The right season

If at all I've learnt anything being in this potti thatting industry, one thing is sure that you need to have immmmmmeeennnnsssseeee patience. Not that you can make haste in others, but here its not just the patience that counts. It has to be at the right time and at the right amount.

There are always periods of intense activity which will wreck many a decent nerve. Even those can be managed. But then will come a period of lull, a relatively calmer period which would test your patience. A period of uncertainty about the next project, a period which will make you realize why you should've socialized more when you were breaking your head to meet deadlines, a period when you would need so much information about the company health status and where the next work will come in and yet all you will be fed with would be gossips and rumors, a period when people will ask you to enjoy and relax after having slogged your asses off for the previous project and yet would secretly want you to fret over the status by dropping a subtly heavy hint, a period when you can't pester the staffing team hard enough to irritate them nor long enough for them to even forget about you, a period when contacts become critical incase of any good opportunities being gobbled up internally.

Like outside the off stump line in cricket, its this corridor of uncertainty that wrecks many a career. The longer the lean period, you would be tempted to try out every single job on offer. You would start to over sell yourself and would end up under selling. You would aim for all things positive at the beginning of the search only to end up doing the same rut again in a different company for probably same salary.

But somehow, people do buck the trend. Some of my peers have this knack of ticking the right thing at the right time. I don't know if its sheer dumb luck or how else they manage it, but they always end up at places where people can't even imagine. If at all they are afraid they never show it outside. THAT I would say is there biggest plus. It might be a false sense of bravado, but to the onlooker it gives a different feel about their character. They make up pretty well for their short comings with their confidence and somehow it always trumps conventional wisdom!! For those who decide to stick on to the same company for years, for some it has paid off and they are in pretty good positions, for rest, like the infamous TCS story of recent past, they are considered as excess baggage!! Very rarely I get to see someone who make the right career move in a logical progression.

I've always been very choosy about what i want to do, within the limited scope of my career having chosen variety over monotony, even at the stake of promotion. At the end of the day, when I sit back and think about it, sometime I feel, I should've probably been bit less adventurous about what I do and lot more patient. If only I can get to know the knack of doing it right, I would be more satisfied.