The Pathways & Padlocks Conversation
00:44:59 · Sachin
[00:44:59] S0: just wanted to give you an opportunity to explain what that means to you personally in your own experience, and then why that's particularly resonated for you. Yeah, so I think the period in my life where this really hit home was when I was on exchange. And there was a period of time where I was constantly listening to podcasts, reading books and stuff. Every moment I had by myself, was always trying to improve, right? And I realized, I think it was once when I was riding my bike because in The Netherlands, everyone rides bikes everywhere. And my thoughts were constantly like in the future about this happening, how does this play out? How does this investment play out, etcetera, etcetera. And that's really not how I'm gonna live my life, right? I missed all the beauty that was around me in that particular bike ride. Was... My thoughts were too clouded to connect with other people. And something I've been really passionate about, and I think this is from an early interest in spirituality, is that, like, why are we here on the Earth, first of all, and everyone has a different reason for that. But for me, a fundamental thing that we all have in common is some of our best moments in life are the ones where we're present, right? If you ask people what they enjoy, a lot of the time they'll say things like playing sport, maybe it's skydiving, maybe it's art or surfing or something like that, right? And those are all moments where you're present and you can and you're not your brain isn't in the past or future, right? Our brains like aren't biologically wired to be constantly thinking about these things, right? And if you ask anyone when the happiest moments are, it's always when they're present. So that's something I've been very passionate about because to me, there's no point in me achieving anything in my life if I'm not present and there for the people around me and actually, you know, having that space in between my thoughts. I think there's a quote from the Buddha which is, Enlightenment is the space between our thoughts, which is something I really believe in.
00:46:50 · Sid Dissanayake
[00:46:50] S1: Yeah, and I think what you're getting at as well is that can get so caught up in the past and the future as well. And you know, personally for me, like I'm 100% victim to that and something that I can improve on for sure. And I think, you know, I was reading a blog about the book because I wanted to raise it, raise the idea and what they were saying is that, I'll read the quote, they said that the past is nothing more than a collection of present moments gone by and the future is nothing more than present moments waiting to arrive. And I think that pretty much reflects what you just said about how, you know, the emphasis and focus should be on the now and the present moment. Is that something that you sort of resonate with and reflect? 100%.
00:47:35 · Sachin
[00:47:35] S0: And the thing I'll say here is it's difficult, right? When I first got exposed to this idea, I thought that we had to be present all the time. And honestly, that's not functional, right? We can't do well at work or uni or whatever if we're present all the time because we need to be planning, studying or like, etcetera, planning things with friends. But we have very little moments in our life when we're present, right? And it's things you can integrate into your everyday life. Like when you're brushing your teeth, you'll notice that your thoughts are everywhere, everywhere. So now when I'm brushing my teeth, I just try and really bring it back to what's happening right now. And I think when you do that, you discover a lot of beauty in the world. Like when I meditate in my back garden every day, I look around and I see things that I never saw before I meditated. I see little movements in the trees, I see little insects that I never would have noticed because my head's so clouded with thoughts. And those things to me are like what's beautiful about life and often we're missing them all the time.
00:48:26 · Sid Dissanayake
[00:48:26] S1: Yeah, I think that's really valuable, particularly for university students who you can get so caught up, as you mentioned in this idea of constantly growing and developing and you know, you need to spend 100% of your time on your on yourself and developing yourself. But I think developing tools like self awareness, as you've done through meditation is is really important as well. Another sort of topic I wanted to touch on, and I suppose, like a philosophy or tenet which you live by, was that idea of the data points and the fact that the more data points you have, the better prediction you can make. And I think, particularly for young people who might be in the later years of high school or early years of university, it's about collecting information, collecting those data points as you put it in your analogy. So what exactly does that analogy mean? And how can students out there, whether they be university or high school, how can they leverage that idea?
00:49:26 · Sachin
[00:49:26] S0: Yeah. So this isn't that similar thematic to what we were talking about before, about having as many experiences as possible and following your curiosity, right? And I don't want to get too econometric right here, but if you're a business student, one of the first things you learn is that to have better predictions, you need more data points, right? And I think that's an idea that can make intuitive sense to most people. And for me, that analogy was one, a way of kind of getting my message across to the more quanti people that may not, you know, understand how I was saying it before. But it's true. Like, as I said before, all those coffees, all those kind of internships, all that research on the internet, that all gives you a more firmer idea of where you want to go. And sometimes it may not feel like that. Sometimes the more information you get, the more confused you can get, right? Which is I think something we need to acknowledge. But I think generally, as you kind of talk to more people, you have a more clear understanding of where you want to go towards and what kind of an ideal career or an ideal whatever looks like for you. So it's a simple idea. And the way it's actually come into my life recently is through the podcast where we've been talking to a lot of venture capitalists. And through that, I've really decided that's a place I want go in the future. Me and Adam have this ambition of starting a social impact VC in the next five to ten years. So that's something we're kind of working towards now. And that's an insight or career insight that's come from all these data points of talking to these people and hearing about their experiences.
00:51:02 · Sid Dissanayake, Sachin
[00:51:02] S1: So, I mean, those that don't know, like who aren't business savvy or tech savvy, what is a VC? Can you explain that for people who don't know? [00:51:10] S0: Yeah, so a VC is short for venture capitalist. And what a venture capital firm does is it invests in early stage companies at different times in their journey and gives them funding to scale up their growth. So if you think about the biggest businesses of our time, your Airbnb's, your Facebook's, your Ubers, they were all funded by VCs, right? And VCs have actually had a pretty profound impact on their trajectory of growth, right? So I'm really interested in that space in using capital to facilitate new social innovations, because I just think that'd be the coolest job. And that's an insight that's only come to me in the last few months.