my buddy hari has been a mentor and friend of mine forever.  he was my freshman year resident assistant at northwestern. he took me to my first college party on garnett st. in evanston with jwade and grover. he recruited me to come work for ford. he watched over me and introduced me to the people i consider my strongest networking connections. he introduced me to derek, my best friend in detroit on the first day i moved from chicago. i visited him in china a year ago, and this week he’s in detroit.

we met over drinks tonight at the motor city brewing works with derek, talked about life over the past year and discussed where he’s been.

hari has done everything, been everywhere. he worked for ford’s cio. he worked in shanghai and nanjing china for a year. he spent 4 months travelling on one of those round the world tickets and flew to nepal, india, dubai, south africa, tanzania, all of europe, and countless other places. he can make friends wherever he goes, never lacks self-confidence and considers the world is in the palm of his hands. he was accepted to every business school he applied to, harvard, stanford, princeton, northwestern, penn, mit, to name a few and chose stanford. he works for a company that hires just a handful of summer business school interns a year from all over the country. apple, google, microsoft, and a host of others were companies he turned down. i wouldn’t refuse any of them given the opportunity.

talking with hari for 15 minutes is enough to entice anyone to drop what their doing and leave their life for something better. i’d argue hari has connections (or can get them) at every company in the fortune 500. he asked me tonight to come to the bay area and just spend one week with him, during which he’ll introduce me to anyone i need to know to start or join a company doing whatever i want to do.

his outlook on life, and relationships, and business, and politics is so different and so intelligent. he can logically argue through each and every point, reference data and cite articles and authors with numerical statistics to back his argument. his skills are unprecedented in my view. he argued with the ceo of amd about their business model. tomorrow he’ll likely tell the ceo of delphi they’re doing something wrong. he told the cio of ford his dream was to become an astronaut.

most of all, hari is just something i want to be. what i think many of us want to be. he does what many of us just dream or talk about. he’s been places and done things many of us can only imagine. he methodically plans his moves and knows when and where to make it. in the game of life, he just knows how to get things done and do what he wants to do.

talking to him tonight just gave me new found energy to make myself better. the last time i felt like this was last year august when i took up running. i’m not quite sure what i’ll do with hari’s motivation this time, but i think studying is in my future.

tomorrow, we celebrate part ii of the hari / detroit crew reunion.