I was introduced to Mark Suster’s blog by a friend and fellow technology enthusiast and took to it immediately. I loved Mark’s long and detailed posts – they all had a lot of “soul” in them and it felt Mark did really put his heart into them. I’ve been commenting on Mark’s blog for a couple of years now and we’ve had a few exchanges during the time. But, e-meeting Mark for the first time was a wonderful experience – one that I will remember for a long time. He was completely present, very gracious, and eager to share his experiences and learning. At the end of the conversation, I walked out feeling like I knew him for years..
I learnt a lot from my conversation with Mark and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
My favorite snippets –
“If you are an Indian kid sitting in Singapore, people are going to define you whether you like it or not. They’re going to define you by your age bracket, education, ethnicity, geography. Given that people are going to define you anyways, wouldn’t you rather take control of that?”
“The advice I was given when I was young was to always dress like the part one level above where you are, where you want to be. That’s part of people perceiving you as the next level up when you act and behave like that.”
“A new school of thought came out that said not to fix your weaknesses, but play to your strengths. I’m a much bigger believer in that.”
“What I do is, because life is about working with other people, I always surround myself with people who are good at the things that I’m not. Because I’m terrible at process, you will not find me doing anything with anybody where I don’t have a good process person with me, including my wife. She’s the process person in the Suster household.”
“You should form peer groups and get peer mentorship. I did that when I was a first-time entrepreneur. I would simply have luncheons and I would invite other CEO’s and it would be private off-the-record. I always started by opening up first.”
“With regards to finding more senior mentors, most people actually want to help people. They want to give back. They want to find ways to be meaningful and useful. The problem is that there are too many people approaching you, so how do you decide? Then there are just the people who are extra-friendly and extra-persistent. They seem like they’re good people and they give back. You end up just finding a way to be their mentor.”
“Unfortunately, most parts of our economy are very backwards and very conservative so they still need to judge you based on credentials rather than judge you based on capabilities. The more we can break down that model and judge people based on capabilities, the further away we’re going to get from breeding indentured servants who graduate with debt and end up in dead-end careers and jobs.”
The full interview, as always, is on RealLeaders.tv.
A Learning a Day 