Career - An eternal conquest for Edge
July 23, 2025
July 23, 2025
I recently concluded an exciting internship at Bain & Co where I was fortunate enough to receive a full-time offer. For most, this is where the search ends but I ended up in an almost expected crisis of purpose. My inner materialistic was fixed on the overarching question - how do I become successful in my career? Building your career is an incredibly complicated task and means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For some, career is defined by money, by fame for others and satisfaction by a few - this makes creating a unified theory of career success very difficult. What is the objective function we are trying to maximise? The Japanese took an interesting approach to this through the concept of Ikigai. The diagram below does a good job of explaining it.
Some stalwarts like Cal Newport had their own conceptions around the thought of figuring out what you are good at and not what you necessarily like as means to career success. This begs the big question - would I really like to cry in a Ferrari or laugh in a Maruti? I am certain most people reading this would assume it’s the former until they are in that position which is when they’ll crave for the latter. As I spent more time thinking through these things, I realised that the prevalent philosophies are either too idealistic or overtly practical, both of which do not work in a human setting. This exactly is the subject of this essay - my thoughts around career, failure and decision making. Here’s the broad structure we’ll follow through the essay:
One of the biggest struggles in building a successful career is choosing the career you want to build in. Should I become a developer or a maybe a trader or a singer might be fun, or not? It is incredibly difficult to choose a career and to be honest, I don’t know how to. The first challenge that comes up with this is choosing between your passion and what pays.
Let’s say you are an incredibly painter, what are the odds that you could even earn enough to sustain let alone thrive? I personally would have loved to become a singer but I find it very difficult to choose passion driven fields such as these which is why I hugely admire people courageous enough to follow their desires. A model to still rationalise these career choices could be “the knowing framework” that I discussed later in this essay.
Now that we have limited ourselves to professional fields there are two consecutive lenses I believe one should take to come up with an answer. A caveat before I delve in - these lenses are eliminators that help remove career choices that you wouldn’t have preferred. You may end up with long list of careers even after these two lenses in which case you have an eclectic taste that makes an already difficult task a tad bit more complicated.
Let’s start with Lens 1 - Can you imagine yourself doing the job for 14 hours every day for 30 years? Sounds simple but is a little tricky to understand accurately. We typically are only privy to the rosy pictures of every career. Consulting isn’t just 5 star hotels, Private Equity isn’t always high stakes takeovers, Software Development isn’t architecting the high frequency trading algorithm while sitting in your basement. There is a rosy picture sold for every career which is always just a very small part of the job. We tend to skip out on the real day-to-day of it. In my Bain internship, I stayed at 3 different 5-star properties for 2 months, spent Rs 20,000+ of company money on food and coffee daily. Guess what fraction of my day did this represent? I had food for 2 hours a day and went to my hotel to literally just sleep. The bulk of my job was vastly different to what people are sold. The high-stakes CEO & MD meetings were literally 4 hours of a 500 hour long internship. Thus, I need to think about the 496 hours of actual work that I did and ask myself question - can I do it everyday for 30 years? While I was lucky to have an internship to help me form an answer not everyone is. For hard skills like equity trading, development, data science etc, courses are a very good way to gain insights into these careers. For others like Investment Banking - reading blogs, LinkedIn one-on-ones are good ways to get some flavor of the profession.
Once you have a set of careers left in your list, we apply our second lens. I got this from my manager at Bain. It’s a set of 3 questions and is honestly an ongoing question you keep asking yourself through your career:
Question 1 solves for you not crying yourself to work everyday. Some people find sitting at a table writing code after a point irritating and for others having to talk to too many people as a part of your job is tiring. There is an overlap with the previous lens but this is more of an ongoing exercise.
Question 2 focuses on the people aspect of a career. Humans are social creatures and if the people you work with and spend more than half your life around are not your kind, life becomes significantly worse. I understood the importance of this at Bain. Our first interaction at Bain was around the people-centric culture and after experiencing it first hand, I attest to the importance of culture in a career and in a workplace. There are stereotypes for every career and firm that we can use to judge the people aspect of the company. IB is typically known to be cut-throat with BofA leading among them. Within consulting, McKinsey is known to be more individual dominated, BCG more cut-throat/ high growth and Bain heavily people oriented. Understanding these nuances through one-on-one conversations and public information can save a lot of future pain.
Question 3 is purely around the materialistic aspect of a career. Lifestyle isn’t just about the money - do you want travel in your job, do you want to work from home or office etc are parts of the lifestyle question. But, realistically speaking, lifestyle would mean the money question for almost everyone and that’s fair. I know as a matter of fact that I cannot do the IB lifestyle of 100 hour work weeks, I’d rather do 70-75 hours of consulting with relatively lower pay. Conversely, I do not want a relaxed plan job of 30 hours but with much lower pay. Societal standard, pay, location, familial desires and others included constitute the lifestyle question. As we move through life the answer to this question keeps changing, but early on while deciding one’s career it would fair well to atleast take an educated guess to your future answers and work accordingly.
I believe this thought exercise would greatly help in understanding what makes you tick atleast and hopefully give you a good sense of the career direction you should. I acknowledge that the process is tedious and ambiguous but this is the 2nd most important decision in life after who should you marry - I believe it’s worth the pain.
There are set of fields where you just need to be right once and that’s enough to set you up for life. A field where you typically have part ownership (like entrepreneurship, stock investments etc) is a career where these outsized returns are possible. If you get a stock investment that 1000x, you probably are set for life. Similarly for entrepreneurship, getting one company even remotely successful sets you up for a successful life.
The key trick to identify these are by doing a input v/s output analysis. With a stock investment, you can only lose 100% of your corpus but can potential earn 10,000%. Similarly with entrepreneurship, if gone wrong, you can potentially lose some capital and primarily a few years of life that you invested in it, but if gone right, you can earn a lifetime of freedom. These outsized returns are what makes these risky. Losing 100% of your corpus or the time of your life where you could’ve built a traditional career earning crores are major risks. And this is exactly where our framework enters the picture.
Life is a test match, there are very many balls that will be thrown at you. In careers such as these, you literally need one sixer to win the match. The winning strategy then is to be able to stay on crease long enough without getting out to get a ball that you can surely hit for a six and when you do get it, capitalise on the chance. Credit where it is due, I believe it was Rakesh Jhunjhunwala who drew this analogy up.
In less confusing words, in life, the primary goal is to always be in a position to be able to restart in case everything fails. This is the part where we do not get out and go back into the dugout. It’s alright to try to hit a six, i.e., try to capitalise on a big opportunity and fail but it shouldn’t lead to bankruptcy or a complete destruction of all future career options. In stock terms, this means never going all in on one share and in entrepreneurship terms this could mean having a degree or a network that helps you get a job if you fail. With this in place, you can now keep taking singles/ doubles in the wait for the perfect opportunity to hit a six. This is a lot easier said than done but this is a good framework to analyse major make or break opportunities with outsized returns.
Let’s try and define a roadmap for career success. If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written then it’ll be obvious that I will first ask the definition of success. I must define success to be able to build a philosophy around achieving it. Here’s how I’d define it:
There are 3 parts of one’s life - the self, the family and the social world. This definition of success mostly solves for all 3 of these aspects. I included monetary & familial aspect through a vaguely defined “lifestyle” component. If you are proud of what you do, chances are the society is alright with it. Lastly if you do not wake up crying in the morning, things aren’t bad; I do not define success as things being good because I want to stay away from idealistic zone and be as realistic as possible.
With that out of the way, let’s start with how. An MD at one of the world’s biggest PE funds once told me, your success is defined by 3 things:
Typically, if you have something incredibly rare in just one of these boxes, you are mostly set-up for success. What this means is, if you know the PM of the country very well, you probably can get your way around most things in the world and atleast achieve the success we defined. Similarly, if you were the one of the very few experts in optimising GPU design for LLMs in 2023, you are en route to achieving our definition.
The third one is tricky - if somebody knows you, it’s probably for the first 2 reasons, thus “who knows you” seems like a by-product of the first two in our current exploration of this model. As counter intuitive as it may sound, the third is where the magic happens and one that I am trying to build in life - we’ll see how. But, as you might have realised by now, you probably don’t fall in any of these buckets, neither do I and neither do most people.
This is where our “how” will now start to flesh out. Unlike the people born with a silver spoon, we’ll build across all three buckets. We want to know some people and want some people to know us for some skills that we have. The first step here would be to start building “what we know”. This happens through our colleges, external courses, YouTube etc. The goal here is to learn a few skills well - they do not have to be “in-demand” as long as you’ve learnt the skill to a sufficient level of proficiency. With this in place, you start building your network of people (who you know). Internships and other forms work are often the go-to mechanism for this. Shiny college badges (IITs, HBS, MIT etc) are ways to signal to the external world that your “What you know” is very strong and due to your extensive alumni network there is potentially a big list of “who you know” as well. This helps jumpstart the process of success.
Once you've started to build a base of what you know and expand who you know, that third pillar – who knows you – isn't just some fortunate byproduct. This is where the real magic happens, amplifying your reach and opening doors you might not even have seen.
Think of it: mastering a skill ("what you know") and consciously building your network ("who you know") are absolutely foundational. But "who knows you" is about your reputation, your visibility, and crucially, your influence. It's that point where people beyond your immediate circle start recognizing your expertise, inherently trusting your judgment, and actually seeking you out for opportunities. This is precisely where the delightful unpredictability of serendipity truly kicks in. It could be a former colleague mentioning your name for a role you hadn't even heard of, or an article you penned leading to an unexpected, game-changing collaboration.
Now, building "who knows you" is certainly a more organic, long-game kind of process, but it's not entirely passive. It means consistently delivering work that makes you memorable, generously sharing your insights and becoming that reliable, valuable presence for everyone in your network. In essence, it's about becoming the go-to person for something specific, a genuinely recognized voice. The MD at the PE firm put it as follows:
We’ve explored a lot of different inter-connected yet disjoint ideas, but if there’s one thought that you must take away with you, it’s this one. One of the first questions a company is asked by an investor is - what is your right to win? In simple words, why should you win vs. all of the thousands of different competitors in the world? This question isn’t asked enough in a personal capacity and I believe this is what makes you irreplaceable.
No one remembers the “average team player” or the “hard working person” - people remember someone for having an unique quality that only they possess in that specific environment. This is your edge in the world and your right to win.
Let’s understand this through a series of examples:
Your edge is incredibly context specific - what might be an edge in certain scenarios is what makes you mainstream in certain others. Edge isn’t necessarily a single trait either. Intersectional knowledge/ experience across Financial Services & Bottom of the Pyramid marketing is an edge (think Sahara India). Classical sitarist with GenAI experience can also be an edge.
Your right to win or your edge is what makes you stand out in a crowd of people and makes you irreplaceable in your career. I picked up the concept of edges from a weekend with the Entrepreneur First team and I realise the importance of accurately defining your edge and playing purely on them. I’ve subconsciously carved out my edge in the different universities and organisations I was lucky to be a part - only student-run start-up on campus for some time in Jadavpur University or only coder in a business development team at BSE. This has helped me stand my ground and be unforgettable (to the greatest extent possible) at some of these places.
The crucial next step, then, isn't just to identify your existing edge, but to actively cultivate and sharpen it. What unique combination of skills, experiences, and perspectives do you bring to the table that few others can? Perhaps it's your specific technical proficiency blended with an unusual soft skill, or a niche industry background combined with a fresh, outside perspective. Your edge isn't static; it evolves as you learn, connect, and challenge yourself. It's about intentionally building on "what you know" and "who you know" in ways that make "who knows you" truly recognize your distinct contribution. This continuous pursuit of your evolving edge is, I believe, the most potent strategy for ensuring long-term irreplaceability.
Defining a singular philosophy for success in life (a.k.a. career) is impossible, but I listed out the major guiding principles that I follow in my life at various points. There are some other philosophies that one might find useful and I refer to from time to time, am listing them out here.
In the end, career success isn't a destination but a continuous journey of growth, pain, and self-discovery. If you do desire a silver bullet for success, it’s QUESTIONS. Asking the right questions will always guide you towards your version of success. By thoughtfully engaging with the questions and philosophies I listed out, I would hope that you are equipped to not just navigate the professional world, but to truly thrive in it.