 Good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon wherever you are joining us from. My name is Abhijit Baduri. I work as an executive coach and I also advise organizations on the talent strategy. Now, one of the things in working with people I've realized is one of the toughest things to crack is how to get motivated to do something. Even if it is something which is good for you. Have you ever felt that? Yeah, so you know, let's say going to the gym is good for you. But how do you motivate yourself to actually do it? Yeah, and then of course you have a scenario where you come into a level two problem. How do you motivate somebody else who's part of your team and then you come to a level three problem? Which is how do you motivate the organization to do something? And this is why I just thought that I'm going to talk to you about this particular thing today called intrinsic motivation, which basically means it's not driven by any kind of a reward system. It's not driven by some kind of an incentive. It's just that you want to do it. So that's the intrinsic part of it. And I found that there's a fabulous book which I recommend you must check out. This is a book called Intrinsic by Sharad Jeevan and he was recently awarded the Order of the British Empire and I am today going to talk about intrinsic motivation to Sharad and I'm going to ask him all these tough questions. So do tell us where are you joining us from and what is the one question you would really like Sharad to answer? Because this is a real tough thing, which I think it'll be a great idea if we share our ideas together about what you've seen working and what Sharad has learned from his years of research. He's done some interesting work in schools. As I was reading the book, I thought it'd be great for me to share it with you. So without any further ado, let's get started. Sharad, welcome. Thank you so much. Did you notice that I have that book in that screenshot, which is there, you're on my bookshelf, prominently displayed? I was very impressed by the GTI anyway. I saw that as well. I was very impressed by the book. But how's it been the reception to the book? I know you've got a new red-colored cover as well. I noticed that. Which one do you have? Yeah, let me show you the audience as well. But both are very much available and I know it's been great. And one of the things that's been so exciting of GTI as writers, we spend years in a dark room writing for ourselves with our publishers, but getting ideas come out into the world. And so I'm working with companies like L'Oreal, for example. I'm working with the government of Kenya on their civil servants, talent strategy and entrance, working with people trying to address homelessness, venture capital funds, and also with individuals as well. So it's so nice to see the ideas get out there now and really make a difference in the world and help us hopefully all be more motivated in our lives. Absolutely. I wanted to sort of dive straight into the subject that when you started to write the book, was it the result of the research that you've done? Was it an independent idea? What's the trigger? And what is the hypothesis of your book? So the way this all starts, it was very much in India. That's why it's really special to have a chance to talk today. I'm an economist by background, have a business background. But I spent the last 10 years, most of them, funding an organization called Stir Education, starting in the slums of Delhi in poor communities like Sri Lampur and Shadr and so on. And what I realized from that work was that we were trying to do all kinds of things to help teachers improve their teaching practices. But if they didn't want to change in the first place, if they weren't motivated to want to change and improve, no amount of technical training was going to make any difference. And so we realized this. We tried this small experiment I talked about in the book. We hired a wedding hall in Sri Lampur and very rickety old wedding hall, the biggest place we could find. And we invited 400 teachers to come on a Sunday. It was like 45 degrees centigrade that day, the final day of an India-England test match. And we invited them to come and see if they would want to spread their energy and work together on their motivation. And we were taking vets in the team as to how many would show up that day, Sunday, all these things. I remember I thought 80 would show up of the 400, about 20%. In fact, 340 showed up. Most women, some brought kids. We had to create a little kindergarten on the side. Many brought husbands or brothers and so on. We had to cater for them as well. But the energy was so intense and so exciting. And so what I realized was that I'd confused the baby with the bathwater. In a way I was trying to plant seeds, but the soil wasn't fertile. People don't want to change and are not motivated. Nothing can happen beyond that. So everything I did focused on motivation and the organization reached about 30,000 schools in India. In fact, it reached every school in Delhi with the Delhi government, worked with the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, etc. From that work I learned that there was a lot of academic research on motivation out there. But actually how do you apply this practically in our lives? In our organizations and teams, as you said, and in society more widely, there was almost an unknown a black box. So that inspired the book. It just came out at the end of last year. And what I do now practically is advise a whole range of organizations from government ministers, to CEOs of companies, to education figures, politicians, on how to apply these ideas of intrinsic motivation to our lives. And also obviously talk to individuals and hope to help at that level and help us all practically today as well. So today just for those who have joined in late, I just would invite you to share where you are joining us from. I'm actually joining you from the beautiful city of Kolkata. I'm here today. And Sharad, where are you joining us from? From which city? I'm in a very gray and miserable London. I'm jealous about the sunshine out in Kolkata as well. But no, it's good. We're coming out of lockdown here in the UK. People are out. We're doing face-to-face meetings, workshops. It's such a nice time. It's an incredible city, as you know. So to be able to enjoy it again is a real pleasure. And these two years of the pandemic have been so tough. I think it's a real chance to reignite now as well. Is it, you know, when you talk about motivating somebody else, is it the same when you do it on Zoom or, you know, on a digital platform versus in person? Does that change? What is your take on that? I think both are possible. I have many of my partners, clients all over the world in the US or Australia or India, for example, or Kenya. But what matters, I think more, is really the principles of motivation applying them. I think you just have to put a little bit more effort when it's on Zoom to make sure you build that relationship and it doesn't just become transactional. So I think both are very much possible. I think in the face-to-face world, we can have a little bit more of the quiet things that happen around meetings and discussions to pick things up. But I think we can build relationships well in both contexts. So tell me about what you learned about motivating the teachers in Delhi. What did you find? What was missing when you called them in and what made them show up? What did they want to change? What was your finding in that? I was trying to think in the book of what the right image, the right metaphor was to describe what I was learning about. And this applies, of course, to teachers, but to all of us. And I was thinking about the many hours I spent on a car in India, right across many cities. And, you know, most of the cars I was in taxis most of the time, they were run on diesel, right? And, you know, you'd get from A to B most of the time. But it was not usually a very pleasant ride. And that's a bit like extrinsic motivation. It's like it's doing something, as you said at the start, because something else is promised at the end, either a reward, a punishment, a sanction. If you think about the opposite, intrinsic motivation, self-motivation, motivation from within ourselves, that's like driving an electric car. You know, you're gliding on the road. You feel like it's pleasurable, rewarding, fulfilling in its own right. And, you know, basically, the 30 years of evidence shows us that we need both, we need both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. But in general, and I think especially in India, our motivational dial is set very much more towards extrinsic. And in fact, the research shows that the more we live our life by intrinsic principles, motivation from within, we're going to be happier for one, will be more fulfilled, number two. And three, we're actually going to be more successful in the long term. That's in our work lives, but also in our parents and our marriages and citizens of the countries we're in as well. That's fascinating. So, does it mean that, you know, when people, when you look at the vast number of people who have to be motivated to do, give their best, organizations really struggle with that, that, you know, they say that, you know, this person is not motivated at all, you know, and everybody looks for passionate people. So, is this something, I know, this is one of the topics that you've discussed in the book, but I'd love for you to talk to my listeners and tell them, are people born motivated in a certain way? I mean, is there something, you know, you have or you don't have? I mean, why is it that when you look at some of the people, let's say people who are training for Olympics, yeah, and, you know, Usain Bolt, for example, says that I trained for four years to run, you know, for those 10 seconds. So, what is it that, you know, is it the glory? Is that what it is? Is it that the person is internally driven? What makes the person become like that? Yeah, it's a great question. I let's take the idea of sports stars, for example, Jit. So, I'm a big tennis fan, and I was looking at the career of Roger Federer, the tennis player, and he, you know, he would play the perfect tennis set in his, did I lose you there? Should I go back or? No, no, no. So, I was talking about Roger Federer and tennis to use your Usain Bolt analogy, and, you know, he plays the perfect tennis set in his mind, not against Nadal or Djokovic, he plays it against himself. And the idea there, this idea that really any of these top athletes and any of us, we can all reignite and sustain motivation. It's not something we're born or not born with, it can be developed. And there's a lot of evidence that most of us have a high degree of intrinsic motivation to start with, you know, look at teachers working in schools, they want to make a difference, right? There are many other careers out there, but it's the culture around us in a corporate or in our organization or, you know, our marriages or our schools or parents, that tends to reduce that motivation over time. So, the key is for us to really think about three internal drivers, and I talk in the book about purpose, and this is how what we do helps and serves others. It's a bit like the destination or the GPS you put into the car to know where you're going. The second thing is autonomy, and that's feeling like you're at the wheel of the car. And India, there's always a often a backseat driver telling us what to drive, whether it's our in-laws or our boss or whatever. It's saying, no, no, I listen, I'm listening to you, but I want to drive there, I want to drive. And mastery is, you know, everything from the motorbike or the annoying pedestrian or the the potholes, it's being able to master the road and be the best driver we can be. So, purpose, autonomy and mastery, these are three conditions that make us highly motivated. It's not about how fancy our office is, not even about our salaries really, any of these things we normally expect, it's about these internal factors, and we can create them for our own lives and also in the organizations we work in and live in as well. And, you know, are there leaders who can ignite motivation in others? You know, can a teacher do that for the kids? Can, you know, a spouse do it? Can a parent do it? How does it work? Exactly. So, I think we can do a lot ourselves for our own lives, but I think one of the things I talked about in the book, one of the big ideas is the idea of nurturers. And I think in general, you know, if we find people in our lives who can nurture us, we're much more likely to stay in the course, stay motivated, and be successful. Then, you know, I talked in the book, I was lucky to go to Cambridge University for my undergraduate degree in the UK, only because I had one very stubborn English teacher who saw in something, something I didn't see myself, my parents didn't see. He almost forced me into the back of his car, got me to go, drove me to Cambridge, waited outside various admissions offices till I basically applied. I didn't think I was good enough. But he was a nurturer. He tried to really help me get to a place I wouldn't have got to otherwise. And so, there's a lot we can do to nurture motivation in others. And I looked at restaurants, I looked at publishing, I looked at venture capital, you know, a whole range of industry sports, and that role of nurturers. But I think often we tend to, sometimes we have these people, sometimes we don't have them. If we don't have them, we shouldn't lose hope. There's a lot we can do to bring it into our own lives. So, if I can give one example of them. So, let's say in the world of work, let's say we work in corporate India, we work for a company, and I'm sure that we've been spoon fed or pushed that the company mission statement, right, what the company stands for, there'll be all kinds of corporate training and workshops and so on for that. Very few of us have a personal mission statement. Going back to this idea of purpose, you know, our work helping and serving others. So, I made it a goal myself to try and create a personal mission statement for me. Let me just give you mine. And also, I help organizations and leaders to reignite in a drive by writing, coaching and consulting. So, I help organizations and leaders to reignite in a drive by writing, coaching and consulting. So, I help. So, who am I helping to do what and then by doing what? So, if you can express that in about 15, 20 words max, you've got a clear GPS that you know what you stand for. And I think the most motivated people I've seen in work, they're not just, you know, applying for a job description, doing what the company wants, they have a sense of what they want to do and what they stand for. And a good, I think now a good deal at work is where it's like a marriage. We are fulfilling the company's mission statement, but they are also helping us to achieve our mission statement as well. And it's a bit like the army talks about a tour of duty, you know, three, four, five years, how do you work together? Then in five years time, you might revisit and have another mission statement to look at. But that idea of these very simple techniques can unlock a lot for us, I think as well. Yeah, I really like that three-step kind of a process. So, I was just trying to say that if I had to try this on the fly for myself, I would say I help my clients, which could be organizations or individuals, become more competitive in the marketplace, you know, which could be the individuals may have a more fulfilling career and the organization could be more competitive and therefore win in the marketplace. That's what I do. And I do it through like you coaching by strategizing with them and helping them build their brand and stand out in the crowd, etc., all of that. But yeah, I mean, I could sort of see myself refining that and putting it together in a sharper way. But yeah, that's very helpful, actually. Can I just say just one thing on that? I was doing some reflection myself and looking at my diary the last few weeks. I was feeling very demotivated a few months ago. And I was spending so much my time doing things that had nothing to do with my personal mission statement. I was doing schedule, I was doing random calls, all kinds of stuff that wasn't what motivates me. And so it was a force for me to say, let me take all of that stuff out and focus on that mission statement. Let's spend 80% of my time doing what I love doing and what I believe I can make a difference to people through as well. So a lot of times the marketplace keeps changing, shifting and the skills that we have may not always land us in the opportunity where we can give our best. Sometimes some of us have to make compromises in our career. In that case, is it hard to get motivated or can one still be intrinsically motivated? Yes, one of the things that is really interesting with the research currently on mastery of it as well. I mean, you probably, I'm sure, head of the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell talked about that we need 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. There's a little truth in that, but what I tried to talk about in the book was that that's true for technical skills, you know, coding, for example, or financial modeling, for example. But it's not so true for some of the human skills now. They're really the core of modern work. So things like influencing, communication, curiosity, critical thinking, those are much more important. That's what we're learning is that whether you're in the dream job or not right now, you should try to be as engaged as possible in that job. Because if you're engaged, it's very likely you'll be developing the transferable skills that I talked about, that will help you get the next job. What I see a lot of people do is they're not in the dream job, they complain of them, that's fair enough, it's okay to complain, that's why we have partners or friends, do that. But try to find something positive in that, what you're doing. Try to find at least some aspect of your personal mission statement that you can see, build on that, you'll be more successful and more fulfilled, that will need you to be more skilled, which will help you get to the dream job over time. And I always think that I think it's infinitely easier to say that, you know, a lot of times you say it's much easier to love what you do than to do what you love. Because sometimes we may think that we want to do something else, but actually we don't know and self-awareness comes over a span of time, you get clarity over time. It's a little bit like in the morning you have the mist and then the sun shines after a while. It's a little bit like that, at least as far as I'm concerned, I certainly think that for me to discover what is it that I really, really, really wanted to do. One of the things I remember a friend of mine mentioned, which I thought was so powerful, he said that one of the ways to discover whether you are really passionate about doing something is if you can do the repetitive part of that role without flinching, you know. So like for example, I like to write and I can write every single day without thinking it's drudgery or that, oh my god, I have to submit this article or you know, this is what I want to do. No, it's something I can do, it's repetitive, but I love doing it because I know with each iteration you become just that little bit better and that's motivating enough for me, you know. And that I think is a, would you agree with that something like that? No, I love that advice, it's a really nice example. So writing would be similar for me, but also workshops. I do a lot of workshops and I love each one because each time I'm learning something new. It may be content, the frameworks may be common, but actually each company, each organization is so different and you're learning about different aspects of culture, you're learning about national cultures, you're learning about how that organization is wired and so on. So that kind of almost that explorer mindset where it might be the tasks might be repetitive, but there's so much broader mastery we're developing. I think sometimes we forget to write that down and say, you know, at the end of this workshop what I learned, so I'm going to come out of this LinkedIn live session with you with so many ideas and tidbits, right, that I'm going to write down and say this is what I took away from the conversation with Amjit that I learned. I love that repetitive example. So I think if we can be conscious about our development of mastery, what tends to happen is we wait for a company to send us to some fancy training program that only happens once a year, but every day if we can pick up something new and think about our mastery more broadly beyond the technical domain, that'll help us that sense of momentum and moving positively will help us a lot. You know, when you were saying that some of us may not be in the dream job right now, but what do we do about it? My immediate response was that, you know, when you are not in the dream job, the human capabilities, you know, like the ability to influence, the ability to work with others, the ability to work with difficult people, the ability to get somebody to do what they don't want to do, all these are very powerful skills which pretty much any employer would be grateful to get from you. So in that sense, in the worst of the jobs, if you focus on the softer skills, I think you continue to evolve even when the skill that you are sort of demonstrating, you know, and the job out there is not what you would have ideally chosen. So and then as you focus on the soft skills, I think you get more success and that in turn motivates you to sort of, you know, focus on what you are doing. So that's how I would interpret it. But that way, you know, I'm talking to for the benefit of those who've joined us late, you know, thank you for being there. I would love to, you know, take some of the questions if you have, it's a live conversation that I'm having with Sharad Jeevan. And Sharad has written this lovely book called Intrinsic, which you would have seen in that bookshelf of mine. Of course, you know, I was lucky to get one of the advance copies. But this is a lovely book. It focuses on and my takeaway was that all of us can do a couple of things which we can, you know, ignite the intrinsic desire that we have internal to us. We don't need an incentive, you know, pay out or some such thing. And this is what, you know, my guest is really talking to us about today. So Sharad, back to you to ask this whole question that, you know, when people talk about incentive design, and, you know, the workplaces are sort of notorious for that. I mean, we recently heard about some of the startups to hire people, you know, they are offering them, you know, the sports bikes, and they're sending them IPL tickets to Dubai and all that. Is that the right way to do, you know, hiring? Would you get the most motivated people to do that? Is that the right thing? Wrong thing? What's your take? Yeah, so I was talking to a trader in the city of London, a financial trade up a few weeks ago. He'd been given a £20 million bonus, I think in crores, that must have been 200 crores or something, I think, roughly. So that was his bonus for the year. And, you know, his first reaction was, he told me, look, I need to work harder. I said, what do you mean you need to work harder? He said, look, I heard from the virtual water cooler, because someone, they hadn't got back to the office yet, they're working remotely, someone had been given 21.5 million for their bonus. So what we know about things like money, so I know clearly this is a different level of world, but the money, how fancy the office is, these are all, they stop having much effect after a certain point. We need it to a certain point. But after a while, each additional rupee or dollar or pound or whatever, it doesn't give us that much more motivational happiness. So it's better to think about we need a certain amount of money to live well. But if we start creating a cultural organization, which is all about incentives, we create these kinds of perverse incentives and effects. And we create a lot of bad behavior, look at the financial crisis we had 15 years ago, most of that was caused by some of these crazy incentive schemes. So be careful, I think, with these kind of extrinsic or external incentives. And if companies instead can really tap into intrinsic motivation, it's much more, first of all, financially affordable, but also much more sustainable and enjoyable for everyone. And I just thought that Sharad, maybe you could run an experiment where this friend of yours got 20 million pounds as incentive, some other person got 21, I could be given 19 million. I'm happy to be part of such an experiment if you. I think LinkedIn will sponsor us. I really think they should. I wanted to switch track and really talk about when, how did your own perspective on motivation evolve when you're in school, college, and in your professional work? How did that evolve? And where was that light bulb moment when you said, this is what matters? So talk to me about that. Yeah, so I think I'm the son of Indian immigrants that I was born in Chennai, that I came to the UK when I was about four years old. I think for me, my parents being immigrants to the UK, I guess the mental model I grew up with was what I'd called the part of it's almost kind of this idea of delayed gratification, that basically for the first 20, 21 years of your life, work very hard, study very hard, get into a good school, get into a good university, get a great first job, and then life will be smooth sailing from that point on. And that was very much the mental model I grew up with. And it was really a lot of pressure to chase brands, right in status, really in some ways, all with a view this would create security. So that's why I went to Cambridge, I went to in Seattle, my MBA, all these kinds of fancy places. The problem is, I look at, I'm now 45, many of my classmates are 1050, I didn't see it for example, many people, many of us are losing jobs in the corporate world now because we're expensive, there are many younger people willing to work harder and for less and so on as well. So that idea that 18, 20 years you work hard and then life is a smooth sailing, it just doesn't reflect the world we live in right now. Instead, we've got to have the motivation to keep learning and developing and changing. And this is probably my fourth career, I was in the strategy consulting, tech, the NGO world, and now I'm sort of a coach and writer like yourself. So we have to keep reinventing ourselves and changing our personal mission statements. That's got to come by having motivation from within and seeing how can we make a difference, how can we help and serve others better. So it took me about 10 years I've been to to really get as an adult to get rid of these mental models. And I think honestly working in India, working in schools in thousands of schools across the country, I felt that what I was doing made a profound difference. I realized that that was how I want to spend my time. I want to be helping others be successful and nurturing other people's talents. And that was a very big shift in how I thought about the world myself. So when you think about a lot of parents, when I talk to them they say the one reason why I work is to be able to create a better life for my children. Is that intrinsic motivation or is it extrinsic? I mean, and is that a good thing? But you judge your life's purpose in terms of your kids' success vicariously, you're living through your kids' success. How do you view that? Let me tell you a little story. So we spent a summer in your hometown in Bangalore with my kids. They went to cricket camp. My oldest son is cricket mad now. He watches every match and is a big supporter of India, England, everything. But I spent a lot of time waiting on cricket pitches for him to finish his matches. And I see dads with mostly dads shouting at their kids every time they haven't pulled the perfect googly or hit the perfect six at the right time. And it's almost like, as you said, they're living their lives through their kids. That's extrinsic motivation. And it's very damaging because what it's doing is it's putting huge amounts of pressure and anxiety on the child and it's destroying their sense of purpose, autonomy, and mastery. In a way, the child becomes an extension of you as the adult. And what I recommend in the book as one of the ways to get around that, and I talk about some ideas there, I talk about parenting quite a bit in the book, is actually for us to feel more motivated ourselves and our own life. And particularly in our work life, because if we feel like we're more fulfilled at work, we're already helping and serving others, we're much less likely to be tempted to try to micromanage or helicopter parents in the words that people use our children's life and will give them that space, that autonomy to be their own people. They're not us, as you know, Khalil Gibran said, you know, very famous in his poem, they're their own people. Yeah. Yeah, it's a children are not your children. Yes, completely. I mean, I think anyone before becoming a parent must read that particular, you know, chapter on being children, they're like arrows that life sends, you are the bow, but the children are the arrows who are independent also. And yeah, I think it's a beautiful way to look at it. When you think about this whole business of motivation, the flip side of that I wanted to ask you is, if I want to do stuff only for myself, let's imagine there are a lot of us who are selfish, we don't want to do anything for anybody else, you know, we don't derive any joy from helping someone else. We just feel good when we, you know, are helping ourselves and living our dream that I want to get this house, I want to get this kind of a car, I want to do this, that and the other. Is that intrinsic motivation? Is it not? And what do you think? Yeah, so that's, I would again call that extrinsic motivation because we're trying to do basically achieve things that we're told a program to believe are important to us. And I think, you know, we are social animals as humans. And I think there's something deep in us that that sense of purpose, that sense of helping and serving others, that such a fundamental motivator in almost all of our lives. I think what tends to happen is, you know, I'm sure this happened to you, we get the dream job, we get the dream car, we get the house we wanted, but it doesn't, it feels a bit empty, right, without the right people around it. That job doesn't feel that great if you haven't helped other people get the jobs they deserve as well. That house doesn't feel particularly homely, unless there's someone that's a deep relationship with your spouse and your kids, right, and you're nurturing them as well. So I think that part the selfishness and it's even trickier, especially in India now we most of us live in metros and flat and flats, apartments and nuclear families. It's easy to go inward and become very self obsessed in some ways. I think a lot of the ideas in the book about how we create helpful relationships with others, you know, work and our personal lives. And one example, you know, we tend to know if we're married, for example, have a girlfriend, a boyfriend, we tend to rely on them a lot for all of our emotional nourishment. But one of the things in the book I was talking about is actually friendship matters a lot. And we need different kinds of friends to help us stay motivated in different ways. How do you have that white circle that keeps us learning, developing and curious about the world and motivated and happy as well. So from all the examples you've given so far, you know, when I listen to you, I kind of think that the common recurring theme seems to be that, you know, when people have curiosity, they're trying to learn something and they're interested genuinely in other people and, you know, which could be I'm curious to know what we can do together to collaborate and what we can do together to help each other to, you know, so and what do I learn from you. And overall, the driver of intrinsic motivation in any very big way seems to be a curious model. I mean, who believes that there is far more to be done and far more to be learned, etc. Is that true? Is it no? Absolutely. So one of my clients is the Deco group and I work, I've worked with a foundation. They put about 5,000,000 people a day into new jobs. If you talk to them, talk to many employees I talk to, when you ask them, what do you care about new recruits coming in, especially younger workers coming into the workforce? They don't talk about academic skills at all. They talk about two things curiosity. And just alongside the sort of parallel hard work, so you have to be willing to act on the curiosity and do something about it. I completely agree because if you have that, you're basically trying to learn and develop and you're open to the world. What that requires, though, is a is a self maturity and ability to emotional safety, if you like to say, I'm content. I know what drives me. I don't need to be jumping around and getting distracted by all these external distractions. I can really focus on what matters to me as a person that takes a lot of maturity. It takes intrinsic motivation. If we have that, we have the space to be curious and explore a lot more as well. Is motivation genetic in the sense that if you have parents who you've had as role models who are extremely intrinsically motivated, would you learn from that? Or if you've seen your role models getting driven by external factors, is that going to motivate you differently? Is that going to take away from your intrinsic motivation? So I did a really fascinating series a little while ago where I spoke to very successful people, CEOs and so on about their childhoods. And it's amazing how powerful those mental models are in our lives and how long they take and how difficult they are to shake off. So if we have parents who have taken a more extrinsic view of success and external view of success, our mental models tend to be shaped by them. We need to be able to throw that baggage away. And if you think of them as like suitcases, leave them at the door and move through the doorway because it's not helpful. So yeah, I think if you do have parents who have that culture at home where they're curious, they're asking you questions, not just to pass an exam, but because they want you to be curious about the world, they themselves are curious about the world, that's a huge benefit. There's a transmission of that because the role modeling is there. Not genetic, but it's more the culture of your house. But if you haven't had that, it's okay, you can still do this. And it just means you have to work a little bit harder to reset that motivational dial. There is this whole notion of what is called the locus of control that I feel I'm in charge of my destiny or that's intrinsic locus of control. And then there is external locus of control, which is the world is really not in my control and I don't have much to do with it. Is an internal locus of control correlated in any way with intrinsic motivation? Massively. So I think that autonomy is pretty much the same thing. I'd say well very linked, sorry, they're not the same thing, they're very linked. So that idea of autonomy of ownership of our lives, often I think in India we grew up, I would certainly say this is my own background. We have very strong families, strong people have opinions and it's very hard to say, look, I'm listening to what you said but this is what I want to do. That can really be a real problem if you don't manage this well. We are in fact that famous poem, we are our own people. We have to have that sense of autonomy in our lives. And what I talked about in the book is this idea of guided autonomy. So we aren't Clint Eastwood, we can't go off and do everything we want either. We've got to find a balance. So let me just give you an example. When I was running the NGO stir education, we had very bright people in our team, people who went from to IITs or you know, St. Xavier's or Stevens and all these kind of top colleges, their parents were shocked as to why are these very bright, why are my kids going into work for an NGO when they could be working for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or whatever it might be. So we would do parent days, literally bring the parents in just to meet the other staff and they realized, look this is a very bright team. They're surrounded by people who are as bright, who have the same kind of education as they have. That would reassure them a lot and they would just back down and give their kids more space. That's what I mean by guided autonomy, that we can't, we don't want to disown our parents, that's not what I'm suggesting. But how do we help them see the world through our eyes, expose them to new ideas gently and let them understand what deeply motivates us. Often I think as kids in India, we feel embarrassed or it's almost sort of not a shame, but find it difficult to talk to elders, without that sense of I'm being disrespectful. I think we can be respectful, but we can also give our views and self-advocate, to use those words more in terms of our own autonomy. That's also true in the workplace. Our bosses, even if they're older, more experienced, we can still share our views respectfully and talk about how we can make work a lot more fulfilling for both of us. And when you look at what some of the progressive organizations, what they do is, they actually have programs such as reverse mentoring, where a very young kid would be mentoring maybe the CEO of the organization or somebody in between, whatever. There's a massive gap between the experiences of one of them and the older one. And it's quite incredible what it does to both people, you know, what it does to the older person who learns about a generation who they have only cared about, but they've never probably met and spoken at length. Also, I think after the initial shock and the phase of judgment, which I think we always go through initially, the person begins to accept and becomes less judgmental. And then they start really appreciating because that, I think, is the three-step phase on which you go through. And what you're recommending to actually practice that even at home to be able to share an alternative point of view in a manner which is respectful. And for the parents also to say that there are lots of things that have changed in the world. And therefore, maybe, I don't have all the answers that I did in a world which I was 100% familiar with. I'm reminded briefly about one of the taxis I took when I was in Mumbai. And the person said that my son wants to be a YouTuber. What does it mean? And I explained what that potentially does. And he says, well, how do these people get money? Because I talked about with a certain number of views, etc. So he says that even if I watched his videos all day, it would still be one view. I said, yeah, that's why it is hard. So at one level, I mean, it brought in a certain amount of appreciation, but I think he was going to be able to have a better conversation and not necessarily get the kid to not be a YouTuber, but also realize that maybe there are things that he should share and let the person take a call. So it could just be that. How did you decide your career choices? Yes, I want to just pick up on that a bit, because I think what you talked about there and touched on was one of the ideas in the book around this idea of nurturing. So what I found with the mentoring term is that often it tends to mean, although reverse mentoring idea is great, it's fantastic. It can be, I've got all the experience, I'm coming to tell you as a more experienced mentor what to do. Coaching tends to assume that where the client, the person has all the answers, often they don't. But that middle ground of nurturing where you're asking the right questions at the right time. So it sounds exactly what you did with the parent you asked him about. So it's that thing that skill that's so difficult in the world. It's difficult as a parent, difficult as a boss, as a spouse, you name it. We need money more nurturers in the world out there. They're key to getting us to places we wouldn't have got to otherwise. And so, yeah, I think for me, the key to have is, you know, I mentioned my English teacher to answer your question, but all through my career, people who are willing to believe in me and believe that I had a unique path to make in the world, both in my career and in my personal life, but they would give me the space and would ask good questions. They wouldn't tell me what to do back to your parenting example. But they would help me see new patterns that would help me stay motivated. They would help me feel I had ownership of my choices. They did that unconsciously. And I was lucky, right to have these people in my life. But I believe we need a world of many more nurturers where this becomes a day to day thing. You know, we should be having many people like this in all of our lives who can nurture us to our full potential. In this book that you have written, I really enjoyed reading your book in French. For those who joined us a little late, do me a favor and just, you know, show them the cover of the book. And yeah, that's the red colored cover. I don't know whether he's got better examples and jokes than what I read. This is the cover that I had. So, you know, this is the black colored cover, but I can assure you it was just as good. Which of the stories, you've got lots of lovely examples. I'll tell you which is my favorite story from that book, but I'd love to know what was your favorite story, you know, most inspiring story that you came across of intrinsic motivation. Yeah, I think so. For me, it was, there's so many interesting stories from it, but there was a person I interviewed actually in Bessin Bombay in Mumbai, and we were talking a lot about he worked with entrepreneurs. So he ran the Accelerative and NIMS, you know, the big universities in India, and we were just talking about like how his mental model shifted and how he supported entrepreneurs. And he had, I think before what I'd call an extrinsic mindset where he saw his role as basically, I'm going to select the best companies, put them through a huge selection process. And in India, we love, you know, pyramids of talent and selection, you know, the IITs, all this that we've been conditioned to think that way. And these crazy pyramids were like, you know, if every 1000 people, one person gets a place, that kind of option, that was his mindset, right? And what changed, I think, is he realized that what was happening is he was picking companies that look great on paper, they were spending most of the time selecting people. But actually, there were so many other entrepreneurs who were more connected to the community in Mumbai who knew the problems better, knew the communities better, knew the customers better. And he did not, everyone had to become a flipkart or, you know, that's some unicorn either, right, that they could all, many of these companies could be successful, viable companies, but it would be a more patient part. So he said, look, I'm going to move away from trying to select companies so much to nurturing all the companies that come on board, and trying to make sure that the people from all kinds of background entrepreneurs from across that great city could apply and become entrepreneurs on this program. And his success rates massively increased. So instead of getting one unicorn for every hundred, what he was doing is finding a much broader base of talent where lots of entrepreneurs could find a way to create good products and fit the market and be successful in the long term as well. So that movement from extrinsic, that kind of talent management mindset I call the book, to one of, you know, one where we're going to nurture everyone's talent and motivation. And when you think about the whole concept of talent, I mean as talent, if it is equally distributed, why is it that I can't run as fast as Usain Bolt? I mean, why is it that, you know, I can't play tennis as well as Federer, and why is it that I can't draw as well as Picasso? So is that proof that talent is not necessarily as universally distributed? So I looked at this a lot in the book. One of the ideas I talked about a lot was how we move away from this winner takes all the world. So take your sport example, let me go back to tennis because it's a sport I love. Roger Federer, he pocketed a 300 million dollar deal from Uniqlo, the Japanese clothes manufacturer, at the age of 37, the end of his career pretty much. The top 60, 70th, 80th play in the world, if you watch them at Wimbledon or any tournament, they play almost as well. You can barely tell the difference, honestly. They struggle to make ends meet often. So why do we have this really skewing how we reward talent? And what I realized from the book, and I went back to read people like Charles Darwin, evolutionary theory, he has this phrase, survival the fittest. You know, I talked to many leaders in corporate India that say things like, you know, it's a dog eat dog world out there. I'm going to work, I'm going to put my corporate uniform, my armor, literally, because it's this competitive world. I think this is all nonsense that really what Darwin was talking about was we need to be distinct and distinctive. And so not try to compete quite so much. So instead of, you know, going head to head with someone, what's unique about ourselves, our personal mission statement, our mastery, our autonomy, that we can be a little bit different and find a niche that only we can occupy. So let me give you an example. I have an accountant in London. He's a very good accountant, technically, but he's a very good people person, which is not always the case with all accountants. So, you know, he trades on that or that's his unique calling card. People like to work with him because he's very responsive, very informal, get things done quickly. He's realized that yes, he does the accounting as well as anyone else, but he's got a unique personal set of skills that really helps him. So playing to your strengths and being different, not just trying to be a little bit better than everyone else. That's a key thing we can try and do in terms of talent. I also think that perhaps if we combine our talents in different ways, you know, what it does is, A, it sort of allows you to use, bring all of yourself to the workplace, wherever that might be, you could be self-employed and then, you know, that's your workplace. But when you bring in all your talents and figure out the ways in which you can perhaps put in a unique combination of those things, that perhaps creates the motivation because, A, you're bringing your old self in. Two, that unique combination is potentially so unique, it's hard to replicate. So that's how you look at it. So would you say that combination works well? I think so. That's certainly my personal learning, which is sort of take my work, for example. I've got a very specific niche, right, intrinsic motivation and talent, but really I work with everyone from venture capital funds to governments to large corporates to families and parents and so on. So I love the breadth for me. What I really love doing is seeing how all these things link together. And that was a very big personal motivator for me is to, that we couldn't tackle this from one angle. We can't, it's not just a corporate problem or a work problem, it's a wide problem. So yeah, that's that kind of idea of a category of one is one of my friends at Kashaman talks about it, that that idea is a very powerful one. So yeah, how do you take strengths from different areas and combined with all the disciplines and fields, that's very, very important. Sharad, you know, you've got this OBE, Order of British Empire. Is this something like the Padma Sri Padma Vibhushan kind of awards, the UK equivalent, is that what it is? Yeah, exactly. It's one of the sort of highest civilian honor in the UK. I was a bit embarrassed for the language of British Empire is not language that I, you know, necessary personally, you know, empathize with its old language. But basically it's a recognition of civilian sort of contribution to the world, the country. I felt very proud as an as a, you know, Indian immigrant to the UK. My parents were doctors. They had to make a lot of sacrifices to come to a new country. They started in jobs. They didn't, you know, it was a very tough road, right, starting it again. There was a lot of discrimination when I was growing up in a glass ceiling for many Indians in the country about what they could do and couldn't do. So I think, you know, it's so nice to see this generation, you know, with the advantages I had and others had breaking some of these glass ceilings. We have now a chance, like our number two finance minister in the UK is an Indian, sorry, British Indian, and similarly our Home Office Secretary in the UK, our Health Minister or Secretary. So three of our top roles in the cabinet now come from those. So it's great to see Britain be a much more, the UK become a much more multicultural place for other people's talents to recognize. So I felt very, very proud to be a small part of that story, I think. I don't know, it definitely makes all of us very proud to, you know, see an Indian name, you know, with the OBE written after that. So that's fabulous. What's the next destination for you? What's the next mountain you want to climb? Or are you going to just enjoy the scenery from this mountaintop? I know, as you know, I'm a big bit of a mastery and so the idea of the many things I want to still learn and grow and develop into. So I'm doing a lot of thinking, actually, in this conversation I've learned so much, so thank you for that. But this whole question of like nurturing talent and success and what our mental models of success are like, what I've been learning is that so much of our happiness and motivation comes from those assumptions and mental models. How can we rethink them? And I love your point about this idea of what if I was just a selfish person, I just wanted to do good for myself. That's an idea I'm playing with and how can we get the best out of others in order to help them and ourselves? That's kind of the idea I'm playing with right now. Because I'm more and more with the evidence and research and work I do with showing that to get the best out of ourselves, we need to get it through getting the best out of others. It's very difficult for us to always improve ourselves, but we can have a very powerful role in developing and learning through nurturing others. And that's kind of a yes, work I'm doing right now in terms of practical research and learning as well. I'd love to keep sharing notes and learn with you on that together. Absolutely, that would be so terrific to learn from you and sort of see how does the culture of a country come into play when we look at some of these mental models that we grew up with. That'd be a fascinating area to work with. One last question that I would think of is, I've often wondered whether the model that corporations follow where they reward individuals and yet expect collaboration, you know, it's just really like, you know, you're rewarding opposing forces in some sense. Is that the right thing to do? Because when you are sort of creating this whole culture of collaboration, then perhaps the reward systems, the incentives, and all of that needs to be very different. And that's my thesis on this. What's yours? Yeah, I fully agree. I think there's one level before that, which I think the amount, the level of incentives in corporate India right now, I would say, is unsustainable and it's deeply harmful, first of all. So whether those incentives are individual or team or company-wide or group-wide, whatever, I think it's too much of an extrinsic culture. It rewards too much short-term behavior. And let me just give you an example. So Unilever, they did a study, they have this famous promotion program where a set of leaders join Unilever. And every two to three years, they're rotated into a different management role. It's part of their leadership development program. They look back at their product success and they found that they were not achieving the breakthrough products they wanted. Because of this short-term horizon, the incentive of everyone on this program, which really the top managers in the company, was to create short-term results. So what's the easiest way? You basically do a pricing promotion, you do a little bit of a product retrofit short-term things in digital marketing campaign. But if you really want to create a new category, innovate, be different, things we talked about today, you need a five, 10-year time horizon. You look at ministers in India, you look at civil servants, you're lucky if they stay a year or two years in a role. It's crazy given education, health, sanitation. These are 10-20-year projects. So I think the first thing is we need to move away from this target incentive bonus driven culture to thinking about as long as you pay people well, you reward them well, you make sure they can put bills on the table, food on the table well, there are nice places to work, all that stuff. That's great. Beyond that, we need to unleash intrinsic motivation. If we do that first, then I think we can say, okay, in return, let's reward and nurture this more collaborative approach. And that doesn't mean paying money necessarily. It means things like when people are in the office, now we're going to be hybrid working, can they have time and space to collaborate? Let's rip the cubicles out and let's have a team where people can have conversations and design things together. Let's hire people of different backgrounds and talents. So we have a very diverse workforce in every sense. So we have a very a unique place to work in that level. So yeah, I think the more we can move away from this traditional individualistic, intrinsic culture and really think about intrinsic motivation, our companies will do better, we'll be a lot happier as workers too. Fabulous. Well, thank you very, very much. And you know, I just want to share your Twitter handle. So that's at Sharad Jeevan underscore. And on LinkedIn, you can find him at https forward slash forward slash www.linton.com slash in slash Sharad Jeevan. And for those of you who want to connect with me, it's very easy. Just join my first name, last name together Abhijit Bahaduri. That's the same for me on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn everywhere. It's the same. So pretty easy. Thank you very, very much Sharad. Good luck with your book and good luck with all the work. Absolutely. So guys, this is the book that I read. We were today talking to Sharad Jeevan, who's written this lovely book called Intrinsic, which is a manifesto to reignite our inner drive where you don't need to motivate somebody else by giving them external rewards and you know, people come in self driven. Thank you very much for your time and Sharad. I look forward to reading more of your stuff and wish you all the very best in all success. Thank you so much. Thanks Abhijit. Thank you everyone. Good evening. Thank you so much. And we'll stay connected. Thanks Abhijit. Thank you Abhijit.