Kahran shares stories of his grandfather, SSH Rehman, former director of ITC Limited and leader of ITC Hotels, Divya discusses quality years and Bryan Johnson, Also featured: the graphic novel Sandman, success in academic vs success in life. And there is more unpacking of Pradeep Singh's chasing of success and "big hairy audacious goals."
Spending twenty hours a day maintaining your life and not being able to enjoy things — that doesn't feel like living. Life requires maintenance, but it shouldn't be all maintenance.
There's a metric about the gap between lifespan and years of good life. Optimizing for longevity without optimizing for quality is a strange kind of success.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Oh, these glorious early days of love. I laugh wondering where in this curve will we fall, bound in this particular way. Soft lips on the neck. I wonder when we move forgetting to remember, to remembering to forget. You know that guy, the billionaire Brian something who is trying to be super young? Yeah, yeah, I was thinking that. And if you look at him, he looks like a vampire and you're like, yeah, you know, not the sparkly kind, but the Count Dracula kind.
And like, you know, you just, I don't know, like he looks so weird. And if you look at his, I think Marcus Brownlee did a video or somebody did a video where they saw his entire like days routine. And I'm just like, you need to be a certain kind of ultra privileged person to be able to live like this. First of all, and I'm not sure if I had that kind of privilege. This is going to be such a cruel and harsh comparison.
It feels a little bit like how sometimes, you know, people keep doing end of life care just to increase the number of days. Value of care? No, no, no, not palliative care. You know, people keep getting harsh treatment. So you're increasing the number of days with the quality of life on those days is so poor.
Like sure life requires some maintenance and like, you don't get your eight hours of sleep, do your like, you know, workout, eat all of that. But like, you know, spending 20 hours a day maintaining your life and you can't go to places and you can't like, you know, enjoy things. I just feel like, what is this man? Like this doesn't feel fun. Yeah, there's a metric about that.
And I was seeing that the US right now has the biggest gap between like lifespan and I can't remember the term they use, but it's like, like years of like good life, some equivalent of that. And like the US is like 11 years right now. Yeah, I remember one of my friends telling me quality years or something like that. Yeah, quality years. You're right. You're right. Right. So what he's basically done is he's reduced the number of quality years to like 30 years or something.
And now he's going to have all these years that are I mean, I guess it's quality kind of is it. Dude, he has like a two hour morning routine, which includes like the what whole face thing and like, you know, he's putting a face mask and then some light and some like, you know, I'm eating this. So like, you can either strive for joy or you can strive for peace. This is neither. This is neither for northeast full. What is this?
It's people who are not come to terms with the fact that everything ends at some point. Everyone forgets you whether it's 200 years or 2000 years at some point. Every person is going to be forgotten. You know, for some of us, it's going to be two years or 20 years, right? But everything ends, you know, and I think you haven't come to terms with that notion of saying, yes, maybe I'm going to add 20% more. Maybe I'm going to add 50% more. I'll live 50% longer than I would have lived otherwise, but it will still end.
I also feel like maximization of the time that you have versus Mac trying to maximize the volume of time you might have is like two completely separate things in a way. You kind of send me down a different thought, though that is an interesting one. So I'll give it a moment first. Yeah. I was just thinking for a minute about this game that we're working on, and we have this AI character that is really written to be quite sentient, right? Like she feels things and she has emotional connections with things. And it's like, yeah, it would struggle be a struggle to think like there is no end, right?
Like you have to sit with this forever and you have to be there forever and you will be there forever. You never think that there's going to be an end. I don't know. It's a hard kind of question, I think, to grapple with as something that is finite. You know, we are finite. So imagining what the experience of an infinite being would be like, or even knowing that like, I don't know, maybe the way to write this actually is like that she is finite, right? She does think that at some point she will shut down because she knows her processors will wear out or something. So she doesn't see herself as infinite. She just sees herself as a little bit longer, you know, maybe a lot longer of a finite being than otherwise.
But yes, you sent me thinking about that a little bit. Go ahead. Sorry. I wonder where like a rather house scale interfaces here. So there are two factors, right? One part is that you have certain things that you maybe want to do. And there is like a certain amount of time that those things will require, right? I was having this conversation with somebody a week or so back. I don't know how we arrived there, but like we were talking about how they wished they would keep having green carnations in human form so that they could keep giving them like, you know, time to execute all of their creative ideas.
And I was like, this is never going to happen because thinking of creative ideas is a second order infinity and doing the creative idea is first order infinity. It's like the number of real numbers is always going to be greater than the number of natural numbers. Even though both are infinities, one infinity is greater than the other, right? And I feel like sometimes that's also like something that I feel in terms of like, you know, finiteness versus infinity discussion where it's like, I don't think there is ever will be ample time to do everything you want to do and go everywhere you want to go and be everyone you want to be. Because at some point you can start like shifting who you are, right? Like if given enough time, there is no need for continuity.
It's just that because human lifespan is so short that we think there needs to be continuity. Even though like I'm sure if I met myself from 15 years ago, I wouldn't relate to her. I wouldn't understand who this person is and why she's doing the things she's doing. So what you're kind of saying is that it's a fallacy to think about even a finite amount of time as bounding the available set of options because even within a finiteness, there's so much available possibility. Or rather, the problem isn't the bounds or at least like that's my perspective.
And this is a philosophical conundrum more than it is a scientific conundrum. So there isn't the right answer or the wrong answer. But like my perspective is that the problem is in how we are thinking about it and not the amount of time that is there. I'm not sure how I feel about this point. It's a little bit orthogonal to where I was trying to use the notion of time and finiteness because the way I was thinking about it in that context, especially in the context of that character, is that I feel like there's a need to complete things in a bound window, which comes from knowing that we are finite.
Right. That there would be a longer. I'm going to have to give you an example. Something that's happened in my MFA recently is that I realized that I've switched a different attitude in approaching my work. So it's much similar to how I used to behave in academia when I was a child really, right? Then it is how I've worked in the professional workspace.
And just to give you an example is like when in places where like, let's say I had a presentation to build or, you know, we had a client that we needed to do a quarterly business review, a QBR for, there would be a certain day that that thing was needed to be there. And then whatever kind of form we could get it to in that window would be what we did, you know, like we had to make certain things have to be there at a minimum. And then certain things were embellishments and you figured out what could be there and what couldn't and you got where you could by that window because that was what you needed to be done. Right. And I think when I was a student, there was much more of this notion that I was like, oh, you know, there's this thing that the best version of myself could do and all these kind of beautiful ideas that I have in it. And I'm going to write in what I can and maybe hint at those ones I didn't quite get to.
So like I'm giving the sense that like I have more and like, you know, there's almost like I'm giving a sense of my brilliance here, but you know, I'm not able to kind of capture all of it. And there's some reason why, right? Like it's like, oh, if I hadn't had this other exam I was studying for or if like I had been able to, you know, read this thing a little earlier or free up my weekends in this way and I wouldn't have had to be doing so much at the end and had to not quite be able to get it to where I was hoping to. And it's just like a different mindset. It's this mindset of like, oh, there's a. And it sounds like you like that mindset. I don't really would say I was trying to speak from the place which does like that, if you will. Right. Like I think there's different parts of me that do like that. And so I was trying to speak from those places.
I mean, I don't think it's that was one of the things I kind of was reflecting on as I was thinking about this first semester is like, oh, you know, I think approaching that the way I would have approached projects through my career will just be more helpful. I think seeing my classmates as skilled colleagues and seeing my professor as a skilled colleague who can help me elevate this thing I'm trying to work on versus trying to look at it as this either competitive or kind of a valuatory situation, which is more traditionally what I associate with academia. And I think it has all these kind of hiccups or kind of routines in the way I approach it. Or yes, you know, I need to make sure I seem very brilliant and I need to make sure that I'm giving hints and kind of, you know, caveating places where I think I could do better work and whatnot. That's kind of what I was saying, right. I think in places where there's a time boundness, there's a fine-nighness that drives a certain way of thinking. And so as I was thinking about that character, I was like, well, if you don't have that fine-nighness, right. If you know that like you're going to be out for years and eons and whatnot, that you do not have a need to maybe close decisions. You kind of leave them open and leave them wondering and keep working on them in a way that you wouldn't if you knew that there was a date that thing actually had to be done.
And so that was the way I was thinking about time as bounding that would it just change the mindset of a person or, you know, in this case an AI. So altogether that it would almost be kind of alien for us to think about the way we would think about, oh my God, like, you know, dwelling on something for a long time is clearly a sign of like mental instability or almost like, you know, like you can't get over it. But like if you're actually unbound in your time, like it's just like the notion of your meditating on the nature of existence forever, right. Like, and that for us seems reasonable, right. Like that's something that you almost aspire to as an enlightened being is to meditate on the nature of existence. So maybe for this AI, it's like, you know, reflecting on the choices that led to her losing all of her human cargo and people is just like something that she's spending time with forever. And it's like in her mind, it's just like that's how I've spent time on everything. I always have been evaluating things forever. I never close a question until the decision point comes. But isn't that like almost reverse in the sense that like in that case you are operating from a finite time being your hypothesis is that unless there is finite time decisions will not be made.
Because as a human who has finite time decisions get made when there is like a deadline associated with it. You're quite right. I could be totally or often how it manifested. So there I guess there's two points I'm kind of questioning. One is it is it would it be a decision make? Would it change the things at all? And then second, how would it actually manifest? And you're right. Like I could be totally often thinking that the way it would actually manifest has to do with like conservation of time. This is reminding me of something else. In Sarman there is this one character. So you know that death is dream sister. It's like a plug for saying man. It's this audio book and comic book. Dream is the main character.
Dream is the main character. He's an endless. He was there before the world began and he will be around long after and there are seven endless. There is dream death despair delirium a bunch of others destruction. The twins. A couple more that I'm forgetting. Desire. Desire. Yeah.
Yeah. And anyways, so death gave this some guy immortality. It isn't the kind of like, you know, tricky immortality where oh, you're going to be old and immortal. There are no negative caveats per se. And dream and death just thought, ah, this guy, he's gonna like, you know, ask to be killed at some point. So she just gave him immortality and he just has to do a check in in one particular place with dream every hundred years so that like, do you remember this part? I remember. Of course. Yeah, it's such a great party. Go on. What I feel is like it's so interesting how they dealt with it because here is a guy. He is seeing people around him die and people who he love die.
That doesn't stop him from loving. While as human beings, normally, because of our mortality, we have this idea of I'm going to love one person. They can ask you with me for the rest of my life. And like, it's going to be so painful when they die. If they die, I wish they don't die. Right. But like, that doesn't change the fact that this man does not want to not love people. He has to see everybody he loves die. He sees pain sometimes are better, sometimes are worse. Right. And I just found that to be so interesting because like if you take away the lens and I think Neil Gaiman is like particularly good at that. If you take away the lens of like an educated adult and like, you know, whatever you take for granted about the world, the world looks very different.
So like in case of RAI, I would think that like what it calls success metrics of its existence might look very different. It could become like, you know, more and more stuck in its ways, but it could also as well just to choose that. Oh, anything that is more than 100 years ago doesn't matter because well, it is more than 100 years ago. Enough time has passed. Like I have limited memory. I will erase certain things from my memory. So I maybe don't know how this happened or how this came about. Like what is the limiting factor becomes very different. So like, let's say the thing is that like its processors might die, then it might choose to not process things too much.
It might just be like, okay, I'm going to take decisions quickly and move on because I don't want this to end. Remind me one thing if you remember, how does his values change over the centuries? I just remember that like, you know, dream and death thought that like, oh, he'll ask to be killed at some point. I remember that in the initially he's quite bad. Like he's like a thief and whatnot and he like steals money and he becomes like gets a fortune through. Yeah.
But then in the end he starts to really just care about his wife and his child. No, but he also like interacts with different people and he moves and he sees different things and he finds different people to love and like, you know, builds a family then leaves them at some point when people start talking. Oh, there was that point where like, you know, people at some point start talking how he's not growing older. Yeah, she is. And like, you know, then he's just like, he's like, okay, now that's this is my cue. I need to leave now. I think it was it was really missing from this play I just saw, which was called maybe maybe happy ending. And there it was a notion of these two retired robots, but I think they didn't quite think about the notion of like, a robot would be able to evaluate
Do I need to be using that right like they took as a given like the Wi-Fi chip would fail, not that the robot would just like maybe reroute itself in a way that's not use Wi-Fi if Wi-Fi was starting to fail. I mean, and it is so interesting because humans do this all the time. If your knees go bad, or if one knee hurts, you start putting pressure on the other one more like you start loading it asymmetrically. Yeah. So that's why we decided to record two days in a row, which has never ever happened before is because we felt like yesterday's episode recording was really interesting. And we arrived at like something really good, which is that maybe success is less about striving for perfection. And over time you learn that success is about striving for authenticity. That is the notion that we ended on. So Kahran, I know that you had parts yesterday.
But do you still have them? Exactly. It's always a good question. I mean, it's in some ways it's been like a very weird couple of days because we lost my step-grandfather a couple of days ago. And he was someone who really, I think, chased professional success in a certain way. Like my assessment of kind of having observed from the outside is that there was a purpose that he really had around creating a legacy and creating a legacy through building things that were really tangible, right?
He built a huge company. He kind of helped ITC hotels really become what it is today. And a lot of ways some of the major decisions that were taken that will shape the company's future for generations around owning their own hotels and owning land in major cities across India. And in the way their relationship is structured with ITC Limited, which is their parent company, a lot of those he had a big hand in and shaped them. And those are the structural things that will shape going forward. And then of course, like from our family's perspective, it was a kind of a tumultuous figure. You know, there was a lot of really complicated relationships. And so I don't know. It's an interesting notion to think about. Like that feels like there was an authentic city in the purpose he was striving for, right? Or if I gave a different parallel, like I feel like I have this desire to attain some level of mastery with my craft in terms of how I can convey stories in written work, right? And I think I realized, especially in the last few months, that there's been something that I thought of as mastery, which was really comprehensibility. And I think that one of my big kind of realizations is that mastery will come when I'm able to communicate whatever I'm trying to communicate.
And sometimes that may be something super comprehensible, or sometimes that may be something very esoteric that is more about making people understand a feeling or communicate a feeling or communicating a sense of something in a way that's not so much about the readability or the understandable ability of the actual text or, you know, letters on a page even. So that feels like an authentic pursuit for me. Now, is that a pursuit in search of perfection? In some ways it feels like it, right? No, mastery and perfection are two very different things. Mastery is like, you know, oh, here is this thing, I'm fascinated by the multifacetedness of it. And I want to explore and understand each and every facet. Perfection is like, here is the ideal thing. And whatever I create, it needs to look like this. They are two very different things. Mastery is very exploratory and understanding oriented and perfection is very evaluation oriented. So if I took you back to that podcast you recorded with my father, when he was saying that success for him was changing the definition of made in India, does that feel like a perfection chasing success? Because there's like a singular definition to that and you can either do it or not.
Is that the way you're defining things here? I shouldn't, but like he also said that ultimately success is about how much you change yourself. It's not about changing anything else. I was going to say that that takes as a given that you one needs to change themselves, right? Or that every person has that desire or need, maybe I'll phrase as a need, which as I was just pondering it for a second, that does feel true, right? Because the world changes. So if you are not going to kind of change, you won't actually even remain the same because the context around you will have changed. And I also feel like if people don't change, they do not stay the same. They become stagnant and like stagnant water is like just like stagnant water stagnant people also stink a bit.
That's a funny way of putting it in the sense that like, you know, if you talk to somebody who has not explored anything inside them in, I don't know, a decade, you'd realize that like this person is no longer a stagnant. He's no longer living. I don't know who said it. This was quote by some author that we die two deaths, one when we stop living and one when our body dies. And in that way, I feel like Pradeep's definition of success is like if you manage to change yourself in the sense at least like that's how I understood it. If you manage to live like you're understanding yourself, you are figuring out, okay, what do I want? What do I need? How do I change? I hear you on that. I guess as I was thinking about it and hearing that it felt like that was the evolution, right? So there was this initial way of thinking about success.
I felt he talked about as a younger man, which was chasing these kind of goals and you know, setting the big, hairy audacious goals. And that I think was the way we summed it up at the end of last episode was that almost felt like the perfection notion to me. Yeah, yeah, it is externally defined and like, you know, then you stop doing the externally defined thing. I don't know. Do you feel that way about your desire to like have an impact on culture and kind of push culture in the way that I don't know whether I'd say you think is best or just like the ways that you think are interesting, maybe. Like, does that feel like it's a similar sort of big, hairy audacious goal the way my father set out to go and change the way the world thought about Made in India?
That is a good question. It doesn't feel so. It doesn't feel like a goal. Maybe because he was trying to take it somewhere. He wasn't like, I want to change Made in India or I want to impact Made in India, right? He was like, I want to take a definition. I want to achieve a certain thing with it. And maybe that's the difference. Yeah, like he said, what Sony did for Japan. Possibly. I also feel like it doesn't feel like a goal because I feel like part of it is also it's going to be incidental. You might have to say more about that.
Okay, I'll give a very short example. Now that I've been like writing for three weeks for my substack, I can see if I continue to do this like, you know, a year later, I'm probably going to be a much better writer. But the improvement is going to be incidental. Like the writing is the main thing. But then like, you know, if I improve as a writer, it would be a lot better. Like, you know, this when I'm done writing, I like, you know, give it to GPT and I ask it for editorial notes and clarity, tone, consistency, and like a couple of other things. And this time GPT was ultra complimentary. Like I was feeling like this is a garbage article, but GPT was ultra complimentary. And it was really interesting, because according to it, my writing had improved even from the editorial notes, I could say that like, oh, it's not giving me very harsh.
Like things that it did earlier on. But like, I didn't write it quote unquote better. It's just that like, when you engage with something for a meaningful period of time with at least the word I would use it is like with mindfulness and authenticity, you have like a lot of these incidental growth advantages that come out of it. I hear you on traits, right? But when I think about it in terms of like, I don't know, for us to have an impact on culture, we will, it may be just the two of us, it may be just you, right? But the probability that we have a larger impact if we have kind of created a team of people who are working in conjunction towards a goal, right? Even if it's maybe a smaller project or right, maybe we come together for just a short amount of time. But then it becomes a thing that efforts would even be multiplicative and not just additive. So then I guess that's how I would ask a little bit, right? Because then it's not incidental, the goal, right? Like we're sending that out as our goal.
Would we do? So like my question then to you is would let's change the world ever be a goal because like that's not a smart goal, right? That's a dream. But dreams are not goals. I can really want that to happen. I want the world to be kinder and nicer. But like, that's not a goal. You know what I mean? Yeah, I guess the way I understood my father's company, especially other three, which was, you know, the first company started when I was young was that it was like, it set out to build a place that was challenging all of the norms of what was accepted about software development, right? Like the office was actually fun. And like this was really early, right? This is like early 90s. They had like rooftop lunch. And so it was kind of more about this notion of like you were part of a team. And this was a time when like the alternatives that people were getting hired from were like Infosys doing like the Y2K bug stuff, which was just like a lot of going through really boring lines of code and looking for bugs. Right? Like that is what drove this initial growth of Indian outsourcing. And so I guess, yeah, he was trying in his head, apparently, right? Like trying to change the way made in India was, but that wasn't what he talked about. He talked about was building this great company and building this great place to work and buying a place where people's ideas could come out. Yeah, which he was successful at. Yeah.
Recently in one of the groups I was in, somebody said that a great business is not the same as a great place to work at. And like it really made me think of your description of Aditi, like, you know, your dad was running it in the early days. Yeah, it felt like they were doing good work and it was a lovely place to be at. So yeah, maybe you are right then. Like the so the goal that we would bring people together around would be something like creating an experience that help people. Like a goal has to have an end line, right? Yeah, like maybe even something like, you know, the thing I've dreamed a lot about, right, like creating like an experience or like some sort of event that really brings people together in a way that they can share the things that really matter to them that they spend a lot of time thinking a lot about. Right. So maybe we do get a group of people together. We pull off this kind of incredible thing. And in the process, we show that there's a way of just, I don't know, creating community for people using digital tools and whatnot that becomes a lasting community in a way that people didn't think about.
Right. There's all these articles being written about how like now that people are becoming less religious community is dying in all these countries. Right. So maybe there's a way that we literally can kind of reverse that trend. But I think what I'm hearing from you and I'm kind of starting to agree with is we wouldn't gone out and said that right like we would have gone out and said we're building this thing we're putting on this event we're making this really amazing experience we're doing this one thing. And in the process we kind of also do these really big things. I also feel like a lot of these things are a little bit like happiness. You can't chase happiness. Like it just comes to you. It is incidental and it is important right like so I'm not questioning the importance of the dream, or even the size of the dream. But I don't think that it can be a goal. Like let's say I'll take the example of Brandon Sanderson writes an insane volume of books is like enormously successful. Right. But I don't think he could have started with, oh I want to be enormously successful and right like the kind of high fantasy that very few people
write. Like he actually is like, oh, you need to write and he has a schedule and he's like okay I'm going to sit down and write for eight hours a day. And this is how I'm going to do it. And that's how he's creating like you know two to four books a year. I don't know like maybe it's also like some part of my brain which looks at things in almost like a crafts person perspective feel like you just have to sit down and put your hands on the thing. And just to do it, it's not going to be glamorous. There are certain jobs which feel very glamorous, like you know a lot of creative jobs like you tell somebody, oh I work in films, or like a work as a creative producer or I work as a VFX artist people who like oh how awesome. Right. And or like you know I'm an entrepreneur or I'm running my own company like whichever you say, right like it sounds so shiny. And there are other things that somebody says oh I'm an accountant and people like how boring. But very honestly, no job is 100% boring. Right. And no job is honestly less than 85% non-broad. So it's like the band you're moving from is like 95% boring to 85% boring.
Like if you just think about that. But in some ways you just have to do that 85% part and you can enjoy it also. But it is rude and it is the same thing again and again and again. Like even if you look at you love talking to people and you love working with people. But working with people is like having the same conversation again and again and again and again and again many times. But if you enjoy it you can do it. But like it is 85% of the time is the same thing. Yeah. And I actually think this reminds me of something you and Pidip talked about a little bit right which was he was saying that there's no point in feeling sorry for yourself. You know you've got to just get the thing done sometimes and that's what needs to happen. And I think the really interesting point you raised was you were saying that yes but acknowledging sometimes that it's hard just helps you not be resentful.
Like it helps you accept it in a way and kind of appreciate you did do something hard and bring kind of the energy you need to do for it. So I guess I would think about it from that point of view right that yes for some of us like doing that 85% over and over again will feel hard right and the 10th time they do it will feel harder because they feel like they've done it 10 times and now they're like God damn I have to do it an 11th time. But I don't know I think do I like the notion of having a big Heria audacious goal kind of it's like kind of reassuring and I think in some ways I do like setting them for myself you know whether it's like oh I'm going to I'm not objecting to dreaming about it I'm just saying it's not a goal you can't call it a goal changing the world is a dream it's not a goal. A goal is a goal post where the ball goes and you're like yeah I scored a goal like it has to be that tangible.
I will know it when I see it as a dream it's not a goal. I'm trying to think about how I feel about my dreams which ones are goals which ones are dreams. Interesting dichotomy I have not pursued before. To put it slightly differently I would say that like you have to articulate your dreams in smaller goal terms. So like let's say if we were to talk about you know the idea of bringing people together and giving them a new way of connecting with each other which is sort of like this emotionally safe and intellectually challenging third
space where people can come together right all of those things are almost what I would say like values that we want to make sure that our goals are like you know meeting in some ways right but like the first goal might be oh we want to have like a meeting of 10 people and we want to figure out what works what doesn't work do people want to talk do people not want to talk like you know getting 10 people together can we do it right like so the first goal is get 10 people together. Maybe the second goal is get 1000 people together and then like you know you can add more things to that where it's like oh maybe it needs to have this kind of skill and maybe it needs to be in this kind of a location and it needs to have this kind of an experience but like having sort of almost like hard markers is important. This is interesting. I've been spending time with a friend of mine who moved from a consumable business like really doing kind of a condiment. First of all it was this dream that she had right so she was like oh I want to have something that people can consume and consume repeatedly and doesn't
require kind of a lot of hand holding and there'd be a product driven growth basically right like some amount of product like growth but not in a technology space like really in a handheld right so first she had this kind of broad dream thing I want to do something in this space and then now you know they ended up opening a red light therapy studio so red light is this very trendy thing right now that seems to actually be really good for you especially because tanning is so bad right and we all acknowledge tanning is so bad so there's been this movement away from tanning studios as a place to hang out and they're like well here's something that seems to have health benefits can we repurpose the idea or take this line of idea and they'll create and so now as I talked to them I spoke to them a couple of days ago they have tangible goals right they want they wanted a hundred annual members by the end of the year and it's looking like that one is going to be really tough right but they've gotten a bunch of people buying packs they've gotten one annual member signed up so far and they have a plan to try and see okay you know what is the next reasonable goal right and so now they're saying okay our next reasonable goal is by the middle of January or the end of January we want to be getting enough consistent revenue and that we can hire one person and I guess as I was thinking about it it feels to me like this is kind of the path that you were outlining right that you
have this like dream you have this idea that I want to be in the space I want to do this thing and then you're setting yourself not like really big goal post but these smaller kind of measurable tangible goals okay we want to open by this date by our opening one have this many pre sales once we see it now assess okay so we set that one too hard now should we set maybe a little bit over more reasonable goal now that we understand our velocity our abilities I would also say that like in context of like you know creating a space where it feels different for people to work there and there is a sense of belonging I think the most tangible goal must have been that like every conversation people have they should feel included and not excluded right like any decision whether it is at company level or at small level whether it is at small level whether they are talking to their juniors or seniors or peers or clients they feel like oh they you know the team got their back are the company got their back nobody's out to get them like like there is all of those layers of psychological safety and like inclusivity and all of that that like you know those must have been the goals in a certain sense like this is how we do it if all conversations are good then overall it would be good like I'm sort of extending of course I don't get good know what it's like to work in a company much less like you know run a big company but I'm just like you know extrapolating. No I think you're you're not wrong right like I think in a lot of
ways the values that senior leadership and particularly your CEO show get replicated through because those are the ones that people know they will feel safe in emulating right like those are the ones that are being demonstrated for you over and over again and I think yeah my father has a lot of willingness to listen to people and a very low willingness to tell you to do something he wants to get you to agree to do something right he wants you to understand and then you
to want to do it you want to agree to do it he's never not really one who's going to tell you to do something and I think that pushes a certain kind of thinking right it means that you have to be thinking about why is it in someone's interest to do this thing yeah and then that operates all the way through. I also imagine it would have pushed out people in the early years who were spoon feeding like if somebody doesn't want to put their brain to it they wouldn't be a bad fit
and then they would not feel interested in being there because like again this is a side point but I feel like with changing the world I'm also learning this a big thing is many people are different there are like you know you can create pockets of change but creating universal changes almost impossible. I don't know I have a friend who I'm actually having lunch with today who's found us saying that someone did everything right you know somebody
invented the kind of fork that we now all use and take as a given that it should have whatever you know four prongs or something how many prongs is a fork? Yeah yeah yeah correct somebody designed everything I agree with you. Yeah right and so there was a person who had that impact in a lot of cases it was a singular person who evolved it to this place where it was now today and maybe a really small thing. The world isn't uniform in any way shape or form so like I'll
give you an example half of the India doesn't have internet like 800 million people using internet in India which means that there are like about 800 million not using it right internet and everything that is based off of it I don't know a life outside of it and nobody around me knows a life outside of it and like something that we take so much for granted there is half the country that does not have access to it and they're not all living a bad destitute life all I'm saying is
I'm not disagreeing with you somebody did create everything I just think that like in our pockets we are more prone to thinking that the propagation of the impactful thing or the impact of the impactful thing is greater than it is on the larger world and like giving ourselves that space at least I feel like is healthy giving yourself that space to dream a dream even it's not that big you mean no no no in the sense of giving yourself the space to say that oh many people will not get this and many people
will not agree with this and this dream will not change the world because the world is massive that's interesting so I as part of my final project work for for this semester of my MFA I did a report on Allen Ginsberg and one of the things that I felt like is a lot of his work was challenging social norms right that he was really trying to push things in front of people that would make them question why they felt that these were not things that they could talk about
right he was pushing on these like customs a lot and there's a lot of people who don't feel that way right there's people who feel like he kind of was just throwing random shit out right like much more conceptual poet in the lines of like Marshall Duchamp or right or like even like later Kenneth Goldsmith right like but more in the conceptual poetry line where you're really just kind of like pushing on form you are modernist or even postmodernist and not so much kind of worried about
creating meaning or chasing meaning which is something I really felt when I looked at his work so I don't know yeah I guess I think I was thinking about that as you were talking because there's never going to be a uniformity even in people who right are considered great like there will always be these people who don't feel that way about that or don't see the magic in that work which is then an interesting lens to even put to what my father was initially saying right which is
like did he not change made in India I'm sure he did for some people right there was like probably thousands of people who worked at the in the years that were there who thought about living in their country or thought about working in a certain way and then they had tens of thousands of people they worked with right who then touched and then they experienced a different kind of company and they saw that oh yeah these weren't just kind of code monkeys who are there to kind of like you
know outsourced like the the software you didn't want written yeah but actually could kind of help think with you and like yeah they were different than and also like many of those people who went on probably to like you know lead their own departments later in life probably propagating that change in outside karnal and there's something like a hundred companies I think maybe it's more than a hundred now who have been started by ex other three people there's like someone who keeps account of them
and these are just started by them right but like maybe some of them went into conventional companies like Infosys or Wipro and like you know they were like oh this is not how it is done just like I think I mean just an addendum to what Pradeep said at least like my understanding again but like I think it's not just that like you change yourself but I feel like by changing yourself you show people what is adjacent possible and that changes things for them because like then
they propagate that change outwards so maybe even more than he was like a cool leader to start with it was that other they changed so much over the years right and there was so much willingness and flexibility and kind of growth right that happened for people across different places like he was very willing to move people his his engineering managers into like IT or into HR because he was like I feel people who really understand this company are going to do a better
job in those roles than people who have kind of have expertise in that function like we can learn the function if you know what the spirit and the ethos of this place is and yeah that was a kind of interesting way to approach right it just meant the career paths were not normally what you would think they had to be yeah they could be kind of all sorts of things and also like just imagine those people how they would show up for their kids yeah it was their mind did a little bit of a
story one of my two colleagues at Therese Munoz Capital um Sahel he was recounting a story to us of some years ago right now he manages basically the infrastructure for Chase at this point right so he's this crazy job where it is there's something always failing at some part of the world as he was explaining to us right some transactions failing something is broken in some country in the world almost all the time and so at some point there was some something that went down that it really was
attributed to one person right someone had made a mistake and then he had to get on a call with Sahel who's like the big boss right and he clearly expected to be fired and Sahel didn't fire him right he was like listen you're never gonna make this mistake again right so why would I fire you and have someone else in the job who will make the mistake again right so it's more a question right now you know how this happened let's make sure how do we learn I think it is an attitude right
like that's an attitude that they had now that's carried forward to one of these huge banks that would otherwise a lot of ways would never have these kinds of attitudes and what a compassionate view of looking at people right like that's not what finance industry is known for thank you for thinking with us visit thinking on thinking on the web at joyus.studio to get notes past episodes and transcripts before you go can you do me one small favor go online right now
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