Today’s article is about opportunities and preparation.
Mortals like me wait for opportunities and, more often than not, fail to convert them. While people operating from their zone of mastery transcend waiting and create Reality Distortion Fields.
A visualisation of this framework is below.
Here goes:
- Missed opportunities
- Pigheaded hustle led to my zone of success
- Reality distortion field
- No chance in hell
- Consistency compounds
- Opportunity or threat?
- 100-post anniversary survey results
Missed opportunities
When I graduated with my first MBA degree back in ’98, I had no clue that 11,000 km away, a guy named Jeff Bezos was piecing together a rocket ship. By ’97, he’d already penned his first shareholder letter.
My entire experience of groundbreaking technology was limited to the amazement that my classmate and I could simultaneously edit the same file on a shared drive at the MDI computer centre from terminals just 6 feet apart.
Even if I had known of Amazon then, there was no chance that a non-engineer MBA from an unknown B-school in India would have even gotten close to an interview.
If, by a crazy twist of fate, I had managed to join Amazon in 1998, would my life have been entirely different? The answer is a 100% yes.
One, I would have been rich beyond imagination. Early employees or investors who started with $1,000 in Amazon stock in 1997 would have about $90,500 today. [Source]Two, I would definitely not have been a brand marketer. Early Amazon employees did anything and everything that would help the flywheel turn. Not marketing in its pristine sense.
“What if I had joined Amazon in 1998…” is an interesting counterfactual, but not laced with regret because I was simply in the wrong place and time for a role there.
Pigheaded hustle led to my zone of success
The L’Oreal pre-placement talk at MDI set my heart on fire. I yearned to be part of this company. This led to the famous airport chase I write about in The Butterfly Effect.
L’Oreal taught me everything I know about building premium beauty brands. I then traded what I learned there for a role at Unilever and never looked back.
I was well on my way to building a career around the skills I enjoyed honing, i.e. growing brand-centered businesses. Years of sharpening my skills led me to cruise into the Amazon India CMO role by 2021.
Maybe things turned out the way they were supposed to because, as I said earlier, had I joined Amazon in 1998, I would certainly not have been a brand-centric marketer. Amazon only started investing in marketing and brand building in 2018. If you’re curious to see their earliest ad, click here.
But I digress.
Reality distortion field
When average folks like me have a vision, we think we are hallucinating. When geniuses hallucinate, they create a Reality Distortion Field.
Jeff Bezos’s 1997 letter is a masterclass in this. He knew Amazon’s obsession with customer satisfaction would power its flywheel of wide selection, low prices, and convenience.
But this flywheel hinged on reinvesting free cash flow back into the business.
That’s why his letters had one goal—to convince shareholders to postpone ROI while continuing to invest in a loss-making company.
We can’t do it alone when we hold unrealistic beliefs to unreasonable degrees. We need others to work their A-game. That’s why, this vision’s relentless and continuous drumbeat to shareholders and employees was crucial.
“When I interview people, I tell them, you can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com, you can’t choose two out of three.”
Bezos, in his 1997 letter
Not many people know this, but Bezos did not spot this opportunity by himself. It was David Shaw who foresaw that the Internet would transform the retail industry. (Bezos was working at D.E.Shaw- a hedge fund)
Shaw wanted to enter the online retail game, so he made Bezos the project leader. Together, they created the Amazon blueprint—start with books, get customers to write reviews, and so on. [Source: Richard Koch on the Tim Ferris Show].
I would have taken comfort in bringing this audacious vision to life with a partner, but not Bezos. It takes a titanium-grade spine to want to lead this vision all alone. Shaw wanted this venture to stay under his company, but Bezos said he wanted to do it independently.
Shaw took Bezos on a two-hour walk around Central Park and tried to talk him out of it. When this did not change Bezos’ mind, in an incredible act of generosity, Shaw let Bezos go off to start Amazon and didn’t even ask for a piece of the pie. (!!! I know.)
The rest is history, which brings me to an act of generosity that I squandered away.
No chance in hell
It was 2009. The year I completed my one-year Sloan degree from Stanford. Unlike 1998, I was at the right place at the right time. Kindle had just been launched, and a Sloan alum, Jeff Blackburn, was hiring a Kindle Product Manager.
I wrote to him, and he immediately granted me an interview — unlike the MDI time, this was a perfect opportunity — right place, right time, and Jeff’s generosity.
I think I was ready for the role, but I was unprepared for the interview process. On campus, I was surrounded by world-class folks with intimate knowledge of Tech, Amazon and the Product Manager role.
Did I call anyone and ask for help? Of course not. I naively thought my background in consumer goods marketing and my passion for books was sufficient for the role. This was my Dunning-Kruger moment.
I blew it because I failed to appreciate the privilege I was given and the dues it demanded in the form of humility and some honest hard work.
Consistency compounds
Enough gurus have told us that opportunities will magically appear if we prepare long enough. And there are many stories of greatness achieved through consistent hard work.
One such story is that of the Beatles.
They were a rather average band pre-1960. Then they moved to Hamburg, where they played seven days a week, eight hours a day, for two years. Lennon says, “We couldn’t help improve with all of that extra experience.”
Let me not add more to this narrative when I have already written enough about this in Performonks earlier. Here, Here and Here.
Instead, I want to square off this article by sharing a counterpoint that life can trick us. Read on.
Opportunity or threat?
As a Chinese legend goes, Zhuge Liang had a formidable reputation as one of the best military strategists of his time. [Source: The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene]
There was a time when his army was away, and he was resting in a small town with just 100 troops. He got wind of another general, Sima Yi, who was coming to attack with a force of 150,000 men.
He told his men to hide and flung open the gates, changed into Taoist robes, sat on the most visible part of the city’s wall, lit some incense and started playing his flute.
Even when he saw the army approach, he pretended to be engrossed in his music.
Such was his reputation that the enemy took this state of relaxation to mean that Zhuge Liang was so well prepared to destroy them, that they beat a speedy retreat.
Zhuge Liang was right to evade this war. But Sima Yi? He made a mistake because sometimes opportunities come disguised as threats.
The 100-post milestone survey results
You just read the 100th Performonks post.
Apart from the shock that we’ve hit this milestone, I am deeply grateful to you, dear readers, for your emails and comments and for sharing Performonks with your friends.
Thanks to the 13 folks who filled out the survey.
- It’s like they read my mind. 46% want a Marketing Strategy Course. 15% each want a Book, Videos, and Community Features.
- They want me to write about challenger brands, the latest advertising, Rama Bijapurkar’s Liliput Book, AI, How Creators can market themselves, and B2B marketing.
- One of you wants to contribute articles to Performonks. I will get in touch!