The Pathways & Padlocks Conversation
00:23:46 · Sachin
[00:23:46] S0: Yeah, for sure. And Sid, I think you know our podcast better than we do, because I had no idea what episode 28 was. Yes, so the top down, bottom up approach is kind of an analogy I use to the way I live my life. So as I've kind of developed throughout university, something that's been really important to me and has really grounded me is daily habits. And that's where the bottom up comes from. So the daily habits, I think, really make me perform at my best. They make me a pretty happy individual and they make me connect with people around me a lot better than I would if I didn't have them. And I'm also a creature of habit, I need that because there's so much chaos going on inside my head, so many ideas all the time that I need these things to ground me in every day. And also ensures that you're a happy, healthy individual, which I think is more important than a lot of this other stuff we talk about a lot. So those bottom up habits, what they look like for me is every day I wake up, I have a cold shower, I'll do meditation, I exercise every day pretty religiously, I eat healthily, I drink a lot of water, I just kind of make sure and I sleep at least eight hours, check on the blue light blockers. I'm pretty into all that kind of biohacking stuff. But for me, makes sure that I'm performing every day. That makes sure that when someone needs me, when my family needs me, I can show up. And that over time, that I know I'm not deteriorating myself. Because my worst nightmare is to work too hard and just burn out because that's not what I want do. Want to kind of continuously show up every day. So that's a bottom up. And I think that if everyone does those kinds of things, they will I know I keep saying the word exponentially, but I'm going use it again will exponentially improve their life because those things to me have had a profound impact on my mood, etcetera. And then the second part of it is the top down. And the top down is about having a vision. So having a vision of where you wanna go, where you're heading. Because I think that if you do that bottom up stuff without having a vision, that's going to lead to existential angst because you're not going to know why you need be performing well. You're not going to know why that stuff is important, right? So finding a vision and it's so much easier said than done.
00:25:54 · Sachin, Sid Dissanayake
Finding a vision of where you want to go is very difficult. It does help talking to a lot of people. It does help doing some soul searching about what are your intrinsic interests when you strip away all the noise in society. But I think combining those two together, you make sure you can show up and you're a happy person, a present person, etc. But then you're also moving towards something. And I think as humans, we to justify our existence on this earth and we need to try and be moving towards something. [00:26:22] S1: Yeah, you mentioned there like the idea of soul searching. I just wanted to ask, was in developing your own bottom up and top down approaches, did that happen overnight? Or did that happen over months, weeks, years? Yeah. Give us insight into that process.
00:26:40 · Sachin
[00:26:40] S0: Yeah, so it definitely took years and don't think that it's like an official process. As I mentioned before, that it's actually an analogy I came up with just on the spot. For me, those habits are really important and the most happiest people I know have those habits. And I think it's more about the individual habits. It's the fact that you're showing up for yourself every day. It's the fact that you're kind of telling yourself that you matter. And I almost say these habits as an extension of self love. Like, you're showing yourself that you matter and that you're important and you're doing things that make you perform better, which I think that is important for everyone to do because being a student these days can get chaotic. Have all these stimulus around us all the time. It's really hard to find time for yourself. Yeah. And so the way I came up across it is I've always been a macro thinker. I've always believed in having a big vision. But I've also always believed in the small things. Like I think the beauties of life are those little moments you have every day. So it was combining those two things together. And also funnily enough, as a philosophy subject I did at university, which was the philosophy of happiness. And we talked a lot about fulfillment in the long run. And we talked about how a lot of religious people are more happy than non religious people because they have that macro thing, they have that thing that gives them meaning, they have that sense of community that obviously makes them happy and that sense of purpose. So I was like, how can I combine those elements to make religion so good into my own life? I wouldn't really consider myself a religious person.
00:28:10 · Sid Dissanayake, Sachin
[00:28:10] S1: Yeah. I mean, I wanted to transition now, Sachin, just in the interest of time, to one of your passions, which is for social impact and social justice. You mentioned previously that, you know, since a young age, you know, there's have always been, you know, some burning desires of yours. And you've more specifically stated that you're passionate about the intersection between two things, that being business and impact. And you've already touched on previously about how you're interested in quality of opportunity rather than outcome. So I just wanted to get an insight into where exactly that passion has come from. And, you know, how have you expressed that in your, you know, university life or professional capacity in different positions or roles or experiences that you've undertaken? [00:28:58] S0: Yeah, so this would be a pretty long answer, so feel [00:29:01] S1: free to interrupt.
00:29:02 · Sachin
[00:29:02] S0: I've done a lot of thinking about this. So from a very young age, I've always had this kind of this passion for social justice. And it manifested itself in high school when I was involved in a lot of social justice projects. But I think that where it came from is my brother. So my brother has a disability, cerebral palsy, and he's the most amazing person you'll ever meet. So he gets up every day with a smile on his face. He's done so much. Leaves like he makes me my achievements seem like they're nothing because he's just done so much in his short life. And I think growing up every day, seeing my brother show up, try and create as many opportunities for himself as possible, see my family unit changing so much so that it could facilitate the best life for him as possible, I realized that this stuff could happen for other people. My brother was so lucky to grow up in Australia to have access to all these opportunities. Lucky enough that my mom could stop work when he was born to kind of look after him and give him the best opportunity full time, right? And so my parents also were both born in Africa. My family spent a lot of time in East Africa and I've spent some time there as well. And I think from a very young age, it was nights I couldn't sleep because I'd always think about someone that's the same age as me, characteristics, but through no, but through pure luck, I'm here in Australia and that in, let's say for example, Uganda, I'm struggling, struggling to eat right and not having opportunity for education. And that's something that's really bothered me from a young age and I didn't really know what I could do about it. Still don't really know. So as I graduated high school, I graduated with that kind of duality of experience with my brother and that kind of, you know, understanding of what people go through. And so as I transitioned to university, I thought, first of all, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. And then I looked at how many human rights law subjects you do in a degree, and I realized that it wasn't for me. Second of all, I thought I wanted to work for the World Bank. And so that's why I originally started economics. But as I came into high school, I'm sorry, as I came into university, I discovered entrepreneurship.
00:31:16 · Sachin
And that really of stood out to my personality because I'm someone that like doesn't like status quo thinking. I like creating stuff. Like moving fast and that energy of the space really stood out to me. And then further down my journey, I discovered social entrepreneurship, which was the best of both worlds, right? It was my passion for social justice and also my passion for business combining into one kind of very convenient package. And I was like, cool. And that really made me rethink the narrative about business that I kind of grew up with, and I imagine most of your audience would have grown up with, is that business is bad. It's all about money. Have social impact, you need to join a not for profit, not make the best salary, etcetera, etcetera. And I've realized now that that narrative is complete bullshit. Like one of my biggest mentors, Chamath Palihapitiya, I say mentor, but I've never met him. It's just someone I look up to. He has a fund called the social impact capital. And essentially, they invest in businesses that he thinks is going to change the world. A lot of kind of climate change tech, a lot of med tech, and he's compounded more returns than Warren Buffett. And he's going to be on track to be returning 15, 20% a year to his investors, which is absolutely phenomenal. Another kind of experience that stands out to me is I was watching an address by the chairman of the World Bank. I'm not sure if chairman's the right word, maybe it's president. But he was saying that he thinks that this frontier of business and social impact will be on the precipice of a lot of change. He gave an example of a drone company that delivers blood in Africa to remote communities via drones. And they have a viable business model and they're scaling up and they're doing so much cool stuff. And to me, that's the space that excites me the most.