Story vs Telling Part 3

There are two deadlines next week, one in Science Gallery, one in MAP. I'm thinking of applying to both. Okay, so then we have a target for this work. You don't want to think about them in that. Because they're not really...

Yeah. I feel like because I am applying to a lot of different places, it's not very hard to apply. It's the more generic self-positioning that I struggle with. Contextual self-positioning when there is a problem statement

and I can talk about how do I align with this problem statement? For example, there was this residency in Swalbard that I applied to. Do you know where Swalbard is? It's like the Northmost village or some stuff like that. They have a seed bank.

Like how I know is like Swalbard has one of the biggest seed banks in the world. Right? I do know. It's in Norway. Yeah.

I think they had a residency and they were like, okay, what are you going to do? And there I could very easily say that at least for me, what's interesting is the contrast between somebody who comes from a tropical country and going to a country which is like completely, completely opposite.

And like what that would... How that would impact my artistic practice. That was easy to do because it's just like... It's one of those things which is... I know what point of reference I'm looking from.

It's harder to think about like, who is the social media artist? Like where does that come from? Or like, you know, like that's where I would say most of the difficulty is.

Hmm. Interesting. Do you feel like that's particularly with a social media identity or that's like any new identity? I feel like I feel that way even when I'm meeting people,

like you know, even when I'm meeting new people, I find it somewhat challenging. How do I position myself? And like now I just feel like it's like a cluster of things that I can say, oh, it sounds cool.

Right? Like I make games, that sounds cool. I work on films. That also sounds cool. VFX also sounds cool.

Run my own agency. That also sounds like, you know, and now we have such a cool thing like, oh, we are a storytelling consultancy. Again, like that also like sounds cool.

All of those things sound cool. So like individually, there isn't... Again, if I say I have my own artistic practice, all of it sounds good to me, but I don't know how to put it.

It doesn't feel cohesive. But before we go there, so like I want to update like how I feel about this stuff after our conversation. So it's very interesting because I think that like to some degree, I have lesser resistance.

It's interesting, but like I also don't know what exactly changed, but like somehow I just feel like there is some much needed distance between me and my perception, like people's perception of me now. Like I feel like our conversation managed to help me have some gap there. That like this is going to be impacted by who is seeing it.

And so if I want to control perception, I need to think about who are the people who are seeing it. I can't blanket say that like, oh, I need to be seen this way. Like who? Like, you know, the story matters based on like who is coming to the story

as much as it matters. Like who is the story of? Yeah, I was thinking, you know how we have this new client in lay, right? And so you know about the ice stupa that's on a month, month, I believe, right? So he did that project where they take the water in the winter

and they create artificial ice stupa. So they shoot the water up and so it freezes into a stupa like this, like, you know, so then there's water available in the summer and it's just like that project only works in that context. Obviously, you know, there's an extreme example, right?

But you need to have these extreme winters. You need to have available power in the winter to be able to pump the water. And in that context, that's a story that really resonated with the people. They're like, oh, yeah, we know what stupas are. We know that we could create them and the idea that we could create one.

And then that would give us the water. It's like creating your artificial glacier. So really resonant story for that audience. But you know, you take that somewhere where people don't, you know, to a girl in the tropics not going to be like, you know, stupa like more like what's a stupa?

I mean, like I have not seen snow. Ever. Ever. Oh, huh. Interesting.

Yeah. Girl from the desert in the truest sense. Oh, yeah, that's what I was thinking about. It's like, when did I first see a desert? I feel like very late in my life.

I feel like I've never really seen deserts other than like when we went to like. You went to Egypt. Yeah, I mean, I was before that, of course, we got married in Rajasthan, right? So we've got married in the desert. But I think before I went to Rajasthan, I can't remember ever really seeing a desert.

You must have seen a cold desert. What's a cold desert? Like a tundra? Is that considered a desert? Yeah, desert is basically like, you know, it's a land where no vegetation grows.

So like the Gobi Desert is a cold desert, but Sahara is a hot desert. But then you wouldn't say like on top of a mountain is a desert. That's just a summit because there are also no vegetation growth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also it's because it's above vegetation line.

Correct. Yeah, yeah, right? There's a tree line and then there's vegetation line. That's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Desert is mostly because like the sand, the soil has been some years, but like I think it is because the soil lacks the ability to hold on to nutrition or moisture and plants need that. But it also can't be like volcanic. Yeah, I think it might be moisture because if you write like there's always these

at least in California, they'll periodically be these stories about like, oh, there was a rain and now the bloom, right? All these flowers have been waiting for the like one rain and then suddenly the desert blooms. So there has to be nutrition to allow for that, right?

So then the trigger is the water. Like the soil nutrition has to be there. But it's not. Yeah, but also like the soil lacks the ability to hold water. That's what I'm agreeing with you, right?

So I'm saying it not the ability to hold nutrition, the ability to hold water. So if it was nutrition, yeah. If it was nutrition, the trigger would be different for the bloom. Hmm. That makes sense.

That makes sense. The trigger would be a lot of plants dying. Okay. So it's become easier to think about. I think is where we were when I sidetracked you to about Leigh.

Correct. Yeah, it's become or at least like now when I'm thinking about it, there is this variable that comes to my mind that it's like, okay, but who is it for? Like just before our call, I was chatting with like, you know, Varun and Devanshu and I was like, we were discussing shape shifters, BTS and like Instagram and all

of that. And I was like, see right now the stuff we are putting out, it has two audience, but like who all do we want to approach and we need to think about it like that. So I don't know. There's like some separation between who I am versus how people see me.

That's where I'm at right now. It's like, you know, I'm not having an emotionally violent getaway from the reaction that I had last time. That's good. It's good when we were able to unpack our emotionally violent reactions.

Interesting. I was thinking about a certain kind of aspect. I think we talked about this podcast a long time ago, but I feel like there's kind of a process based solutioning, right? Where it's like, you know, there's a process to follow here and that we trust

that that process is going to lead us to the solution. And then there's something that you can start to do when you're like very practiced, right? When you're very adept at solving that kind of problem where you're very adept into solutioning, which is kind of this like genius based solution where

it's like, oh, I'm going to gather all of the information I can. I'm going to infer a solution. I'm not really going to follow the kind of like manufactured process. I'm going to just be able to like trust that I will win. I have enough information.

I'll be able to figure out that this feels right. And I was calling it a genius based or inference based solution. I feel like we've talked about this before a long time ago. No, really, I feel like in the first season, there was a whole, I mean, my memory will not be there, but like this is the first time this is

such a beautiful model. I've never heard it. I swear I thought of it. I think, yeah, I remember us talking about it really early on when we were thinking about actually we were using it for joyous.

And I was saying, we were talking about how I find it to be very costly to doing genius based solutioning or whatever inference based solutioning. And then you were kind of giving me the thought that like, you know, we don't have to apply it in every situation that there are situations

which really warrant it and need it, but there are situations where you don't need to go through that much energy and it can be more reasonable to just kind of like follow the process. It may have actually been in one of our first projects now that I'm sitting with a little bit.

It's kind of coming back to me that one we did. And also there also, I don't think you use the framing genius based solution. I may have made it more about inference or something. Yeah.

I think I used to feel more uncomfortable about saying things like that. Anyway, so as I was, I happened to have one of my other windows open on my screen, the Figma that we're working on where we're kind of bring it, building out what are the skills that joyous has. And it was interesting to me to looking at it because there's some of

those that would be designed for different audiences, right? Some of those skills are basically saying the same actual attribute, but for a different audience. And so it's using it in different words or a different voice. And we didn't follow the process there.

We didn't follow the process that we've been talking about on this podcast for the last episode, right? Where it's kind of like breaking down who is the audience? What is the attribute of the story that we want to highlight for that audience? And then how are we tailoring the story in that way to highlight that attribute?

Which is kind of what I'm, you know, pushing you on that. What we did there is what I would think of more as like this genius based solution, right? Where we like wrote a bunch of stuff down, wrote some other stuff down. We spent a long time kind of formulating around in that space in the amorphous

space. So then when we came down to actually write it, it kind of just wrote, right? I think as you told me, you wrote most of them yourself and like GPT helped with a little bit. And I think I wrote like another 10, right?

But it just, and even when I was writing them, it wasn't that hard. I kind of sat with them and I was like, oh, this feels like a gap. This feels like a place. This feels like something more. So I don't know.

I do think though, I was just, so that's what I was thinking about was what kind of solution do we need to do here? And I think given where we are here, I don't think we understand either of us, unfortunately, understand well enough how to do the kind of thing that we're saying, which is take this story and make this story feel accessible to

other groups of people than it's feeling accessible to right now. It would be really nice if we could kind of infer that solution or be able to do this genius-based designing for it. But I feel like where I am today, I'm like the reason why I'm pushing you on this process, because I feel like I have trust in the process, but I don't

necessarily have trust that I could just arrive there without the process yet. I feel like I don't know if it is a skill problem or like we can't get there. But the problem at least from where I stand, it is when you're too attached to something, it's much harder to like as in I'm never going to be detached from my story.

Anything that I do, I can only pretend to not be attached to my story or how people see me or how I am understood. The same thing with like joyous. I don't think either of us can be detached from it and the emotional labor of detaching takes away some of that inside generation.

So I feel like, you know, it's more that when you're doing it for yourself, the Ram gets occupied in an unfriendly manner rather than the fact that it can't be done or like the skill is lacking. You know what I mean? I'm saying this only because like I was able to do it for shape shifter pretty

quickly, like we came up with some sort of strategy like these kind of people and these kind of people and this is what we need to do. And like these are the gaps and we need to address those and stuff like that and we'll go in more deeper conversation and whatnot. But we were able to do it and it's partly because like I'm not as creatively

involved in everything. While like Varun and Devanshu do feel a little bit more like, hmm, okay. We're so tight into this. We need to, it's hard to zoom out from it. Yeah, I think that does make sense.

Like emotionally, I just feel like every time I have to introduce myself, I'm left with this feeling of, I don't think I properly introduced myself. Yeah. Even when people really like me and like what they heard. It was interesting.

I was away over Memorial Day weekend, which was about two or three weeks ago now. And I met this guy in a bar who I actually found on LinkedIn because I was so tickled, but I gave him like kind of my pitch and he was like, oh, so what you guys do is storytelling. And he's like, that's incredible.

Like I feel like there's such a gap in vendors who are able to kind of go and promise that and are actually delivering against it. And I was like, wow, you actually understood. So I hear you on that. And it is very satisfying in those moments where it does feel like it does

get communicated well. I have a thought, but I don't know if it would feel limiting, but I guess I can share it and then we can see. What do you feel about like leaning into one aspect of it? That's what I've been doing.

Okay. Say what you like. I just like I just craft my answer for the room in a way. Like what are these people responding to? And I just like sort of navigate according to that.

Like that just I just feel like that narratively feels dissatisfying. There's nothing wrong, for example, with character driven stories and all stories should have compelling characters. But sometimes when you're reading fantasy or historical fiction or sci-fi, you want the world to be equally compelling.

And if either of those two things like if you're reading a contemporary romance, you don't care about the world. Well, like if you're reading us like, you know, fantasy romance, you want the world to be compelling. You want it to be beautiful and you want it to be detailed and you can't

say one or the other. Like you want to both like you don't want just the world and boring characters and you don't want just the characters and no world. And I just feel like it's an additional degree of complexity that I would like to incorporate.

Like I've been already so like for example, people who know me mostly through joyous might not know that I work in VFX and people who know me mostly through VFX might not know that I make games and people who know me through games might not know that I run a design studio. Asteroid telling consultancy.

Right. But like I just feel like I would like that to be actually now that I'm saying it, I feel like the problem is that I don't want anything to feel like oh, it's coming out of left field, but I still wanted to feel interesting. Right.

Tell me more about that. Why is it bad? Yeah. Cause cause I'll give you a small example, right? Like when you were talking, you're reminding me of, you know, our guest really

early on in my partner at Tom Boy X, but Fran, Fran Denoway, right? And like it's so out of left field. Sometimes when you're like, wait, you used to make political ads for the Democratic party and like, she had a whole career as a producer. Then before that had a whole career running group homes and then she

started an underwear company. You know, like it does feel out of left field, but she doesn't seem any less interesting from it, you know, but it's not a part of her right now. That's the problem. She still carries those things, right?

Like she's still going to have political acumen and it doesn't matter. Like just like, you know, I, I don't lose out on something if people don't realize that I've studied physics. Okay. Their image of current me is not incomplete, but like if image of current

me does not include the fact that I make games or that I own, like, you know, own and run Joys or that I work with shape shifter, then it feels incomplete. Interesting. So maybe a better example is we have a client right now who's a dancer and something that's really important for her when she's telling her story is

that she likes to tell her background, right? And that her, she came from this family and the family was a big part of just raising a voice, right? Like they have been generations of people who have stood up for things and in her mind, kind of her standing up for, for her dance form and kind of helping

carry that into the future is part of that heritage. And it's very important when she's telling her story that that message comes out. This is kind of what you're saying. Yeah.

Much more so than the fact that like Fran had a previous career. Like that's not I see. Yeah. Like we all would have, right? Like I can talk about it.

Like I don't need everybody to know about my previous projects. I'm okay with that. My problem is that my right now always is so multi-dimensional that I don't know how to capture that. Do you feel like there's some part of it that you're like, I don't know if

they're going to think this about me or know this about me? Like I'll give you an example for myself, right? Like that I will sometimes be like, and it's crazy because you know, I've like been out and married for years, but I still will sometimes have moments where I'm like walking down the street and I'll be like, Oh, I bet they're

like looking at me and thinking he's gay. And then I'm like, I catch myself, right? And I'm like, why is that a problem? Like what is, well, what feels wrong about that or what feels scary? And that it's still something I'm trying to unpack, right?

Like I don't fully, but I know that there is this thing of like, Oh, am I going to be seen like this? And there's a bit of apprehension to it. And so I'm curious, is there some aspect there that you feel a little bit of apprehension about that?

Or all of them are identities that you aspire to be seen as, at least in this context, not your whole life. You know, like in the context of talking about. All of them are like trickles of my core identity, which is like a multidisciplinary maker.

I want to be like, I'm like, you know, form agnostic and like, you know, topic agnostic, but I can create in multiple ways. And I really like that's what matters to me. That's why there are so many representations of it, but everything like it just feels like a stack list of items and not a me who goes and does

things because she likes to, even though that's what I want to communicate. And honestly, like that's what I feel like is the challenge of the podcast also because like it's not like we're just talking about business and we're not just talking about storytelling and we're not just talking about like, you know, self-help, but it's that interweaving between these things.

Like I know that my writing is making me a better artist, but I also know that like me coming from an artist, artistic like experience also makes me a better writer, right? And I don't know how to communicate that. That makes sense.

Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that example as much. I would more think about it like, because I think when you're putting something in the public domain and you're trying to get some resonance or some response that it's more comparable to compare to other things that that happens with versus, you know, like, I think that's such a constituent

part of what is happening that even if you're looking outside the domain, like that is the key element that needs to be happening. So I was thinking about like when a restaurant gets started, right? Or like I just invested in this bar in Greenpoint and it's in a location which people often walk on that street and particularly like around that area

looking for restaurants and bars. So then there's already an expectation from the community in that area that like I'm going to see a restaurant or bars. They're going to be looking for it. So then you can be more dependent on like saying, am I going to have the

quality that's going to make them talk about me or recommend me to other people? But I know that at least the initial problem of people doing the discovery is I'm putting myself into that community that is they have an expectation of discovery, right? Like that is a moment they're already looking for.

So I more feel like that is to me feels like the thing. It's like, how are we putting ourselves into the community that is looking for that thing? And I think it's just because of the world we live in where there's so much content, like you have to actually put energy into saying,

how am I putting this content in front of the community that is right for it versus and then once you've done that, the value of it can keep people coming back and getting them to tell the story. But the initial discovery problem is that problem. Would you say that the way I framed the problem, is it a discovery problem?

Like, is it a marketing at the broadest discovery level kind of problem? That's a good question. Say how you framed it again. Sorry, if you can easily like so basically what I'm trying to say is I don't know how to articulate me and like, you know, talk about all of the different

pieces of me cohesively. That's a discovery problem. That's not a discovery problem. It depends on what the goal is. I guess you did articulate the goal.

You did a reasonable job. If I like played back what I feel like I've understood from you so far is like you feel like there's aspects that you think contribute to the fullness of your story or the completeness of the way you think and talk about yourself and you'd like to be understood that you're not being able to share in a way that

feels that gives that sense of completeness or maybe like more objectively speaking, I don't know how to evaluate how I am being perceived with this new found distance that I have from people's perception of me. I feel like I don't know how to evaluate our people getting a good idea of it's like, you know, let's say last Wednesday I went for like this dinner

like a junior of mine from college is doing this like, you know, meet five club and he invited me to a dinner. There are other people like everybody introduced themselves. I don't know if they would find it random. If I said, oh, I have a podcast, you know what I mean?

But like I feel like they would find it random, but then I don't know if they will actually find it random. They might think like maybe my introduction was fine and they might think that makes sense. She does a lot of things.

This feels part of like, you know, it seems like on the path. I actually don't know. Generally, when you give introductions, do you do that from how do you give them? Like, is it just like you'll just talk about something like that you're recently working on or that you talk about like, I don't know, where do you start?

I actually talk about it like I do a lot of different things. I run my own storytelling consultancy called joyous. My co-founder lives in New York, but like, you know, we both collaborate on different kinds of projects. They are very broad, but like, you know, we do all sorts of things.

I also work as a VFX producer with the studio based out of Mumbai and I run make games with my sister and I have my own artistic practice. Yeah. These are some of the things that I do. This is like basically this is the structure.

Yeah, but it is like beep, beep, beep, beep, right? And it's the kind of thing where you have to be paying attention all the time. And generally that's not what happens when people are giving introductions because everyone's thinking about what they're going to say also and they're only listening to some part, right?

Some part of it will catch their attention. I went last, second last. Yeah. I almost always try and go last. Interesting.

No, I'm just, I understand what you're saying now. That was really helpful. So I think something I've gotten a lot of feedback and I'm pretty confident about is I'm very good at introducing myself in certain structures, right? Like especially in one-on-one meetings or when I'm meeting someone in a corporate

context, I'm very good at giving an introduction. So I'll give you a little bit of how I would give myself an introduction and then we'll see, right? So I start off by saying that I grew up in Seattle. I started computer science and economics in Boston and after that kind of went into

tech, but mostly stayed on the product side of technology initially. And then I'll usually pause to understand if people like because product means that you're working for the company, right? So everything you own is owned by that company. Whereas then when you, I went into services after a couple of years at that

point, almost all the work you do is owned by the client. It's kind of just a fundamental difference in technology. And then when I started my career, I started off as a product manager and the product managers at that point had responsibility both for translating what the client was looking for as well as for the timeline.

So as well as for the ship cycle and then as transition as the industry has changed, the, the role started to change a little bit. So you saw this growth of scrum masters and more agile methodologies and then that part of it responsibility for the development cycle move more into the dev team and the less out of the product teams.

And I kind of move more towards marketing as that transition happened. So once I had a couple of really cool projects where I did some, some in London, some in Germany, some in New York, and then kind of that took me to India where I was working for an ed tech company. Eventually became CEO of that ed tech company and then spun out one part of

it and then actually shut down the rest of it just before the pandemic, which was kind of like a big thing. And depending on how the conversation has gone at this point, I might go into more about like, what does it mean to shut down a company or some different parts of it?

And then would come to say that, you know, and then I spent some time kind of figuring out what my next move was going to be. I started venture capital firm called Thrice Monos Capital. I also then really found that what I loved and the thing that the work that I really found I really loved was client work and that I really missed was doing

client work. And so when I met Divya, we had an opportunity to start a consulting company and then that's really been the place that I spend a lot of my energy and time. But I also have some other things I really like to do. So I spend about 50% of my time on Julius, but then I spend some on my time

with my investment company. And also I am doing an MFA and in poetry and creative writing, which I'm going to complete next year. And I'm also learning Indian classical dance, which are kind of two artistic pursuits that I'm very excited about.

See, but you sound so cool. And I also realized what the problem is in how I do it. What?