My Career 2.0: Reversing the doughnut

In April 2018, I left my job and a great corporate life, to strike out on my own.  It is not a novel thing, a lot of people do so when they hit their forties or after. In fact, the pandemic has accelerated this trend, as people realise the really important things in life – health, family, community, passions.

What was a little unusual, perhaps, was what I did or did not do, after I exited corporate life. Most people do a typical ‘tech startup’, many partner with like minded people and open a consulting firm, some start a restaurant in Goa.

I did start a company, my own advisory business,  but the number of people to one, just me. I had, and have, no ambitions for it to ‘scale’ and go big (or go home!). I seemed to doing a lot of things, with my fingers in numerous pies : advising, consulting, teaching, speaking, writing, coaching.

A lot of people thought that I was meandering along, with a lack of focus and commitment. In fact, most people would be at a loss of words to describe what is it that I really do.

On the other hand, I have always known and have been super-clear and super-focused on what I am doing in my Career 2.0: I am learning.

I believe that conventional careers are mostly about earning, and a lot less about learning. So, as the roughly scribbled diagram below explains, the core is about earning – the salary, the bonuses, the ESOPs, the designation, the responsibility, the size of team.

Peripherally, it is about learning. What you learn is incidental to what you earn, as you focus your entire career around the latter. 

In my Career 2.0, I have reversed this ‘doughnut’. The core is about learning, and what I earn is only to financially support myself, as I learn. Simple.

So, every year I learn something formally: In 2018, I learn to become an Executive Coach; in 2019, I learnt Future Tech at Singularity University; in 2020, I learnt how to be an Independent Board Director. In 2021, I am learning as much as I can about Enterprise AI, in 2022, I will learn about AI, Ethics and Society.

Everything that I do, I do to learn. As a part of my Advisory assignments, I have been learning a lot about Sleep, about being Agile, about Business Models and Platform Businesses. Through my writing a Mint column every fortnight, I learn a little bit about a new technology or business every 15 days: quantum computing, drones, mRNA…

So, that is what I am doing in my second career: Learning a huge number of new things. And, earning a bit to support all the learning.