Category: Personal Brand

Saurabh Garg – Personal Brand

This is an excerpt from the daily newsletter that I send out to some friends. More about the newsletter is here.

Please read this and tell me what you think. 

The next thing that I want to share (and more than share, write and thus get clarity in my head) is my personal brand.

For starters, twitter. 

So, twitter is the largest, strongest, baddest, bestest connection I have to the outside world (I remain an introvert at most other places). And on Twitter, I would often post whatever comes in my head, even if those things are embarrassing and cringe-inducing. You know, I was being authentic (I am like that IRL). Which was great to a point in time. But I feel that authenticity is making me a tad more human that what I hope to be and is thus preventing me from making business connections. And to be honest, right now, I need business connections more than anything else at this point in life.

Ergo, fixing twitter. Step 1 towards fixing personal brand.

Last night, I split my twitter usage in three. Yes, three. I am not for small measures 😉

@saurabh – where I’ll mostly talk about work. Try to create connections that can take me far. I will talk about my writing, marketing consulting assignments, events and all the projects that I am a part of. The idea will be to use the platform to showcase work, create more opportunities and meet more people that can help me grow.

@altsaurabh – this is where I would move what I was doing with @saurabh. Put things that I want friends and family to see.

@altsg – this remains the way it was. A backup account that I use when I am super-fucked in the head. 

And yes, I take myself very seriously ;P

I know I should not – I have been warned by enough people in as many words (including that longish comment). But I don’t know how else to live. I am a reflection of my work. And my work consumes all of me. I don’t have a personal life, heck, I don’t want one. I don’t enjoy anything else but this grind. There is nothing else that I am passionate about. There is nothing that I think I will ever do in life but think about the next. You know, divinely discontent. Each thing I do — from writing to fitness to hopes to live long and more — is an input for things that I can work on.

I know my definition of life and work is kind of warped. I don’t know what is work-life balance. I don’t even want to know. And the range of things that I work on is pretty wide but it is what it is.

Assuming that is the border you have to work in, if you are willing to help, do see my LinkedIn profile and my website and please do tell me if all these are in sync and make sense to you.

That’s about it I guess for the time being.

See you guys tomorrow!

The randomness of success

Remember, yesterday, I talked about the guy that I met that made me think hard? Well, that hard thinking is still happening! In the sense that what he said, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. There are a million threads going all over the place but the one that I keep coming back to, again and again, and again and again and again is the one where he asked me about my heroes and their success. He said, what if the heroes that I look up to (people like Steve, Bill, Elon, Jeff, Paul, Raj, Suvi, Rajesh and others) were not really driven by hard work but by randomness. What if they just got lucky and there is no formula that you can take from their success to apply to your life and get successful.

Now, this is a very new idea to me. I mean am aware of the concept of fooled by randomness and the coin-flipping concept outlined in the Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville. But I never applied that to the success of people that I look up to. I always thought they were ahead of the curve because they were doing something right. And I’ve believed that I can reverse engineer their success and create this magic potion that can help me find success.

But this very thought that the heroes that I look up to could be because of sheer luck, it is not cool. In the sense, I want to believe that success is achievable and there is a path that I can walk to reach the end goal. I am not getting in this debate between goals, path, destinations, etc. Hope you get the drift when I say that you can tread a certain path to reach the end goal. 


I tried hard to give evidence against the assertion. I said that if success is random, then how is that some people can get successful at multiple ventures. And before I could wait for a reply from the guy, it dawned on to me that just the law of large numbers can explain people who have multiple successes and people who have nothing. It IS all randomness!

The idea that success is random also sort of questions the very existence of this idea called Saurabh Garg. I mean the inking that I have in terms of what I want to do with life is around enabling others to live their best life and that means I need to help them get successful. But, if I can’t decode success and thus I can’t enable it, why am I even alive?