Personal Growth Archives - Page 3 of 3

About a week before my 28th birthday, I had a mini anxiety attack. I remember speaking to a friend that day saying, "I just feel like I should've been somewhere by now, and I'm not". As of the time of writing this, I am 27 days away from graduating business school and am still looking for a full time job in a really competitive London Tech job market. To add to that, my personal life was also thrown into disarray a couple months ago which led to a whole new paradigm of personal growth for me- which I wrote about here. The saving grace is that I have been working part time for the past couple months and have enough overheads to sustain myself for the next 6 months or so, till about the end of 2023. Anyway- that particular day, I just remember waking up and feeling really desolate. I had had a few job interviews go until the last round and then they went with someone else or, even worse, told me they were freezing hiring for a couple months. At the start of July 2023, I was speaking with 4 startups, and by 20th July- they all whittled down to zero. The recruiter I was working with stopped taking my calls, and I realised- damn, I essentially have to start again from scratch. Small things bothered me like- I expected to move out of my student accomodation by this point, and be able to afford a better place. Anyway, feel like I've painted a pretty (grim) picture. Here's what I did next: I decided to seek inspiration. For me, whenever I've been in a tough spot, reading about people who have overcome problems that I've faced helped me a lot. In my case- while I didn't need someone to have exactly been in my situation, I just knew I needed a little perspective resetting. So, I picked up Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl. For those of who you haven't heard about this- Victor was a psychologist who spent many years in Nazi concentration camps, and survived- rather thrived after being released. During those years, he talks about suffering horrific torture and abuse from the guards, sustaining himself just on a piece of bread and some watery soup everyday, and the effects of being the camps that every inmate suffered from. When he got out, he was completely emaciated, and realised his beloved wife had been killed in the concentration camp she had been sent to. Could things be worse, for this man? Yet, he wrote a book which is considered a classic today, and one that inspires so many. I'm halfway through it and two particular passages really stayed with me. First, he talks about how it is almost irrelevant what happens to you, because you don't control it. Rather what meaning you give to the event is what determines the outcome of that event for you. That's what meaning is. You can put two people, have them go through the same situation, and both may have completely different takeaways from the experience. The lessons you draw from your experiences shape you- and you can either draw constructive, positive lessons or self limiting ones. In the second passage, somewhere at the start of the book- he spoke about how success is simply a by-product of everyday action. It is inevitable, if you have aligned your mission to the right path and stick to it. If you like my content so far: Consider subscribing to my weekly newsletter: I write about my entrepreneurial learnings, personal growth stories and everything in between. If you're in your early-mid 20s and are trying to navigate life, career and are entrepreneurial minded- you'll like this. Subscribe I've been journaling and reminding myself of these two takeaways for the past 15 days now, and they were my antidote to anxiety. Since I realised this, I started focusing on my daily tasks and stopped thinking about what the outcomes were going to be. Sometimes, I forget my own advice- I wrote about how sales (and life) is a numbers game a couple months ago, and I didn't remember to apply it to my own life. Essentially, I have started telling myself that if I do a set of daily actions, aligned to my goals, I will get that job I want. Success is inevitable. I just need to: Prospect interesting roles on the market Figure out who's behind the hiring effort Reach out and do the above for at least 10 companies a week Do a LOT of research on the companies I interview with- understand their customers, problems they solve as well as potential issues they might be facing today, which I can possibly solve for them Rinse and repeat. Focus on my actions without worrying too much about the return, and trusting the process helped me calm down significantly. It's ensured that mini anxiety attack was simply a one-off thing. I've even started having fun with my cold emails, which is when I started to get higher responses- like this one I sent to a sales head at an AI startup- that led to a 20 min meeting. As I head into Q4 2023, I'm backing myself to get the tech sales position I really want- without putting undue pressure on myself. I'm trusting the process, and getting comfortable in the discomfort. Anyway, that's my learning from the past 2-3 weeks. Hope this was helpful. Talk soon, Shubhankar