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Home » Personality Begins Where Comparison Ends: Saheli Chatterjee (Transcript) 

Personality Begins Where Comparison Ends: Saheli Chatterjee (Transcript) 

Here is the full transcript of Saheli Chatterjee’s talk titled “Personality Begins Where Comparison Ends” at TEDxIIMUdaipur conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Value of First Income

All right, so by a show of hands, I’d like to see how many of you remember your first ever income. You remember your first ever income? Okay, quite a lot of you. So, I guess we can all agree that the first income is always very special to all of us. Okay. I remember my first ever income. It was 110 rupees. I was about 15 years old, and this is pre-Geo era, okay, when for 11 rupees, you got 110 messages to send to friends and crushes’ texts.

So, 110 rupees as phone recharge was a big deal back then. So, I remember how much of a big deal it was to get 110 rupees back then. And of course, it’s been almost seven years since then. I’m working for a really long time now. And a lot of people ask me, “Saheli, what is the highest paying deal you’ve ever gotten? Which client paid the best,” and I always tell them, it was my first client, not just in terms of money, but because they paid me in something that was intangible. That is, confidence in my skills that I’m worth getting paid for.

And today, I’m going to tell you about seven skills that can change your life forever. But before I go on a, you know, gyan rant on seven skills that can change your life, why should even take advice from me. So meet Saheli. She started working at 15 years of age. At 17, she decided she wants to be a self-taught marketer, work with global clients. Figured it out in like two years. So at 19, I hit my first one lakh in a month working for clients in the US.

And by 21, I was earning over five lakhs a month as a freelancer selling my marketing services to them. At 23, I have directly contributed to 14 crores in revenue for my clients, who are brands in the ed-tech sector, both creators and brands, and my own business just made two CR in the last financial year.

Overcoming Rejection

And that has been — thank you. And I know that sounds like a nice journey, but it doesn’t start there. It started with this kind of messages. “Hello, do you need social media management services?” No, not right now, thank you. It doesn’t start with the growth; it starts with a lot of rejection. And I often heard this, “Hey, can you lower your rates a little bit, because you’re from India, right? Do Indians really charge this much?”

And somewhere I started feeling embarrassed of my nationality. It’s only over the years that I have understood that you don’t need to be paid less just because you come from a different nation. You deserve to get paid based on your skills. And over the years, I’ve embraced my nationality, which is why I’m wearing a sari here today, although I’m very uncomfortable. It’s not something I wear regularly.

But for me, being Indian doesn’t mean that I deserve to get paid less than a US counterpart. It means that I have very strong work ethics. Being Indian means that I have the dream of conquering the globe, but my foot will always be in the ground.

The Promise of Growth

And with that, I want to tell you that if you’re sitting here today confused, unsure about what lies ahead, you will get everything you have ever dreamed about, and some more, I assure you. My own career growth kind of looked like this, okay, I’ve actually broken down by the year, how much I made, what was I doing in that year, so that you get full context. At 17, I made only 20,000 in a whole year.

But by 19, I had about 7 lakhs in income of the year, while also topping my college exam. So don’t, you know, deprioritize your studies because of business or working. And by fifth year, I was making about 30 lakhs in revenue. In the last two years, I’ve added more income streams, of course. And how can you build this kind of exponential growth for yourself?

Future Mapping

Well, I’ll tell you. The first one is future mapping. What I want all of you to do once you guys are home is take out a journal, okay? And if you can, you can actually do it right now, take out your Google Calendar and set up a recurring meeting with yourself once a month, where you sit down for five minutes and write down all the traits, all the skills, all the habits that the best version of you ever will have, okay?

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I used to do this activity, and these are real pages from my journaling sessions, maybe two, three years back, some of them are from as back as in 2017. And it’s super simple, it’s not written in any format, I’m just writing that I’m going to show up on my business side, all the habits I want to do, I have still not figured out how to do exercise at 5am, if somebody has, please give me notes later.

But why is this activity so important is because I discovered this study by Gail Matthews, where he divided participants into five groups. The first group had completely unwritten goals. The second group had just written down their goals. The third group wrote their goals, and they committed to it with an action. The fourth group had a supportive friend that they committed to. And the fifth group also gave progress reports every week.

Of course, it’s no shock that the first group had the worst results, and the last group had the best. But simply by writing down your goals, you can double the chances of you actually meeting them.