Nothing Shameful in Self-Promotion
By A.H. Cemendtaur

A section of the audience

A lecture on “Promoting Yourself - The Power of Effective Social Networking” given by Moazzam Chaudry was listened intently by the attendees eager to gain skills that would give them an edge in an unpredictable Silicon Valley job market. The lecture was arranged under Koshish Foundation’s Knowledge Exchange Program
(www.koshish.org/kx.html).
The underlying assumption of this very informative lecture was that no matter how good you are at what you do you need to have the marketing skills to sell what you have to offer. Two people with similar qualifications end up at different places based on their marketing skills and how they use their contacts.
Moazzam Chaudry, a young hardware engineer at the Sun Microsystems, besides being the Area Governor of the Toastmasters’ club is associated with a number of Muslim and Pakistani organizations. His association with the Toastmaster’s club has helped him hone his public speaking skills. Moazzam Chaudry was definitely one of the better speakers who featured at the Koshish Knowledge Exchange lectures.
“You have all the resources you need to do whatever you want to do,” gesticulating Moazzam Chaudry told a mesmerized audience. “You can
start with as small a group as the people in this room and then extend outwards.”

Moazzam Chaudry

Moazzam Chaudry was alluding to the well-known fact that any two people in this world are at most six degrees of separation apart. For example, you and a Chinese farmer unknown to you only have six people in between: you know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows the farmer.

Moazzam Chaudry peppered his speech with real life examples - mostly on how people landed jobs by locating the right contact in a company, by picking up the phone and talking to the right person, or by searching the email addresses of the relevant people and then contacting them.
Moazzam Chaudry hinted on several aspects of the social-interaction science that Dale Carnegie seems to be the pioneer of:
In social gatherings break out of your normal social circle. Be gutsy, meet new people; get their business cards and then later send them an email message or call them; make these contacts bloom.
Have confidence in yourself.
Whatever you want to do, do it with passion.
When you need people’s help, tell them you seek their advice. People want to feel important, they want to give advice.
Listen more, talk less. Be genuinely interested in others’ stories.
Don’t procrastinate. Use these techniques today to achieve whatever you wish to achieve in life.

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