My Learnings in 2023
In this blog, I will share my top 5 learning in 2023.
The year 2023 was unique its own way. There were many highlights, ups and downs, learning and unlearning.
The year 2023 is also special to me as my wife gave birth to our second child. In the month of December-2023, my younger son turned 6months old. I wondered how soon time has passed and yet it feels like yesterday.
To close off the year 2023, I am sharing my top 5 learnings that has made me a better individual.
Learning#1 : Being authentic matters
When I decided to start blogging in 2022, it mostly started as a fascination for writing. I didn’t really had anything in mind about what topics that I will be writing.
In 2023, I was very inconsistent and blogging had become an overhead. There were so many days, I thought to stop writing and focus on something else.
But in August 2023, I realised that many have read my blogs and have appreciated. There were some great feedback in LinkedIn and one blog, The C.A.R.E.S framework [1] had close to 200 reads.
The question in my mind was why should I stop, when there are individuals who are reading and giving feedback. Then how can I become consistent and make sure individuals who are looking forward for my blog get it on time.
When I retrospected about the situation, I realised that being inconsistent is not going to serve the true purpose of writing. So I had to discover myself on why should I continue to write?
This is when I realised being authentic about the topic and why I want to write will make me consistent. Irrespective of how many blogs I end up writing or how many individuals will subscribe or read, I should be authentic and in-turn consistent about writing.
In September 2023, when I discovered myself on why I should write, created a plan and executed it. Until now, writing blog never felt a overhead. I had always time for it and motivated enough to put in the hours.
Learning#2 : Partnership
I have been in management for almost 7years now. When it comes to resourcing and hiring, technology adoption, the approach that I have taken until now, was proven inefficient.
The 2023 year, my team went through lot of attrition. I needed members in matter of weeks as there were nobody left in the team to take knowledge transfers. But, the typical hiring cycle i.e. sourcing for candidates, interviewing, offer negotiation and joining; was close to 60days.
If I had not decided to partner with resourcing agencies who are ready to get you a candidate within 2weeks, can’t imagine what would have happened.
Another instance where partnership helped is conducting interviews. Since there were many open positions and not enough senior team members to take interviews, conducting interviews started becoming a bottleneck.
Without partnering with interview as a service agency, it would have become a huge scalability issue to interview candidates faster and lower the hiring cycle.
The situation of higher attrition and lesser senior members to take interviews made me to think to utilise third party partnership and made me to appreciate the benefits of such partnerships.
Learning#3 : Take feedback from peer leaders
Sometimes we forget to take feedback from our peers. Sometimes peers would have become more of our venting-out buddies.
Since I was managing team for quite sometime, I know exactly what to tell to which team member to keep that individual motivated or how to get a team member align to team objectives etc. This had made me to ignore some of the other aspect of team management and being a leader.
The effective team structure makes lot of difference and there must be constant check on forming and nurturing the structure of the team. If not then there will be so much of chaos which will become uncontrollable.
From September-2023, I was struggling to get efficiency improved in the team and things were just not falling in line. And I was wondering how this can happen when I have followed all the management practices to build and maintain this team.
The conversation with my peer who is an head of engineering made me realise the way I have hired and structured the team has caused an imbalance in the team from skill and experience point of view.
Due to budget constraints and other external factors, I have ended up hiring members who have lesser skills than those who left the team. This realisation made me to think, how I have never consulted on my approach and reviewed from a peer leader. How did I miss the common practice of sharing and taking feedback from peers.
Without the discussion with my peer leader, I wouldn’t have understood the core problem and I would have been trying to solve for something else without getting good results.
Learning#4 : Developing consistency
At the start of the year, I had bought 5 books to read in 2023. I realised in October-2023 that, hardly 2 books are completed and yet to retrospect on learning from the books.
I spoke about being consistency and authenticity as part of my writing in Learning#1. The same applies to reading and for other things as well.
Without being consistent and authentic about what I want to do, it is impossible to achieve something. Be it reading, be it going to gym, be it developing a new skill or be it starting a new company etc.
One of my major learning and realisation in 2023 is about being authentic and consistent. After this realisation, I decided no matter what I want to do, there will be authenticity and in-turn consistency will come with it and helps me to achieve my goals.
This was proven - I now write blogs consistently, I go to gym 3 days in a week consistently, finishing up my MBA classes consistently, reading books and writing about it consistently.
Due to being authentic, whatever I want to do will never look like a burden nor I have to force myself in doing it. The result of this is, I will be reaching my goals in due course of time.
Learning#5 : Learning about personal finance helps
When 2023 started, there was a huge doubt whether I will be able to manage my finances. There were so many financial commitments I had to take care.
From 2021 onwards, I have been trying to understand how to better manage my money and what are the better investment plans to consider for setting up financials for my son’s education, clearing up the loans, stabilise the returns from investments and save for future years.
I wrote a blog on personal finance in 2022 [2]. This captured most of my learnings. But I was not sure whether it will really yield results when I wanted.
The year 2023 was one such year where I could see my actions related to personal finance really helped. Due to my planned investments, enough corpus funds had got created. In this year, I had to take a pay cut, but that didn’t impact any of my financial commitments.
I was able to manage my personal family trips, could plan for future investments, continue building corpus, further investment for my son’s education, could prepay some fraction of my loans and still sustaining a healthy savings on monthly basis.
So learning about personal finance and applying it with bit of risk really helps when the time is not in favour of you.
Final thoughts
The year 2023, was another year where I got to learn something new. I got to meet new people, there was new partnership, great learnings to take to coming years.
The top 5 learnings has made a better individual and one of the key learning is being authentic on what I want to do. The authenticity helps in bringing in consistency and in-turn helps in achieving goals.
With this signing of the year 2023 and looking forward for more learnings and meeting new individuals in 2024.
Happy new year!
