop off the muscle that holds it together.
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But despite the deficiencies as above, I am simple, straight as an arrow and a happy guy too. Coming to think of it, I keep my life simple like most men I know.

So this post is for my readers with a feminist slant…

How do men keep it simple…? I read a chain mail that got lodged in my inbox with the title “Why men are never depressed”…

Men Are Just Happier People– What do you expect from such simple creatures? Your last name stays put. The garage is all yours. Wedding plans take care of themselves. Chocolate is just another snack. You can be President. You can never be pregnant. You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park. You can wear NO shirt to a water park. Car mechanics tell you the truth. The world is your urinal. You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky. You don’t have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt. Same work, more pay. Wrinkles add character. Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100. People never stare at your chest when you’re talking to them. New shoes don’t cut, blister, or mangle your feet. One mood all the time. Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat. You know stuff about tanks. A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase. You can open all your own jars. You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness. If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend. Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack. Three pairs of shoes are more than enough. You almost never have strap problems in public. You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes. Everything on your face stays its original color. The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades. You only have to shave your face and neck. You can play with toys all your life. One wallet and one pair of shoes — one color for all seasons. You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look. You can ‘do’ your nails with a pocket knife. You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache. You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December24 in 25 minutes. No wonder men are happier.

That said, if I had a choice then and had not exercised it, I have room to regret. Or if I had multiple choices and had exercised the wrong one, I could feel remorse. But most occasions throw up just one choice and that having been acted upon led us to a later misery, we should learn to cope than brood over it. Again the wisdom dawns only in hindsight and not at the moment we choose to do or not do something. So never live to regret anything in life over which you had little or no control over.

I was convinced I’d given the honest answer. Worrying would have gotten me nothing. Regrets lead to disappointments and later frustration. I must thank my super set of genes that made me look inside more for answers than to look outside and seek them out from externalities that I knew I could never have controlled anyway.
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So I never felt (desperate) like the Ferrari.
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And success, like someone said is not a destination, it’s a journey. We should keep striving hard, the destiny will play its role and we could end up as victors in all that we set out to do.

If those miners had been trapped like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. a private company in Berlin, Pa with just 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for-the-money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

So my ex-boss has been vindicated. He often asked “Do you know what is the 11th commandment..?” Before we could be through with our blinking, he replies “Profit” !!!

Documenting a foreclosure requires invasion of privacy—an embarrassment shared by the sheriff’s deputy, a trash-out crew, a journalist or photographer. Having spent the last couple of years writing about this crisis myself, I can say that the embarrassment never fades. The sentiment in letters and photographs long abandoned never evaporates completely, no matter how moldered. This sense of invasion, oddly paired with an uncomfortable intimacy, is part of the voyeuristic tension of documenting the homes that people leave behind—sometimes in a rush that scatters toys and trophies and love letters, sometimes with the kind of order and neatness that speaks to a stubborn pride.

So what’s that big future moment that I’m talking of…?

I shall get off the block with my sense of awareness. How well do I know my country, its people, their inadequacies and insecurities..? When I think of my country, honestly my direct perception is limited to the few people around my home, my school and a few places I’ve visited in the past. The rest of my knowledge about our country is from what I’ve gleaned from a profit obsessed media (for which everything is `breaking news’) or what I’ve inferred from reports by someone else. And then I also need to look inwards and size up my natural strengths and recognize my limitations. Identify domains where I can be of good use, to bring about a “real” difference to as many as I could within a finite time frame.

The great deeds done by our great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rani Lakshmi Bhai and so many others have given us a great history. But it’s the future that we have to be concerned with. I gather, our primary responsibility is to address the futuristic issues of how to live in an integrated world, a global village that overlooks all geographic boundaries and cultural inhibitions. We must preserve our culture by all means, but not to the extent of getting fanatical about it and refusing to acknowledge the benefits of adopting the proven best practices from others.

So I look across the world. I feel sad as we still find place amongst the countries of the “Third World”. I realize my big moment is around the corner, only if we could move up a few notches quickly and get listing under the “First World”… How did the first world countries get there…? Reasons are not far to seek. They had the right mix of individual enterprise, backed by government support, propelled by enormous political will. Of the three, Individual enterprise is something that is within our control. I take stock and look up our population data. India, has a population exceeding 1.1 billion, of which 60% are below 40 years. Stacked against most other countries where an ageing population constitutes the majority, we clearly enjoy a demographic dividend. It presents a perfect foil for us to demonstrate our individual enterprise and leverage the relative economic boom that we are currently witnessing, especially at a time when the most other developed nations are struggling to get rid of the adverse effect of the recent meltdown.

I am hopeful. The ball is rolling. CEOs of some of the Fortune-500 companies already are Indians. Indra Nooyi of Pepsico, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Shantanu Narayan of Adobe Systems, Lakshmi Mittal of Arcelor-Mittal, Ramani Iyer of Harford Financial to name a few. I can see the effect rubbing off on our enterprising young minds as many IIT and IIM graduates are starting up ventures on their own, brushing aside seven figure salaries offered by top global corporations. Now what remains is the government support to their initiatives like the Israelis do and get it propelled by political will. If that happens while I am still around, I shall be happiest to stand corrected and say “I am not just lucky to be Indian, I sure am proud about it.”

A great majority of careerists are chancers. I’ve talked to some of my own friends belonging to that set and have found most of them unhappy over where they wound up. Many tried to switch careers midway, but it’s a cruel world out there that didn’t let them veer off the course because they got labeled already. “You were an accountant for the last 20 years, now how can we trust you with marketing” – is the refrain. They go try again and nothing happens. But then bills have to be paid and they are forced to stick with the soul-sucking career they’ve gotten into.

So what should they do to get around it…? First off, they should create a problem before they can solve it. Recognize that you are cut for something different and you won’t settle short. Settling for the status quo is easy, but it bleeds you from inside. Make it your mission to get to where your heart is. Work towards it. Use your weekends and workday evenings to talk to people who are in the field of your choice and get to know its intricacies, finding out ways to “get in”. But the best method is to start freelancing, go blog your views on it. Take on the mighty and the frivolous, but make sure you have solid arguments that stand out. When I say freelancing, I really mean it in a literal sense. Do it for free for a few guys and make them see how good you are at it. You may not make money initially, but you are building referrals and even track record in a small way. Use it to your advantage until the moment of reckoning finally arrives. It will.

Most importantly, never give up, never compromise. Go after it. Get it.

“In the summer of 1980, MIT graduates Donald Faber and Peter Haberle moved into an empty two-car garage and started work building their first ever personal home computer. Almost 30 years later, what began as a humble two-man operation has since grown into an even more humble, even more cramped computer company, based out of an even smaller single-car garage.”

That’s what you call staying put, really