Pride: Practical Guide Leading to Success in Professional Career and Life — By Sandeep Agarwal
Publisher: Stardom Books
Pages: 154
Price: Rs. 595 INR(Paperback Edition), Rs. 49 INR (Kindle Edition)
ISBN: 978–1732328747
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As you start your professional career/business post your academics, having much desire to start earning and standing on your own feet. There is a lot of enthusiasm surrounding and a lot of expectations and dreams for a bright future ahead. As you take your first steps in a professional career, you look for some mentor guidance or role model to emulate and be successful. Most of the times you don’t know where to start, where to look out for help, and the whole life starts fizzling out.
In this book, the author Sandeep Agarwal, provides the necessary foundation, starting with identifying your real purpose, defining your vision statement, and then guiding you step-by-step regarding how to lead a successful professional life with dignity and respect. He goes on to explain the values that become an essential component to shape your career and allow you to achieve your vision and take you closer to realize your real purpose in life. He defines the benefits in an acronym P.R.I.D.E which provides details regarding professionalism, taking responsibility, embracing integrity, maintaining a complete self-development not just for your mind, but body and soul, and driving with excellence. These five behavioral traits which you can embed into your daily life and your actions will provide the focus to lead a very satisfying and prosperous life. The book covers anecdotes, his personal experiences, stories, and a detailed action plan that can guide you to live a holistic professional life.
About the author:
Sandeep Agarwal has 25+ years of industry experience covering a broad portfolio in across diverse sectors such as Industrial, Consumer Electronics, Digital Enterprise, Telecom Communications, Enterprise Networking, Embedded Technologies and Data Center Domains.
At Happiest Minds, Sandeep built the ER&D business acquiring some major and marque customers in Networking, Industrial, Semi and Embedded Technologies.
Sandeep helped incubate the IoT focus and forged solid partnerships with MNCs and many other companies to provide end-to-end solutions and system integration services to Happiest Minds’ customers.
As part of the Senior Leadership Team, Sandeep supports various major and minor initiatives at the company level. Sandeep also actively participates in ER&D council at IESA and NASSCOM apart from actively participating in the start-up eco-system.
Prior to joining Happiest Minds, Sandeep was with MindTree for 12+ years and was part of core team that was instrumental in growing MindTree’s Product Engineering Services business in the global market. He played a key role in establishing successful multi-year relationships with a host of Fortune500 companies. Sandeep was also a recipient of MindTree’s prestigious Chairman’s award and Citizen’s award and headed the PM council at MindTree for the year 2007–2008.
Sandeep started his career with Tata Unisys in Mumbai, and then moved onto working with Lucent Technologies Bell labs as part of their 3GPP/UMTS initiatives in the late nineties.
My take on the book:
P.R.I.D.E by Sandeep Agarwal is meant for anyone starting with their professional career and wish to excel in the long run. Sandeep explains 5 major pillars for a successful career — Professionalism, Responsible, Integrity, Development, Excellence which dwelling into the WHY? WHAT? and HOW? of these. Explained along with the Purpose, Vision, Values that are needed by an individual with respective to these 5 concepts.
The writer divides the book into 3 parts — with the first part dedicated to the need to know your purpose, the need to defining your vision and the individual values. The second part explains about each of these values in detail. The third part is dedicated to explaining how to take action by quoting the life stories of few highly successful and motivational individuals.
Each of the values are explained with illustrations and simple but beautiful stories that leave a strong and impactful message. Also, each chapter ends with an exercise which encourages the reader to put down their current state and desired state and the action they intend to undertake to move from their current state to the desired state.
These exercises can be helpful tools to put down an individual’s current details and can be revisited at multiple points later in life to compare the progress made. The book also has multiple quotes and interesting anecdotes.
If you are a beginner who has just begun a career, this book can be a major guide to help keep you motivated and on track to excellence. However, if you have already read multiple self-help books or books meant for professional guidance, this might come across as too simple. Nevertheless the writer has done a good job in putting together his own personal experience into a purposeful action plan for young individuals.
My rating:
3.5/5.