Kushaan Shah
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About
Kushaan is a Product Manager, former consultant, and founder of Social Rise, a non-profit organization focused on closing the digital divide and empowering marginalized communities to learn social media through workshops and advocacy, as well as a digital marketing advisor for early stage startups and individuals. He is a StartingBloc Fellow, has served as a Startup Weekend Mentor and has spoken at TedxUMD, the AISEC Youth to Business Forum and the University of Maryland Social Enterprise Symposium. Kushaan’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Washington Post, IBM’s Social Business Insights, and blogs from various non-profits including LIFT, ByteBack, and Street Sense. A published blogger, he is currently building a new series for the Huffington Post around digital equity. He enjoys rooting for his hometown Boston sports teams, well-made burritos.
Kushaan’s Career Stories
What is the one piece of career advice you wish someone gave you when you were younger?
Celebrate small wins. If your goal is to help one hundred people, celebrate when you help one person. If your goal is to get a job, celebrate when you receive positive reviews on your applications or get interviews. While lofty goals and strong ambitions are great to have, celebrating the journey can be just as valuable if the destination is not reached. Ask yourself this question: “If you failed tomorrow in some way, would you feel accomplished?” If the answer is “No” multiple days in a row, start taking a new perspective on the meaning and idea of success.
What is the most useful piece of career advice you got as a student, and who gave it to you?
Some of the best career advice I got was actually from a speech I heard by Barack Obama. In his commencement speech to Howard University, Barack Obama touched upon the importance of compromise. “You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.” As someone entering the world, it’s hard to reconcile what you want with the reality of a situation — the best skill you can often have is adaptability. Listen others, engage their arguments, stand your ground, but remember that any negotiation requires sacrifices by both parties. An inability to sacrifice will turn your convictions into a source of perpetual frustration.