 Moving forward ladies and gentlemen to our first keynote session of the day, we have with us Mr. Nitin Thakur head of communication from OYO, a very warm welcome to you sir. Thank you, I started with the cardinals in, I'm sorry about that. We all have done that at some point but a very warm welcome to you and we all are waiting to hear from you, over to you sir. Thank you, thank you so much for this opportunity. For those who I haven't had the opportunity of interacting with before, my name is Nitin Thakur and I head communications for the global travel tech company OYO. Let me begin with what I wanted to speak with you today, which is essentially about the five hacks for a gravity-defying communication career. So first of all, congratulations in advance to all those who are making it to the under 30 professional list, which will be announced today evening and equally to those who were in the fray but may have narrowly missed the bus. However, whichever of these two categories you fall in, since you were shortlisted, clearly you're doing well in your career and you know, are one of the best in the profession. But still you do have at least 30 to 40 years of working life ahead of you. And assuming that you love the field of PRN communications, how do you defy the personal organizational and the culturally gravity to constantly keep moving to a higher orbits. You know, as someone who has practiced this profession for two and a half decades now. Today, I wanted to share with you the five principles that have worked for me. So let me begin with the first one, which is that you should try and be the chief clarity officer. Now, some of you may already be commanding small teams. So as I was saying, try and be the chief clarity officer. Now, some of you may already be handling a small team. Some of you may have larger teams, etc., and so on. I think one of the things that almost everybody in the team looks at and needs to perform to their potential is that very often they don't get a clear sense of direction of what is most important for the team, for the organization. And I'm not necessarily talking about which is the best, you know, next big launch for your company or your agency team that you're working for or the announcement or the initiative coming up. But it's more on the lines of clarity that comms can deliver, which would be most invaluable to the company. And what are the parameters that you actually needs to put in place to shift to that. And how does this clarity come to you as a leader? It comes from a little bit of introspection. You know, I think hustle is really important. It's highly rated, but hustle also comes with a downside of not stepping back enough. So my advice to you is while you hustle, please find for yourself some time, think through, get clarity and then provide clarity to your teams. So that'll be my first one. The second piece of advice is don't follow your passion. You know, that is one of the worst advice that people give. And I'll tell you why. The first is very few of us know what passion truly means. It also assumes that you have only one or two passions in life which will remain constant throughout. That's not true. And the biggest law, by the way, is that the assumption that you're good at your passion. For instance, most youngsters today want to become Instagram, YouTube sensations. That's the passion when you talk to them. All right. So I don't know where I got dropped off, but I was talking about not following your passion and trying to follow your contribution, which essentially means find the things that you are good at doing, what energize you on things that you get positive feedback. And when you find those excellent zones, then you start gravitating towards it. Let me give you an example. After college, I landed a green job in one of India's top garment export firms. You know, the pay was good. I had a creative bed of mine. Fashion designing is always a cool thing, especially for youngsters. It's almost like today's equivalent of being a creator or influencer. And the Indian government exports were a big rage at that time. It was a high potential sector. Now, once I joined, I realized that one important part of the job turned out to be to ensure consistency and productivity of the workforce on the shop. So I had to keep pushing a set of jaded workers to be on their tables all the time and keep working every minute. I was like a primary school kid trying to play the monitor to a bunch of senior school TV shows. And of course, I hated that part, mostly the part I did like though. And which got me a lot of appreciation was when I was designing and publishing contests and schemes to make these people motivated. And this is eventually sold the seed of my finding my way into the communication profession. Remember when I started off, I thought I'd be doing something in the fashion business, but I gravitated. I shifted my passion to the right orientation. So what do you do when you find the past that energize you? I think it's very simple. Just work hard towards prioritizing them, giving them more time versus other pressing things that are coming on your table every day. And gradually, I think the organization also realizes what you're bent is and more such way work finds a way on your table. That's my second one. I think the third that's worked for me, which I want to talk about is finding unresolved problems. Now, I'll give you an example again. In my company, one of the biggest segments of travelers that do booking with us are the business travelers. So while it's the largest cohort, most of the communication focus work effort is actually talking towards a leisure traveler. So that's a more exciting thing to communicate to talk about. Now, no one, so that's one example. And then the second is no one is talking about ready room availability. Oyo is one of the only players who actually most of the bookings get done the same day as the person is to live there or stay there or maximum a day before. Now, you know, when I started talking about highlighting these aspects in the company, I hardly got any traction because, you know, remember the concept of organizational diversity that I spoke about earlier in my speech. So, you know, it's not the way things are done. We focus on leisure travel as the industry norm. We do it. So things like these are always unseen as unimportant or they are unprioritized till you're able to show success. Now, I have limited time in the speech, so I will not go into how we actually started talking to the small business owners, but tried hard, found an unsolved area, worked towards this, and today there's a lot of appreciation. So, but the larger question is why should you do this? How does it help in your career progression? I think it's very simple. Organizations often want workers to accomplish assigned tasks. You know, they focus someone to get things done at the first instance. But at the same time, they also, I'll be a little reluctantly cherish those talents who can take up a cause on their own, find it and drive it through. The fourth one I want to talk about is it's a principle that I have followed intuitively, but I think it's been captured well through some of the books lately, like The Power of Atomic Habits. Some of you may have read it. It's by Arthur James Clear. It's one of the best sellers. There are a few more in this area, which is like The Power of Habits by Charles Duhit. Now, what does this principle essentially say? It just says that a good routine, which is small and easy to do, can become the source of incredible power and success in your career. It almost works like compound interest goes up bit by bit. So a small change can accumulate into habits and over a long period brings systematic change. So I think it's aptly said, and I'm paraphrasing, if you want better results, then forget about setting goals, focus on your system instead. Success is the product of daily habits and not once in lifetime transformation. Let me bring it live by giving another example. This time, not from a professional life, but my personal one. I tried very hard throughout my life to have a regular exercise routine. Everyone knows the importance of it, but it was easier said than done. And so one of the hacks that I tried is that I love reading. So from my regular reading regime, I switch over to one hour of listening to audio books or podcast instead. So I'm still getting information whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever, but I'm getting it in form of audio books. And then once I got into this habit, I switched to walking alongside this listening started coming naturally needed for a month, month and a half, and then switched to a little bit of jogging. So, you know, first time in my life, I was able to form a habit, which was aligned to something which I was anyways love doing which is reading or listening to nonfiction stuff. So I think there are similar ways to build habits in professional life, which can lead to success. And you'll find that these habits are true key to success in your career. I'll go to the last one that I had on my mind, which is and I'm also conscious, I think I'm already almost reached my time, so I'll hurry this up. Try and find what if you're a startup, think about it this way. What's your product market pick? That's the first thing that startups trying to write their approach to market validation has something for a speech. So do one thing, try and find an area which would be useful in the future as per you in the field of communication. Think of things like a visual data scientist or national natural language processing expert or a synthetic content coordinator, whatever you read up and you find is interesting. Then finding elements in your own personality or working style that make you fit into, you know, a single piece. And then take our time to gain expertise in any of them, which you think will become which are which are areas of future will become mainstream requirements later. And then once you have adequate knowledge, validated by doing a pro bono project for anyone, you know, your client, your friends company, wherever. This is the only way you get to break free from gravity and shift your orbits as you grow in your career. So I'll close by hucking back to one of the films that I love and, you know, it's based on a book which my friend Anup Sharma had given to me long back. This book was, thank you for smoking. And in this the protagonist public relation profession for the tobacco industry is trying to explain to school children what he does for a living. And he says, movie stars talk to, you know, movie star get paid to talk. And that's what I do, I talk. So now to be able to talk successfully about something you need to be sure about it. Which basically equates to the point of chief clarity officer that I spoke about. And you also have to have new stuff to talk about, which is the sense in a sense is what I spoke about in terms of finding unsolved problems. So with this, I like to end my speech and thank you for listening. I hope some of these pointers that I shared will help you break the gravitational pull of mediocrity and take you to your higher orbits. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much Mr. Tucker for that very insightful session and I'm sure a lot of your words are going to stick with our viewers and thank you once again for spending time here with us. Thank you.