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. So this is a very important activity. I actually used to do this in this manner, that you set a 30-day goal, a 90-day goal, and a one-year goal, and a five-year goal. What happens is that your vision does get aligned for your long-term goals in the short-term and mid-term as well.

So again, this is a real page from one of my future mapping sessions, and if you see my five-year goal, this is written on April 29, but my five-year goals, those were almost all of them except being engaged. I don’t know why I had written them, but except being engaged, all of that has come true. Oh, I also don’t have a swing in my house yet. But all of that happened in just two years instead of five.

So I want you to do this activity today, because two, three years down the line, you’ll be shocked at how much you overdid yourself. A lot of us underestimate ourselves a lot, and this future mapping session will help you overcome that. The second skill is just simply understanding the basics of markets.

Understanding Markets

So largely, business can be divided into products and services. Most companies either serve in the product-based market or the service-based market, so you need to know whether you’re interested in products or services, and then how are you going to approach it? I personally like services more, especially ed tech, right? That’s why I’m working in that industry.

And when it comes to markets and submarkets, there are three large categories. Health, wealth, and relationships, because human nature is to have problems in these areas. We all want to look amazing and have an amazing health. We all want to make a lot of money, and we want to maintain great relationships. So it’s human tendency to have desires, pain points, and troubles in these areas, which is how the whole economy is functioning.

And there are, of course, submarkets as well. So under health, there’ll be submarkets such as weight loss, nutrition, women’s health. Understand which markets and submarkets interest you so that you’re able to make a good choice for yourself.

Building a Personal Brand

The third one is building a personal brand, and I’m not going to go full LinkedIn mode here for those of you who know me from LinkedIn, but actually, according to a survey, about 78% of employers will look at your profile before hiring you. And if you have a business, of course, your profiles, your social presence becomes like a storefront for you. So personal branding is very, very important. And no, personal branding is not about what your profile picture looks like or what does your bio say. It basically is, when you are not in the room, what do people say about you?

Okay, when somebody asks, “Hey, what does he do?” What answer do they give? Are they able to direct them towards what you’re actually skilled at? Now, how do you get started with this to get these opportunities to influence your field, to attract clients, employers, to understand which platform will be a good fit for you? I recommend taking a picture here so that you can make a choice for yourself based on your convenience.

Platform Recommendations

But my personal favorite is LinkedIn, because of two main factors. If you see the fourth column, inbound potential, inbound potential means that what are the chances that other people will come to you and give you opportunities instead of you having to reach out to them.

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So, the inbound potential of LinkedIn is very high. And what if you stop? Even then, LinkedIn is still optimized; you have still made a name at some point, so people will still find you, okay? So even if you stop, LinkedIn will not totally abandon you, unlike other platforms.

Okay, I wouldn’t recommend YouTube, because it’s very intensive. I do recommend Instagram, though, for those of you who are addicted to Reels. And these are the kind of results that I have personally gotten, and I’m just showing LinkedIn where I’ve been active for only six months right now. Each post that I make reaches about 7,000, 8,000 founders easily, which means I get hundreds of leads for my work and my business from the content that I create.

The Power of Storytelling

And these are actually real messages that I’ve gotten from people willing to work with me. So, I’m sure that if you started today, you would be able to build something for yourself very soon. The fourth skill I feel is very important for anybody in life is storytelling, okay? We are all storytellers.

All the time we are telling stories in cafes, to our parents, to our friends, but knowing how to influence others with our stories is what makes you unstoppable in your field. There are three elements to any story, the first one being hook. Hook is the very first line that you use in your post, in your content, or in the conversation you’re having. Usually, if there are these three elements in your hook, you will have a good storytelling skill.

Elements of a Good Story

Number one is shock. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this happened.” Something like that. Second is relatability. So recently, I took out my parents for a five-star dinner. It was my mother’s first time going to a five-star, and that post went viral, because most people can relate with the feeling of doing something for your parents, okay?

Talking about parents, I’m just so glad that I’m here today, because I couldn’t become an MBA, and my father was very disappointed at me, so I just wanted to let you know that it’s a big… I’m very happy to be here today.

Crafting Your Narrative

And lastly, value at the end. If there’s something like, “Hey, just read this to know how to do email marketing,” read this post till the end to understand how to grow your business by 10 times by the end of a certain year, that, of course, becomes a direct hook. There’s a middle. Of course, it should have a strong flow. It should be easy to understand. It should reflect your true motivation. What do you really stand for? What are the core beliefs you have?

And of course, your story should not feel like you’re marketing something. Every sentence should implore the reader to go to the next and take some sort of action. And lastly, of course, there’s the end, okay? Your story should end either with a moral that helps people understand how they can approach a problem, or with a change of perspective on something.

If a post makes you think, “Oh, I never thought that way,” of course, you are going to remember it for a really, really long time. And lastly, it can end with a call to action on what somebody should do next. This brings me to the fifth skill that you should have, which is controlling your personality. And at this, again, I want to know, how many of you are introverts in the house?

Understanding Personality

Please raise your hands. Okay. I see the introverts at the back. Okay, nice. How many of you are extroverts here? Okay. All the extroverts are in the front of me. Okay. Fine. Okay. The room proves my point. A big problem that I feel I face personally is thinking that, “Oh, I’m an introvert.”

Okay. I’m an introvert, by the way. I don’t know how many of you understand that. That I’m an introvert, so I can’t do this. And a lot of people do think that way. We think certain things are a part of our core personality, who we truly are. “Oh, I’m an introvert. I cannot do networking.” “I’m not a creative person. I cannot approach this problem. I’m a procrastinator. I’m never going to get it done on time.”

Well, thinking this way is going to damage your future for sure. Because there’s a lot of narrative around accept yourself, who you truly are. But I truly believe the day you accept yourself as you currently are, you will stop pushing yourself to become who you were meant to be. Okay.

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The Power of Self-Belief

Why? Because imagine if someday I decide, “Oh, I’m an introvert. I don’t want to do calls anymore.” Where would my business be? A lot of times, the person you want to become, the success you want to have, the career you want to build will require a lot of sacrifices. And sacrifices are not easy. There are sacrifices that you’ll have to make in terms of your personality as well, which will be the hardest. Okay.

But the day you do that, the day you realize that you have the self-belief that you are the person controlling your personality, you are the individual controlling your personality, and it’s not your personality that controls you, you will see a different version of you. The world will be shocked that you’ve changed, and that will be for the good, for sure. The sixth one is leverage. Okay.

Building Leverage

Leverage basically means unfair advantage. Now, the most common type of leverage that we hear about is financial leverage. But if you don’t have financial leverage, there are three types of leverage that you can build to build your influence in your sphere. The first one is skill leverage.

In skill leverage, you basically improve your skills so much that when somebody needs help in your area, they will come to you. You will probably directly contribute to revenue growth for companies or individuals. So that’s why you will be pretty well-known, and you’ll be paid well for it.

The second one is network leverage. This is a person who is very well-connected in a certain community. They’re not wildly popular, but they are known in a certain field very well. This means you’ll give access to communities to various people. Recently, one of my clients was struggling with their website last moment, and I just happened to know this person who was building a website builder tool, and I just connected the two of them and got a little bit of commission in between.

Achieving Social Leverage

So, that is what network leverage can do for you, just knowing the right people. And lastly, social leverage. This is basically fame and distribution. This is definitely the hardest to build as well. But social leverage automatically means you have such a wide sphere of influence. No matter what you do, you will be successful in that on some scale at least.

These are three areas of leverage that everyone should start building, at least one of them. But if three of them combine, the fame goes on some other level. Think about the most popular celebrities today. And lastly, have the mindset of domination. In today’s market, it’s not enough to just be competing. You need to decide that you will dominate this sphere.

The Mindset of Domination

In any field, there is one star who always shines at the top, and others kind of follow after that. And you want to become the star of your field. Am I saying that you will become the star of a big field overnight? No. But you can start with some markets. You can start with small segments. You can build your sway there, and slowly you will see that mindset taking you to the top of the bigger industry there. I hope that this helps you in making some better choices for your career, for your future.

Conclusion and Leadership

And lastly, I want to end this by letting you know that a lot of people often ask me, “Saheli, I saw that you just hit 100K followers on LinkedIn. How does that feel?” And I’m very embarrassed to say that I actually don’t even notice when all of that happens. Because the follower count or those numbers actually don’t matter to me. Because I’m not here to build my follower count. I’m here to make people leaders.

I’m here to build leaders. And I hope that this talk helps you in becoming a better leader in your sphere, and become more skilled in whatever you do. And thank you very much for being such a lovely audience.