Category: The Real Leaders Project

Dhanya interviewed Sharanya Manivannan on RealLeaders.tv. Sharanya is a Sri Lankan-Indian poet, journalist, and novelist who currently lives in Chennai, India.

My favorite snippets –

“I think everybody is creative. I think everybody has that creative nerve. I do believe in a spiritual understanding of what creativity is and I think it comes from somewhere within.”

“I also realized that I had always regarding writing as an incidental activity. My mistake was trying to change that perspective. Now I am going back to the original idea. I wouldn’t say priority, I would say incidental. Incidentally creating a piece of art carries a deeper a sense of satisfaction along with it – atleast for me.”

“Write what’s true; what’s true to you. Write when you want to; write when you have to. Don’t worry about the rest. It’ll come when it does.”

Full transcript as always on RealLeaders.tv. Enjoy!

EB interviewed Ted Serbinski of Detroit Venture Partners and the interview is now up! Aside from working on the start-up renaissance in Detroit, Ted has been an entrepreneur for many years and spent 8 years as a lead open source developer for Drupal.

As always, my favorite snippets –

“Things that keep me on track when I look at coding and hacking and those kinds of things are to always be enthusiastic and passionate about what I’m doing and there’s a great saying online of David Seta’s.  It’s “build, ship, mentor and share.”  The concept is that there are these four steps to every process.”

“The first thing is the team behind the start-up.  The second thing is how they’re actually executing.  Notice that I’m not saying anything about their idea and I’ll show the reason for that in this example.   When someone says, “I have the best idea and it’s going to change the world,” I say, “Let me tell you about my idea.”

When I’m investing in start-up, the biggest question is how do you judge start-up one from start-up two?  What’s the real difference?  There are two fundamentally different things. My idea is that I’m going to rent out a big space.  It’s going to be on a busy street corner and it’s going to have about 10,000 square feet of space.  I’m going to put down tables and chairs and have a menu of food.  It’s a restaurant.  There are millions of restaurants in the world, but they’re all completely different from the décor to the type of food, the type of service, the cost.  But they’re all fundamentally exactly the same idea, so when an entrepreneur comes to me and says they have a great idea I tell them, “I don’t care so much about your idea as how you are going to execute.  What is going to be your cost?  What is going to be the way you’re different?  How good is your food or your product going to be?  What kind of icon, what kind of colors?  Those are the things that will really differentiate you.”

The full transcript is up on RealLeaders.tv.

Jonathan Haidt is the author of the much acclaimed book “The Happiness Hypothesis” and as a bit of a happiness geek, I had been attempting to reach him for a while.

Interviewing Jonathan was a real pleasure and it feels like one of the biggest takeaways from interviewing “real leaders” is that they are all incredibly nice.

 

 

 

My favorite excerpts –

Love and work, and the essence of love and work are about your degree of connection or embeddedness. 

Work isn’t just about achieving something. I came to understand that concept of vital engagement, of immersing yourself in something – you learn about it more and more and you become part of the community of people who are working at something. It seemed so similar to love that I realized that that’s really the key.

“Joy so lies in the doing.”  It’s not the achievement, it’s the doing, and there’s a lot of scientific support showing that our brains get more pleasure from making progress towards a goal than actually achieving the goal.

I still say stupid things, but now I’m really, really good at apologizing.  I know how self-righteousness works. 

Know your body, and your energy cycle.

What I’m coming to see is that balance is of value in life overall but one should not strive for balance in every point in his or her life.

Full transcript as always on RealLeaders.tv. Enjoy

Bill Bernstein is one of my favorite authors. I loved his book “A Splendid Exchange” and recently read “The Investors Manifesto” as I began piecing together a thesis on investments.

I am glad I reached out to him as he’s among the friendliest people I’ve had the fortune to meet. The interview was full of funny quips and piercing insight.

A few of my favorites quotes from Bill –

‘Now the other thing you learn from financial history that may be the most valuable is that the best fishing is done in the most troubled waters.’

‘Show me a person who works 70 or 80 hours a week and I’ll show you a person who’s never had an original thought in their life because you just don’t have the time to have them.’

‘The times that I was most productive were actually the times that I was working the least and I had the most free time.’

‘Careers are grossly overrated.  If you really want to accomplish something, don’t put yourself into a deep, long rut.  It’s going to eat up decades and decades of your life.  You have to do whatever the heck it is you want to do.’

Full transcript on RealLeaders.tv as always. Enjoy!

We have a Twitter friend to thank for this interview. Jayadev recommended we speak to Ganesh Krishnan, one of India’s best known entrepreneurs and connected us with him too. He had some very interesting views on entrepreneurship in markets outside the US – especially India.

“Making marginal improvements on existing model or even trying to execute better on existing model is a lot tougher than trying to enter blue ocean business model where competitors do not exist.”

“In terms of the future, I see India as a great market not for something like Facebook monetization or for location based services, but more as a medium for delivery. For buying books, music, video, groceries, or even buying fashion goods, I think there’s great opportunity.”

“I play tennis every day 6-7:30 so that helps my metabolism, makes me more productive, and sets me up for the day.” (this one had to go in. :-))

Full transcript on RealLeaders.tv as always.

I met Cam on my first consulting project. The project was a massive post merger integration in the Middle East and Cam was leading the program. I knew I’d learn lots from Cam the moment I met with him. While we only managed to make time for 2 meals (i.e. 2 one-on-one conversations!), we went on to stay in close touch. I owe Cam a big thank you for many learnings over the years – the biggest of which was undertaking a journey to understand myself better and be comfortable with myself.

Cam has influenced many a point of view over these years and I’ve learnt a lot from his questions. (He’s also been the “wiser friend” on more blog posts than I can count!) I enjoyed this interview as it gave me an opportunity to ask him questions!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Full transcript as usual on Realleaders.tv.

My favorite parts –

“The one that I run into and have to remind myself of most often is to not assume.  Don’t jump to conclusions; don’t be too quick to judge.  Just pause.  Always give the other person the benefit of the doubt.  It’s about human interaction.  There’s no need to usually rush as much as most of us do. That one I run into every day and have to remind myself of a hundred times a day.”

“I also believe that no matter how many times I’ve been told in my life that we’re all different, and we need to respect our differences, that we are more similar than we sometimes are willing to accept.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect the differences, but sometimes we get obsessed with them.  Eighty percent of us are essentially the same.  We’re the same people with the same motives, the same drives, and the same needs regardless of our religion, our ethnicity, or our profession. That’s been a good guide for me as I’ve ventured into many different types of organizations to see if I can help.”

“It’s often not about overcoming weaknesses.  We spend so much time, especially in western culture, trying to fix what’s broken with us.  I think we have to manage those things.  We have to make sure we’re mitigating risks or severe damage but more and more know who we really are and what our strengths are and let those flourish. “

Enjoy!

I blogged about my interview experience with Cal Newport the other day.

I am happy to share that the interview is now up in full on Realleaders.tv,. It is insight packed and is a resource for anyone who cares about remarkability in their careers and the concept of deliberate practice.

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About Cal

Cal Newport is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He previously earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004.

Newport is the author of three books of unconventional advice for students, which have sold a combined total of more than 100,000 copies: How to Be a High School Superstar (Random House, 2010), How to Become a Straight-A Student (Random House, 2006), and How to Win at College (Random House, 2005). His fourth book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Grand Central, 2012), is a contrarian look at career advice.

In his role as an author, Newport has appeared on ABC, NBC, and CBS and on over 50 radio networks. His writing and ideas have been featured in major publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and FastCompany.com. HisStudy Hacks blog, which chronicles his attempts to decode “patterns of success,” attracts over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

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Dhanya, from the team, put it nicely when she said at the end – “We did bold things that grabbed more attention than the rest, but to be honest – every single word in this transcript must be read and thought about.”

As always, the transcript on Realleaders.tv – click here.

And, if you prefer to just watch it instead, the video is below.

Enjoy!

After a year away from building excel models, I’ve had a chunk of excel modelling over the past couple of months. The internet is a great resource for anyone working on a complex model and few websites are as good and comprehensive as Chandoo.org.

Purna Chandra Rao or Chandoo is an Indian entrepreneur who started out with a blog sharing excel tips. After three years of increasing readership, Chandoo quit his full time job to work on Chandoo.org full time. He has been very successful at building this website into a niche business and has a team of 6 work for him.

Chandoo struck me as a very humble person through his posts and I was disappointed my teammate, Dhanya, called dibs on interviewing him. She had the pleasure of spending 20 minutes with Chandoo on Skype..

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did. Full transcript on RealLeaders.tv of course.

I read Roy Baumeister’s brilliant book “Willpower” just last month and reached out to him right after. Coincidentally, he was on his way to Australia on a business trip and we managed to find 20 minutes to speak while he was on transit in Sydney airport.

It was a really interesting chat with one of the titans of research into human behavior, specifically willpower.

I apologize in advance for the audio quality. We were in a noisy airport food court and we’ve done our best to ease the noise.

About Roy

Roy F. Baumeister (born May 16, 1953) is Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belongingness, sexuality, self-control, self-esteem, self-defeating behaviors, motivation, aggression, consciousness, and free will. He has authored 500 publications and has written, co-written, or edited almost 30 books. He earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University and his M.A. from Duke University. He returned to Princeton University with his mentor Edward E. Jones and earned his Ph.D. from the university’s Department of Psychology in 1978. He then taught at Case Western Reserve University for over two decades before transferring to Florida State.He is a fellow of both the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science. Baumeister was named an ISI highly cited researcher in 2003.

 

As always, we have the full transcript here on RealLeaders.tv.

My favorite quote from the interview –

“We think of using willpower for resisting temptation and for powerful acts of virtue. However, people who are successful in the long run seem to use their self-control to set up a smoothly running life – for creating good habits and good routines.”

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

We have a couple of big updates from the “Real Leaders Project.”

First up, our interview with Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, one of New York’s premier venture capital firms .

Albert is one of those people whose wonderful personality shows from his writing. I have been following his blog for a while now and it was wonderful to spend 30 minutes with him learning about his background and understanding his view on how technology is changing the world we live in.

 

Starting today, our transcript will be on our brand new RealLeaders.tv website. We would love for you to check it out, give us your feedback, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on YouTube. and  +1 us on Google+. :-)

Thanks Albert, for a wonderful interview! And, thank you all for the support.