 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're joining us from. My name is Abhijit Badri. I work as a talented brand strategist and I'm the author of the new book, Career 3.0, where I talk about how careers are changing in this world. In this podcast, we talk to amazing people following their career journey and we usually think that career journeys are very straightforward parts. You learn, you earn, you retire. The guest today actually will tell you that it is everything but that. My guest has been a first generation entrepreneur. He's an Indian entrepreneur who's also known for his philanthropy. He's an opinion leader at least written two fabulous books which we will talk about and without any further ado. Ronnie, hi, welcome, welcome, hi, hi. Thank you for joining us and Ronnie, you've always talked about in your books, you've talked about you have no sense of entitlement. You came from a lower middle class background. You pursued theater, you became an entrepreneur and then you sort of got to make it really big. What does it mean when you say you have no sense of entitlement? Well, maybe your last sentence I'll correct and thank you for having me on the show but you're looking forward to the interaction. Just to comment first on the and then you made it big. I think that's work in progress. There is no benchmark for that. It's a very subjective thing. Perception takes much more than reality but I think for me growing up with the background that I grew up with then choosing a career path to be an entrepreneur and time where it actually wasn't really celebrated to be an entrepreneur and you didn't have the resources to actually do it versus today I think entrepreneurship comes with a lot of entitlement. If you think you have a great idea you should get somebody else. 99 of the people I meet don't want to start unless they get their opening funding because they didn't have the luxury at that stage. So when I say lack of entitlement it's about when you come from a background and you believe that I went into it without resources, without angel funding. I think the context is that if you are at base level and if you have a lower sense of entitlement it actually makes your runaway much much much much more longer because then you look at every lens, every challenge, every failure from a very different point of view. Does working hard make up for lack of talent or lack of ideas or whichever? I don't think so. I don't personally think so. Definitely need to work hard but I don't think it's a trade-off. You do need to work hard in spite of everything else not in lieu of anything. So it's a more recombination of talent, hard work, opportunities, funding and how you scale up, work with people. So it's a very complicated equation but I would say it's a very committed ecosystem. If you're all in, if you start going to have doubts about I want to try this out for a couple of years and let me see, I think you're in the wrong pocket. If you're going to ask the question of work-life balance you're in the wrong place. And when people start working in a large setup to learn the ropes and then become an entrepreneur is that a good part to follow or I think all of us wear the choices we make? So if you're working in a place and you're successful but now you feel burnt out or you feel at a crossroad or you feel you have the highest capability and why the hell should I be doing this with somebody else? And I want to do this for my own. That's the motivation. But at that stage, two things I think that would need to play. One, don't start by saying, let me try this out. Look, I'm in my 40s. This is the right time for me to do this. When else am I going to do it? My risk appetite. And I'm saying, hello, hello, wait a minute. Risk appetite for what? To try it out for two, three years and I'll see where it goes. Worst case situation, I can always go back and start my new job. And I'm not a good senior that I said I failed in my enterprise which is actually a good asset because you picked up a lot of experience. So I would say if you're planning to give it a try, don't start. That's my personal point of view because you have to figure out that if you're switching tracks, you're doing it for life. The second one is you need to be all in. And I think that means, look, I've come with a set sense of background. I know exactly how it was when I ran a company or I was the CEO or I was the head of something else, whatever else. I think the quotient of unlearning is going to be whatever you thought it would be, it's going to be 10X of that and be prepared. So I think off the cuff, these are the two things I would say. Why is it so hard? What is it that's about entrepreneurship that is so hard that people don't talk about? We celebrate people who've succeeded and they of course come and talk about failures but I don't think it's a wall. Just because I said those two, I'm saying optionality will allow you to have an exit door. So don't allow optionality. And the second one is from that perspective, just be all in because it's going to take that. I don't think it's hard. I think in many ways, a job is harder or a career path can be harder because there are no guarantees there also today if you look at it. So everything is hard. Everything is hard in life. I don't think anything is easy in life. So to me, I'm not here to spook anyone. I'm just saying if you unlearn is very, very important because actually when you're coming from a large company and you're extremely successful, trust me, you're coming with a lot of entitlements in your mind. This is what I used to do. This is how it was. How can this happen to me? It is going to happen to you. And you let the face up to that. At that stage, you're not going to be in self mode or feel anything from that perspective. So I guess I'm not saying it in a spooky manner. I'm just saying it in a very down to earth manner that that's really the challenge. When you started, what was it like? You wanted to be an entrepreneur. Was that your stated career choice? Did you think that this is what you will do and was your family supportive of it? So three things I think one is, it was tough because it was an environment in which, no, it wasn't something aspirational. It was almost like, oh, you didn't get yourself a job. So now you've got to start working for yourself. And there wasn't any element of VC or angels or venture capital or any such people existing at that time. So there was no question of an ecosystem of getting funded. Second, was it my career choice? I would say, I think at a very early stage, I just realized that maybe I'm not the best person to implement somebody else's vision, which actually when you're in a career and a job, you're part of a collaborative team. And anyway, when you're building your own company also, sooner or later, even as the founder and CEO, you'll have to build a lot of collaboration. But to me, that was my penny dropping moment that I'm just not going to be very good at implementing somebody else's vision. And see from our parental support, I would say I got the right support and understanding that there are many, many, many households in which it's almost a no, it's a flat no, or a crossroad where you have to take a call or whether the family is someone who's going to be supportive. So there was a sense of support. But I think the two things they said to me at that stage were, do you not want to just finish either your management or your business MBA or a charter of accountancy and then get into? And at that stage, I said no, because that's a plan B option to me. And I knew that if I had it by the time I'd finished that, I'd already be thinking about a career and a job in a different manner. And I think to that extent, I was very clear that if I didn't have the optionality of actually getting a job at that stage, I would be able to hold on here much longer. And the second one I think is what my parents told me that finally, if you want to do what you want to do, we're with you, but please understand that we're only with you in spirit because if anything goes wrong, financially, we're not going to be able to bail you out under any circumstances. And that kind of grounds you at a very different level. And yeah, I think once you've gone through that phase, whatever you do in life and whatever your failures and whatever your setbacks, whatever your disappointments, you know that if ground zero is that, it can't be that bad a place. The good part about an entrepreneur and the resilience that people keep talking about is that your definition of ground zero is always a very realistic sense. If I started my career and in the first three months I got $100 million in funding, my ground zero would be very different. And then I think it'll be even more challenging to get to the next level. That doesn't mean I'm saying that somebody who gets $100 million shouldn't take it. I'm just saying there's a sense and that comes back to the entitlement context. You've done a lot of work in your philanthropy and looking at helping people get started in terms of a career. If you ask a person in their twenties in the urban area versus a rural area in India, is the answer different when you ask, what are your career plans? What do you want to do? Yeah, I say they're very different because aspirations are different. And aspirations are different because when you're in a surrounding where you feel you're not in control of your own destiny, which comes when you don't have that self-sufficient livelihood that may come in rural India and you're much more on government grounds, then you're not in control of a destiny. So then your aspiration does not allow you to think outside that box. Whereas even a certain sense of the ability to be able to learn and do whatever, I think it comes in a very different sense. You know, are those opportunities changing in rural India? Do people want to do different set of things? You know, I met someone the other day who said, I was in a taxi and this person said, my kid wants to be a YouTuber. This is not a choice that you heard very often earlier. You're a really very successful YouTuber. Is that a kind of a shift that you see or is it a one-off? No, I think the shift is the younger generation do not want to necessarily flow in the eyes of whatever else. And the fascinating and good part is that the older generation are quite proud that, okay, I didn't make it. I couldn't do this and I'm really excited that my son or daughter is being able to do that. So that's a very positive feeling. There's a very positive feeling. When you look at career stages, you know, you've looked at, you've got employees and you've been an entrepreneur. Do you think the set of skills you need to be an entrepreneur and an employee, are they the same? Do they have an overlap or are they entirely different? No, I think there's a lot of skill sets that are the same because at the end of the day, you're building an organization. The only thing is you're building it from scratch. Whereas if you're an employee, somebody else built it for you to a certain extent and then brought you on. But otherwise, I think the same level of leadership, the same sense of collaborativeness, same sense of being able to hold on to team building, the same of being able to express your vision. People come to join companies, not just for payrolls. They come because they inspire. They're inspired by vision. They're inspired by entrepreneurs. They're inspired by a CEO, a leader, their boss, whatever else. And I think that remains constant whether you're a large company or a small company or a big company. And I think today there's no definition of a small company in that sense, right? Because if you've got a vision and you're growing at 100-200%, the chances are in size and in absoluteness, you're gonna be definitely very, very different than some of the other well-established companies. So I think career parts today are, the optionality in career parts is huge just based on that. And in your book, Skillet, Kill It, I loved that book, by the way. And I really think everyone should read it. It's such an amazing book. I like it slightly better than your previous one, which was also fantastic. But I like this one. The first one I wanna talk about failures because no one, people don't talk about their failures. This one was more because when I found it up grad and started that out and go for outing it, I realized that a lot of people lacked the soft skills. And so my focus was on soft skills. You know, this term soft skills gives people the view that what is really hard is how do you pick up accounting or coding or whatever? And the other stuff like working with people, et cetera, is really easy. So it's a soft skill. So there's a problem with that terminology. How would you define it? And what do you think are some of those skills that people should be building? So I mean, at the core of it in your professional life, whether you're a leader or a manager, even if five people report to you or 5,000 people report to you, you're a leader. Just because five people report to you doesn't mean you're less of a leader. Yes, of course, the load is different. But at the core of it, as a leader or a manager, you need to connect. And I think for that, there is no textbook that gets you that. And it's something that you have to be able to figure out how you connect. And most people think connect means I need to have the gift of the gab or I need to be something really good at whatever else. Or I need to have the right diction of the action to talk fluent English. Actually, that's not the case. Incredibly smart tech people have been able to connect. Just connect with teams and inspire people. So connect means the ability to communicate, the ability to inspire, the ability to be able to get the best out of people, the ability for everyone to feel, wow, we can change the world, the ability to innovate, that if you have that quotient and everyone should have that quotient, then actually whatever is your strength, you've got a three X power behind it. And that to me is the most important part. We're having this conversation here and the reason you invited me here to a certain extent is also my ability to be able to communicate and connect and flow and have this conversation and not necessarily have prepared for it. We're just having a very impromptu conversation. You haven't framed any questions that I've known from before. That is something that I think has to be built with everyone. And you're not born with it, but neither is it something that everyone should not have. How did you go about building this capability which you obviously have an abundance? So I would say one out of necessity because I didn't have a huge qualified background. I didn't do my management then and didn't do my charter currency. So I was at a grassroots level in terms of education. Second, I was at a resource scale where I didn't have the financial resources that can actually get you somewhere. So at that stage when you're starting out and being on your own, I realized that the ability for me to be able to tell my story and get people to get convinced about me and not what I necessarily stood for was very, very important. And I think I worked very hard at that. Second, I would say yes, my early days when I did a lot of theater as a hobby definitely helped me because when you're in front of our audience about 1,000 people, there are two things that get tested there. First, your collaborative skills because you have eight more people on the stage. If you say one wrong line, everyone's off you. The whole setup goes away. And second, you've got to get your timing right and if you're not connecting with 1,000 people, they laugh at you and not with you. So I think that training that came there and the confidence that it gives you to be able to be that with the rhythm. And the third one is it taught me the element of the importance of really rehearsing and rehearsing and doing it all over again. That means that parenice because I think we rehearse for six weeks. And then just when you think you got it right, the director says, okay, let's take it again. You're saying, well, we just took it nine times this evening and I want to get to bed. And he said, no, let's do it one more time. That's when you realize that there's a reason for that 10th time. And that is about the element of the right level of perfection, the right level of tonality that what you're seeing comes so second nature to you that now you can give your best by actually connect or looking at skills that people are building besides this, what other skills do you think become really important for people to succeed in their career choice? Whether as an entrepreneur or as an employee because some of my viewers want to be entrepreneurs. Some of them want to be employees and are happy doing that. Oh, yeah. Firstly, I think that's its phenomenon. In your career path, I don't think you have a choice and you don't need to be a great communicator and a connector only if you're a professional only if you're an entrepreneur. I think the parts are applicable for almost anybody whether you're running your own business or you're part of a large company or you're part of a small company. The communication skills, I think come at the core and the ability to connect with that then comes the multiplicity. I think you've written that in your book with across six settings and six chapters. And I think that's pretty much what is needed across the board but it's different strokes for different folks. You've identified six to the 30, 40 of them. I think everyone has to find their comfort of the three or four things that allow them to be defined as a person and as an individual. Some people may just feel I'm not speaking up at group meetings. I'm the quiet guy. Every time I feel like saying something I'm not quite sure about whether it may sound stupid. You have to break that mold. You can't necessarily be the quiet person in the room in whatever else. So your ability, your self-confidence sometimes may be the most important obstacle that you need to do. At the end of the day, for me, if I'm here today, it's because of my self-conviction. When people say failures, what's the recourse to failures? It's just self-conviction. It's like, okay, yeah, this really, really, really went wrong but I'm quite clear that I'm around. I'm not going anywhere. That requires self-conviction. So for a lot of people, I think just tanking up most of the time on soft skills is very, very important. You've spoken about failure in your first book, Dream With Your Eyes Open. When do you look at that? I mean, you obviously got a point of view about how do you build that resilience? What have you seen working with people and does it change from person to person? Yeah, I think it changes from person to person. It's very, very clear that it would need to because I think most of the time people are more fearful of failure than failure. I've seen people who are comatose and they actually don't actually fail. They think they've failed but actually they've not actually gone out and failed and therefore that's the biggest failure of them all. If you're so taken by the fear of failure and the coma of that, that's really been the biggest challenge for a lot of people because I think most of the time the question you need to ask is what's the worst case scenario? Like what is the worst case scenario as far as that is concerned? If you can handle that, I think you should be doing whatever you necessarily want to do. Second, if you don't look for failure, failure is gonna come looking for you in any case, right? And even in your job, they're gonna come looking for you. There's no guarantees because if you think you're gonna fly under the radar in the 21st century, there's no such thing. You're gonna get noticed for non-innovation. You're gonna get noticed for non-wristaking. You're gonna get noticed possibly for indecision because at the core of it, if you're fearful of failure and you say, well, why don't I not step out of rank? You're gonna be in the bottom 30 percentile of the company and that's gonna stand out. So you don't have a choice. The norm and other stuff that people say that failures is always good and you learn from that, of course you do, there's no question about that. And lastly, is it cathartic at that time? Yeah, it is. But chances are, and I would say that you will narrate the story of your failure six months later with a cup of coffee in your hand or in a sense of a laughter. So if you can just visualize that six months later when you're gonna be articulating this cathartic moment at that stage with three friends over a coffee or on a walk, you realize that it's not as bad. And at that moment, there are about a million other people who are making some other failure of their own in the first place. Have you failed? Yeah, I mean, failure as a definition sounds almost like a finite thing. It's not finite. Am I made multiples and multiples of wrong decisions? Absolutely. Have there been summary situations because failure to me has to be defined in a particular manner. Failure sounds like an endpoint, right? Like, oh, this was over, kaput. Normally failure means at that point, something didn't work. Two days later, it became a setback because you're already starting to figure out how to change that around. So you move from failure to setback then to learning experience and then you move that out of the day. So that would be one way I would answer. The second one I would say is my failure ratio is about eight is to two of success. And that sounds like, wait a minute, then I shouldn't be even around, right? But I think when you fail, it's a minus one X, whatever that is, whatever risk you took on that, it could be an investment, some money, a decision, a wrong hire, a right hire, a bad idea, a good idea. That's a minus one X. So if I have eight failures, that's minus eight X. Because I've been able to do that, I've found that the success, the high points of the success are 20X and 30X. And I don't think I'd be able to do my 20X and 30X on the thing that really went right if I didn't have a lot of graveyards of the minus one Xs. But at the end of the day, if I can get two successes, because I've had a minus eight X with eight failures, my successes have been 10X and 20X. And therefore the maths is in your favor. And you know, when you have looked at working in the media and entertainment industry, and you've sort of really seen it over the span of time in some senses, one could argue that you've even defined it in there, you know, your TV productions. And I remember seeing that in so many movies, it's sort of, you know, your familiar logo comes in. Where has that media and entertainment sector evolved? Where do you see it today? And where do you think it's going? I think the constant is really the consumer and people think technology is changing faster, but I think the consumer is changing faster than technology to ask me that. And technology is an enabler. And I think most of us have not kept track with the consumer, the consumer and the demographic, the age group, what do they really want to consume from the long form to the stories to what the stories are today to the element of short term, where I want to see it, how I want to consume it, do I want to see it collectively to the interactive one, which is really gaming the entire interactive part. And how sports has actually evolved as a major, major element of thrills, excitement and enthrallment. So if I wanted to see an Avengers, but now I can see a basketball game or a cricket game or a football game or a soccer game, it's giving me the same level of thrill. So I think sports has also moved into that. What I would call entertainment category in a different sense, it just gives you what you want to do. I think that's really where it's moved. The consumers move, the younger generation wants much more interactiveness. The peer-to-peer, what I've seen in the upgrade, for example, is that the peer-to-peer learning is redefined the way we learn, more than even the lecture wave in which we do that. And I think that one is seeing that the ability to the user generated, as people call it, and the way, yeah, unfortunately or fortunately, the largest media company in the world from a consumption point of view is YouTube. Now, is it the largest in terms of a recall of the fact that Disney does this and X, Y, that? But today, the word media has changed because Apple is a media company and Facebook is a media company and Amazon is a media company in many aspects and Disney is a media company. So I think that has evolved a lot and I think it's only gonna evolve very rapidly in the next 10 years, not because there'll be consolidation, but because the definition of media and entertainment in its original sense is actually quite in state right now. Of course, in my book, Career 3.0, I talk about three things that shape your career. One is the kind of work, which is, you know, in this case, we're talking about media sector that is changing because gaming and sports is now also becoming part of this. And I would argue at some stage, so will health and education and we can come back and talk about that in a bit. The second I talk about is the kind of skills that you have. So the sector you want to work in, the kind of role you want to do demands a certain set of skills. And then the third is the marketplace for the skills which is when you can decide whether you want to be an employee, you want to be an entrepreneur, whether you want to be a part-time person, whether you want to do three different things together, all of that. So it's this combination which shapes careers today as I talk about in the book. When you see media and entertainment going forward and if somebody is trying to build their career in this, what would you advise them? Nothing, it's huge. I think it's actually become broader, not narrower. Most people thought of it as either you're a content person or you're a production person or you're a creative person or you're a business person. You're either in the advertising or in the subscription. But now today it's 360 degrees, right? Because if sports, interactive gaming, media, live, experiential, and yet is all part of what is defined as media, the opportunities are huge. And I think the value chain is also gone to a much larger level. So it's broadened. You also see another large shift and we've seen that newspapers have been folding up. A lot of the well-known publications have either folded up or they are laying off people in large numbers. One of the things is that it used to be very advertising heavy. All that advertising has now shifted whether to point of sale like Amazon or to Google and Facebook, TikTok, leaving people with different ways of funding their enterprise. Two, I also think that people don't just consume news. They also consume news plus entertainment. They don't consume education. They're consuming education plus entertainment. You don't just consume health-related stuff. It is also health plus and entertainment. So I think entertainment and media is becoming that ubiquitous layer in all the sectors in every part of the thing. Is that something that everyone should build as a skill in themselves? I think we need to first understand that news as it's been doled out over the ages is no longer news. People want to hear it today. I think that recommendation engines come in there. You don't want to be told about the experience of a hotel or a city or whatever else. You want to hear it from 100 people and not necessarily read about it in the financial times. As exotic as that story would be. So I think this sense of an editorial or a one-way pontification, as you would call it, how you want to say what the world is about, I think that's changed dramatically. So I think the way people consume news is different. And then of course you've got the whole element of fake news, right? Which is the generativeness of being able to have agendas that can actually create something out of nothing then almost make it sound like it's the real news. So today credibility is at stake. I think if some media companies or newspapers are shutting down, I think it's also because to a certain extent COVID kind of slowed that down where you kind of jumped out of physical consumption of newspapers to a certain level. And then the second element is the more regional you are. So I think the world has changed in terms of how you consume information and news, but most of it you want to be told by peers. This whole world of editorials today, I think is quite arcade. I mean, we all love it and we'd like to see because we all grew up on it. But if you ask people for the real consumer, the real, and they don't want this one-way street of pontification. Which is why I was saying that, I think what you see happening in news and media is also happening in education. You have an education company upgrade. And you see that traditionally it was the sage on stage. The teacher sort of, it's a one-way, one-too-many kind of a model which has now become completely replaced by a peer-to-peer, you talking. I would not say replaced totally. I think most of, and I've learned that in media that nothing gets really replaced, but the supplementation and the augmentation is huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I used the wrong term, but you would know absolutely that you have the teacher in the classroom and then you kind of ask your friends, what was it about? And can you explain this to me in a different way? And then, you know, five of you sit together that work on this. I mean, that's been traditionally the model is just that now it has moved into many more sectors. I would imagine that is the model that's sort of follow for... Yeah, I think that we count on that as a model, right? That peer-to-peer learning will. And that doesn't mean that again, it's a massive augmentation because firstly, as a working professional, you didn't think that you were gonna go back to school, so to speak. That was more a bragging context. Like you arrived in life and you could take a year off to go back to school or to go back to specialize in something. It was almost like a luxury. I'm taking a year off to learn more. Today, it's an absolute necessity, absolute necessity, right? Because if you have not upped your game every three to four or five years in some form or the other, from a generalist to a specialist, from a specialist to a generalist, you know, a 360 degree approach. And I think that's really what has changed there. So you can't necessarily into a new work or must go back to school or go back to college. So your approach is much more of augmented learning. And I think that is where the peer-to-peer learning comes in because that's where you want that experience where you do wanna hear the professor's point of view, but you wanna hear five other point of view for sure. When you look at the education sector, what has traditional education missed because what you see around, you know, what is happening? And I was talking to someone the other day and I was saying that, you know, what you see happening with newspapers that, you know, newspapers have been folding up one by one. And of course, you see a similar kind of a thing happening with a lot of institutions. Their enrollment is dropping. People kind of talk about a lower employability. Has that model become obsolete? And going forward, if you were advising every business school or every university, what is it that you would want them to do? No, I think they should have a hundred year plan. They had a hundred year plan before and I would recommend they have the next hundred year plan. I think they'll have to open up to be a lot more pragmatic about that. And I think a lot of universities are doing that. So firstly, I have the highest regard and respect because those institutions are not going away for another hundred years. Whether we like it or not, there is a symptom where people say, oh, look what a computer looked like a hundred years back or wasn't even there to now. And everywhere we see this a hundred years back and now that you see the classroom and the picture seems to be the same and that it almost sounds like learning and education has been in standstill for a hundred years. And I would say, actually, that's not really the case because at that core level, you need to follow a curriculum. But the beauty of today is that it can inject a lot more in terms of augmented learning and specialization. Some of our approach to it is a little archaic. So I think there's a fair amount of disruption that needs to happen in the physical space of universities. And then everyone needs to accept and harness the ability that you're not going to be able to have that option and you come back to a physical space. And that an online space or a digital space is not just about content and a Zoom call or what we're doing right now here. It's a great deep learning experience and can take place. And upgrade that with the evangelists and we invest deeply in that because I think for a working professional, the optionality to augment themselves is no longer an option, it's a reality and a necessity and the ability for them to go back, take a year off is three opportunity costs. One, you're going to lose a year of salary. Second, you have to relocate to the place of the place which is the boarding and lodging because of that. And third is the fee. And I don't think people even want to take that risk because today the world is moving so fast that you're not even sure when you'll come back to your job in a year's time if you take it off because that's a voluntary one you want to do. And I think the other part is today, corporates are realizing that it's an expensive part. They're realizing that most people and they're hiring are not job ready for the job that they want them to do. And it's an expensive process, right? Because you're getting them in, you're paying them a salary, first three months you're actually training them in some form or the other and then hoping that you'll be able to retain 95% of them a year from now having invested the first three months in training. And that otherwise not coming through either. Therefore, these worlds need to meet at a much more harder place rather than everyone saying, well, this is not going to go away and this is going to go away or this is going to stay. You know, I've often wondered that when you look at YouTube it's probably one of the places that most people go to learn some skill or the other. A lot of content has been created there where people who are not trained in curriculum design or they are not instructional designers and yet they are the people who seem to be passing all the skills who know how to teach something. Is that something that you would agree or disagree with that you don't agree? I would disagree, I would disagree because I think it's a top-up medium. It's not a basic medium. It's a good medium and it'll grow over a period of time but just sitting and consuming content is not a reflective source. You know, tech talks are great but they'll get you to reflect, they're not. And yes, for evolved people, you're getting more evolved but if you were not an evolved person and you were then the tech talk, you're not going to come out of there because your ability to get the basics and to get the reference and to get them is not going to be that easy. So we take a lot of that for granted. So I think YouTube and the education medium there is top-up but just plain playing of content is not learning, it's not retention, it's not application in the longer term. There's nothing wrong with it but it's a top-up. You've talked a lot about the importance of storytelling and you are of course in the world of storytelling altogether. What is a story? How do you build that skill? How do you learn to recognize that you have a need to build that skill? I think all of us have stories to tell. The best stories are the underdog stories. I think we over-amplify that I need to be a good story teller. Actually, the underdogs have the best stories to tell. Some of the best stories that have stood out, some of the best books, some of the best, some of the best, what I would say, even movies are about underdogs. People who just came from a very hard background went through the entire grime and process. So I think storytelling, people think is a knack or a badge of honor or something you need to have. Every one of us have stories to tell. Now, you may think the way I tell the story is slightly different but that's not taking away from the fact each of us have strong narratives about our childhood, about our learning, about our failures, about our setbacks, about our relationships. So I have my story to tell. Actually, the more underdog it is, I think the more interesting it is today. The world has changed. If I come from a world of storytelling, both in our education in undergrad or in my previous undergrad, when I ran a media company, I would say that the commonality today for audiences, they want it to be contextual and real. If it was a suspension of reality in pure entertainment before, even today people want to see it with a sense of urgency. And they want to hear stories. I think some of the best stories of sports people are the underdog stories. So people who've failed actually today are being more celebrated and people want to hear about stories of failure. They want to know about it because then I can identify with that. The chances of me identifying with a successful story is very, very rare. I may like to hear it, but I can't identify with it. And if I give you 10 more failure stories, people realize that actually, no, I'll gravitate more. I'm more happy listening to failure stories not so that I feel comfortable, but it's just that I can relate to them. Yes, absolutely. And when people hear the failure stories, they also know that it is possible to build up your resilience and pull yourself up. I mean, I think that's why failure stories are so, so inspiring. And, you know, you work with a lot of film stars. Is it a good time to build film as a career, you know, to be an actor? Is that a career choice you would recommend to people? I've been out of this sector for the last 10 years because I've been focusing on education, but it's not that I don't have a point of view on that. I think there is no good time or bad time for what you want to do and pursue as your career. Whether it's in the creative field or whether it's in the education field or whether it's creating the next research project or in health or in artificial intelligence, I think it's only a good time based on your self-conviction and how badly you want to do it and how much patience you have to stay the cause to go through multiple failures before you get to the success. And I would say that creative functions, especially, you know, being a director or filmmaker, require an incredible amount of patience, but you're going to have to walk through many rooms in which you're going to get booed first before you get a standing ovation. If you're willing to pay the price for the standing ovation, go for it. Which is the one where you really cherish the standing ovation that you got in your films. Ah, in my films, I don't think anyone would give a standing ovation, but I think it's my proud moments. I think you make films also because you feel that's what you wanted to do. I think in the early days of our career, we did a film called Svanese, which commercially at that stage didn't do well, but it's really nevergreen story. Then we did a movie that actually changed the way I wanted to do storytelling, which is a movie called Rang De Pasanti. Then we did a movie, which talked about just the basics of life. You know, it was a very small movie in that sense and that broke out. So I think just incredible stories. In films, you see a number of people are very talented, some people who made it big. Are they difficult people to work with or are they easy people to work with? You work with them behind the scenes. What we see off and hear and read about them in the media, it may not be the actual thing. They're certainly not. They're certainly not the actual CEOs of companies. Are they easy people to work with? I don't think so. Elon Musk, I think he's a genius. Is he easy to work with? Not at all. So why should Tom Cruise be easy to work with if Elon Musk is not easy to work with? Why should Shahrukh Khan be not easy to work with when Bob Iger may be a tough cookie to work with? I'm just giving you that as an example that I think it's not a branded context. You could have a boss at a manager level that could be a very difficult person to work with. And there's an enigma you need to create, right? So obviously when you're in the creative things that media likes to create an enigma around you. But at the end of the day, you're doing something difficult. You're creating something out of nothing every single day versus when you've got a product line or you've got an offering, there's a process and a system. Sometimes each project is an origination of a startup. So imagine that you're in a startup almost every single day and you're in startup mode creating something out of nothing. But no, I think the simple answer is absolutely not. I think everyone from that point of view, you want people with the highest level of self confidence. That's when they're gonna really be able to perform. So you actually gotta fuel that, not figure out that what's my challenger. But I don't see in any walk of life when I've been through the entrepreneurial walk of life and the creative process where there's a label that creative people are more difficult to work with than CEOs, leaders, managers, and egoistical administrative person in the middle, anywhere, anytime, no difference. So it's really not about somebody who's talented, is expected to be difficult to work with. It's anyone, you know, there are people who are not that successful, who are not that talented, who are difficult. You feel so, yeah, but Saudi is finding a cure to Alzheimer could be a very difficult person to do that because he's just so obsessed and focused. Now, because he's so obsessed and focused, does not make him a very difficult person to work with. But it's actually, if he wasn't so obsessed and focused, chances are you're not gonna find a cure to Alzheimer's. So I'm just drawing parallels there. If somebody wants more people to the moon, they'll have to be difficult people to work with, get real. When you look at people in different career stages and just for simplicity, entry level, mid-level and senior level, and I want to talk about all three of them, do you look for different skills in people, you know, if you're hiring somebody at the junior level versus mid-level versus senior level, how does that portfolio of skills really change? I think the core of what one is hiring for, which is approach, attitude, problem solving and problem spotting skills need to be there ingrained in somebody. The scale will change when you're looking at junior because this junior, anyone who's junior and you don't have a career path for them that's gonna actually change that over two years and they're gonna take more responsibility, means you're hiring with a flat objective. So actually I'm not one that subscribes to too many layers because I think they're gonna have to bridge that gap. When I started off as an entrepreneur, I was not labeling myself as a complete fresher. Some of the people who are two years into forming a company actually overtake people who are 10 years experienced. I mean, five years back I would look for people who were problem solvers and at the right attitude. Today I look for people who are problem spotters because you don't have time to solve for a problem. If you can spot it, chances are because the solving part has now become almost where you go back to your own reference to context. So I think problem spotting is much, much more of critical and important today as a skill at problem solving. What is gonna change because of here when it comes to how we learn, how we teach, how do we build skills? It's an incredible tool. When an incredible tool comes into a sector which is otherwise harnessed in a lot of convention and a lot of calendar events and you can take that data and take it to the next level, I think it'll be very disruptive for the space. But is it the be all and the end all and the answer to everything else? No, I've seen enough of these. Five years back everyone thought the metaverse was really all three years back. I mean, Facebook renamed its company but everyone thought AR and VR, virtual reality and artificial reality and meta is gonna change that. Cryptocurrency was talked about taking all currencies and the US dollar out of the equation, whatever that. So I think that Hoopla always finds water finds its own level. So I think we're going through that and the two alphabets right now which is the buzzword around the world is AI. It's an incredibly powerful tool but it's been around for 20 years in many senses, right? Otherwise the sensor to what you want to do to everything that almost every machine was always there. Now it's called out in a very different manner but it's been there and around. The application and the urgency for which it's gonna get applied is gonna be the velocity of its movement to impact different sectors will be much higher. Therefore the innovation on it will be much higher. Therefore the acceptability from people who are really skeptical of saying does it replace me? The main problem for harnessing a new thing is if you feel insecure that it's gonna replace me the chances that you're not gonna adapt to it that can slow it down. But if you think this is gonna actually turbo charge me and make me look good and make me really be more successful. That's when everyone will harness it and I'm hoping that at least AI is something that everyone should look at. It's a very powerful tool. It's been around for 10, 15 years. It's just been evangelized to in a very different manner. You know, I want to shift the last part of this conversation to you as an individual as a learner and your habits and a lot of that. What does your day look like? When do you wake up? Are you a late riser? Are you at early burn on? Well, I don't know about early but I rise at 6 a.m. If that's early or not early because I know a lot of people rise at 4 a.m. I don't think I can do that. That cycle doesn't work for me. I think I need to see a little bit of sunlight when you're kind of waking up soon. So yeah, I'm an early riser at 6 a.m. I don't know whether that's there. I think every day is a different day. It's not a routine. I think at this stage in my life, I think half the time I have the liberty to be able to choose to do what I want to do versus what I have to do. And then the other half of the days goes into what I don't want to do but have to do. And I think that's pretty much the story of everyone's life. Now whether it's a 10-hour day or a 14-hour day or a 15-hour day varies. But I think when you're involved and you're switched on, so to speak, and you're all in. So I think today whether it is with my primary function today, which is where I've co-founded Upgrad to a little bit of the storytelling occasionally of doing something that I do in the act of creative and media to our foundation that my wife and I are deeply, deeply involved with to some of the sports teams that we own and to my own personal and alone time. I think it's just a really nice mixture. I think from the beginning I've been blessed with a lot of failures but I've also been blessed with being able to take my passions and make them into businesses. So that is something I have zero regrets for in spite of all the setbacks. You know, what is the skill you're trying to build in your search today? I think one of them is definitely focus. I think less for more is something that I'm focused on more. I think this is the stage in my life where I think less for more is becoming much more important. I think the value for higher impact much more ledger focus. I think if I've learned from so much of failures and I'm at that stage where I have that experience where my gut instincts are now matured through a series of the last 30 years of work, I think I owe it to myself, to my colleagues, to everyone else to be able to share some of those learning experiences. And yeah, I think my focus is less for more. What is your process of writing books? How long does it take you to write them? That's been quite impetuous actually. The first time as I said that was just, I heard a lot of entrepreneurs with a lot of sense of entitlement and a lot of people not moving on. They were still, and it sounded like me 20 years back and I said, but the whole world's changed. How come you all haven't? And so it was instinctively I did it. And it took about a year. And in both the cases, I had a co-writer because I think the effort of then doing a book then requires your full time. And I didn't want to give it the full time. And I think to that extent, I got a co-writer and my ability therefore to be able to talk it out. I think we spent three days together locked up where I said all my vision of what I wanted to do. And then I'd spend another four, five, six hours a week with them and we completed the book in about a year's time. And then cut to later when I did skillet, skillet. That was with a different crossroad because of Upgrad. You know, I do webinars and interact with a lot of our students. And again, I realized that they're so ambitious but they just lack some of those soft skill elements and they just don't get the obsession for hard skin without the right balance of scarf seals will actually make them slow down in their career parts. And that's why I wrote the book. That also took about a year. You know, you've done many different things in your career, you know, from theater to movies, to building organizations, to writing, to philanthropy. And I was looking at the long list of things. You know, it's really a poster boy for career 3.0. You know, before the term was invented. It's the one that you enjoyed doing the most. You know, it was you and everything else is good but not quite you. No, I don't think the not quite me has been there. And I think, you know, as my wife asked me, so what have been your highest moments in your life? And I said, actually, I haven't had that many high moments in my life. But you know what? That's also made me sure that I've never really had too many low moments in my life. I've sort of gone with the feeling of the phrase of all glories fleeting. And to me, that resonates a lot because when you move on, you do something and then you move on to the next. It kind of doesn't get you too many highs but it doesn't get you too many lows either. And you don't take everything so seriously. What are your dream of doing next? Well, I think I've got my plate full. I think just doing what I'm doing here and focusing on that is pretty much that. I'm not in the department of thinking what next right now. I'm definitely thinking of how deep can I go and what we're doing with our foundation, it can go on for the next 100 years. For the next 10 years, how do we lay that incredible foundation of what we want to do and how we look at giving back in a very different manner with empowerment. I think the whole learning, skilling, workforce development space, the career optionality that we're doing with up and down. It's fundamental and I wanna be part of the early stages of disruptiveness of what I want to necessarily do. The last question for you is that when you're talking about universities, you talk about they have had a hundred year plan and actually some of the universities, whether it's the Harvard of the world, they are 400 years old and they're sometimes older than the country in which they are there. And when you sort of look at the world today, so much is changing so quickly. Can you actually build a hundred year plan? No, I don't think you can build a hundred year plan. I think those are more, when I've said they have a hundred year legacy, maybe it would be the important way to define them. Yeah, no, I don't think you can build a hundred year plan, but you can have a vision of how deep you wanna go and what you want to do. So I think the vision needs to get articulated in the five year, 10 year basis. This whole phrase of saying I'm in it for the long term actually is not such a meaningful phrase in that sense. So I don't think from an operational point of view you can build that long term. I think the world is changing but it's not changing as fast as we make it out that it's changing. Because I think and I get surprised when everyone makes new year predictions every time and they talk about this, but the main point of that and I've said that often is when you look at the end of the year, nobody looks at the end of the year for the report card of what happened. The report card I can guarantee every year is more unpredictable than predictable things happened every year. So the question is how are you garner yourself for the unpredictable? If you can garner yourself for the unpredictability you can make a five year plan. If you're making yourself to look at anything else you should be making only a one year plan. Naughty, thank you. It's been so very refreshing to talk to you and I so appreciate it. And when people are trying to get in touch with you what's the easiest way to find you? Yeah, I think my LinkedIn connect would be a good way to go about it. And thank you so much again for being here. Thank you.