The FAANG trap
Disclaimer: This article is no dig at any of the great companies mentioned, rather I have utmost appreciation for the work and innovation they are doing, I just needed a clickbaitish title.
Shark diving is a sport where you can swim with sharks in the same aquarium, when asked “How can such fierce creatures be at so harmony with its potential food”, one of the curators answered, “We feed them at the same time every day”.
Wondering? We’ll come back to this in a moment.
While interviewing for any of the FAANG or any other company of their scale, how often do we ask about ‘What work are we going to do once hired’, never right? It’s because we are so much driven by the status quo and the salary we are gonna be fed by working for a multinational giant that the significance of work we will be doing doesn’t matter. We possess no passion but only desire to earn more money, though it’s not a bad choice but it has to be driven by a passion, Bill Gates was writing codes himself when his company was making a profit of 100 million dollars, this is passion. Your salary is the cost of enslaving the ‘creation by your creativity’ you have been craving for, it’s the cost of killing the shark’s attitude and nature of killing. We don’t understand that the investment made today on learning will yield much greater returns than the earnings made today.
India’s average age is 27, when you try to evaluate the potential of this fact, any investor would say it can’t get any better and willingly pour all his money into this great nation, it’s a no brainer, yet, this doesn’t happen. Why is everyone suspicious about predicting the direction of India’s future.
It’s because the way we have been built, it’s the mentality we have developed.
Just like the sharks, we are so happy to be fed regularly that we ignore our ability to disrupt.
The fact that there are less than a few books written on failed entrepreneurs proves how miserably we have failed to endorse failure. I don’t understand the concept of motivational books or sessions for students, why do we even need them? Why do we need motivation from someone else? What do we have to lose? Even today If you put me on road and take away everything I ever had, I’m pretty confident that instead of crying for what happened to me, I would be exhausting my head brainstorming about the next move to make. Failing has never been an option, it’s a part of winning and winning is what we all want. To fly the highest, you must know the lowest.
Fear is the mind killer. Like the Dark Knight, we need to make the climb without the rope.
You don’t blame the FAANG’s because this is how they operate, no ifs or buts. Steve Job’s Apple was a place where there was only one criterion, Innovate, and this got himself kicked from his own company.
My hack has always been to measure what’s worst that can happen to me and I’ve never managed to come up with a scenario from where I can’t make a comeback because nothing can take away me form me. Wear failure and flaws like an armour, so they can’t be used against you and dent the universe. Always remember, we always have one more chance. They say chance of an idea to succeed in the industry is only 10%, well, there’s a thing with statistics so we’ll look at it this way, if it’s not 0% then it can happen.
Ending with a Kunal Shah quote, here’s to the crazy one’s, “The worst thing that can happen to you as an entrepreneur is you will make an extra ordinary employee”.
