Tag: life

Proper Job

For the first time in over nine years, I’m taking up one of these.

If someone, sometime, were to do a compendium of stories of people whose careers changed because of covid-19, then I might feature in it. To be very honest, my present career change had been in the works for a while now. However, a bunch of things that covid-19 forced upon me this year made it that much easier to take the plunge.

As the more perceptive of you might have observed by now, I quit full time employment to embark on a “portfolio life” in late 2011. Apart from getting control over my own time, this change allowed me to do a lot of interesting things apart from my “core work”, which I took on such that most of the work I did was things I was good at or interested in.

So over the last nine years, apart from doing a lot of very interesting consulting work around data and analytics and AI and ML and “data science” and all that, I did a lot of interesting stuff otherwise as well. I wrote a book. I wrote a column for Mint. I taught at IIMB. I did public policy work for Takshashila.

I met lots of people and had loads of interesting discussions. There were times, yes, when I went into every meeting or catchup with a “sales mindset”, trying to sell something to someone. Thankfully these times were infrequent, and short. At all other times, I enjoyed all these random catchups, without any expectation  that anything come out of it.

My network expanded like crazy during these years. For the first time in my life, I came to be known for something apart from entrance exams. I spent time living in other places. I “followed my wife” when she first went to Barcelona, and then to London. It was all smooth.

In any case, you might be wondering how the pandemic resulted in my transition to employment being easier. The main way in which it has eased this transition is by ruining my carefully constructed lifestyle of the last nine years.

I’ve loved going around and meeting people. On an average, I would meet two to three people a week, for things completely unrelated to work. That has come down to nearly zero in the last nine months.

I had grown used to having massive control of my time and schedule. The prolonged school shutdown has completely sent it for a toss, with shared childcare responsibilities. “If I don’t have control over my time any ways, I might as well take up a job”, went one line of my reasoning.

I sometimes think I have a fear of open offices (I’ve felt this even during my consulting times when some clients have asked me to do “face time” in their offices). I hate having other people looking at my screen when I’m working. Maybe it has to do with some bad bosses / colleagues I’ve had over the years. The pandemic means I start working from the comfort of my home. And by the time I go to an office I will have hopefully settled down in this job.

And speaking of offices, the pandemic has normalised remote or hybrid working to an extent that I applied to jobs without having the constraint that they necessarily need to have an office in Central Bangalore. The company I’m joining – I’m not sure I would have thought of them in a “normal job search”. As it happens, while they’re not primarily based here, they do have a small office not far from Central Bangalore, and I’ll be going there once it reopens.

Then, thanks to the pandemic, I have successfully concluded my jobhunt without stepping out of home. All interviews, with a big range of companies, happened through video conferencing. In terms of my personal experience, Zoom >> Teams >> Meet.

But yeah, the biggest impact of the pandemic has  been on my lifestyle. So many things that I craved, and took as given, have been taken away from my life, that changing lifestyle seems to have become far easier than I had imagined. It’s like the tube strike model. I got shaken out of my earlier local optimum, and that has enabled me to convince myself that this new lifestyle will work.

In any case, I hope this works out. Just before joining, I feel positive, and excited in a good way.

Oh, and I guess I need to add here, and maybe at the beginning of every subsequent post.

All opinions expressed here on this blog are mine, and only mine. They don’t reflect the thoughts or opinions or positions of any organisation(s) that I might be associated with. Also, none of what I write on this blog is to be taken as investment advice. 

 

Finite and infinite stories

Stories in books or movies are “finite” in that there is a defined end-point. Real life, on the other hand, has to go on.

Recently I started reading a book called “Finite and Infinite Games”. I’m barely through the Kindle sample, so can’t comment much on the book, but I want to talk about a related concept – finite and infinite stories.

An important feature of the story is that it is “finite”, and has a fixed ending. For example, if you take Lord Of The Rings, the story is primarily concerned with whether Frodo can destroy the ring by taking it to wherever it came from before Sauron can get his hands on it. Once either the ring is destroyed or Sauron gets his hands on it, the story is essentially over, and doesn’t concern about any subsequent events.

Thus, as you plough through either the books or the movies, you condition yourself to the story “ending” at one of these two finalities. And in this particular story, considering that both of these are epochal events, all characters have a horizon no longer than the time required for one of these two events to happen. In other words, most books and movies are “finite stories”, and efforts in those stories are optimised for such finiteness.

Real life, however, is different, in that it is “continuous”. Whatever happens, in most cases, life simply goes on, and hence you need to optimise for the long term. Let’s say, for example, that you are going through a tough time at work and want your current assignment to end. And while you are at it, you look upon your life as a story, where the success or failure of your current assignment is an epochal event. Consequently, you will use a strategy that optimises your performance until this epochal event.

And then this event happens. Let’s say the assignment is a success. Then, life has to move on and another assignment gets thrown at you. Except that you’ve thrown all you had at the previous assignment, and now have no energy left to deal with this one.

In that sense, real life is like an “infinite story” (though death adds a degree of finiteness to this). However epochal certain events seem, unless they are life-threatening, one ought to think for the long term and plan for beyond the event. For unlike in the books or the movies, the story never ends.