In a recent company event, I volunteered to give a short sharing on my career journey on my TMTP (Technical Manager Technical Professional) career path.
Right out of the gate, I decided that this wasn’t going to be a whiz kid story of a highflyer who achieved great feats within a short span of time. Because – who am I going to fool? – I wasn’t!
The objective of the sharing isn’t to highlight how “awesome” I am. Not at all. Instead, I wanted to do the opposite: This is going to be an underdog story of how un-remarkable I was. How I always believed I didn’t have much of a talent for engineering at all. How I would struggle to do the most basic aspects of my job, including getting yelled at by my senior just for asking for help. How I would always fall behind my peers, remaining stagnant in my career as “graduate” job grade, watching juniors get promoted way past me. How every few years, changes in company policy always seem to set me back and put me at a disadvantage, constantly making my life more difficult. Yet, in spite of the obstacles, I kept going, and by Allah’s destiny, things slowly work out, as achievements started pouring in from places I never expected.
At the end of the day, what I hoped to achieve was that my sharing would instill in the audiences a sense of hope and optimism, especially the struggling ones among them. To motivate them into thinking, that I’m just a regular untalented guy, and that “if this guy can make it under those circumstances, then perhaps I just might have a shot”.
The kind of sharing that my younger me would have needed to hear, the content that I wished I had listened to when I was struggling.
In hindsight, my career was a story of two halves.. the first seven years were filled with challenges, disappointment, self-doubt, serious contemplations about resigning, as I recall being thrown into another department because I was the “lowest performer” in the team.
And then in the second half, things started to pick up. As I attained a good performance rating for the first time, I began feeling like an active contributing member to the team. I was no longer a passenger or a freeloader that’s just being a nuisance.
I began adopting a new personal slogan: “coba jak, ney la tauk” (Just try lah. Who knows, what’s going to come out of it?).
Every time “just try”, I put my heart into it.. and I got it. From PMP, Chartered Engineer, Professional Engineer, manager, TP assessment.. I never planned for all these to happen. I just made the decision in the moment. And suddenly things start falling into place, one after the other.
There are no regrets. Looking back, Every setback, every disappointment and seemingly trivial assignment was an important stepping stone towards something greater.
I am reminded of a quote by Steve Jobs: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Put in the work with ikhlas and ihsan, put your trust in Allah - and you have every reason to be optimistic about your future, insha Allah 😄
Finally I closed with a statement made by my friend, when I couldn’t believe the results of my assessment.
“You need to believe in yourself”.
Alhamdulillah I am glad I was given the opportunity to conduct this sharing.
To me, as much as possible, try to grab every chance we get at inspiring and motivating hope in others. Perhaps we have a chance to leave behind a positive legacy after us.
It’s things like these that motivate me to go to work every day 😊
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