Achievements and accidents

A few months ago, while I was still in India, I drove to a restaurant to have lunch with a couple of colleagues. After lunch, we were returning to our office when it happened One of my colleagues casually threw out an empty envelope though the window. Accidentally, that envelope struck a person who was riding a motorcycle. He was a rash and rowdy young man and there were 2 others riding pillion behind him. Suddenly they started shouting at us. After a small verbal courtship, they wanted to take our new relationship to the next level! He was driving through my left. And I was going straight. He, well cajoled me to stop. I was in no mood for amorous exchanges and certainly didn’t want to get physical, so I drove straight ahead. But he was desperate to get to know me better and suddenly pulled his bike right in front of my car… and …I lost control and … ACCIDENT!

Thankfully no one was hurt, and we came to ... er ... an "out of court settlement". But accidents are part of our everyday lives. More people die in road accidents than in wars. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes. I’m not even counting flight accidents. Accidents are unfortunate. They are sad. Accidents may also be happy, though not for the car owners.

I made it into ISB this year. It is a privilege and an honour to be part of such an illustrious group of people. I would think that this is an achievement. But I also believe that I have had my fair share of luck. I got the right breaks in my career: I made a very risky job change that turned out alright, volunteered for some high risk high reward assignments and pulled 'em through, quick promotions, great set of team mates, few amazing people guiding me about the admission process et cetera, et cetera. So is ISB just a happy accident?

I don’t think that our lives can be determined only by accidents. I surely don’t hope so. But many of you will say that things go wrong all the time. It’s a big bad world. Mr. Murphy certainly thought so. You must have heard about Murphy’s laws.
1. If anything can go wrong, it will, or the corollary
2. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.
3. Or this corporate variation: After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month than you did before. That certainly holds true in my case.

Are all promotions accidents? Let’s not even go there. Well, truth be told…the world is random. It is chaos out there. And accidents are just waiting to happen. When I first started driving on Indian roads, I was amazed at how an accident doesn’t occur every second. You have an auto that suddenly barges in from the right. When you escape it by turning left, a rikshaw honks its horns from the left and nearly hits you. And then you look in front and there’s a man standing there….right in the middle of the road….just looking at you and smiling…crossing the road at his leisure as if he’s taking a stroll in the garden, almost enticing you to just go and whack him! Believe me, when you are driving in India, just reaching your destination safely is an achievement.

If we look closely, we will find that our lives are very similar to the roads we drive our cars on. Few months ago, I had the delivery date of a very important project coming up. To make matters interesting, my GMAT was scheduled just before this date. But the week before this deadline, my mother got sick and had to be hospitalized, then when she got better, I got sick. I gave GMAT with a fever of 102 degrees, heavily drugged. Then when I got better and rejoined office, there was a man standing right in front of me looking very angry: my manager. But I stayed late in office over the next few weeks, worked really hard and completed the project before time. The project even earned client appreciation: a small achievement. And yes, I eventually made it into the class of 2010 in one of the best B schools in the world - a bigger achievement despite the accidents. We need luck, yes, but we shouldn’t count on it. I believe that the harder we work, the luckier we will get. Finally, let's hope that unlike the title of this post, “Achievements” and “Accidents” are not adjacent in too many sentences of our lives.