Lessons

Two Thoughts I just have two things to my 20 year old self - be honest and put yourself first. Simple, but not easy. Be Honest Don't get this wrong - I am an honest person in that I will never try to cheat anyone of anything. Honesty, however, is much more than that. Most of us are honest to our society and to our community. A whole bunch of us are not honest with ourselves. And honesty is the single most important ingredient to success, in my opinion. If I have to be frank, this is a little confusing especially to those of us brought up in the 90s middle class India. Money was akin to evil and there were movies showing how all rich people were predominantly evil and how they were morally corrupt and the like. Today when I watch the movies again - apart from being appalled at what I watched growing up - I realize that a lot of the "evil" rich characters aren't that evil or morally bankrupt at all. They are just brutally honest. Their actions are brutally consistent with what they are trying to do. Being honest is taking decisions that are consistent with your belief system. And the untold truth in that statement is that your belief system is not driven by your society or your community. It is driven by your compass, your north star. If you don't have one, you aren't anywhere near succeeding. You can't arrive, if you don't know the destination. For a good number of us, myself included, the north star is setup by social conditioning and religious misinterpretation. ...

Late bloomer is a term often associated with developmental milestones in kids. It turns out the actual meaning is a lot more generous than that, despite what Urban Dictionary has to say on the topic. I always topped my class in school. Even through undergrad classes, I stayed in the top 5 ranks. So, “late bloomer” is not a term that anyone would associate with me. Frankly, I haven’t considered the possibility until very recently. I did well in most of what I took up doing. And if you look at my career path, I’ve dabbled with a lot of technologies across the spectrum. I mean, does anyone even remember SSI clustering anymore? Until recently, I even had a google alert setup for “Mosix clustering” - if you even remember something like that in the first place. Just out of college, I had the opportunity to setup both SSI cluster as well as a Mosix cluster :-). So to say, that I had the opportunities and then I had the capability to pick up on those opportunities is somewhat humble. So where is this thought of a “late bloomer” even figuring in all this? ...

So I came across Myer Brigg’s type indicator test when I was reading something on Quora. The geek that I am, I had to try it out first. I haven’t read up about it yet, but I felt the need to write something I noticed. And so here it is. This test is sorta like a psychometry test. I was told, during interview days just after finishing engineering school, that these tests were used to identify your personality, whether you were clear in your head or some such stuff. I never actually gave one, but was always preparing myself for one. It so happens that I quickly learnt to locate the patterns and game the test! ...