I started my journey with Mr. Sanjeev Pandiya way back in the early 2020’s and am also one of the first members of the ‘Guru Program’. Over the years, it became a relationship that knocks at your door once in a lifetime. Back then, I had just started out in the industry and was working with a FinTech platform, however it was just a day-to-day hustle with no real skill building. I can probably also argue the case that there aren’t many skill development programs that prepare you enough for any role especially in Finance.
My first project was to support Sanjeev sir on his Steel Industry hypothesis which is very famously known in the industry and build up a dump deck for our sector coverage starting with the Power sector in India and exploring the trends in the industry. The fundamental value with which we operate under the ‘Guru Program’ is “If you spend roughly 10,000 hours on something, you’ll basically be a ‘GURU’ in the particular domain.” The journey is a long one but worth every single bit. The ‘Guru Program’ basically helps you in using facts and figures and preparing stories which the market is neglecting or has turned a blind eye to. Think about the recency bias. You tend to emphasize more on the recent events and tend to ignore the ‘facts’ of the past which made a business ‘a business’. Every now and then, these stories will sit right in front of us to be picked upon and that’s when we make a move for it. As in footballing terms, a striker’s instinct is a quality of being in the right place at the right time, the same holds true for us. Of course, it goes without saying that discipline and effort is something which would be required from your end along with the courage to not lose patience.
Over the last 3 years or so, I have developed skills in analyzing data, nurturing a full thought process and basically finding the stories I earlier talked about. This comes on the back of having the right mentorship which I believe is one of the most under-rated inputs and is practically impossible to calculate. “The right mentor is way better than a degree.” Under Sanjeev Sir, the growth has been tremendous and I am putting it in a very mild way. Starting out as young lad in the industry, today I have gained phenomenal knowledge of sectors and some of my research work has even reached to various executives attached to the top-most investors in the country. However, I still believe there’s a long way to go as the journey of knowledge building has no end.
