3 Secrets to Grow Fast In Your Career! (The BCG Way)
Here is an interesting question-
Why do you think people like Mark Cuban, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, despite being billionaires, not only get up in the morning and go to work, but are also excited about it?
One could say they are following their passion, or they simply like what they do. You are not wrong. In technical terms, it is called- the concept of flow.
What is the concept of flow?
As human beings, we love challenges. Whatever work we are doing right now, we are doing it as a challenge. Probably the next job we will go to, if we find it challenging and fulfilling, we will certainly enjoy it.
But here is the disclaimer- do not confuse a task for being challenging when you actually find it backbreaking. Your work should not be so hard that it causes you an intense amount of stress.
When the challenge that you pose to yourself and the skills that you have are matched- a flow is maintained, and you enjoy your work.
I have had a successful career as a management consultant working with BCG. I am also a YouTuber, an entrepreneur and I have invested in different businesses as well.
In this article, I am going to discuss three specific lessons I have learnt in my career.
By the end of this article you will have learnt a lot about how you should approach your career. With the right mind-set, you will easily be able to make an insane amount of money.
- Top 5 percentile rule.
Each of us is gifted in certain areas. You might be a brilliant data scientist, painter, singer or are a very analytical person.
Estimate things in which you can potentially be in the top 5%. In my case, I always felt that I am a very analytical person. I love to analyse things and draw my interpretations. I always pick non-fiction books over fiction, because there is a lot more analysis that goes into them.
That is how my personality was, and hence I decided to zero down on management consulting.
Management consulting involves:
- Extensive reading.
- Business analysis
- Getting creative with business ideas.
I was naturally slightly better at these and hence the work appealed to me.
But I always endeavoured to get into the top 5 percentile of things that I pursued.
- When I decided to become a management consultant, I put my heart and soul into the fact that I should go and work at one of the best management consulting firms.
- When I gave the GMAT, I made sure that I worked really hard and got a really high GMAT score.
- When I wrote my business school applications, I was determined to get into the world’s top 5 MBA programs.
Do a self-assessment of your skills to figure out what you can be good at. Activate that and work really hard towards that goal.
Now, how should you do that self-assessment and what are the key-points that you should keep in mind?
Here is a simple two by two framework that BCG consultants use-
On the X-axis you draw out your skill-sets and on the Y-axis you draw out the job requirements.
In this graph, I have taken my own example. I was good at a lot of skills which were relevant in the field of consulting as you can understand from the graph. But I was not good with Excel or speaking well, which were very important in consulting.
This form of self-assessment allowed me to uncover the skills which were important in consulting. I then started working on it and cultivating my skills by a) learning Excel and b) exploring public speaking forums.
Doing this two way analysis helps you:
- Figure out the skills you are bad at.
- Isolate those skills and start working towards cultivating them.
At the same time be smart enough to identify certain sub-areas in a job that you are exceptionally good at, bifurcate them and use it to your advantage.
- The 80-20 rule.
To generate 80% of the results, you just need to put in 20% of directional efforts.
If:
- Your strategy is right
- You’re looking at the problem in the right way.
Just by spending 20% of your efforts, you can generate 80% of the results.
A very simple example would be- solving the past 10 years examination papers for a test you have in three days, which you are completely unprepared for.
An example from my life would be when I was playing cricket at the state-level during my school days. I used to practice for 4-5 hours on the field. I then had to attend school. Everyday I got only 2 hours to study, so I had to utilise that time in a focused manner to get the maximum output. Funnily enough, I did not know back then that what I was doing was called the 80-20 rule. But I was managing my time really very well.
And this is a habit which has helped me generate even better results going forward in my life.
When I graduated from INSEAD and joined Dalberg, I was simultaneously running a business, which took effort. Now I also have a one year old son to manage. 
Over the years I have realised that understanding how to optimise your time is a very critical aspect to managing your entire career.
- The importance of interdisciplinary learning.
Whatever you have learnt in one of your career paths, you bring it to your other career path. An example of mine would be- some of the skills that I picked from management consulting were immensely helpful when I developed a bunch of businesses.
Skills like:
- Structure a problem and then
- Break it apart in a systematic manner.
I applied the same principles I learnt in consulting to build my businesses.
Similarly, when I started investing in the stock market, I began-
- Analysing companies
- Understanding their product liability
- How they are going to gain traction in the market and
- How are their sales and profit numbers going to go up?
My analytical skills helped me a lot when I started investing in businesses as an angel investor.
To sum it up, career paths these days are extremely fluid.
And lastly, there is the concept of concentric circles, given by Peter Thiel.
A good business starts out by building an expertise in a particular area and then moves to its second area of expertise.
They expand like a concentric circle.
This is what Amazon did. It first used to sell books and then eventually became an e-commerce. It then began selling its own internal products.
Thus, every career move you make, it should grow in a concentric manner.
The goal is to be a life-long learner!
Now, to summarise this entire article into a few short sentences-
- Focus on the flow
- Focus on excellence by trying to be the top 5 percentile of anything that you do.
- Follow the 80-20 rule.
- Learn a bunch of things, so that interdisciplinary learning propels you ahead in your career.
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