“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”
I guess the proverbial phrase aptly describes how an idealist looks at life; you take what you get and make the best of it. We are taught to pick a path and stay on it, never doubting or worrying about the direction in which you are headed. Making unconventional choices can lead to you being labelled a quitter. More often than not things will go against you and it will seem like the entire universe is mocking your decisions. At that moment it is up to you to find a way out of the mess or learn to live with it.
Post completing my bachelors in engineering I was fortunate enough to land a job at an MNC as a full stack developer. The job was simple I just had to use all the skills I acquired over the years studying computer engineering and use them to design products tailored to the needs of the client. I was on top of the world. Then reality strikes and you find out things are slightly different than what you envisioned them to be. I was more of a bits and pieces developer than a full stack developer, we were given a component of the product to be designed and tested, resolve as many tickets as we possibly can. There was no client interaction, I felt helpless and without a clue. My desire to have a handle on things, to control what I work on and see things through the finish line was making me doubt myself. I thought maybe I should switch companies but that didn’t seem like it is going to resolve anything when you are unhappy with the condition of the road you are walking on you don’t change shoes with hopes of the road suddenly becoming more bearable. Cut to 7 months into this new career I found myself putting in my resignation without any plan B. I returned home like disgraced soldier court-martialled on the battlefield, some suggested I seek counselling, some thought I did what I did due to homesickness but in my mind I had clarity about what I really wanted to do. I wanted to start my own venture.
Now the question was how do I go about it, so I did the most cliched thing ever I joined the family business not to fool myself that I was doing business but rather to understand how businesses work. It was complete chaos. Every day felt like today’s the day it all fails. Every day there was a new challenge, sometimes it was the supply chain, sometimes the buyer and sometimes the production but somehow, we persisted and were ready to face the same challenges the next day. Some might say I traded cashews for walnuts, but I enjoyed every moment of my time there. When I did start my own venture in a field not even remotely connected to my undergrad major, contrary to the general perception I did not feel that my four years at college had gone waste but rather my skills as a developer came in handy at every turn. In a world where every business must have an online presence before it even starts production on any scale, I was able to build that with zero investment using the open source tools I was exposed to at my first job. As engineers, we are wired to cover entire syllabus in a night and it came in handy when I had to learn about the components that were to be used in my products in a short span of time and then apply what I had learnt to make improvements of my own. Drawing parallels from the testing parameters we used for the software components I was able to structure a testing and quality assurance procedure without hiring any external consultancy services. Though I was in a different field yet it seemed like I was being trained for this exact job all my life, and that according to me is the entire point of getting an education.
Life is too uncertain and unpredictable to operate in a straight path. There are intersections and diversions according to which you have to adjust while maintaining your motion forward. Though the jury is still out on whether the path I took tenders me as a success or a failure, I did learn a couple of things from my experience. The purpose of education is the enlightenment of the mind, not to mould you for a certain job or task. While there are always certain desired skills for each job but that does not mean that choosing an alternate career path would render the skills acquired previously useless. Your skills are your own and what really matters is how you apply them. Change is the only constant in the world and one should not be afraid of it. The choices from the past should not govern the choices for the future. Difficult decisions are often the most liberating ones. It is okay to quit something that doesn’t bring you joy but never the quest to find that joy.
As far as the phrases go I would extend the aforementioned one a little. When life gives you lemons, ask yourself if you’re content with lemonade; if not, give those lemons back and fight for the fruit your heart desires.