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By Peter Longini
Before the tech bubble burst at the start of the decade, Arun Ranchod – now a Manager of Business Development at MEDRAD – had been riding the dot.com wave for a company backed by venture capital. But when the heady air of optimism abruptly leaked out, the company was forced to liquidate and Ranchod, like everyone else caught in the implosion, became distraught.
But, at least in hindsight, it turned out to be one of the best and most formative periods of his life. “After the initial mourning and bumming out period where you can’t believe you don’t have a job, there comes the day where you wake up and say, okay, what do I do now?” Ranchod recalled.
To start, he began looking at his life in much the way an accountant would – using a balance sheet. “Here are the things you don’t have – a steady paycheck and benefits that are going to run out at a certain date – and here are the things you do have: the time to pursue things you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” he said.
“You have assets and liabilities. And the society we live in is very materialistic. So it’s natural to look at a layoff as an earth-shattering, negative thing. But you have to force yourself to talk a look at the asset side of that ledger as well. And it’s your responsibility to utilize those assets. One of those assets is time. And even though you’re not getting a paycheck, that doesn’t free you of the obligation to use your time well.”
Fulfilling that obligation directed his attention away from anything he had done before. “For quite a while I’d been working hard and feeling harried and not really able to get too involved in a spiritual life,” he reflected. “Now I had this block of time opened up to me. Our church is very active in missions, and one of the missions was to Jamaica. So I thought ‘what better a time to get out of my funk, to experience something new, and do something altruistic?’ So I signed up for it.”
The mission, which involved helping to build dormitories in the impoverished highlands of Jamaica, lasted just ten days. “I had done some construction work back in college days, and this wasn’t real ornate construction,” he said. “It was basically plastering walls and hauling timbers and nailing things. But it was fantastic.
“By the time I came back, my mindset and skill set had definitely changed,” Ranchod recalled. “Any time you get to interact with another culture, it’s a positive thing, it helps to develop a world view. You get an understanding of how other people look at the United States. So it’s always a positive to get outside the country.”
But the payoff included more than just another world view. “Despite the extreme poverty there, the people have such a joy about them that it frankly makes you a little ashamed to feel sorry for yourself just because you don’t happen to have a job at the moment,” he said. “You still have a family, you still have much more materially than those folks have. Yet somehow they find a way to have real joy in their life. And I think that made me a more positive human being; I know that my outlook certainly lightened.”
Ranchod was also exposed to a different type of economy. “The trip got me interested in microfinance, which has helped me tremendously,” he said. “It’s opened up doors here. It also made me more willing to serve on boards. It opened my eyes to public service as something more than just me giving. I’ve always felt that I got back ten times more from the mission trip than I ever gave. And I feel that way about serving on boards as well.
“Just understand that there are some things you have control of and other things you don’t,” he said. “Take care of the things you can control.”
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