How to get success?

I stumbled upon Canadian Desi today just by pure fluke. My boss advised me to put an advert in the classified section of this awesome web page. I just could not help stealing a bit of my office time to read the articles of different people. I have friends and families who have moved into this country. Some are successful and some are not. Therefore, I am not very surprised to see on the forum a mixture of both successful and not so successful (YET) people.

The reason why I am writing today is that a very important man, my dad told me before I left India for Canada with my husband on a summer day of 2002, “Associate yourself only with successful people or with positive people.”

What surprises me with many of the articles is that people seem to claim ignorance to the job market in Canada before they land here. Not that I had many friends and relatives here to the contrary we both knew nobody in this cold country, but before we accepted this as our place of stay forever we did a considerable study about it. We knew from the beginning that nobody in Canada is going to wait with open arms to hire us even though both my husband and I are MBA’s from a prestigious college in Mumbai.

We came to this country and many people who claim to be well-wishers started discouraging us as to not to apply around and waste time, but to take up odd jobs like labour etc.

Since I was working previously with a multinational electronics company as a brand manager I got a job within 15 days of landing with same company in Canada but not an office job. I started of working for the store in retail sector.

OK so I got a job not a huge break but we were paying our bills. Now it was my husband’s turn he was always into freight forwarding and shipping. (Not shipping and receiving but shipping LINERS). He had in the past worked for several international companies in India as well as in Dubai. He had contacts since it was international trade many people already knew him. However, out of job means out of contact list. Many people discouraged him in applying in the field of shipping here. He said nobody would ever recruit you, as you do not have “CANDIAN EXPERIENCE”. In addition, shipping industry is full of GORA’s so you do not have a chance.

So the next step – Invest. If you do not have a job but have reasonable money, make the money work for you. We invested in the payphone business. Many people discouraged as again. Who uses payphones? Everybody has cell phones. Nevertheless, we made a decision so we stood by it. We invested less than CAD $20,000 and became proud owners of payphones in Toronto. The return on out investment was over 45% p.a. so we bought a few more.

Now on December 2003, 1 year 4 months and 10 days after we have arrived in Toronto for the first time, I have quit retail. Now I am a sales manager in a telecommunication company. I have a midlevel payphone business, which makes money on its own while I work and my husband is a senior sales executive in the best shipping company of the world with excellent salary, company car, laptop, cell phone and a lot more perks. WHAT DID WE DO?

We did not listen to any negative suggestions. We did not loose heart when someone told us we are making wrong decisions or things not possible. We quietly started ignoring people who cried and complained all the time. We listened to what my Dad said “associate only with successful and positive people.” Please you people do the same.
LOVE AND REGARDS,