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–Prabuddha Raj
[Prabuddha Raj, a high school graduate, details his learnings and experience of working for us for more than a year.]
I was in my gap year, spending most of my days cocooned inside a blanket and wasting my nights deep-diving into the vast ocean of video streaming sites watching movies I did not intend to. Amidst all this boredom, a 30-something CEO of a social enterprise asked me if I wanted to work. The job was simple as he put it. I would be helping poor farmers from a desk job in Kathmandu. What followed was a snap call: I knew that opportunities like these don’t come by each day. I joined a day later.
After working for a full year at Gham Power, I have realized a few learnings- personal and professional. Here they are:
Get out of that high-school bubble.
High school destroys the agency in you. You hang out with like-minded circles where opinions are rarely contradicted. Absence of criticism makes us feel worshiped. And that’s bad. At Gham Power, I met a diverse array of personalities. Everyone has walked a totally unique journey in life and, as such everybody has a different outlook on almost everything. My opinions were never agreed to the full without a discussion preceding. This continuous feedback and constructive criticism have helped me become a cautious thinker of sorts. These days, I criticize my own ideas; try to find flaws in them before presenting it to others.
There is so much to learn.
My second week at work, I was invited to a meeting. To showcase (or rather, showoff) my unfounded talent, I spoke for five minutes or more, trying to describe Nepal’s energy scenario. This was a bad, bad mistake. All attendees at the meeting headed an energy corporation, and all understood the market far better than I did. This helped me realize that there are people far wiser than I am. I have since developed a knack for listening. And you should too.
Simplify things, don’t complicate them.
Until I arrived at Gham Power, I had an inclination to present ideas in the most complicated fashion possible. Words like circumspect (risk-averse), arduous (challenging), etc. filled my vocabulary. I took fun in trying to make the world look like a fool. At Gham Power, I was exposed to a pool of talented colleagues who could understand all of my complex words. But they would never use them. Because at the end of the day, you want to get your message across to the million people who don’t understand you, not a small group of experts – this is marketing 101.
My one year stay at Gham Power helped me learn so much more – all of which I won’t be able to express in this blog. These have definitely helped me become a better person, personally and professionally. The laid-back atmosphere at Gham is a perfect environment for self-reflection, and I would recommend all high-schoolers to work for this prestigious institution.
Prabuddha pitching at UNDCF’s Women MSME Fintech Innovation Fund.
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