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The Best Advice Our Guests Ever Received | 2022 Recap · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that is a good one because there's been so much good advice I've received over the years.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I want to tie it back to the product design thinking and uh the design thinking that we talked about earlier.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was in product design and I was starting just starting out, taking the first class, one of the people who was one of my instructors, not a professor, but one of my instructors who helped David teach the class was a guy named Peter McDonald.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he expressed it in a way that other people have said, but he was the first one who said this to me.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, quantity has a quality all its own.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a great way of summarizing the design thinking mindset, which is, uh, and many could call it the Nike mindset, the just do it mindset, which is you should be doing and trying, because most of the things you do and try are going to fail.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's okay because it's a part of the process.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: What is important is that we continue to do, to try, to achieve, to get the things that we want, to make the world better, to improve the lives of people around us.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Keep trying.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Don't just give up.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Don't just lay back and say, you know what, I'm just gonna do what comes easy, and I'm just gonna do what I've already done.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: That is stagnation.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And inevitably, it's going to lead to your downfall because the world does not stay in place, and the rules that you came up with and you follow so assiduously are going to no longer apply at some point in time.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: So quantity has a quality all its own.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Always be trying, always be doing.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_10: Something that has influenced me a lot is um is if you look at what Steve Jobs taught the world, and not just about technology, but about um a lot of things about how you should run your life.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_10: Many of the uh self-realizations that you know people have had looking at his life and his the way he went about doing it.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_10: I think that has been fairly impactful.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_10: For example, his thing is that you can you can only connect the dots in hindsight.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_10: Right?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_10: You you cannot connect the dots when you're looking forward.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_10: It's only when you look back and you can kind of connect the things.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_10: The second thing that he said is that you know, if if you're trying to uh decide what area to work on, look at the thing that really excites you.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_10: Look at the thing because finally, you know, you'll you'll excel at something if it doesn't look like work to you, it should look like play to you.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_10: Now that was a very uh, you know, it's a very uh radical way of thinking about it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_10: I wish I'd heard this saying, you know, again 30 years ago when I was in school and college.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_10: But uh I generally find some of his writings and his quotations very inspiring.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_08: Two things I would say.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_08: One is um my dad, he's not an advisor, he he he just does things like uh he sings every day in the evening uh for the last few years, but otherwise he sings at home.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_08: As a child, he used to sing, get up in the morning and sing, single.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_08: He's not he's a teacher, he's not a concert guy, but then he would sing, he would keep singing.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_08: If I do I I I play with him, I practice with him.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_08: Nowadays I'm not able to do that, but uh for a lot of years I used to sit with him and practice.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_08: If I don't practice with him, he'll say, Today gone, one day gone.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_08: That's it, that that's so much in it, that particular statement, okay.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_08: It basically says that with the time lost, you can't take it back.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_08: Whatever you do, you can't take it back.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_08: So you have to make sure what you do with your time.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_08: What if it is lost one hour lost, lost, it's gone, you can't take it back.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_08: Decide.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_08: So that puts a lot of pressure on you, okay?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_08: You have to decide what do you want to do.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_08: You are you lose lost one one hour, so it drives me crazy.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_08: Second thing is again Sudan Murti's talk uh saying, I don't quite remember what exactly it is, but it says that whatever situation it is, you may be in a disadvantage situation, but identify the advantage of that and make use of it.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_08: So whatever situation, it may be disadvantageous to you, but then try to identify what is uh the best what you can do at that time and take advantage of that.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_08: That situation may not arise and that advantage point you will not get.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_08: So I think these two are uh quite a bit of uh entwined into my uh the way I do things.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_06: My father and everybody has a you know a certain unique relationship with their father.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_06: And uh the idea that he never gave up.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_06: Uh he was the hardest working guy I ever met in my life.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_06: He worked in a foundry and uh for the Ford Motor Company.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_06: He he would come home smelling like a foundry every day, you know, because he was just immersed in uh you know foundry dust and the suit and stuff like that.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_06: Uh I just wonder what what made this guy tick?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_06: What made him get up every day to do that?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_06: He had a hard job.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_06: Uh it was just you know his nature.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_06: He would always tell me to never give up, you know, decide what your dreams are and you know, go out and tackle them.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_06: When when your father talks to you like that, it gives you that kind of inner um feeling of uh you know, possibly you know, yeah, yes, I can do this.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_06: If my dad believes in me, I I can do that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: One of the best pieces of advice is um that that I've received is actually I'll I'll tell you a brief story on it.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: I was um you know, I was meeting with a professor's TI university students in particular, so applied them.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I was just a little bit frustrated just in terms of careers, or I was kind of saying, what's the point of of politics and in in different areas?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Why why do we have to play this game versus that game?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: Doesn't that seem remarkably inefficient, especially as a data guy?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: So why should we do this?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: And he had an interesting approach, and he said uh he availed me to an idea that's called tournament theory, uh, which came out of the University of Chicago, where they were trying to understand why executives were paid so much.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_03: Like they were looking when someone gets promoted from an SVP to a CMO, does their utility really double?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if not, why do they double their salary?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: That seems irrational to a group of economists, and so they studied it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: And what they found out was this idea of a tournament, which is that in this tournament model, your CMO is not going to be creating as much value as they're getting paid for.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: But because of the disproportionate pay, it encourages everyone underneath them who's fighting for the CMO position to work harder.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: And if you have 50 people who are now working disproportionately harder to get that promotion, then that utility justifies why the salary, the prize of winning the tournament has to be so high.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: And and think about it, below the SVPs, you have the VPs, you have the directors, you have the managers, you have the analysts, all looking to say the next level of the tournament right, is what they want to win.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: And what his argument was was that unfortunately a majority of people only play in the tournament that they're given.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: They don't explore all the possibilities of their life.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: They simply say, Well, if I want to get promoted, or if I want to get to this next stage of my career, this is what everybody tells me I need to learn and I need to do.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then what they do is they shut off everything.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: They almost become have tunnel vision around, well, what is it to get to the next step that somebody else sets for me and somebody else tells me.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: If I look back at my career, people say, Well, how did you get into customer analytics?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: How did you get into this field?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: The most successful moments of my career have been when I was able to break apart from that and pursue something, not because I saw how it was going to help in terms of winning any particular tournament, but because I saw that there was a potential just in the field and the idea itself.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I worry all too often that students, when I talk to them, they're focused, well, how do I get a job with this company or how do I do this particular job?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: And they turn off things that are naturally interesting to them, things that they would be passionate about and would love to do, but because it's not part of the tournament that they've been put slotted into.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so that advice is just to say be always mindful about the tournament that you're playing in and the skills.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: And if there is something that's interesting where you see value, you see something that you can make a great career out of, don't turn it away just because it's not a skill that you need today.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about things in a wider sense about where things could go, or perhaps consider yourself playing almost in a different tournament than the one you've been given, you'll find more opportunities.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: The best uh advice I would say, because um the stock market is a place of uh very speedy gratification.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: The best piece of advice was my mentor telling me that uh you stay away from um people who want to run too fast.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: So stick to what you do, don't worry about how others are pacing their work, whether it's business or investing.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: So you set your own pace.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the best advice which I got uh when I did not even know what I was going to do because after you finish your studies, there is this phase of uncertainty.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: So at that point, I think that uh we were uh able to set that correctly.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_09: I think uh it was given by the chairman of um Unilever the first day I joined.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_09: For me, I joined in Bangalore, and that was the last day on which uh uh Kiki Dadiset uh was uh going to be the chairman of uh Hindustan Leavers, as it was called, and he was moving to a global role.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_09: He flew down all the way from Bombay to Bangalore just for a few hours to meet and welcome the future leadership of the company.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_09: I asked him if there's a lead, you know, advice he would like to give me, what would it be?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_09: And he said that I think winning the battle in one's mind before winning it in the marketplace is very important.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_09: In the the mindset that isn't required, you've got to play that game clearly in your mind.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_09: Saying, look, this is what's gonna happen, this is my plan, and this is how I things will pan out, and these are the challenges I'm going to face, right?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_09: Because the world is not waiting for you to come and roll out that plan.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_09: The world has its own plans.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_09: So, what will you do if those plans are at loggerheads with what you see in the ground?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_09: How will you overcome and play that entire thing to that level of detail?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_09: Right, is very is going to be very important.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_09: I think that's a very valuable piece of advice anybody has given me.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_05: Um, I'll give you I'll give you two from my father uh who who long ago told me that uh the answer to every question is it depends.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_05: And uh just to recognize that that situation, you know, the situation really does matter in terms of of what you're answering.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_05: Um the other thing is he was a great help when I was thinking about leaving IBM and starting my own business.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it was after the book Mass Customization came out, IBM offered me and my wife both six months' salary to leave.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_05: And should we do that or should we stay and so forth?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, um and his and I was really wrestling with this, and and his advice was son, whichever way you choose, you'll have a nice life.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_05: And it sort of like took the pressure off and said, okay, okay.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_05: And then I say, okay, well, then I'm gonna go for it, right?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_05: I can always get another job.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna go for it, see what can happen in this, and I'm very glad I did.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna give you the piece of advice that I have to explain.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_04: So the advice was from an investments class I took as an undergraduate, and the advice was pay yourself first.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_04: Now that sounds super selfish.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_04: So the the context of that was if you're investing, you have to always invest.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_04: It's like uh dollar cost averaging, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: You don't want to like, hey, I'm not gonna invest well because of of compound interest, right?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: Compounding is a magical process in which, if you're consistent, you can actually almost anyone can actually become wealthy if you wait 30 years.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but it's the same thing of putting on your oxygen mask on the airplane before we help somebody else.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_04: If you are able to do what is necessary for you, that means you can share that with everybody else.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_04: So um, you know, it's it's not selfishness to want to do the best for yourself because it means as social creatures, we can do the best for those around us and we can bring all those together.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_04: So in my company, Emerging Neuroscience, I've had the pleasure of hiring four PhDs that trained in my academic lab, people that I love, I trust, I've known for you know half my life.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: What a pleasure that is to be able to build a company and hire your best friends.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's awesome.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_04: But if I hadn't taken the risk to start the company, put my own money into it, I could never have done that and hang out with these people that you know I truly um am blessed to be around.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_04: So um, so yeah, pay yourself first, which again is not selfish to take care of others.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_07: I was in uh I did college in Brazil, and uh and then I wanted to get a job like everybody else.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_07: And the jobs weren't that good when you come out of college.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_07: Many of the jobs didn't seem like that wonderful to me.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_07: Wonderful businesses, but when you would ask them, what am I supposed to do?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_07: They would say a bunch of things that weren't that valuable.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_07: And um and then uh uh I had a professor who's who encouraged me to do a master's in statistics.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_07: I said, Don't go get a job now, you're too young.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_07: Go go do a master's in statistics and understand very deeply um how to uh uh create knowledge from data.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_07: That will be extremely powerful for all of your career.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, but I want to make money.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_07: And he said, you're too young to make money.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_07: You're not gonna make much money because you have very little differentiated skills versus other people that are coming out.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_07: You might think you're amazing, but you're actually not.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_07: And until you can prove that, you're just going to make just a little bit of amount of money.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_07: And now is the time for you to develop yourself.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_07: And I think that was extremely valuable advice, right?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_07: So if you're coming out, like just learn as much as you can.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_07: And then later on in life, when you've learned so much, you can extract in the form of you know, uh getting a job and working and or building a business, something like that.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_07: So early on, I'd say like the big advice was to learn as much as I could and leave the process of value capturing that we've been talking about for later on, trying to try to not want to capture a lot of value uh, you know, when you're 20, 21, 22, because there's so much complexity in the world, so much that you need to invest time in kind of creating knowledge, and later on in life you can kind of start extracting value.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_07: And for the most successful people in the world that I've talked to, the most successful when measured by a certain amount of wealth, they they keep telling me, so tell us like I'm 60 or I'm 70 or I'm 80 or I'm 55 or I'm 40, you know, like um 80 to 90 percent of my wealth I re I I captured in the last 10 years of my life.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_07: You can see that um you know, like if if you learn powerful ideas and concepts and theories and and you learn about the word as much as possible, you learn it, that becomes fuel for you, and then later on in life it's so much easier to monetize that than if you just try to make money and get the job that pays more early on in your career, and that's what I mean.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's that one from my father earlier about living an absolute life and not a relative life.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably the hardest piece of advice I've ever gotten, but it is it is by far the best.