 Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning wherever you are joining us from. My name is Abhijit Bhaduri. I work as an executive coach and an advisor to organizations about their talent strategies. I am the author of this book called Dreamers and Unicorns, which is where you can see that in the corner there. And that is what inspired this particular set of conversations that I have with some really super interesting person. And that's the hint about my guest today. I'm going to talk to you about this book, which whose title actually intrigued me. The whole idea was that, you know, here is a person who's written a book which says that why do we want what we want? Yeah, isn't that intriguing? I mean, why do you want what you want? What made you want to become an engineer or a doctor or an artist or whatever you are? And then why is it that you, you know, during the pandemic, perhaps wanted to buy up, get a pet? You know, why do you want to wear a certain kind of a brand? What is the reason? This is the book that actually got me thinking about that. And which is why I thought that the best thing I should do is to actually invite this person to come over to the show and talk to all of us. And let's ask all the questions. So whoever is joining us, you know, please feel free to put your questions in the chat box and I'll bring it up. And thank you so much once again. And let's get started. Well, guys, my guest today is the author of that book, which I showed you. And that is actually Luke Burgess. Luke Burgess, did I get your name pronounced correct or did I murder it? You got it absolutely right. Thank you. Thank you. You got that perfectly right too. So Luke has written this phenomenal book, which Luke, you know, do you want to just show that book so people start to get familiar with? Sure. Well, I have a my version will look different because this is the US version of the book. So this is the book Wanting. That's, you know, I must confess that when I first had that word, mimetic desire, you know, and I said, what does that really mean? And then I kind of thought, does it have something to do with miming? Which, you know, when you see MIME artists and all that. So I said, well, let me find out. So I did look up the dictionary through confession. And then I found that, yes, it does have something to do with it. We'll talk about the book. But I wanted to first introduce you to my guests. And Luke, you describe yourself as an educator, as an entrepreneur and as an author. Three things. Talk to me about where it all began. Where did you grow up? Where are you joining us from now and everything? Sure. Well, thank you for having me. It's good to be with you all. I'm joining you from Washington, DC, where it's morning time for me. I'm already, I've been up for a while, though. I'm already on my third cup of coffee. I'm a pretty early riser. I'm from Michigan originally, which is in the Midwest part of the U.S. from a city called Grand Rapids, not far from Lake Michigan. Which, if you ever see Lake Michigan, it doesn't look like a lake. You would not know that you're not an ocean. It looks like an ocean. Yep. So I grew up on the shores of what in my mind was an ocean, but it's a lake. And ended up graduating from high school in Michigan and going to college in New York City. So I went to New York University, where I studied business at Stern School of Business undergrad, finance and accounting. Went to work on Wall Street after I graduated. So I went a very traditional route for undergrads at the business school at NYU. And I went into investment banking, where I worked many, many hours. I made pretty good money in New York and even spent some time in Hong Kong. I basically took a position as an analyst in Hong Kong because I wanted to see the world. So spent a lot of time traveling in Asia. China, Thailand, one of the big deals I was on was in Thailand. So I learned a lot during that point in my life, but I was not entirely happy. There was an itch that I hadn't scratched and I couldn't figure out what it was. I was making good money. But all of my friends were sort of ditching the investment banking world. And this was 2005. And many of them were quitting their jobs and starting their own companies, including some that I really respect. Some really ambitious, smart people that had plans to change the world and solve big problems. So as they started to sort of leave the finance world, I began to wonder if this is something that I might want to do too. So to make a really long story short, I left my job one day, the day after I got my bonus, and moved to California and sort of threw myself headfirst into the world of Silicon Valley. I never lived in Silicon Valley though. I was always in Los Angeles, but I used that phrase just to describe the world that I was in. All of the investors, all of the entrepreneurs I knew, we were sort of gravitating around these giant models of entrepreneurship that came from San Francisco, San Jose. Paypal was blowing up. Google and Facebook had just started at that time. I was still using MySpace back then actually. But so there was a lot of really fun stuff going on. And I started my first company, which had nothing to do with tech by the way. My first company was a food distribution company. So all we did is we took a healthy version of products that go into vending machines and we came out with a healthy vending machine product and we put these all over the country. And that was the first of four companies that I ended up founding or co-founding until my late 20s when I realized that the last couple of companies that I started, I became disillusioned with. Or I wasn't excited to go into the office every day, which is your own company. Still you weren't excited despite the fact that these were despite the fact that I had started the company. I grew bored with it after six to eight months after we'd sort of gotten things off the ground. And that was incredibly confusing to me. And one of those companies Fitfuel, e-commerce company that I'd started. I was in talks to sell to a major retailer, Zappos.com. And the deal fell through at the last minute. And when the deal fell through, I felt this tremendous feeling of relief, which was confusing, right? This should be something I'm upset about the deal fell through. What I didn't realize at the time was that the relief that I felt from that deal falling through was me feeling a sense of freedom that I could now sort of pursue what I really wanted to pursue. And that I had been actually starting companies for all of the wrong reasons. Becoming an entrepreneur just to be an entrepreneur is the worst reason to become an entrepreneur. It's not a good reason to start a company just so that you can sort of play a certain role, right? There needs to be a real problem that you're solving in the world. And I was doing that, but a lot of what I was doing was driven by a certain kind of identity that I wanted to have, certain kinds of recognition that I wanted to have. And I was sort of caught up in what I describe in my book in a vicious mimetic cycle where I was imitating people and things and never once considering the things that actually made me happy, brought me fulfillment, the kinds of companies that I actually wanted to start. So, you know, I was so driven by what was popular at the time that I was chasing goals that ultimately were going to make me miserable, even if I achieved the goal. And I wanted to avoid that so I stepped back from this sort of hamster wheel that I felt like I was caught on. Even though I had had success, I realized that I needed to step off of the hamster wheel and take stock of myself, get to know myself better before I moved on to the next thing. And that is when I was introduced to this fascinating thinker named Rene Girard, who this was over 10 years ago now, who really changed my life and I've been on this journey of self discovery and a different way of thinking about business ever since. And that's why I wrote the book because he helped me understand why people want what they want, why I wanted the things that I wanted. So where did you meet Rene Girard? I read Rene Girard. I went on a silent retreat actually. So I had five days where I was totally unplugged, no technology, no devices. I was in a silent retreat in a very remote location. And one of the gentlemen who was one of the directors of the retreat center, I explained to him sort of what was going on and what I was trying to figure out in my life. And he recommended that I read Rene Girard because I think he had diagnosed one of my problems. And just very gently, without saying too much, gave me a book by Girard and said that I should read it. And I went totally down the rabbit hole. I read everything I could get my hands on. He's not easy to read, which is why I wrote my book to try to translate him and make him accessible. But I thank God for him because he really saw something in me that I wasn't able to see in myself. And you talk about a time when you were in the heart of all the action, you were successful, you had companies. And you go on to something which is a silent retreat, which is in India we have this entire school which talks about silent meditation, which is called the Vipassana, which I'm sure you are familiar with. And so then it was some kind of a realization which led to that. What changed after that? What did you do differently which you wouldn't have done otherwise? So the first thing that changed for me was I had to sort of take an inventory of my life and understand the people that were influencing me in positive and in negative ways. And this is the core of what Gerard was saying in that book is that human desire is not generated spontaneously. It's not entirely my own. So the idea is that I'm a social creature as a human being. I'm in relationships with people that are close to me and people that are not close to me, people that I see on social media, people that I see on TV. I'm in relationships with all of them whether I know it or not. And they're affecting me in ways, most of these are unconscious ways that they're affecting me. And more than anything, they're actually affecting me at the level of desire of what I want. And Gerard calls these models of desire. So we rely on models, people in our lives that we're paying attention to that help us to know what to want. And I hadn't been aware of the models of desire in my life. Going all the way back to my parents, I never thought of them as affecting what I want. Now that I think about it, it's kind of obvious. My mom was an artist, so I naturally, she affected me in all kinds of ways. I've always gravitated towards art, but I never fully appreciated the way that she was a model of desire for me. And then the same thing when I got into college, I had models of desire that were modeling the desire to go into an investment banking for me. In fact, I was surrounded by them, but I sort of never admitted to myself how powerful my classmates were. And the people from Wall Street that they brought in to speak to us, how powerful, powerfully they were affecting me. So I sort of took stock of my life and I saw models of desire every step of the way. Good ones, tremendously positive models. And then models of desire that were just so influential to me that I would follow them no matter where they led me. They could be leading me to start a company or move someplace just to chase some idea of my life that was ultimately not even real or not even authentic to who I am. So identifying my models was the first step. And the reason that I think Silent Retreats are so wonderful are because they allow one to detach from the immediate world that we're immersed in. So we're fish swimming around in this ocean, not knowing that we're swimming in water, right? It's kind of that old parable of the fish who says, what the heck is water? When somebody asked him how the water is today, he says, water, what's that? That's kind of the way that we're all swimming in our own sort of world and we need to detach from that to be able to see it with clear eyes. So that experience of taking a sabbatical from my own company, from my own career and do that interior work that I needed to do, really allowed me to see how I was being pushed and pulled and gain some distance from it. And then to go back into it in a much more intentional way where I could intentionally choose the models that I wanted to influence me more than others. Fabulous. So I'm talking to Luke Burgess who's the author of the book Wanting. He's an entrepreneur, he's an author, he is also an educator and I'm really talking to him about how he came to write this book, which actually says how much of what you want is really what you wanted to do and not model based on what others think is good or cool or right or wrong. My question for you, Luke, is do you think it works more in collective societies like India is a collective society? So is it likely to be that we are far more vulnerable to what maybe the surroundings, the environment tells us to do? And the reason why I asked that question is, you know, when you look at the number of times when I meet people and I used to be working in a company, you know, some of these companies that I work for, employ literally thousands and thousands of people, you know, engineers. And very often when I would ask an incoming group of engineers whom we hired fresh off the campus and I would ask them, it was my favorite question, how many of you wanted to be an engineer and given a choice, you would abandon it, provided of course somebody says that okay, your living standards will not drop, how many of you would continue to do that? It's quite unbelievable and there was just a fraction of the people who would say I wanted to be an engineer and I want to continue to remain to be an engineer. Most people would say I want to do something which is more creative, I want to do something else, I wanted to do this. And they would very often say, when I would say that, you know, like I remember this conversation, one of the guys says I wanted to be a photographer, but my parents had become an engineer, then do what you want. So then I have spoken to people older, they also say the same things. People say, oh, now it's too late, you know, you've got your monthly mortgages and EMIs to pay, you can't do this. At the end of the day, your life is gone. So when do you really live for yourself? You know, what you just described Abhijit reminds me of a story of my friend Tony Shea, who was the former CEO of Zappos.com. Yeah, very, very large shoe retailer now a part of Amazon. And I want to tell you this story because sometimes something needs to happen in your life that sort of forces you or wakes you up and forces you to admit what's really important to you. And he had this brilliant tactic. And what he did was this when they had a new hire that went through orientation at his company, surrounded by other new hires. They had like a four four week orientation process and all of them were, yeah, yeah, yeah, we want to work for Zappos. This is great. This is the exact role that I want to be in sort of saying what everybody, you know, wanted them to say and wanting what everybody wanted them to want. And then at the end of the orientation process, the company would offer all of them a large amount of money with several thousand US dollars. And the deal was it's kind of like the game show, like, you know, make a deal, right? You can take the money and leave, or you can decline the money and stay. And they did this because it really helped figure out what people really want. So the people that wanted to take the money and leave would have never been a good fit anyway. It sort of forced them to admit what it was that they really wanted, right? Sometimes you don't know until you have to make a sacrifice what you really want. And in that case, the people that wanted to stay would have to sacrifice a short term immediate little windfall. So it was, I didn't know it at the time, but in a way it was a very sort of anti-mimetic tactic that Tony was using in order to help force people to reveal themselves and admit to themselves what's really important to them, what they really want. So I think things happen to us that give us a moment of clarity, a moment of truth. Do I think that sort of a more sort of collectivist society, you know, this might be more prevalent? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so necessarily is, you know, I'm in the U.S. and, you know, we think of ourselves as this very sort of individualistic society, right? But I think that the more we lean into that, the more we buy into that idea, the less we're able to admit how social we really are. And we sort of buy into this, what Gerard calls the romantic lie, and it's this romantic idea of our desires being totally autonomous, totally independent. And the more we buy into that myth of autonomy, the less we're able to see the way that we're influenced by others. So I happen to think that, you know, many of the sort of the circumstances I was born into, the traditions I was born into, there's a sense in which they're very beautiful, right? In which they give me context and they help shape my desires in good ways, you know, for the culture that I'm a part of. So, of course, they're good and they're positive and negative ways that they do. But the more that I thought of myself as independent in my life, the less that I probably was as I look back on it. So there's an interesting paradox there. And I haven't quite thought through how it plays out in other places because I haven't spent enough time. And unfortunately, I've never been to India. But I suspect that the gap is not as big as we might assume that it is. So does anti-mimetic behavior necessarily mean that you're being rebellious, you're being a contrarian? Is it that, you know, you're not following the herd, but you're doing something different any which way. If people are going left, you're going right, if they're going zig, you're going zag. Is that what it is? Is that, you know, the root of creativity? Is that your basic hypothesis? So the short answer is no. So we have to make a very, very important distinction here. So to be mimetic, when I use the word mimetic, which is, which does come from the word mime, it's a way of speaking about imitation. And imitation is not good. It's not bad. It's just we imitate languages. It's how we learn how to speak. It's how we develop culture. Imitation is not a negative thing at all. We imitate in very positive ways. If human beings didn't have this wonderful power of imitation, we simply wouldn't be who we are. Why do I not speak of imitative desire? And I say mimetic desire. Well, mimetic has a negative connotation to it, right? That's why Gerard chose to call this mimetic desire and not imitative desire. Mimetic desire is the kind of imitative desire that's usually unconscious. Well, we don't know that we're imitating and we're taking somebody else as a model and we're miming them without admitting to ourselves that we're doing it. So this plays out all the time, right? Very few people are willing to sort of admit their own mimesis or their own mimetic desire. So sometimes what happens is, you know, a person has a model of desire who they're imitating, but they would never admit that that person is a model for them or a rival to them. So you think, for instance, of a person who's a rival to somebody. And some people, the way that they deal with that situation is that whatever that person does, they do the opposite, okay? That person buys a brand new Tesla. Well, it's like, why could never own a Tesla because that person does. So I'm going to have to go buy an old pickup truck instead, right? That runs on gas. So we can get in these what I would call mimetic relationships with models of desire that lead to super strange and destructive and non-creative behaviors where we're just being contrarians. We're doing the opposite of them because we don't realize that we're in that mimetic relationship. So to be anti-mimetic does not mean just to be a contrarian. That's just what I would call mirrored imitation. There's nothing that creative about that, right? It's like, you think that, I think this, okay? That's not what I mean by anti-mimetic. To be anti-mimetic means to have the freedom to not be reactive and to not simply be responding to the models in our environment, right? To have some freedom to be able to act authentically. It doesn't mean whatever everybody else is doing, they zig, I zag. When I say anti-mimetic, I'm speaking of a certain kind of freedom to not be reactive to the environment that I'm in. And why should one not imitate others? What's wrong with imitating others? Because there are people we feel inspired by. I mean, there's this whole industry that runs on the motivational speakers who will come and sort of say, you got to do it, you got to do it and people then say, okay, maybe I can do it. And sometimes you get inspired by other people. What's wrong with that? Yeah, well, there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I think that the idea is being intentional about who the models are. And if I'm inspired by, let's say a motivational speaker, Tony Robbins. I listen to him and I'm really inspired and fired up. The problem becomes that if I want to be Tony Robbins, I'll never be Luke Burgess, right? So there's this point in which we have to become ourselves. And if the imitation to be like somebody else or to have their lifestyle or to be more like them totally consumes us, we're never sort of able to develop into who we are. And we all have very unique gifts and talents. We all come from specific circumstances and families. So part of the core of my work is frankly is like capturing that uniqueness and unrepeatability of each person, which emerges out of imitation. You know, we all have to imitate somebody. But for many people, especially in the world that we live in today with where social media is just pervasive for people at a very young age. Many people, especially many young people, are never able to actually detach from the hyper imitation, the hyper mimesis and spend time with themselves and get to understand how they're meant to develop their pathway for growth, which is going to be slightly different than anybody else's because nobody else has been born into the same circumstances as you, nobody else is you, nobody else has your DNA. But you know, and just as we all have have a biological DNA, you know, I sort of believe that we all sort of have have our own, I'll call it a sort of a spiritual DNA, psychological DNA, like a pathway of development that's never going to be quite the same. So there's there's a stepping out, and it can be a lonely place to realize that my my pathway for growth is going to be different than anybody else who's ever existed. And the image can only take me so far. So, you know, Luke, I just want to take a minute and reset the room. So for those who joined in a little late, I'm talking to Luke Burgess, and he is the author of this lovely book, which I read. Very unusual book, and I recommend you take a look at it. It's great to read. And it just set me thinking about how much of, you know, the things that we chase, the things that we want, how much of that is really what we individually want. I mean, what is it that is it something that I would have wanted to do? Or is it something that I'm doing because everybody else is doing it and I want to be seen as cool. I want to be seen with the crowd. I want to be seen as the in thing. And I want to be seen as hip and with it. So that's what really comes in the way. And I'm actually having this fascinating conversation with Luke Burgess. And, you know, for those people who want to actually check out his Twitter handle. And, you know, if you want to sort of do that, you can follow Luke on Twitter. That's what you can do. And the topic that we are really discussing is why do we want what others have. So, all right, look, now I'm going to switch gears. We are at the halfway mark. I'm going to switch gears and say, so how do we break this mold? I mean, how do we really what are some of the things that we can do to break the mold? You know, and one of the things in your book, I'm going to start the thing that really set me thinking, which was that, you know, when you think about your own schedule, you know, you kind of say that, okay, we work from Monday through Friday, we take that, you know, it's almost on autopilot. You know, we are supposed to hate Mondays. We love Fridays. We, you know, have those kind of rituals built around it. Every Monday you will see something called Monday Motivation and then there is all of it. You know, is it, are we like this because social media constantly is telling you, this is what is trending, you better be with it. Is that the responsible thing? I mean, scheduling is a great example. So when I quit my job, my traditional nine to five job, well, investment banking is not quite nine to five, but when I left the corporate work world and started my own company, I found myself working as the founder according to this sort of schedule where like, you know, not nine to five Monday through Friday. Oh, it's Saturday, you know, now I get to sleep in, you know, today's Sunday, I do certain things on Sunday. I was following this, this mold. And I started to ask myself, well, wow, this is deeply embedded in my psychology. I mean, and it's sort of been woven deep into some part of who I am, right, through, through these cultural norms. And it's crazy that I'm still following them. And I still think of the work week like this, even though I don't have, I mean, I'm totally free to work whenever I want to work. So it was just a realization that I had, right, of like how sort of mimetically we follow even things like schedules. So, you know, at a certain point, I mean, little things that I did, rather than trying to go to, you know, I live in Washington DC, we have lots of wonderful museums. I have the freedom. I'm very lucky. I have the freedom to go visit them at 11am on a Wednesday morning when there's literally nobody there yet. Because I was sort of, and I can work on Saturdays, right? And I often do that. So I often will just take a Tuesday or Wednesday and go do things in the middle of the day, rather than going on Saturday when everybody else is there. Same things with eating out with little things like that. And, you know, I have a very odd and strange schedule right now, but it's the one that I've sort of crafted after I've detached from kind of the mold that I was uncritically following for a while. So what's your schedule like? Oh, my schedule. My wife could tell you. I mean, I work off, I mean, I have certain times when I'm disciplined in order to write the book. You know, I had to wake up in those first two hours of the morning or were very disciplined for me. But then I'll basically, when I hit a breaking point, I'll just take, you know, two or three hours off. In the middle of the day, shut my phone down. And, you know, it might not be until 11 p.m. until two o'clock in the morning when I, I'm speaking of writing specifically, when I'm inspired to write again. And then I stay up until two o'clock in the morning and write. And, you know, I might wake up the next morning. And when the sort of the frenetic, you know, hours of the workday, you know, go, go visit something in the city or just do something, you know, leisurely. So I work, I mean, I guess the older that I get, the more I realize that my creativity is not entirely in my control. And a lot of my work these days is creative work. And it seems to me like something that doesn't happen from me, something that happens through me. And I just sort of need to put myself in the right position to get the inspiration. So I leave myself the freedom to be able to work whenever I have that creative burst. So that's it's and it's a I think it's kind of a luxury to be able to have that, but there are little ways that we can that we can make adjustments. I'm sure everybody listening has ways that they could make tiny adjustments to their schedule. You know, that's this is a relatively easy thing. You know, there are so many things like other little things like reading foreign foreign news, for instance, you know, getting getting my news from non American sources. Is a little way to sort of you follow the language, obviously. That's that's what you read. Follow the language. Yeah, which means if let's say, you know, I would say, would you be able to read the news in Hindi if you didn't know Hindi? No, no, but I do know a couple other languages. So I'm able to read those those sources so I can read Spanish, Italian, I can read French, even though I can't really speak it. But sometimes I will check there's a wonderful tool called Google Translate. And if I just want to know headlines, sometimes those are very instructive, right? Like with everything that's going on in the world right now, as we're speaking, sometimes I just want to see, well, what are people in other places saying, right? I'm only receiving sort of news and information in this very tiny bubble, right? And the algorithms are showing me very specific things. How can I break out of that? It's a very memetic cycle that each of us is caught in if we just take what's given to us. So whenever possible, I try to make an intentional act to move a little bit outside of that. I can completely resonate with that because one of my friends actually shared this insight and it really struck me. And he was saying that if you look at, let's say, in case of India, you look at the headlines of any incident. You scan through the headlines of the national dailies. And then you look at the newspapers which are written in Hindi, Bangla, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, etc. When you look at that, you're actually surprised to see that something which an English speaking reader would imagine is like of national concern and people are up in arms. Actually, it's nothing to somebody else. And there is something else which you didn't even know existed. So your worldview is shaped a lot by the language which you read. So one of the things that I try to do is, I don't do enough of it, but I try to spend a certain amount of time reading things in Hindi and Bangla, which are the two other languages which I speak. Because in many ways, it's almost like saying, because I'm right-handed, do I want to make sure that my left hand is not completely useless, that I can do a certain set of things with it? That's one of the equivalents that we can do. What are the things? So you talked about two things. Really question, why do you need to do something on a particular day that you've always done and does it have something to do with just being told that, okay, this is talking about something which I can change. So scheduling is one. The second thing you talked about reading newspapers and languages other than the mainstream language that you are normally driven towards. So that's fantastic. Give me some more ideas that I can use and my listeners can use. And by the way, listeners, if you have any questions for Luke, feel free to put those on and I'd be happy to bring them up. Even if you disagree with something that Luke is saying, because it's really something which is unusual if you disagree, feel free to share those and we'll bring it up. Luke, what's your third tip to break out of the mold? Here's one that's very relevant to me, but I think it's relevant to everybody. And I wrote an article with 25 sort of anti-mimetic tactics, by the way. If anybody's interested, I'm sure we can find a way to share that. But one of them that I think is important to me and I never would have been able to write my book if I hadn't followed this tactic, I promise you. It's filtering feedback. Now, feedback is good. I'm not against feedback. But especially if you're creative, there comes a point where you have to have a limit to how much feedback you receive. You have to be very intentional about who you're going to get feedback from because not all feedback is created equal. And at what point do you have to take the creative unnerving step of just moving out and writing and saying what you're going to say without trying to make everybody happy? You sort of need to just turn it off at a certain point. So I had to do that because if you don't filter feedback, if you're constantly taking it in, it's very difficult to make anything creative. That's not just a reflection of the feedback and tends towards the lowest common denominator. Very quickly, just tends to be a reflection of the most general and common feedback that you've received. And how can you create anything uncommon if you're basing your creativity on the most popular feedback? Whatever you create is sort of going to be a reflection of that. So I think there's something intentional about filtering feedback, having a limit, and creating without being completely mimetic to the feedback that you've received. So you have to set guidelines before you start. This is kind of like a goal. So the worst goals are generic and big U.S. goals, right? If I wake up and say, I just want to be a better person, you know, you can always find excuses to out of your goals. The same thing with feedback, like when I set out to read to write my book, I said, OK, I'm going to get feedback. These are the most important 12 people that I'm going to get feedback from. And then at this point, I'm going to stop soliciting feedback and I'm just going to write. So I had to set that I had to lay it out out front. And I think it made the book a little a little edgier than it might have been if the whole time I'd woken up every morning and worried about, you know, how people were going to receive a certain sentence paragraph or chapter. I just love that idea. You know, one of the things I believe in this. And by the way, so we have Arul Johnson, who says that, you know, he's learned a new idea today, which he sort of says that and says that it's beneficial to him. And thank you very much. Arul is joining us on Facebook. Thank you. And there are others who have joined us on LinkedIn as well. Bhaveen and Jay and Navjoth and I can, you know, thank you so much for all the people who have joined us at none. Thanks a lot. I so appreciate your sort of being here. One particular piece that I wanted to share that when you say, when you are seeking feedback, be a little cautious about being an either extreme. I mean, if you shut yourself from any kind of feedback, you don't know whether, you know, you're going completely haywire. But at the same time, you know, this obsession with seeking feedback constantly just means that you become a people pleaser at some stage. You know, you're really not going to ever be your own self because you know, you're trying to say, okay, I can't do this because this one doesn't like it. And someone already told me this and I shouldn't do this. You really give up being yourself. I mean, I certainly find it very stifling when you do that. I think it's even more important to think about when you are looking for feedback in the early stages, you know, and someone had shared that tip with me when you're writing a book for the first time, which I was at some stage. They said that this is not the time to seek feedback because somebody was like, what kind of a silly book is this? And that's the end of it. You'll never complete that book in your life. I mean, it's tough enough to write a book any which way, despite all the encouragement. And then somebody said, that's, I don't think anybody wants to read something like this. That's the end of it. And you don't know. And I've heard that the Stephen King, you know, the great horror writer, he never tells anybody that he's writing a new book until he writes his books in three months. And I think the only person he shares an idea with is his wife, maybe, nobody else, right? He sort of realized that it really throws him off. You know, and this is this also applies to our lives, our careers, our vocations. Okay. You know, my wife, for instance, you know, she was on her way to law school and she really is into food and food systems and food justice. She was she kept getting feedback from people, well, should I should I not go to law school? Should I should I follow this route and go into food? And everybody that she talked to sort of told her that it was kind of crazy. Well, you're leaving a stable secure job. And at a certain point, she had to she had to stop trying to please everybody in her life and go that route, right? She took their feedback into account, but she made her own decision with agency. And ended up going to study food systems and it's now very, very happy, right? But when we live when we live our lives that way, like constantly looking for affirmation for validation of every little thing that we do becomes a very miserable place to live, way to live. So I would recommend find mentors, right? I'm I think finding positive good mentors that are not the kind of mentors that are to what's the word I'm looking for. Formulating enough to make them like clones. Yeah, you want a mentor that gives you freedom, right? I mean, the best mentors to me are the ones that actually help you become more free, not less free. You know, they give you advice, but they help you become who you are. So I think you need to find that those good positive models of desire and mentors that the sort of understand that they're not there to mold you into their own image. You know, they're there because they truly want to help you develop according to your own path in plan. Who has been your mentor? Yes. Yeah. So in terms of mine, you know, they're not they're not big names. They're not people that you would ever know. You know, one of my mentors is he was actually my attorney when I lived in Las Vegas. And he was a he's just a model of a father of a friend, right? He modeled friendship to me in a way that that sort of nobody else has, despite being having six children and being incredibly busy. He's the kind of guy that always seems to have time. He never seems like he's in a rush when he's with you. He has 100%. You have 100% of his attention. And he's frankly been somebody who's always willing to speak with me about the next steps. Oh, Luke, you want to write a book? Why? Let's talk about that. Right. He's just been absolutely wonderful. And I think all of my mentors are people that you probably and the listeners probably wouldn't know. And that's the beauty of it. You know, you can have these highly influential positive models in your life and they're probably closer than you realize. You know, they don't have to be, you know, Elon Musk or that are the big sort of people that are in the news. They can be positive models in your own community even in terms of people, you know, that I've that I've mentored. I one of the many hats that I wear is as a teacher. So I teach many undergraduate first year college students and I've been doing this now for four years. And so I've just now seen my first my first class is now graduating from college. And, you know, every year I've got a couple of students that really, really form special relationships with me. And I teach in the business school. And one of the one of those students that I sort of really took under my wing four years ago now through going through some of these processes that I've talked about in my book has realized that he in fact, he doesn't want to go into business at all. He wants to become a teacher. And I think that's a that's a wonderful thing for me, right? I mean, I don't have a dog in that fight. I want him to, to, to, you know, follow the path that that's going to make him happiest. And if that takes him out of my own school, then that's, that's an accomplishment. And, you know, I think he's been able to sort of detach himself from some of the memetic forces and he sort of had that realization like, hey, like maybe you know, hey, like maybe this is not for me. Maybe I don't want to become an entrepreneur. I'm really passionate about education and, and he's, he's thrilled. So, you know, that's been, I consider that a success story. He's, he's, you know, become a reader of Rene Girard. So that makes me happy. But more than anything, I'm just glad that he sort of put some of these ideas into into practice in his own life. You know, so one of the things I really resonated with is this whole thing of, you know, wanting to be your own person and it's such a challenge. It's not easy. It's not easy because you're constantly told, especially, you know, those of us who are on social media, whether you want it or not, you are influencing and you are getting influenced in so many ways. You know, people put a like based on what you said or you've done. And the next time you write something and there's no one who puts a like, you continue to do it and that requires a lot of courage. So the question I would have is, you think, you know, people who are being memetic are people who are less courageous than the ones who are, you know, doing stuff on their own. Who are working to their own beat? Is that something you would say? Well, I think that in so the only the only fish that sort of, you know, float totally downstream with with the current are dead fish. So I have this saying in my life, you know, no dead fish is kind of a meme. Because if you're not at least swimming against or, you know, sideways to the current, if you're not fighting the current, you're not really alive in some way, right? Like the easiest path is is is almost never the healthiest path, the healthiest path. You know, so I do believe that, you know, we can become lazy when we're taking the easiest path. And often we think of that in terms of, you know, our health or physical fitness or something like that. Then it's it's, you know, that's pretty obvious, right? Like if I just eat whatever is given to me, you know, I'll probably become pretty unhealthy, at least in that sort of American culture that I live in. So I have to make intentional choices, you know, but the same is true when it comes to the news that I consume, you know, the choices that I make for how I want to invest my time. There's often some sacrifices that I need to make that cut against the grain a little bit and make me a little bit uncomfortable and cause me to have to detach myself a bit from what comes easy. And, you know, social media is a great example of that, you know, it's very easy to follow the crowd to, to, you know, to sort of, it's hard to stand out, right? Because if you say something that's unpopular on social media, you know, you can get canceled, you can get called out. That happens all the time these days, it seems like. So there's little things I think we can do to protect ourselves. I mean, I'll tell everybody who's listening. I mean, I rarely, rarely ever read comments and replies to my tweets or things that I, that I post. I have, I have a team member who sort of goes through those for me and lets me know, hey, Luke, this is something that you should really respond to a reader had this question. If I was to go through and read all of the replies to everything that I write, it would probably drive me crazy and make me pretty miserable, right? So it's just a way of shielding myself a little bit from what I would consider the unhealthy sort of mimetic reactions that I might have to every review of my book to every, everything that I put out there. There's no shortage of noise. So I've sort of enlisted some help to try to help me cut through the noise to find the real signals. But your book actually, you know, if I were to sort of really look at your book has got a great endorsement from Adam Grant of all people, somebody who whose work I deeply resonate with and admire. So and, you know, I was just reading the Financial Times has written some really awesome stuff about your book. So you've got very positive reviews, so you should have no problem reading those and feeling happy about it. Absolutely. But, but even, even the positive reviews sometimes and I'm very, I'm very fortunate, you know, Adam has been generous and there has been a lot of good feedback. But even that can be dangerous, right? And sort of lead to a to an inflated sense. So, you know, I think in general this applies to the positive and the negative. And it goes back to that question about feedback, you know, it's good. It's, you know, you want you want it. I mean, certainly, I won't pretend that I haven't seen any of it. But I've sort of, I've, I've, I've drank from it carefully, so to speak. Terrific. You know, what, what is, you know, give me two more before we end up because we're coming to the end of our conversation. Give me two more of your tips on how do we stay, you know, anti-mimetic and, you know, what can we do to really discover our own point of view and, you know, because the reason why I'm sort of talking about this is, you know, there is, when you look at personality theory, you know, they talk about the big five, which has openness, consensuousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. You know, it's called the ocean model, which is one of the big five and almost all theories of personality talk about it. When you look at the agreeable part of it, I mean, that's almost built into human nature that, you know, you, you like people who are agreeable. You know, because they're easy to work with. And you don't like people who are constantly, you know, saying that, let me think about it, maybe I'll do something different. Do you think people who are anti-mimetic, do you think they are better off being outside of an organization? Because organizations tend to, you know, veer towards the lowest common denominator in order to, you know, collaborate, move forward, find consensus, whatever, the reasons could be many. And not all of it is bad, but my question would be, are anti-mimetic people more successful outside of organizations? Some anti-mimetic people inside of organizations, you know, can become great leaders. And I think it's important to have anti-mimetic people in your organization in order to grow as an organization. That the people that are willing to say this, the tough truths when nobody else is. Okay. And sometimes that takes an anti-mimetic person within the organization. So one of the things that I speak about in my book is, you know, one of the measures of organizational health, in my opinion, is the speed at which truth moves through an organization. You know, when somebody says something that's true, even if it's an inconvenient truth, how quickly does it spread to everybody else, right? So that often happens through an anti-mimetic person who's willing to speak truth courageously. And then mimesis spreading throughout the organization. So I think having the right number of people that are anti-mimetic in an organization is a good thing. And by the way, I think you can be anti-mimetic and be agreeable at the same time, right? You can be anti-mimetic and not necessarily adopt what everybody else is adopting while also being, you know, not a complete ass about it, right? You can be, but there's nothing to be said about that. You can be, you can state a point of view which is different without being abrasive. One is not equating anti-mimetic with being abrasive and just being rude and nasty. That's not what we are talking about. We are just saying that you may have an alternative point of view and that's probably the real skill. The more I think about it, the more I think that that's a real skill. When you and I can have a conversation about what makes you think about something in completely polar opposite manner, let's talk about it. So maybe both of us get become smarter at the end of this conversation. Well, this is a, I would say one of the most important skills for people to develop is to be able to have a different point of view or to want different things. And being able to have a nice discussion with somebody about that who may not have the same point of view. And this is why we have problems in American politics today and other parts of the world. People are simply not able to disagree constructively and have conversations. So along with this sort of anti-mimetic approach comes the responsibility to be able to have conversations about it and to be able to articulate ourselves in ways that are welcoming and not that don't necessarily alienate other people. So, you know, I just want to sort of at this point of time, just want to really talk to people about this lovely book. We are talking to Luke Burgess who's written this book. I really recommend take a look at it. It's something that will set you thinking. And the way I read it was that I read it, you know, at a leisurely pace because it, you know, many of these chapters. I went back and made my own notes and scribbled on it and kind of said that, okay, what part of me wants to do something like this? One of the recommendations of the book about being anti-mimetic was to say that 10% of your bookshelf, you know, should be, you know, completely done by authors who you disagree with. Yeah. So this is, I call that my deep bookshelf, right? So these are books that I read, not necessarily because I want to read them, but because I don't want to read them. I know this sounds totally crazy, but they're the kind of books that I look at. And I think, well, you know, that's written by this author who, you know, clearly I can tell by the title and the subtitle that I'm probably going to disagree with his fundamental thesis with his worldview. I don't want to read that book, right? But that's exactly why I know that I need to read that book. Otherwise, I'm only subjected to the things that I want to read, the books that Amazon presents to me through the algorithm. And it's going to make me sort of far less interesting. It's going to like help, it's not going to allow me to engage with any thoughts other than the things that I want to engage with. So that's highly uncomfortable, but I would recommend at least pick, pick a, even if it's a book a year, you know, it's better than nothing, you know, pick, pick a book that you are willing to engage with. That is sort of an anti-mimetic book choice for you. And I, you know, that's really changed my life. I've been doing it now for a few years. And I always find things that I do agree with in those books, by the way, things that are, because there's, there's truth in every, you know, all over. And I never would have found that, that different perspective. I never would have engaged with it had I not taken the uncomfortable step of at least exploring it in the first place. So thank you very much, Luke. It's been lovely. And I was talking to Luke Burgess, the author of this book, Wanting. And I recommend you take a look at it. I've really enjoyed reading it. Just in terms of summary of what we spoke about today, you know, some of the things that resonated a lot with me. It was that very often it's important to take a step back and ask yourself, how many of the things that you are doing? Are you doing because you wanted and how many of you, how many of the things that you are doing are things that you are doing because you want to fit in? And nothing wrong with that. We do learn a number of things like language and a couple of things. But I think one of my big takeaways was that the right mentors that we have are the people who actually leave room for you to develop as your own person, not necessarily as people, you know, who enjoy creating clones of themselves. And that for me was a real good one. The other tip that I really liked was that 10% of the books should be from authors you disagree with. And with that, I certainly thought that, you know, there is, of course, this song which I've grown up listening to which said, Akla Cholore, Jyodito Dakshu Nekyo Naashe Tabe Akla Cholore, Gandhi Ji used to sing that. And it simply means if there is nobody who's going to heed your call, so be it, have the courage to walk alone. And thank you so much again for joining me and look forward to seeing all of you back again on yet another edition of Free Music.