A good part of my early career was as an employer and a startup guy (before I knew there was a concept called Startup). This goes back to 1993 when I graduated with an Electrical Engineering Degree from National Institute of Technology Calicut.

Straight from college that is what I did. I started a company with a friend. Then after a few years I went on to work for someone. I was back to trying my luck at being Self Employed in a few years. And again got back to being an employee.

The reason is simple. Every attempt I made failed or it did not give me the needed reasons financially and professionally to continue. It happened a total of five times in my career.

In 2010 I decided it was enough and just wanted to work for someone. Some would say this is a compromise and that I am being risk averse and I should try again and again till I make it.

We all have our own pilgrimage to make in life and one person’s learning is not the same as another person’s. I will leave it at that. No arguments. You are right, it was a compromise and it made me happier and content.

But I did decide to do side hustles and chose content creation as my area of interest. It is not something that I can make a living out of now or expect to do anytime. It is all about my passion on the side and more of a part time activity that becomes full time when I am between jobs. Like this time again.

So the simple goal for me now in the past 13 odd years has been to remain Employable. And do my best to be a good colleague to the people I work with. Even there I know I might have failed at times as some of my colleagues will attest to.

I say this because in the coming days I want to talk about some of my missteps and failures openly and be able to write in all transparency about what I learned and How I learned. To talk about Success and Happiness and being complete and Content.

I know LinkedIn (this post was first published on LinkedIn) is a preferred place where we promote what we are capable of and what we have achieved and can achieve again. This is the stage for our next role. Sometimes too much transparency can even hurt. But I am taking my chances. Our world went through Covid and I am here writing this. We know how vulnerable we are.

When we talk about Agile and Scrum we stress the need to be transparent and learn from our mistakes and retrospect and continuously improve. So why not start with me.

I think I have more to talk about my misses than my hits.

We live in a world where success is celebrated. Even failures we like to hear and learn only from highly successful people. It is all good. But learning comes from every small misstep. And what is success? Who defines it?

The missteps to learn from might be covered by footprints of well polished costly designer shoes. Let me try to peel the layer beneath that. Stay Tuned!

Categories: Career, Career & Work

Tags: Agile, Career, Happiness, Learning, openfornewopportunities, opentonewconnections, opentowork, Success, Transparency, Work