Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Few weeks ago, I had a chance to talk to Senior Vice President of my company. He is one of the most impressive personalities in my company. I was very eager to talk to him on one-on-one basis since the day I first listened to him in one of our department conferences.

During our small conversation, I asked him few questions in general regarding his career path and preparations one need to take to achieve that kind of career path. At the end of the discussion, he said, “Aditya, I would like to give you one piece of advice which is applicable to your young generation.” I was very curious to know his mantra of success. “Be Patient”, he said.

“It is easy to switch jobs and get vertical promotion both in terms of money and position. You can switch jobs from big companies to startups and get higher roles. You will become successful from society’s perspective in very short span of time. But believe me, that model is not sustainable in long run.”

I couldn’t disagree with him anymore. He continued, “Stay in one role, learn as much as possible from many different dimensions, make sure you know enough about your assigned role, and then seek for the higher role.” For me, it hit me right at the point blank. I had this tendency to keep dreaming about the next big thing I will be doing. Very recently, I learned the Present Theory. It emphasizes the concept of living in Present, learning from the Past and planning for the Future, which taught me how to focus on my present work.

He said, “I was in design engineering for first 11 years of my career, and then I started managing the people.” By today, he must have completed 20 years of his professional career and he is heading the Engineering department. He informed that he did not take any formal management education and came purely from an engineering background. “Be patient”, he again insisted, “But learn a lot.”

Well, many of you may take this philosophy in negative terms. You may argue that he sounds less aggressive and in today’s highly competitive world it is sin if you are not aggressive.

However, I learnt that patience is the companion of wisdom. You need to be aggressive in learning from your current role, but need to be patient before jumping for the next position. What do you think? Do you believe in patience and time? Or you feel that world is changing at faster rate than ever before, and now it is harder to wait than to work.