Advice to the 2020 graduating class
Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the Convocation of IIT Bombay (MEMS department) graduating class of 2020. As honored and unqualified as I was to have got this opportunity, I decided to list out 10 pieces of advice that I wish I had got when I was at that turn of my life.
So here goes some unsolicited advice, the first 5 are practical and easy to implement and the other 5 are probably not that easy but worth taking a chance on.
1. Get your college friends as flatmates.
As the lockdown ends and things start to look like the new normal, you will start your jobs and move out of your homes. You will then have the option to live with your friends instead of the assigned hostel roommates. Choosing a flatmate is a decision that I think most people do not give enough thought to. And it impacts the quality of your life severely. You spend almost a third of a day with your flatmates so make sure that these relationships are worthwhile. When it comes to the choice between a nicer flat and nicer flatmates, choose the latter. Fancy rooms bring you joy once and eventually become the norm. However, best friends as flatmates bring you joy daily. I have lived in 7 flats in the last 5 years, 2 with strangers and the others with college friends and I can confidently say living with friends has made me happier.
There’s a phrase in the investing world, called “double down on your winners” — invest more in your own winning companies (the ones you already know are doing well) rather than going out and finding newer riskier ones. So my advice regarding flatmates — double down on your existing friends.
2. Live close to your office.
Assuming we continue to have offices in the “new normal” — when offices re-open, you will have a choice between living in a better house and living closer to the office. Always choose a place closer to work. It’s similar to living with friends. Not having a stressful daily commute will give you joy every day as opposed to something that will lose its charm very soon.
3. Always negotiate your salary.
“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the world” — Albert Einstein
When you don’t negotiate your salary — you get stuck with a lower base. The job market and future appraisals are based on a percentage of your previous salary. So if you don’t negotiate your salary early on, you get stuck with a lower salary. It might not affect much early on in your career as your burn rate is low (you have fewer expenses) but later on, it starts to pinch. So don’t ever hesitate to negotiate your salary.
4. Make money your no 2 priority.
It’s true that money can’t buy happiness but a lack of money is very stressful. Blindly chasing money is not advisable and leads to a life lived unfulfilled (so I am told).
But what I do know is that when you don’t have money, it tends to aggravate a lot of your other problems.
So don’t feel guilty for wanting money but make sure you don’t optimize for it. Have it as a check metric — something you make sure is met but is not the thing you are solely focused on.
5. Don’t chase brands anymore.
Be it for further education or for jobs at prestigious companies. Brands do give you a privilege or a foot in the door to opportunities that are otherwise very difficult to get. But the thing about chasing brands is — every incremental brand does not give the value you hoped it would. You already have a strong brand associated with you now — your college. It’s enough to get your foot in the door in most opportunities and after that, it's up to you — and your hard work — to excel. If you keep on chasing brands all your life, you keep chasing status without substance. Instead, focus on yourself and that one idea or theme that makes you happy.
Now on to the slightly difficult ones, but fundamentally more important.
- Deliberately try to find that one big idea that defines your life.
Time goes by so fast that if you keep going with the flow, you will end up with too many regrets. So purposefully put effort and find a central idea or theme to live by. It’s super hard but worthwhile. For me, right now that idea is to build — products or companies. But for most of my journey, just like everyone else, I was confused about what to do with my life. When I turned to my friends for advice, I got the cliched ‘do what makes you happy’ and ‘follow your passion’ kinds of response. But that was the problem — I did not know what my passion was. That’s when I discovered a framework that helped me crystalize some of my thoughts. If you are struggling to find your passion — ask yourself these 3 basic questions:
- What did you use to do as a child that made you happy?
- What makes you jealous?
- What do you not want to do?
For the first one, think of treasured childhood memories that made you excited such as dis-assembling electronic appliances and trying to understand how they work.
For the second, picture the lifestyle of some people in your network and find what you envy the most.
The third one comes from the mental model of inversion — if a question seems very difficult to answer, invert the question. This way you can eliminate some of your current choices.
You will be surprised by what you come up with and these 3 questions will help you towards finding your answer.
2. Stay in touch with your friends/wingmates/professors.
It’s incredibly hard but very rewarding. These shared experiences that you have had in college are a great binding force; the friendships you have right now are some of the best ones you will have in life. You may not realize it now but it becomes incredibly hard post-college to make new friends. In a few years post-graduation, you will realize that the only time you meet your old college friends would be at each other's weddings. So proactively invest in some of the friendships you developed here. Keep on sharing those dank memes on your WhatsApp groups and don’t let the connections fade.
3. Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem.
As humans, we tend to overestimate the short term risks a lot and underestimate the long term ones. It is a good practice to live by the formula of regret minimization. For example, me quitting my job to build a startup is not that big a risk if you think about it. Worse case, I learn a ton of things that I can use if I choose to be employed elsewhere.
Remember the famous Sam Altman essay titled — “the days are long but the decades are short”. Optimize for those decades.
4. Treat everyone you meet as an important person.
In college, I treated my seniors as more important, and my juniors as less. Don’t do that in your professional life and you will be surprised how much positive change it brings to your network.
5. Make writing a habit.
Most of us get busy in the works and forget to appreciate the important moments. Writing lets you take a pause and gives you an outlet to put thoughts into text. Eventually, things will start to make more sense and give you perspective on the future. While it’s very difficult to follow through with the habit of daily writing, this trick suggested by Paul Graham works wonders. I personally use a Zapier Zap to automatically check-in via email every day and collate information via Google Sheets.
