So I joined Zerodha recently, which is the peak of what my professional career would have looked like to me 4 years ago, back in college.
Now that I am working here, I realize it is just another company with equally flawed colleagues, who were just lucky enough to have been doing the right thing for a long enough time. This is not to take away anything from what Zerodha has achieved, but the more I learn about what led Zerodha to reach where it is today, the more I realize two secrets of their success:
- Culture
- Dumb luck
While the former is a result of the conscious and deliberate effort made by the founding team and Nithin boss, the latter is as the name suggests – pure dumb luck.
I am telling you all of this to set the context of what’s about to come. As much as it may look like I am downplaying the beauty that Zerodha is, it is home to some of the smartest people I know and the smartest one I have interacted with so far is luckily my manager – Bhuvan.
Although his full name is Bhuvanesh, he apparently finds it ugly and prefers a cooler version of Bhuvan or Bhu1 (Bhu + Numerical One). I don’t know the obsession of these Millenials with trying to act cool, but okay. I can’t blame them for all the lameness that they suffer from.
He may not be the best manager, not that I am capable of making that judgement, but he is one of the finest writers I have met in person, and believe me, when I say this, I can count the number of writers I have met in my life on my fingers of just one hand.
That’s no great feat to achieve, but his writings have had a profound impact on getting me back on the track of writing again. So here I am writing, after a very long time. To put out how I feel about writing, it’s perfectly summarised by this quote, that I read in one of Bhu1’s posts only.
I am giving so much context, to set the expectation with my audience of 2 people (myself and my mom) that I will be writing more often now. With that said, let us talk about what I want to share today.
My first experience with losing a loved one
If I remember correctly, I was in my PG during my college days when the news of my grandpa going through an incident was broken to me. I wasn’t made privy to the details of the incident up until I actually reached from Delhi (college) to Ambala (my hometown).
When I reached, all I remember being told was that he was watching television in the evening as a part of his daily ritual when suddenly he dropped unconscious. A few hours later the family was told that he was now in a state of comma.
I don’t know if you have been through such a situation, but things become tense in the family when this happens. Everybody is worried about the loved one going through this, but at the same time they don’t want the morale of the family to go down. So while we had all our distant relatives coming and visiting us, being the Punjabi family that we are, we kept the mood light by still engaging in witty banter and humour amongst ourselves to cope up with what was happening.
Then I had my end sem exams approaching, so I had to go back to Delhi hoping that by the time my exams ended, grandpa would recover. But as my exams ended, so did my hopes of grandpa recovering. His situation deteriorated, until the dreadful night came, when nobody in our family could sleep because the end was near.
And we lost a gem.
I don’t know about others, but I was too overwhelmed and still in denial of the reality. It was the first time I experienced death this close, and what followed was episodes of me cry incessantly up until I couldn’t anymore.
Zerodha hires me
I got a message from my college senior that I hadn’t talked to in ages – but we both knew what each of us was up to – that somebody in Zerodha was looking to hire a content guy.
My senior knew me from my college days when I had experimented first with YouTube and podcasts, then with LinkedIn. He thought I may know a thing or two about financial content.
He was wrong. I didn’t know shit back then and still don’t now, but am confident enough to make people feel otherwise. Ask Bhu1, who calls me on my bullshit every day in the office. It’s too bad he couldn’t look past my bullshit in the interviews we had before I was hired, but it’s his and Zerodha’s loss now.
That aside, I talked to the person looking to hire, and he was already hesitant about hiring from the competition. Context: I used to work for Share.Market earlier which was the wealth and broking division of PhonePe.
Knowing how overly ethical the folks at Zerodha are, I shamelessly messaged and followed up with the hiring person out of my ass, to convince (or bully) him into giving me a chance at an interview.
That’s where things went south for Zerodha because I knew I could charm anyone in person, be it a potential employer or a date.
All this while, the anticipation of joining the largest and most reputed stock broking firm in the country (maybe the world) built up so much. I even got interviewed by Nithin in my final round, where I outright told him, that regardless of the outcome of the interview I am getting a pic clicked with him.
No points for guessing, but my interview went great, as expected, and I now waited for the offer letter.
I still remember it was 12:30 PM in my PhonePe office when I received the offer letter from Zerodha. I was just about to go for lunch and I couldn’t resist the temptation of breaking this news to my closest colleagues.
Damn, I was excited for sure, almost shivering.
Getting ill away from home is painful
I have been staying away from home since 6th grade. First I joined a boarding school in Himachal Pradesh away from home. Then went off to college in Delhi. Took up my first job in Mumbai. And found myself in Bangalore for better work opportunities.
So never really stayed at a geographical location long enough to call it home. For me, home was always where my people were. My family.
And I got really ill away from my family recently. It was navratri and garba season. I am not a big party person, but Garba is not a thing I can say no to.
So I went for a couple of nights. It was Friday night. After an exhausting garba session when I was already covered in sweat, it rained and I got drenched. Add to that, I stayed wet (😜) long enough to not let my immune system stand even a remote chance of fighting off illness. And I got ill.
I got ill so bad, that I decided to stay the night at my very kind colleague’s place and I couldn’t even lift a finger for the the weekend. My temperature crossed 103°. My throat was fucked, my lungs were spewing phlegm faster than the speed of light, my head was dizzy from all the medicine (read: drugs) I was taking and my body aching from the overly enthusiastic garba night that I enjoyed on Friday.
All I remember was wanting one thing, to get better. Or as Confuscious put it.
A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.
What makes the illness worse is not just the physical battle you are going through, but also the mental trauma of overthinking you put yourself through because you can’t do anything but rest and sit idle. And idleness mind is the devil’s workshop.
It was one of the most painful 5 days of my year. I longed to be with my family. But I couldn’t.
What point I am trying to make?
Why did I just overshare details of my life that nobody wanted to listen to?
You see, all three instances that I talked about above highlighted the extreme situations in my life.
Be it related to my physical health, professional life or mental battles. Be it the extreme good or extreme bad.
They all meant the world to me when I was going through them. There was nothing in my life that impacted me more.
But as I sit down today, vomiting the words that come into my mind on a random and mundane Sunday, I realise they are not even a spec of dust in what a colossal and filthy playground my life is.
What was the only thing I cared about then, now took me a good time to recall what exactly I was going through back then.
As much variance of emotions, we feel during these extremities, I think our state of life converges back to the middle. The boring and mundane parts.
And what does the middle look like? It is that everyday alarm that wakes you up so that you don’t get late for work. It is that boring and mundane skincare routine you do after the shower so that you can impress your office crush (not that I have one, or do I?). It is you putting the 2FA for the VPN on your office laptop as if I have access to top secret nuclear codes that could blow up Pakistan.
It is those conversations you have with your colleagues on the lunch table where we crack the same old jokes trolling that one employee for having imported and installed a fucking Japanese toilet worth lakhs in his house.
It is you waiting for the Bangalore rain to stop so that you can spend another hour surfing through water-clogged roads on the Silk Board Junction, fighting the Auto wala bhaiyas to give you space as you zoom past your scooty breaking the red light to reach back home in one piece, unharmed.
That is life because it makes up 99% of what your days on earth will look like.
Why is a finance bro talking this shit?
Like any fin-influencer, I will now link all this gyaan to a piece of unsolicited financial wisdom that I know you didn’t want, but you will get it because you have come this far reading my crap.
That gyaan being that investing decisions are not made based on the bad 10% fall that Nifty sufffered in the past 5 days. Nor are the investing decisions made based on the multibbager-like returns that PSU and Defense Mutual Funds were giving a couple of months back.
Sound investing decisions are made when nothing is happening in the market, and you continue your SIPs in the funds that you have chosen for yourself, or with the help of someone smarter than you (hint: me).
Smart investing decision is sticking with the mundane things that happen in the middle of your investing days/journey when nothing is happening, and not when everything is happening all at once.
I don’t know whether I did a good job at communicating what I wanted to, don’t forget.
And I love having written this. If you like it, share it with others. You hate it, criticize me in private, so that it’s easier to ignore you.
PS: If you didn’t realize it yet, this was an attempt for me to add more humour in my writing, and all things said must be received accordingly. Don’t have me fired from Zerodha, please.
Leave a Reply