Don't get into the lure of Career Prestige, Be creative.

As of today there is the clear trap of career prestige ahead if you had chosen commerce while in your high school's studies, most likely you end up being a CFO with a corporate or being a tax or investment consultant.

Once we choose a field, while in high school, we are imposed with the moral responsibility of completing that technical education. What is that technical education? It is primarily the collection of facts, laws, rules, regulations and learning of tools and techniques which are already in existence for that area.

I had a conversation with a few of top ranker finance professionals & commerce students. They had a strong grip over their current work profiles, syllabus and studies. But they had filled the complete space of their professional life with that profile or syllabus or studies. Most of them willingly do not want to pursue the same profile for life, they had their own strengths, they willing to make their own choices, but their limited skills and occupancy restrict them to their existing profiles. So if we want to make ourselves free to give a realistic shape to our desires, we need to continuously work on ourselves, we need to sharpen our skills in other related areas.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and
I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln

There are a lot of areas in which we can explore ourselves like website designing, coding, computer assembling, learning networking tools, learning tools of digital marketing, learning of any international language, better command over English speaking, blog writing and music composing etc. to name a few.

In addition to the above technical skills, we can simultaneously work on grooming our personality through a focus on regular gym & workouts, proper healthy & balanced diets, regular sports activities of our interest.
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We need to develop our multi-skill personality to gear up with the upcoming world after 10 years, otherwise, we are ready for the platform which is already working, but we will not be technically & mentally equipped to create and build businesses. We would always be dependent on the entrepreneurs to grow themselves and absorb us either as an employee or as a consultant.

We want a lot of money, a luxury car, a smartphone, start a business, a seven-figure package, a dream home and the worst part are that we want everything at the same time. We push ourselves to ignore other part of life to achieve these endless desires. As years pass & we started owning few of above, the glamour of prestige started fading, but by the time we realize it, we are already trapped.

I had heard a speech from a Chinese Businessman (Jack Ma), which helped me to choose my path.The relevant extract of his speech are as below:

"When you are 20 to 30 years old, you should follow a good boss,

join a good company to learn how to do things properly.

When you are 30 to 40 years old, if you want to do something

yourself, just do it, you still can afford to lose, to fail.

But when you are 40 to 50 years old, my suggestion is that you should

do things that you are good at."

So up to the age of 30 we should surround ourselves with knowledgeable mentors and resourceful & equipped environments. Between the age of 30 to 40, we should do all the experiments, try every silly idea without fear of failing.

But between the age of 40 to 50, we need to acquaint ourselves, what is there at which we are good at. And then we should be technically & mentally prepared for giving shape to that area as a business or profession.

Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, shares her three lessons out of her tremendous success in the lead role. The relevant extract of her lessons are as below:

"First, Please! be a lifelong student.
Second, whatever you do throw yourself into it.
Third, Please help others lives."

Student for lifelong does not mean we always need to join a class or university or training institutes. It means, we should not lose our curiosity and should keep our hunger of learning alive. We need to explore our surroundings and online resources to make ourselves more equipped & always top up our knowledge with new concepts, technology and ideas.

We are not required to learn everything and also not necessary that whatever we learn, we need to learn at an expert level. But we need to identify what are our interest areas i.e. what is the business or professional area which I love to do, then we need to identify our core strength for that area. Further, we need to understand other baseline or supporting skills we need to give shape to our interest as a business or a profession. Like for example, if you are good in photography and you want to make this as your profession, then besides learning skills of a professional photographer, you need to know the physical configurations of the digital cameras, you need to know a little bit of creation of web page & you need to know about digital marketing etc., so that you can scale your idea. Following are few of the online sources which helps us to explore tremendously either at no cost or at a very little cost (even lesser than the commuting cost to a physical class):

1. Lynda.com
It's a learning platform by LinkedIn; the site offers thousands of courses and video tutorials for aspiring professionals and entrepreneurs. It had a monthly cost of about Rs. 1500. It has hundreds of leaning tutorials on web designing, mobile app development, marketing & sales, design & photography, excel, photoshop etc. Starters can sharpen their skills with the available materials.

2. Skillshare.com
It is just like Lynda.com, you can find plenty to sink your teeth here. It cost about Rs.1000 a month and also you can become a teacher & earn here in your area of expertise by creating online tutorials and classes on this website.

  
3. Codecademy.com
It's one of the most effective, interactive and approachable platforms to learn the programming languages and coding in various languages. This helps to know us online configuration more in detail.

4.. Moneycontrol.com
This website is a great collection of all the data related to stock prices, company history, current & past financials, peer comparison, option prices etc. It's live updated and much faster than many other stock related websites. We can maintain your portfolio with cost prices, so any time we can view our profit or loss scrip wise.

5. Academia.edu
This is an American social network website for academics. This is a collection of various research posted by thousands of academic research personnel. If you are searching in-depth database analytics of a particular topic, it can give you lot of research reports uploaded related to that topic, so you can save a lot of time to reach a meaningful conclusion out of your own research when lot of related data analytics and research reports are already available.

 
6 .Duolingo.com
This is an amazing website to learn basic & proficient language of most of the international languages, I had used its French module for my Kids, it has been designed very thoughtfully so as to cover all the basic vocabulary step by step, to improve your pronunciation & verbal skills of the language. There are various other learning websites, we will cover in our future editions. So we need to be creative to live a great and successful personal and professional life.