Let Me Introduce Myself...

Once in a while you get to do things you’ve never done before. That’s when you use the clichéd phrase, ‘There’s always a first time.’ A few days back, I was invited by my friend to give a one-class talk at a B-School he teaches in. Needless to say, a first for me. While he called it a ‘guest-lecture’, I myself wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t so sure because I have a tendency to get stage frights and I’m quite used to not thinking twice before I speak. Even as I was debating over it, a free lunch thrown in with a free tour of the beautiful campus became the clincher. Preparing myself for the worst (such as what if I lost my voice midway or what if I had to flee the lecture hall from an audience of man-eating monsters) I set off. Just so that things are set in perspective, I haven’t done this kind of thing before (ever) or at least never before such a high-level audience who can use names such as Einstein and Ozzy Osbourne in one sentence and can still make it sound sensible.

Well, the day started off smoothly. I arrived at the B-School without a hitch. It was just before the talk that things began to look a bit down. To start with, I get introduced to this bunch of handpicked ‘hotshot’ students who were the brightest of the lot in the class. Pleasantries exchanged, as we got down to the topic of the talk, I found that these students were expecting a presentation that would be more or less an equivalent of the keynote Steve Jobs delivers whenever he launches a new Apple product. Honestly, they might have been the best, but for me that’s a very tall order to beat. Even before I could recover, another particularly bright student said, ‘I’ve gone through your profile online and I could write a case study about you’, or something to that effect. Errrr… Considering that my presence of mind is not as sharp as I would want it to be, I put on a dumb smile and mumbled something that sounded like ‘scary’ while the students went on to explain how online searches these days could retrieve information about people. I listened to all this with amazement. Not because I didn’t know about Google and what its sophisticated search engine could retrieve but because I didn’t understand the curiosity factor I had created. Secondly, I’m not scared of being a case study myself. That is because for modern day B-School students, life revolves around case studies and for them every tiny feature of this planet and the rest of the universe post Big-Bang can be encompassed into a management case study that will make you think ‘Oh, I didn’t think of that.’

So, I’d be disappointed if I was not a case study already. But what bothered me was the fact that people had read up about me even before I entered the class. All this meant that expectations were already building up. There was also this small point that I wasn’t sure of the fact that whatever they had read about me was good. And last but not the least, I didn’t know a thing about the class I was going to talk to whereas it should have been the other way round. At least, just to get the right results.

Thankfully, a quick mental recap helped me remember that my online LinkedIn and Twitter accounts are two different entities which I haven’t yet linked to my other not so nice pages. By which I could safely assume that most of the info would be the goody goody part. Which meant that they didn’t know that I flunked a Math test in high school, or a gourmet meal for me means a foot-long Veggie Delite at Subway’s, or that I never break the speed limit when I drive. But then I could never be sure. In these days of Google, when 1+1 = google, people can actually search on my name and get stuff which I’d not want them to see. Say for example, this blog. If not the dark side, the blog would definitely reveal the bore I really am.

Whatever be the case, I walked into the hall introduced myself despite knowing that half the class already knew more about me than I did myself and then I talked, listened, talked some more, listened some more and yea, you get the drift. After a two hour session, I did feel that I had done my bit and hoped there was some takeaway for the class. I don’t know how the students felt, but I returned much wiser and much sobered. It was one of those days when the stars had sided with me (barely, so to say). In short, everything went almost well. And the lunch was well-worth all the trouble taken.

The main takeaway for me was that I am now more aware of how the information I post about me can be easily used to intimidate me. Moral of the story: Be very, very careful when posting something on your profile. Its always gonna come back to get you when you least suspect it. In short it’s best to keep some information to yourself so that you can use it to surprise people rather than make them feel that they know everything about you even before they meet you.