Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

I get to interact with lot of students and that is one of the commonly asked question I encounter as to what career I need to choose?

My answer depends. Because it depends on what the person wants to do eventually. What are his/her long term goals and dreams?

One thing for sure is to set yourself in motion.

You set out to do something, and in the process you refine your concept of what is you really want to do. Life is an active feedback loop:  The path you take sends back information that help you adjust and revise..the path you'll take. Your career teaches you about your career: what it can be and also what you want it to be.

All you need to do now is to use the best idea you have about who you are and the direction you want to take, and then take the move. Balance action with reflection, but take action - even if you have limited knowledge of exactly where it will all lead. And of course, keep your eyes open.

Things have changed a lot from our parents generation. In the corporate culture of years past, people framed their lives of getting stuck. That was their dream! You work really hard and give 110% to one company and the company takes care of you. It was considered bad form to have too many job changes on your resume, and people hoped to stay with the same companies, in the same careers day in and day out until retirement.

Now the bottomline is that even if you wanted to stay in one job, the American economy doesn't carry the workers the way it once did, it allows for greater mobility. So wherever you begin, trust that you'll learn what you need to learn, and then surely move on.

To give you an example, when Tom Scott and Tom First graduated  from Brown University, they didn't want to enter the traditional workforce as their Ivy League classmates were doing. So they moved to Nantucket and started delivering coffee and supplies yachts that pulled into Nantucket harbor.

When the snowy winter arrived, they yachts stopped coming and they realized they needed another source of income. First remembered a peach cooler he had tasted in Spain. Using a kitchen blender, he tried to recreate the drink himself.

What resulted was Nantucket Nectars, a multimillion-dollar business that the two have since sold to Ocean Spray.

Did making money motivate them? Yes. They knew the yacht-servicing business was limited to warm weather moths and they had to come up with something else. But what did they actually do?

Mixing the first Nantucket on a cold winter's day, recalling a taste memory from summer vacation to Spain, is a much different experience- from making an appearance at an office somewhere you don't really want to be.

To take another example.

Bill Bowerman was accepted to medical school but instead decided to become a track coach. When you examine the job characteristics of doctors and coaches, you'll find many of the same categories: Practitioners in both fields are "Helpers,", "Teachers" and  "Advisors". My best friend Sudarsanam whom we fondly call him Susi has the same job description. In that regard, both careers he had considered probably corresponded to who he truly was.Yet, he obviously made the right choice: He was very successful, coaching in the Olympics and leading his athletes to several national titles.

Interestingly, one area where the two careers seem to be different is in category "Science." Doctors are scientists of sorts but..coaches?

Well, one day at the track he noticed how heavy all of the running shoes were. He went home, and like a mad chemist he poured a rubber compound into his wife's waffle iron. What came out were the soles for the first, lightweight "waffle" shoes.

Some time later, he and one of his runners, Phillip Knight, put up five hundred dollars each to start a footwear company, intending to bring lighter weight running shoes to the world. They named their company after a Greek god Nike.

Just like Nike says...whereever you are Just Do it!