How I fucxed up working with a Multi-Millionaire?
Story about how I missed a massive opportunity and what you can learn from it?
I am back after a very long break from writing, I had quarantined myself from hardwork, until recently I watched this youtube video saying “why genz is poor & time will be tough in future”, after getting the reality check, I started scrolling X(twitter) and stumbled on this guy (like people stumble on their ex’s profile), I used to work with and started having more guilt trips.
So, this is the story about how I screwed up working with an influential person (and maybe you can learn something from it? idk).
Around 2 years back, I was working at Swiggy and it was remote so I used to work from my hometown, and I used to work a lot at my home (on side projects), I had nothing to do apart from Gym, Family and remote Job. In early 2023, I moved to Bengaluru and was mostly crashing at friends for over 2 months, they used to daily go to office so I started getting bored. One day my workaholic ass started looking for freelance gigs.
I was an active user of repl.it, and they had recently started their bounty(freelance gig) program, so I applied to one of the gigs and the poster accepted it. We connected a few times to know about the project requirements though a big stalked myself, I started searching about the guy. On the first google search, I was like WHAT THE FUCK!!! Am I really talking to this guy? (I had contacts with some founders in tech but this was a whale compared to others). Though I didn’t believe it. Though one day, I needed cloud access for the project, so he mailed me with his official email id and I was like FUCK ME!!, he is really the same guy.
I cant reveal his name, but this has dedicated Sequoia page, personally knows Sam Altman and has multiple articles from Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and others. So, I started working with him, we used to connect bi-weekly on the progress, things were going good until I started getting more responsibility un my full time job. I started getting less time to work on his product and the product quality went for a toss.
He one day suggested me to leave my full time job and start working on a contract with him. My slave mindset couldn’t comprehend this and my ego started kicking in (I can bag another this level of project). Little did I know, American companies can’t hire someone outside US on a full-time role. I dumped his project few days later, transferred the whole codebase to his org and went in a Zen mode (living super chill life).
Recently, I started contemplating what went wrong??
Read more - If I knew about the US/outside US work policy, I might have made better decisions. So read more and read random things, like fiction, non-fiction books, random blogs (like this). “Reading gives you exponential growth, more than your stock market or mutual fund returns”
Keep your ego aside while working - People should have some ego in them, why? Though while working/learning, keep your ego in the corner. Because the person you are working with, might know something you don’t, so its better to lose your ego than losing a massive opportunity.
Luck <> Hard work - If you work hard, you will maximise your luck, by exposing yourself to opportunity and you will get few massive opportunities in life, which might change your life (in +ve way). So, if you got lucky on the opportunity part, you still have to keep working hard, to convert the opportunity into reality.
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Thanks,
Abhishek