I’ve been thinking a little on the best advice I have received in my life. Its hard to quantify that one advice is more important than the other as I have been fortunate enough to have met many people who have given me mentorship in one way or another. However this one has always stuck in my head.
When I was 21, I went to the Global Brand Forum on Redefining Leadership in Brands and Business to represent my faculty. How clueless was I then? I used my home computer to print out my own pink(!!!) business cards when I realized that on Day One I was sitting next to the VP of Pepsi, TIME was asking me for interviews and everyone was exchanging name cards. Back then, I also didn’t know that my sponsor, Ogilvy, is probably one of the largest marketing and branding company in the world.
The reason why I wanted to go was because Rudy Giuliani was one of the speakers there, and I’ve read his biography and I really respect that guy. He was the mayor of NYC during 9/11, and I believed that he paid a contributing factor in cleaning up New York from being the state with one of the highest crime rates to what it is today. I still remember him there saying this. His words were:
You must always know who you are.
What you believe in.
And who you are always going to be.
I thought really hard on this advice. And I believe that sometimes even if you lose your way, and the road ahead seems fraught with difficulties and great tribulations. As long as you hold true to
your principles and fate, at each and every crossroad you would make decisions which would hold true for yourself. And possibly one day you reach to a point in life and you look back, you think back then, that was what I wanted to be. As Steve Jobs once quoted, you don’t understand the dots going forward, but when you look back, you reconnect the dots and you understand it going backwards.
I haven’t reached that point yet, but I hope that in time, it is going to hold true for myself.
- Summerrainx
