Career Advice from the Warrior Saint

The Sikhs are known globally for their humility, dedication to excellence, and a value system that differentiates them from other cultures. From their history of protecting the innocent comes a set of principles that make them leaders in their respective fields.

Keep Fighting, Even After Death: On Never Giving Up

From Sikh lore comes the story of a great Guru that lost his head in the battlefield, who continues fighting after death, holding his sword in one hand, and his head in the other. This story is used to educate Sikh children about persistence and determination, even in situations where it may seem all is lost. 

The foundation of victory is laid with the bricks of failure, each of which forms a new element of understanding what does and does not work. This is exemplified by Thomas Edison’s light bulb development process. 

Edison has faced criticism for stealing the ideas of Nikola Tesla, his teacher once said he was “too stupid to learn anything”, and he was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive”. A reporter asked him what it felt like to have failed a thousand times when it came to his invention of the light bulb, to which he simply answered: ”The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps”. 

In the face of failure, quitting is sometimes the worst option. I always dreamed of attending Northwestern University, but I didn’t get in the first time I applied, despite an extremely competitive background. I would call the admissions office at least once a month, learning more about how I could differentiate myself from the hundreds-of-thousands of competing applications. I applied a total of 3 times, and finally got in on my third. After having failed brutally so many times, it almost felt inevitable that I would eventually be admitted as I turned over every rock, and relentlessly pursued my adolescent dream. Paulo Coelho once said that “there is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: The Fear of Failure”, and I think that’s made a tremendous difference in the outcomes I’ve enjoyed in my life. 

In pursuit of great goals, you truly have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. 

Sikh soldiers came to be known as the “Akali” or eternal ones, which were thought to be immortal and undefeatable because of their complete disregard for their own lives. Islamic Mughal invaders cornered Hindus with two options, to either convert to Islam, or face brutal, torturous annihilation. A small number of Sikh warrior saints were able to defeat these great Persian armies in a feat that defied logic itself.  This was possible only because they truly believed their lives were worth less than protecting innocent peoples from persecution and annihilation. The truth is that only when our goals are worth suffering for, only when there is something significant at stake, will we be willing to overcome the tremendous difficulty of bringing our visions to reality. It takes genuine faith in one’s vision to pursue disruptive ideas. You have to be willing to face significant criticisms, as well as the very likely possibility that your vision is nothing more than a hallucination. 

I started my first startup at the age of 16, when I realized there was a possibility to bring e-commerce services to public school systems. Looking back, the complete disregard for even the remote possibility of failure was a significant motivator for me, even if I didn’t realize it. When you filter the possibilities of failure from your mental workflow, you’ll be motivated to juggle imaginative, truly unique ideas. Even today, when pursuing new projects I put myself in the emotional mindset I had when I was 16, constantly pushing myself to see the steps towards the journey as challenges rather than difficulties, as opportunities to learn rather than possibilities to fail. 

Most problems encountered when innovating are unanticipated, and unique to the goals you are pursuing.  I’m not sure what it is about intuition, but if you practice using it enough times, you can form an incredible, almost divine ability to prepare for this. Find every opportunity you can to develop this evolutionary gift and you’ll find yourself becoming a serial entrepreneur.

One must constantly educate themselves about the soul, the world, and the possibilities that the universe holds. 

Sikhs traditionally attend Gurdwara, which is a holy place, not just of worship, but of education, spiritual enlightenment and physical improvement. Gurdwara’s have offered food, refuge, and above all a chance to connect oneself with a global community. Sikhism is 550 years old, which makes it the newest major world religion. As such, it is able to offer a unique framework that allows for easy and widespread adoption of ideas such as women’s or LGBTQ+ rights. 

Sikhs are encouraged to adopt modern technologies and methods in the constant pursuit to improve the human condition. Its critical to constantly stay on top of changes in science, art, and just about anything else that’s out there because knowledge is power, and trends in one field may have the power to greatly influence the decisions in a completely different, perhaps even irrelevant industry. 

Regardless of your political, religious, or social beliefs, its critical to stay on top of the latest disruptive opinions and global events. By connected the right pieces, by pursuing education in the latest technical disciplines one has the ability to create rather than follow trends.

A brilliant example of this comes from the story of Nick Schwab, who was one of the first to put genuine thought and effort into creating applications for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Nearly a quarter of American homes own an Alexa, but voice activated apps didn’t have the same initial wow-factor that traditional graphics driven applications have, so as a result the market for apps was scarce. 

By studying this novel technology, Nick Schwab was able to create simple, but truly disruptive apps such as games, interactive news, ambient sounds, and even audio poker that benefited millions that adopted Alexa. He famously even bought a brand-new Tesla with the revenue that this simple and passive income provided for him.  

The Value of Honesty Increases Exponentially as External Pressures Increase

Guru Nanak Dev Ji, the first of the ten Sikh Gurus recommended that one should be as honest as possible to create a lasting work culture of mutual trust and respect. 

Internal transparency seems to be the way of the future as more and more companies adopt open floor plans, offer more frequent performance feedback, and vertical communication, which offers adopting organizations to transmit mission critical information directly between departments and levels of management. The pursuit of honesty offers unparalleled efficiency, boosting social interaction, reducing costs, and limiting the time it takes for mere ideas to become actionable realities. This is described magnificently in Robert Greene’s work The Laws of Human Naturewhich describes the Russian culture as one of the most brutally honest, which has created a culture in which harsh realities are not meant to offend or motivate, but instead to be taken stoically and taken action upon. 

Robert describes the need for this culture of brutal honesty due to the extremely harsh living conditions of Soviet Russia, in which being dishonest could result in immediate food and material shortages, accusations of espionage, or even a full nuclear war. The Soviets couldn’t help but adopt this attitude due to the nature of harsh circumstances they faced. This is similar to those faced by Sikhs throughout history. In the West however, resources are in high abundance, therefore allowing for the opacity of the truth in the form of a social currency, which helps to sell products and services, and maintain cooperation by hiding true motives. 

Breaking trust is like breaking a glass. Initially you might be able to piece it together, but the more times you drop it and put it back together, the uglier it looks, the less stable it is, and the less repairable it becomes in the future. Honesty allows us to rise above phony mottos and missions and creates true human connections. It allows people to take extreme risks with the faith that they won’t be cheated or betrayed. Trust is created through consistent honesty, and you’ll find that the most profitable companies and products are those that people can trust their lives to. 

Give Relentlessly to the Community, Live in Service to Nature and its Occupants.

In a traditional Sikh tale told to me by my grandmother, a teenage Guru Nanak once took the work of a grain merchant. To the surprise of everyone in the city, he began to offer bountiful amounts of grain for free to anyone that asked for it. Other shopkeepers were infuriated that their supply would empty in a matter of hours and here stood this lunatic that had a seemingly infinite supply of grain to give. Nanak loved seeing happy “customers” and delivering the impossible became somewhat of an addiction. He spent months scooping grain into millions of once empty hands. At the end of the day, there was always enough grain left to feed himself and his family. The grain would be magically refilled in the morning for him to repeat his now daily ritual. 

This legend may extreme upon first read, but the lesson is that the capacity for human passion is endless. Nanak loved delivering exceptional service and results, and although it enraged his competition, he was unmoved, focused only on dedicating himself to the work that gave him more meaning than anything else. Truly divine, logic defying results can’t be achieved from giving money or time, but instead by scooping into the contents of one’s infinitely available soul and consistently and freely delivering quality that reflects a cause bigger than oneself. This is exactly the attitude embodied by Elon Musk in his work at Tesla and SpaceX. 

Elon Musk once asked a date “Do you often think about electric cars?”. Musk was so passionate about learning about how to build a commercially viable electric car that his subconscious registered it as a commonplace pursuit equated to love, life and the pursuit of happiness. Recently, as the Model 3 product was encountering production delays, Elon would spend weeks at a time, sleeping at the factory, closely inquiring and even inspecting body panel fitment from hundreds of cars. Even before Tesla, Elon was a billionaire with his sale of Paypal, and yet something besides money and fame drive him (pun intended) to magnificently pouring pure passion into his products and people he serves. He is the ultimate exemplification of the modern warrior saint. 

The Sikh Golden Rule: Live in Chardikala, a mental state of eternal optimism and joy, even in the worst situations life presents. 

Sikhs are taught to live in Chardikala, a mental state of eternal optimism and joy, even when faced by the harshest realities of life, one must remain stoic, treating such situations as an opportunity to test our values and capacity to reason. There is never a reason to shirk optimism, which is the ultimate emotional manifestation of values such as honesty, focus, and the belief that all elements of life hold an equal purpose in the world and as such deserve our deepest inquiry and respect. Optimism is the energy that gives us the energy to make choices, and joy is the understanding that we are not judged by the severity of our situations, but instead the values we maintain.