 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, my name is Abhijit Bhathuri. I work as a talented branding coach. And in this podcast, I actually showcase careers of people. You know, when you ask everyone, or you can ask anyone, how did you land up being where you are today? The answer is so fascinating. And that is really what got me hooked on to writing more than studying about careers. And eventually, of course, as I was a career coach, it gave me a chance to interview a lot of people and learn from them. Today, the person that I am going to bring on as my guest is somebody who has something in common with me, which I'll come to right at the end. But you know, what was also interesting is this person's belief in himself changed because he got the third rank in a general knowledge test in school. And that sort of really set the person thinking that maybe I'm destined for better things. But this person has an amazing amount of knowledge and interest in all kinds of music, starting from Kannada music to Hindustani music and rock and roll and Brazilian and Greek music. And you know, we'll talk a little bit about that as well. He actually is better known for some of the fascinating books that he's written. I was recommending this and, you know, in a show that I was doing on LinkedIn Live with another guest of mine. And I said that both books are brilliant and I love them. I completely recommend that. But I am going to today introduce him as a person who was my super, super senior at XLRI and ladies and gentlemen, wait for this. On to the show. Don't go. Huggy. So good to have you on the show, Huggy. Huggy has a complicated person name, which is Haya Griva Rao. For the benefit of uneducated people like me, what does Haya Griva mean? I know it's the name of God, but what? Yes, it is. Haya Griva is supposed to be an incarnation of Vishnu in this incarnation. You know, anyway, it has to do with saving knowledge from the Asura. That's kind of what the story is. So usually it's a name particular in certain communities in southern India. So in some communities, we worship Ganesh as the God of knowledge in other communities, Haya Griva is. And by the way, and by the way, while I'm at it, I may as well tell people as to how I got to be called Huggy. Due to a random chance event, I had a great uncle who went to Yale. And then he married a wonderful American woman called Mary Camp. He and Mary Rao came to India and lived in Bangalore actually for 50 years. So she had a little bit of difficulty in enunciating Haya Griva. It sort of got shortened to Huggy. I think she gave me a great gift. Don't you think so, Amiji? I completely agree. It's so much easier to say Huggy. And so I'm going to sort of stick to that. And you also describe yourself with Huggy. Please do that. And you know, you're, of course, the talent and branding expert. And it is an interesting branding queue, we finally saw say. Completely it is. And Huggy, you are, of course, besides, of course, your journey as an Oscar. And we talk about all of that. Huggy and I both went to XLRI. And we were sort of, you know, a few stack ranked. Huggy was the gold medalist. I was also the same list, but at the other end of this list. But Nemla Nesic, an amazing journey that everyone has at XLRI. Huggy is no different. Was it when you decided that you wanted to pursue your career as an academic? I wish I could share this with viewers that it was my decision. It really was. When I went to XL, I was very young kid. I'd come from a small town, Bishaka Patna. I was good at studying and taking tests and things like that. But I didn't have a whole lot of exposure. And I go to XLRI, like many other people do in those days. I'm talking about 78 to 80. We all wanted to be executives. And I too wanted to be an executive. But then 75% of more of my classmates suggested I was better suited to the profession of being a professor. When I would ask them, they say, you know, you love the research behind, you know, anything that is taught in class. But most of all, you like to complicate things. And you can never complicate things in the real world of your business. So you'd never make it. Well, I thought to myself, isn't it real? When 75% of your classmates are kind of telling me that, clearly they're seeing something in me that I'm unable to see myself. And I think this is sort of a point I want to make about careers. And that is careers are about realizing possible sets. And one of the difficulties all of us have is sometimes we can't see our possible. We become too narrow, too constricted. And it's your colleagues and those who have affection for you, they're able to actually see your possible self in sharper relief than you. And then what you've got to do is you've got to kind of, you can't simply say, oh, they're saying, I want to be a professor. And you got to say, let me find out what preparing for this career is all about. And here I'm equally grateful to the faculty and the then dean, Sudha's Roy. And, you know, I told him, you know, I'm kind of finding all these discourse work to be kind of a little boring, you know? It's really not that interesting. And I'm thinking of doing my PhD. And maybe I should actually do some independent studies. And right then, look at another random event. G2 Sync comes to XLR from work. And Sudha says, why don't you talk to G2? And so I go talk to G2 and say, hey, can you help me with an independent study? He's spent over a couple of terms. And G2, of course, made sure I learned his first year docking readings at the Water School. But most of all, G2 gave me another gift. Every week I remember I had to go to his room. He used to stay in the dorms at that time. He was unmarried. But he had, of course, a much more luxurious room. And he had a fantastic sound system. And he learned classical music. And that was where it was the first time I listened to Beethoven's 9th or 3rd Brahms and Bach, many of which were conducted by Herbert von Karaj. Prior to that, I must tell you, I had no idea of western classical music. So when I think of my own sort of career, what kind of described it as a lot of random draws or chance events that had nothing to do with me, that occurred, and that created openings, and that presented a possible self to me. And so that was, I think, sounds great gift because it created a safe enough environment where you could buy on any self that you wanted. You wanted to be a rock musician, go for it. You wanted to be an actor, go for it. And I think that kind of wonderful permissiveness was something I had not income. And it was fun being with people much older than me. And because I was the youngest, they were very generous with me. I still remember a wonderful friend of mine now in Sydney, Australia, Mohamed Braham, affectionately called Mopes. He looked at me and said, Huggie, I was around and studying when you were but a gleam in your mother's eye. Guys, yeah, that's an incredible state word. And you know, you have been teaching at Stanford now. Do you think that the students who come in today are more clear about their career plans? I certainly, I'm still unclear about what I want to do. But I just see a dramatic difference. Perhaps age and time have made me nostalgic and seeing the past through like the cause of wonderful nostalgia. But really, when we were there in 7880, we were only just grateful to be there. The second thing is I don't think anybody thought about a career. I don't think anybody thought about strategy and this, that and the other. We just had a great time and there was something called placement season where vaguely you had to strategize. Because you could only go for so many final interviews and this, that, you remember. And that was the only time you had to think about it. But then my impression was we all got jobs within, like in those days, it wasn't within two days, but maybe within a week or 10 days, you know, is what I vaguely recall. It all happened very fast. And then you had one more turn. I wish I could say that we spent the one more turn preparing for New York jobs. But that was the last thing on our minds. We just had more fun. And so I think there was no instrumentalities the way I would say it. It's like, oh, I don't need to get to know Abhijit because Abhijit's like a, you know, will get me into connection with this network or that network. It just didn't, those kind of thoughts never crossed any, at least my mind at that stage. But the students now, at least the ones I see at step, they're much not kind of, as you implied, focused, goal-driven and so on. And the way I would kind of describe it is, at the time when I was at XLRR, I didn't realize like choosing a job. I vaguely sensed it, but I couldn't formalize it, Abhijit. But you kind of realized instinctively that choosing a job wasn't just choosing a set of activities in an employer. You really were choosing a version of yourself. I don't think we did that deliberately. I must confess, I kind of sleepwalked into, as you can recall from the story. But the kids I see at Stanford Business School, they're very explicit about the kind of self they've chosen. Most of them come to Stanford because they want to choose an entrepreneurial version of themselves. And so they have their stories, but it's wonderfully inspiring, you know. So I teach a class, for example, here called The Future of Work. And I was challenging our MBA students who take it. It's a lab for future of work-related startup hypotheses. And I said, look, you know, The Future of Work doesn't mean the future of work for people who work in, you know, Microsoft or Google or, for that matter, Goldman Sachs or the TPG or anything like that. There are a lot of frontline workers. What's the future of work for them? What can you do for them? And it's amazing how our students actually responded to that. Some of them now have startups trying to improve the world of work for the hourly work. It's amazing. I feel very touched by it. So they have a lot more drive. They know they're going on a 10-year startup journey. It's like very different kind of orientation, very different. Is it better to be focused in today's context? You know, you talk about the future of work and I'm just intrigued. Would you say that it's a better idea that you know exactly which direction you want to go and what do you want to do? Why do you want to do it, all of that? Or is it a better idea to be around a little bit, sample a bunch of things and then make up your own mind about what works best for you? It's a great question. I think the way I would respond to it is it's kind of different strokes for different folks. So the way I'm interpreting your question, Abhijit, then, hey, do you kind of want to be a little bit of an explorer or do you kind of want to be somebody you've got a map and you know where to get to and that's kind of what you're going to do? I think I would kind of prefer a little more exploration. One is I've done that myself. I find it certainly kind of helpful. But the other thing is you don't want to get a prematurely commit to a version of yourself without checking out what the possibilities are. It's kind of like you're asking me, hey, how do you want to eat in a restaurant? Do you want to look at the menu of possibilities when they give you the menu or do you just say, Navy, I'd like come here just to kind of have an omelet done legally in Dosa and that's all I care about. And I really don't care about the other things. I would find that to be sort of hard to give you an example. The other day we were at Los Angeles and we were in there's a man, my wife and I, we'd gone for our birthday and we were at this restaurant. And suddenly we see a thing which was, if you can believe it, tuna poke with crispy rocks. And when you really look at it, you quickly realize all that they did was brilliantly combine tuna poke with the Indian bale. Now, you know, I'm eating bale, but obviously it's a different kind of bale. You see what I mean? So if you only say I want bale, you probably would never get this kind of dish and other possibilities like that. So my preference always is for a little bit of exploration and the earlier you do the exploration, the better because the cost of a mistake is lower. Does it mean that when, you know, you scale up your career and you've written this absolutely fantastic book which is called Scaling Up Excellence. Getting to more without settling for less. Professor Bob Sutton was also on my show some time back, we had it. And another brilliant book, The Friction Project. I've loved your books. And I'm going to sort of ask you a question and you can sort of point to either of the books and really talk about it. You know, when you said that you sample some ideas, opportunities, possible sense, I like that phrasing and I'm going to steal that, that I think that you look at things that I can do. You look at the possibilities. The more you are able to imagine the easier it becomes. So, you know, I think that's one part of it. But how do you scale it up from there? Because I might aspire to this graduate dream I have for myself. How do I achieve it? So how do I remove friction along the career journey and how do I scale it up? So, you know, that's a great question, Abiji. The way I'm going to answer your question about how do you scale yourself? And that is like the core question. Because what do I mean by scaling ourselves? I mean all of us having a bigger footprint and hopefully a better footprint. Most of us think of scale as having a bigger footprint, not a better footprint. We really need to have a better footprint. Now, from my perspective, one way to kind of think about it is, you really got to carefully think about and this kind of channel some of the arguments we make in our friction book is what you want to do is you actually want to choose jobs so that your curious and generous self is activated. And the key to kind of doing that is to make sure you're doing jobs where a lot of bad friction is kind of removed. Friction, you know, come to this in just a little while. You know, for us, friction, when I say odds, I mean Bob Sutton and I, friction in organizations is kind of like cholesterol. We got good cholesterol and we got bad cholesterol. We got good bacteria, we got bad bacteria. It's the same thing with friction. Some obstacles infuriate people and not only do they infuriate people, what they do is they overwhelm us so that they prevent us from being curious. You really want to avoid organizations like that and frankly jobs. At the same time, all of us know as human beings we can easily choose a more overconfident and more myopic version. So you need jobs with good friction that is obstacles that slows down that make us deliberate and think through a lot more clearly and better. There are a range of ways to do it. Pay careful attention every time you're looking at a job. What are the obstacles involved in the job? And if you ask me, the real role of leaders is to be trustees of other people's stuff. The most important thing is you need both focus and flow. Flow has to do with initiative, energy, all of those kinds of things. When you're taking bad friction out, people flow a lot more easily. They can do things on their own. They don't need to check with the boss. You can kind of really act as an owner. On the other hand, you need to get people to focus, to look carefully at things, to slow down, to consider alternative hypotheses and that's kind of where you need to put in good friction. So my view is the real thing of a leader is carefully to think about, what obstacles am I going to take out so that the right things become easier to do and what obstacles do I put in so that the wrong things become. And the most important thing is when you're in a job, you are allowed to be curious and generous. I think, you know, all of that kind of opens your mind up so much more significantly. Let me give you an example. And now I wish I could tell you it was my own sagacity and ingenuity. It so happened that when I joined the Tata's, I was with the Tata Management Training Center in Pune with Francis Minesis, who was my first boss. Francis was like a very good boss, you know, and I'm very grateful to him because he gave me opportunities that I don't think anybody would have gotten at my age. I was like 20 and a half or 20 while. And I don't know how he would do all of this. Before I knew this, I would be writing a note for Mr. Coley of TCS or Mr. Tobaccoana. The amazing thing that surprised me is they would read my notes and read me out for two hours, telling why all of the things I put down in the note were so far into the future and completely implausible in the press. And it was like an education, you know? And I would wonder, why are they wasting their time on a job like me? And I could just say, man, they don't make any sense. No, but they really wanted to educate me. And for that, you know, you remain very, very grateful, very, very thoughtful and different executives change your life. We had two other colleagues in Pune, Ram Narayan and Mila Khan. They had come from America because they'd done their PhDs and they joined Tata still with Francis Minesis. So I was with them and they never treated me as like a rookie or anything. They saw that I'd done G2's one-year doctoral readings and I was reasonably familiar and they really gave me enormous opportunity. I remember going to IPC and that was the first time I realized a lot of what I knew about organizations completely ignored society and was kind of like, in that sense, like very limited and kind of restrained, you know? Because IPCL is no longer there. It's now part, I think, of the Reminds rule. But I remember going to IPCL and the first thing I remember meeting was a mechanical engineer who asked me to come to a meeting of mechanical engineers and they presented a regression analysis showing how mechanical engineers were punished in the promotion process. Like, if you go to the chemical engineer, they say, we're not becoming factory managers. There's a chemical company, the electronics guys are named Tiger. What are you talking about? Chemical engineering, mechanical engineering. Everything is electronics like we should be the factory. On the one hand, that is half. On the other, the HR department, I think was like, a lot of Bengalis were there. The finance department had a lot of Tamilians. Marketing was full of good Jews. You know, it was like India in lineage. And then you had a lot of trade unions. I forget the number of trade unions they had with the workers in the shop floor and the head of the Office of Association was a guy from IMA. And I said, you know, why didn't you create this association? So the guy looked at it and said, all of us think our immediate superiors are bosoms. We need to talk to Dr. Dr. Ganguly. And this is the only way we get access to. And we're thinking to myself, like, how do you run an organization? And Ganguly, of course, was a brilliant guy. He was a PhD in chemistry from Imperial College. And I must have been 21. He asked me, he says, so young man, I mean, what do you think I should do? So I looked at him and I said, Dr. Ganguly, the chairman is facing IPCR. They actually are Indian miniature. You have professional competition amongst the professions. You have competition amongst language groups. This is kind of India. And you know, if you ask me, the only way I would is for you to build more plans. And he smiles and he says, why more plans? I said, more faculty manager jobs and more this and that. So he lifts it up and he says, so you think the answer lies in you, Delhi? I said, you're a better judge of that, like I wouldn't know. And he knew this all along, and which is why they actually were starting the modern restaurant gas cracker initiative, which was a huge initiative, created many more opportunities. And I think things like that, they kind of blow your mind, you know? They completely blow your mind. And you kind of realize that you can't sort of think of like Mickey Mouse versions of organizational change. Some organizations are so complex that, you know, you've got to think of other ways of doing things. And it's not like doing the conventional things that people do. So my point is, what you really need are tough assignments that put you at the edge of your knowledge. You're not doing things you know. You're kind of doing most of the things that you don't know. And I think that's like the important point. So I'm straying a little bit, but the point I want to make is do jobs, pay attention to the structure of obstacles, make sure you don't get stuck in jobs with a lot of bad friends. That all that you're doing is, you're waiting like Godot for approval from the boss or filling farms or some other mind ambiguity. But at the same time, you know, don't think that if you're on a job without any speed bumps and stop signs and traffic stops and all that, that's not a good thing either because rushing headlong into action without reflection is often a path to disaster. So you really need to look at both and you got to luck out on mentors. In the end, what you really rely on is the generosity of people. Even when I came and did my PhD, my PhD was not something I kind of considered in a very rational way. I'm going to apply to 20 places. I just loved Ram and Neelakant, the senior colleagues I alluded to you and they came from Case Western Reserve University and they said, you should really go there. And before I knew it, I was admitted, I was going there. And I go there after six months, I quickly realized, you know, they do some interesting things, but maybe all the things they do, they don't interest me. And so I had a choice that I dropped from the program and go to another program. But then I realized, even if I go to another program, formal coursework is going to be one and a half years to two years. So after that, you're on your own, basically, working with advisors, of course. And that was when I raised the most important thing is, you got to be able to teach yourself. And here again, the generosity of colleagues plays a role. And there was another graduate who was on the verge of, became an assistant professor. He joined my committee. His name was Mohan Redding. And he was a man much older than I was, much more in folk, but at no point did he ever say, hey, these ideas are crazy. They're outlandish. He would always listen to me and much to our surprise, we even wrote a couple of papers together and kind of did fun things like that. And then I eventually chose a dissertation topic for which I didn't do any coursework. It turned out, I was sitting next to the accident of office allocation. I was sitting next to people in operations research. There were a lot of Indians in that lot of Turkish people, a lot of Algerian stuff. And I remember once I was at very dumb terminal in those days, we needed dumb terminals to access the deck 20. So I'm looking there and you know, wondering what to do and suddenly there is this voice that comes and says, honey, what are you doing? Yeah, like trying to understand these positive rate models and parametric distributions of arrival times. He said, I can teach you. He looked at him and I said, how do you know this? And he said, well, I'm from IIT Bombay and my undergrad thesis was on the failure pattern of gearboxes in 5000 BST buses. So immediately he pulls up the data. He teaches me things and it was amazing. So it does take a village to create a career is the point I want to make. And then all these chance events that all kind of come up together and we tell ourselves stories where we're the heroes of the stories and I wish I could tell you such stories, but it's funny you and I are talking about careers. Ethnologically career means a road or a race so at least in French in it. And the answer actually also defines it as your journey through life. Yeah, that exactly. That is exactly the point. And I think you hit the right thing on the main which is it's journey and not a destiny. I think we're in the moment we think of careers as destiny. How do you sort of make sure that at different stages in your life as you go through obstacles and everything? How do you make sure that you continue to have that kind of mindset that you think about it like a journey, not a destination? Well, the first thing is you kind of realize that at least in my case and I would say that's maybe generalizes to other professions too. What is my job as a professor? Abhiji, for me fundamentally it is to be curious. It is to be chat. It is to incubate curiosity and generosity in our stories. And so what you do in your job is it's all about being curious and generous on the job asking questions, looking at research possibilities. Take, for example, the process to write a paper. It takes about six, seven months of hard work and research and analysis and you're trying to make your results go away because other people will be skeptical of what you've done and you want to kind of make sure it meets a high standard of rigor. So, need patience and you can't say I'm going to write this article and I'm going to actually publish it in this journal. Oftentimes, when we begin a research project we don't even know which journal we're going to send. All that you're thinking is is this a good question? And for me, the way I think about investing in good questions is does this question confuse me? And if I talked about the research that I'm studying or doing if I talked to my mom or my grandmother will they understand it and will they be interested? Of course, my wife is a professor too of gerontology and she understands research. I have to tell you Abhijeet and our listeners and the audience I've given some papers to my wife the person who loves me the most and she's fallen asleep on some of my papers. I didn't care why she made me feel more boring then really I spent six months showing there was this non-monotonic relationship or whatever cubic relationship between X and Y she says who gives a shit and you know when the person who likes you the most is falling asleep he got to kill this like the shit and the water life to be honest with you is killing ideas too. It's not like pursuing every idea that you have you got to kill a bunch of good ideas so you put energy into greater ideas and I think that's really what to mine mine continually renews the career most of all continually renews your curious and the generous some of these things now I learned from my PhDs too they go to many more advanced classes in computational linguistics than I have I don't have the time to do that I wish I did I study on my own but in a research project we're all doing this together I know what they're doing and every time I do any of these new techniques or whatever it is I always say a prayer to my mom who was a high school math teacher she really taught me some foundations though I didn't appreciate her at that time now I do obviously so the reason I'm sort of sharing all of this is so many things going to a career so many things going to a journey and I think the reason you go in a journey is your period your name is all about you know conserving knowledge protecting knowledge Haya Griba the you know the deity is actually doing this and you are also you know pursuing academic which is interesting because there is also sometimes I wonder that people how does that name influence the choice of careers and I wonder whether that happens couple of things sir just for the benefit of our listeners you know talking to professor Haya Griba Rao better known as Hagi Rao Hagi is written there's two fabulous books one is called Killing Up Excellence the other is the book which I recently read which is called The Fiction Project brilliant books I absolutely recommend that you take a look at both of them and we are today sort of really talking about some of the things that I learned in this conversation I've summarized for you down there in the ticker below that teach yourself you know what you don't know be ready to learn and teach yourself I love that phrase which Hagi talked about which is that you become an accident of office allocation you know he happened to be allocated an office next to somebody from a completely different team and that led to some opportunities and that it takes sometimes a village to create a career so so many people play a role in career the other line that I really took away today was that you know how do you treat your career like a journey and not a destination and of course the last one which I love the phrase you kill a good idea so that you can pursue a better idea you know and everybody says kill a bad idea yeah we all know that but the counter-intuitive thing today for me was kill a good idea so that you can pursue a better idea right right and the picture dialed down on two more things we spoke about the Frickschild project but I want to just share an insight from our scaling book and one of the things that our book on scaling talks about Abhijit is scaling is not more of the same scaling is reinvention I wrote a case study on the chief technology officer at Uber he was the CTO he's no known with the CTO a brilliant Vietnamese guy called Tuan and I remember asking him hey online have you worked for Uber and you know he said four years but it feels as though I worked for 16 different companies it was like startled by what he was implying is each year has four quarters in each quarter Uber was a different company and if we take that analogy to our lives and indeed our careers the most important thing is a career means reinvention I mean look at you Abhijit you're a great example of this kind of reinvention I mean sometimes when I sort of think about the avatar idea in Indian myth and philosophy I love the avatar concept because it kind of gives you flexibility for this reinvention but in order to reinvent oneself you need escape velocity otherwise you're going to be doing the same thing you were with Wipro and then you had to get the escape velocity to leave and do your own thing you know and I think all of us need to figure out in this journey a very important thing is making sure you're generating or paying attention to getting escape velocity because otherwise the gravitational pull of what you're always doing is a huge problem that makes us myopic so that's like one piece we poured ourselves into our jobs most of us do our jobs come soon and there was this young lady who told me this with a quiver in her voice Abhijit she looked at me and said Professor Ra poured myself into my job a lot of the job is doing bullshit work that exhausts and I said and she looked at me and that was when she had a quiver in the voice and she said when I go home she said I have nothing but the scraps of myself for life well I think that is stand and tragic that people build lives like this how can you build a life and a career and all that you've got are scraps for your family scraps of yourself for me in my own way I like to practice curiosity curiosity and generosity are not weights they're practices you got to do that otherwise you lose it and you know it's not like you have it and then that's it it's not like a bank bank it's like you've got to constantly replenish them and so what do I mean by so can you imagine coming in my case if I came home tired and my wife too being a professor she can zoom tired what kind of dinner are we going to have you want to say man let's actually make something quickest and fast which is probably going to be unhealthy unsatisfying so how do you create curiosity in fact we had this conversation during the pandemic so she was saying aren't you bored eating the same food I said that's a really good point she said what do you think mission do I said one one way to eat interesting food is to do randomization you said randomization how are you going to do randomization I said pretty simple I got an atlas we have an old fashioned physical atlas open the map of the world and close your eyes take your left or right index finger zap it on a point in the atlas we'll cook food from there so she closes and I zaps it turns out it's in West Sumatra he looks at me and says West Sumatra oh my god what are we going to do and it's in wait a minute West Sumatra was a bit like on the traffic path of how that went Indian traders and I'm sure there's a lot of influence and we found out there's a dish called the rendang that was specifically designed to last for voyages and I said let's kind of redo our version of the rendang we don't need to do the West Sumatran version so we did it and we loved it but the amazing thing though I legit was I never planned to do this after cooking the dish it spent like a week or two weeks reading about Hindu maritime empires in Indonesia and the great battle between the Sri Vidya empire and the clever ambush conducted by the Chola Navy in the Malacca straits that's how the Sri Vidya empire got destroyed and you know how would you like even come across them she was saying you know the odd you know and you're getting tied the Greek thought even Greek thought can you know you keep eating the same thing anybody will get tired of anything and I said you know well maybe we can do something a little different she said what would that be I said you know everybody thinks Vasco to Agama was the guy who to discover India I mean amongst the Portuguese and all then maybe he was the guy to discover and what they would obviously learn the sailors in Kenya who knew this people it turns out the first Western to discover India was in 100 B.C. it was a guy called Hippolus he'd figured out the monsoon structure so you start in Greece the southwestern monsoons will slingshot you into Kerala you wait until November the northeastern monsoons will slingshot you back to Greek I said imagine you're in Hippolus you're in Kerala you're missing Greek what would you make it's an interesting thought experiment right suddenly it opens up kind of possibilities you know half the herbs that you get in the Greek islands you can never get them in Kerala but there are new things what would you do you get simple thing like a Musaka how would you make it very different so my point is curiosity and generosity aren't just at like work it's in life and one of the things I talk about is make sure you recruit your best self at work at home that you don't do yeah I also know that you've got a huge sort of knowledge about different kinds of music you listen to a lot of different forms of music talk to me about your interest in that and you know how did you how did you build that I appreciate music I don't know how to sing I think the last time my sang was in grade eight in Kintri Vidyame and the Mrs. Sunderam who was the music teacher said I have to sing a song and they said what does Shloka do she said you have to sing this from a fill I'm thinking to myself oh my god this is like a tall order Mrs. Sunderam was a spencer of 50 years at that time so this was the time of Arath Abhijit I'm giving you my age here I must have been a boy of eight or 10 or whatever it is and I'm looking at Mrs. Sunderam and saying Rukputera Mastana Mrs. Sunderam said stop immediately I'm going to give you a pass grade please never sing this song again she said she of course was a baron but the thing is sell expose me to many different pieces of music like Jitu there the rock and roll and all of that but the other thing you see I think people kind of are doorways like you know when I've lived in America and then now for like close to 40 years one of the things we all do is we talk with our parents and I discovered that you know the conversations of my mom were like becoming mom how are you like I was doing yesterday then you can't let me this conversation is going nowhere like I'm asking a series of pro-comer questions and she's replying in kind and it's kind of uninteresting and then I knew that my mother loved karnatic music and then I had you know I need to create another channel of composition so then what I would do is like we're doing the now we would do it on FaceTime or WhatsApp or one of the two or Skype or whatever play a piece of karnatic music and I say mom do you remember the raga sometimes she would sometimes she would forget but what I realized was just the act of me playing the music allowed her to tell me find stories about her child and that made her happy when you really think about careers and you know all of this we're all about our stories I mean I take your stories so we aren't going to be a unique human thing you are basically you might but like otherwise they might make anybody else take away my story and I think the thing we have to think about is life is actually about constructing our story and continually editing it's not like you write a story and they buy you know I've done it once and that's kind of it but you're you know constantly editing the story and that's kind of the reinvention that's sort of what in many ways your wonderful book career 3.0 kind of gets at that because we learning the ability to edit and re-edit so in short it's kind of funny we think of ourselves as authors of our stories and of course we are in one sense but other people are authors too but we are editors and chief of our story and so I love that life you do well I'm glad you do you know because that's kind of who we are right you're the editor and chief of your story and that's kind of what being in charge of your career you know there is actually a professor Professor Wilson at the University of Virginia and the technique he uses for people who are abecks and convicts and so on is the way to get them not to repeat the crime is to help them understand the story and give them the freedom in the agency to change their story to edit and so let's think of ourselves as editors of our story wow that's really powerful and that applies you know in multiple ways if you see yourself as you know as whatever I you know I started my career in June resources and I never ever thought that I would be a writer and that I sort of you know had to go at writing media media and there was great fun and I enjoyed that process that opened up a different chapter of my life altogether on that I recall reading that lovely book of viewers and the way when I read it it seemed to me that what you were doing is you were getting escape velocity if you will out of your role and out of the excel experience and you had to write the book and say you know when you know I'm awakening my skeptical curiosity skepticism is one form of curiosity similarly when I thought that you know would I ever become an entrepreneur and I know you teach entrepreneurs at Stanford I always you know grew up with this phrase that was always told that you know oh Bengalis can never be entrepreneurs and I thought gosh that's a challenge and I must try it out someday and I'm sort of so excited about that whole possibility of being an entrepreneur and that's really something but I sort of found that you can weave yourself in and out of different career journeys like you know to be an employee at some stage to be self-employed to be back as an employee back as an entrepreneur really that's exactly it and all the time we're reinventing ourselves because if you don't reinvent yourself we become kind of stagnant I'm kind of boring you know I want to leave our viewers with a story of an extraordinary woman who reinvented us we went to New Zealand you know we were doing some kind of cruise and you know there was a young Indian girl and she was just by herself she looked at my wife and me and decided we were kind of Indians too my wife is a wonderfully generous person who loves to talk to and eat sometimes I kind of say like do you really need to do that but then other times I always tell her I'm so glad you did because I learned about something I never knew anyway back to this young girl so she asked us how did you meet and we tell her we met in grand school and this and that and she was so we said what brings you here to New Zealand and she must have been 20 and she was a hot-rending still her parents were in the travel agency kind of business international travel she was like a Jain she got married to a guy who was a schizofer and nobody told her that her husband was going to be a schizofer her parents didn't know that the in-laws obviously conceded and here's this woman who was married and you think I got to take her to this block for the next 40 years and it's like I had no vote in the process fortunately her parents were amazing they said you don't need to do that we made a mistake you should take over the travel business and what was the travel business she was doing she would actually target to high net worth Jain families and orchestrate vacations to places where Hindi movies had been shot New Zealand was one such target wow she said that's what brought her to New Zealand I said but what brings you to this city she said oh I came here to she was 20 well 21 she said I came here to negotiate with the Hilton and I said negotiate what and she said well I'm coming with the 50 or 60 very particular vegetarian Jains and we come with our own Maharaj who actually cooks and so we want to stay at your hotel but we want lunch and dinner and breakfast prepared by our own chef and the first reaction of the hotel apparently was to sing non and then this young woman asked what would you have said if I had belonged to the Jewish community and said that I came here with 50 people belonging to the Jewish community and we only want to eat kosher food ordinary people can't make kosher food you have to be blessed by the rabbi et cetera et cetera you would probably say yes to the credit of that hotel they changed their policies there she was unbelievable I mean no you're not insane you know 20 years you're going to be stuck with this guy you didn't know from Adam and now you're set free what do you do and I was like very impressed with her you know and then later I told my wife I'm so glad you chatted with her I think a lot of life is linked that we we admire people and I was once giving a talk in Bombay about scaling up excellence I think at this company any wise and you would know of the company and lovely people Vidya and Raseh Shah are the founders lovely lovely people so I get off the car and you know they have a beautiful terrorist something I'm like some 150 executives I was supposed to give a little talk and there's another lady who stops whose car stops or and she gets out of the car and she said ah Professor Rao Bhasan Bani Kibi I you've come here to give a speech I said yes and I said what brings you here so with pride she tells me many Bhasan Bani Kibi I've come here to give a speech she said wonderful and what is the topic you're talking she looks at me smiles and says the right to pee I said excuse me I knew what she said but I didn't want to reach the conclusion that the second time she smiled and said right to pee and I said excuse me and then she knew that I didn't want to commit to an understanding and she then turns to me in Hindi Pishabh Karnika Haq if I remember so she's like come on and I said oh my god I said Pishabh she said and then she goes before me I want tears in my eyes she grew up in a Muhalla in Mumbai but I didn't know this in the community of Angela in the Bhasan community she belonged to after puberty you couldn't yet use the bathroom there was no bathroom inside the house you had to go out and after puberty you had to ask your dad's permission to go out we can imagine then to go and pee or to go to the bathroom like I don't know about you but like I would think of that as a serious kind of limited freedom I mean in the end you can't eat and you're not free to take a leak or go to the bathroom I mean I don't know what kind of freedom you're talking it gets manny then then thinks oh I can do this on my own and much to her consternation she has to ask her husbands to approve she fires the husband and she launched a movement to get the municipal authorities in Bombay to build 200 bathrooms for women so I just stood up after her and I said I don't think I can talk what is it I can tell you about scaling up look at how she's scaled a dream into a movement I'm always very aware that you don't learn just from other professors other executives you learn from just about anybody I think the more we kind of realize that I think the more open we are it's not just you know people in companies and people who are like opinion gurus or whatever you know it's like anybody can teach us in fact you know there's a lovely tumbrie I'm a big fan of the tumbrie music from India and I fucking the exact in the words and the tumbrie features of course you know the tumbrie is a song form of a music sure sure mostly Krishna and Radha and various other things in this tumbrie Krishna crosses the river and there is the boatman who helps him cross the river at the end of the journey when Krishna reaches the other bank Krishna is taking out money to pay the boat and that is when the boatman kind of said something which was I thought phenomenally inside so he tells Krishna How can this happen? Have you ever ever been angry with me? I take people from one shore of the river to the other you you take people from one shore of life to one Oh lovely you little beautiful thing he says How can I take money from you? Some don't do to ek hi biradri me look at how brilliantly it reduces the distance between Krishna and the boatman I know I always have loved that tumbrie it sort of speaks to me and learning and listening and you learn all kinds of crazy things I'll gardener Felipe you know often we sit and chat and it tells me stories of how they make Biria with goat in Mexico I said how do you make it? and he said well the little kids chase the goat around and they said really why do they do that? and he came up with a theory that I'd never heard before he said you know if you want to be chase a boat for a long time a lot of the toxin toxins come out as sweat and so the animal actually is a better animal thing now I don't know whether it's right or wrong but it had the wonderful quality of being close yeah and the careers are you know our journey through life is all about exploring different stories that we hear and we are all made up of stories you know so yes that is of course so powerful we are coming up at the end of the earth and I think it's been fantastic you know hearing your own career journey looking at all these lovely books and some of the things that you shared which you know I'm going to really keep out there I've made those notes some of the things will always stay with me that you know how do you treat your career like a journey and not a destination kill the good idea to pursue something better curiosity and generosity are practices not traits thank you so very much for sharing this indeed very grateful and that's one of the best things about doing this podcast is I get a chance to learn from people I would have otherwise never met in my life you know so and likewise and likewise and I think but that's the point of conversation right to exchange story but when message your audience is remember be the editor-in-chief of your store and make sure you don't bring curiosity and generosity just to work make sure you bring them home absolutely thank you so much once again I appreciate your taking time to do this absolutely thank you if you have any questions you have my email there drop me an email and we'll be in touch