Kaushik Vardharajan, Director, Real Estate Programs, Boston University, School of Hospitality Administration

Kaushik’s perspective reminds us that progress comes from curiosity and continuous learning. When we focus on building knowledge instead of fearing the unknown, opportunities expand. His advice encourages us to keep learning, keep asking questions, and keep saying Yes to growth.

Transcript

Lan Elliott 0:02

Hello and welcome to its Personal Stories, the podcast dedicated to empowering personal success in the hospitality industry. My name is Lan Elliot, on behalf of its personal stories, and today I am thrilled to have Kasik, the director of the Real Estate Program at Boston University School of Hospitality Administration, also known affectionately by his students as Professor V. Welcome, Kashic.

Kaushik Vardharajan 0:31

Thank you, Ann. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Lan Elliott 0:35

Thrilled to have you on. Kash. I wanted to start with the journey to leadership because you didn't start out as a professor that wasn't what you originally planned to do. I'd love to understand some of the inflection points in your career, and if you think there was a characteristic or a skill that made you successful in your career.

Kaushik Vardharajan 0:59

Oh boy. Okay, so we will time travel back to college. I went to hotel school in India. Came to the US in 1998 to go to Johnson and Wales As a senior, I transferred in. I had never been on a plane before in my life, so that was my first time. Didn't know anybody in the country. I had never used a computer rather than to go to a cyber cafe to apply to go to school. So I show up here as a senior and my first class is a class on finance and financial modeling. And so that's how it started. I had never used Microsoft Windows. I had no idea what Excel was. And I was suddenly a senior in this financial modeling course. Someone managed to get through it, and I'll talk about some of the people that impacted my life. Completed at Johnson Wales. Went to work for Steve Rushmore at HVS in New York. Spent eight years in New York, moved to India to run the South Asia offices in for h HP consulting. Yeah. As part of the team that went and opened the office in Moscow. Ran AsiaPac after that for a couple of years and then went into Hilton and I was their head of development for India based out of Delhi. So I did all of that before I showed up at BU inflection points where a combination of opportunities that came up and mentors that stepped up to. The very first mentor who changed my life in many ways is was my first professor at Johnson and Wales. John O'Neill who today teaches at Penn State. And I took his first finance class. He spent an hour with me every day teaching me how to use Excel. I then became his ta, worked with him on his research, helped him with his research, and then I asked him, what is the next course you're teaching? What is, what other courses do you teach? And he said, I'm teaching. A real estate course next semester. And I said, I have no idea what that means, but if you're teaching it, then I'm taking it. And I took my first real estate course and the only real estate course of my life and. Changed my life and he introduced me to Steve Rushmore. That was one big inflection point. Joining HVS was incredible. I've always enjoyed numbers. I was really strong on the mathematics side of things when I was in school, and I've always enjoyed being creative. So going into consulting and being on the real estate side of things was great because it's a combination of being able to run numbers and then being able to think creatively on the development side of things. HVS was great. I think the key inflection points after that were really, every time a new opportunity came up and I said yes, there was an opportunity to move back. I had the whole American dream, the white. The house, the white picket fence. We had a baby, we had a 10 month old boy at that point of time and suddenly I had this opportunity to move back to India and, lead the consulting team there. And I just turned 31 at that point of time and I said. Okay, let's do this and general, and then the next opportunity was to go up, to Moscow and then work on this. Sochi went to Olympics development for the Russian government at that time and then the opportunity to move to Singapore to oversee AsiaPac. So every time a new opportunity came up, that was a huge inflection point because it was an opportunity to go to a new part of the world, learn something new. So I think it was really a combination of. Learning new things meeting new people, or just being men, finding great mentors who believed in me, and then when the opportunity came up, saying yes.

Lan Elliott 4:24

Those are two really great themes that you mentioned. First of all, having the mentors and following the mentors, it's something I've tried to do is to find leaders that I admire and try to learn directly from them, and so that's something that you've done very beautifully. And also I love the idea of saying yes to opportunities because there's always a reason not to move overseas. There's always a reason to not do something and people get really comfortable. But I think saying yes and that willingness to learn new things, the curiosity that you have, is really a great skill in advancing. I'm curious though about your continuous growth and if there was ever a skill that you wish you had learned earlier, and if so, how did you develop it?

Kaushik Vardharajan 5:19

Oh, there are so many skills that I still don't have and, that there's a long list of things that I still need to learn and that's what keeps life exciting and interesting. But when I look back, I think every time. I've always believed, and I, and life has taught me that if you wait till you have all the qualities and all the skills and all the knowledge that you need to accomplish to, to move to the next step, then you're just gonna be waiting. Sometimes you just have to step up and say yes to an opportunity, even if you didn't, don't think you're fully ready. It's a more brutal way of learning, and it's a more. It's more immediate, but that's the way to go. At least that's how I've always embraced it. And yeah, so I think every time I've made a move. There have always been things that I haven't known that I wish I had known before I made that move or before I took on the traditional responsibility. When I was at HVS in New York we were a pretty flat organizational structure, right? Everybody worked on assignments and even Steve would work on his own assignments himself. And so it was a flat organization where everybody was treated as an equal. So we worked with other people. We worked with. If Juniors came in, we worked with them on assignments, but we weren't necessarily their bosses. So I learned so that, so I learned how to be very effective. I learned how to be a great consultant when I was at HVS in the us and then suddenly I was now back home in India having to lead a team. It was the first time I was leading a large team like that, and suddenly I realized, okay, this takes a completely different level of leadership skills. I haven't really had to learn yet. Learn, having to learn that was really important. So I think every step that went along, learning new skills, learning about leadership and learning how to take care of your team was a skill that I had to learn. And some of these learnings don't come easy. They often come from mistakes. So you make mistakes and then you learn from them. There are people in the industry and people that you have had on your podcast who are far smarter than I am who have learned without having to make mistakes. I'm unfortunately one of those people who often is, has to, had, make mistakes to have learned from them.

Lan Elliott 7:33

I think the theme we hear more often is that you learn more from your mistakes than from doing things right?

Kaushik Vardharajan 7:39

Yeah. And I seem to have made quite a few of them, so I should be incredibly. Incredibly great at everything I do now with all the mistakes that I've made. But yeah, that, that has, and those learnings last a lot long, last a lot longer. I think you, they tend to stick with you and they stay with you. And the next time you see somebody else make those mistakes, I think there's more empathy because you made those same mistakes yourself first.

Lan Elliott 8:02

Yeah. I love the idea of learning from mistakes and also that point of moving from an individual contributor or working on a team to actually being the leader and having to lead a team. I think it was Jack Welch who said that was one of the biggest inflection points that not everybody can make that jump from individual contributor to being a leader. So thank you for sharing that.

Kaushik Vardharajan 8:27

Sure.

Lan Elliott 8:29

I wanted to talk about driving innovation because one of the things I've learned from you is that you always love a new challenge, and you've designed and led a couple major student challenges. I think first it was the hospitality innovation competition, but more recently you started the global hospitality real estate competition. And I'm curious about the inspiration for these competitions. How do you dream these up?

Kaushik Vardharajan 9:01

It's a combination of a few different things, right? Again, anything we do, it's not just one person, right? It takes a team. And when I was looking at moving into academia I met with Dean Aja, who's the dean of our school. And one of the things that I truly enjoyed from our conversation was. He was so ready to go out there and make changes and break things and create new things and move fast. And that's something that I've always enjoyed. The perception of academia from the outside looking in is that ade, academia is generally slow in reacting to what's happening in the real world, quote unquote. I did not see that here at Shaw. The dean was very happy to, was. Always trying to do new things. So that's something that I knew was, that was a relationship that I knew was gonna work well. And when I came on board it was, it was it's been a great relationship in that way because he's been very open to new ideas and new concepts that we wanna create. And being part of a standalone school at BU gives us the opportunity to control our own fate to a great extent. Can I just run and try it out? And if it works. If it doesn't work, it, break fast and then go do something else. It's things that we are telling our students to practice all the time, and I think it's just as important that we are practicing it ourselves. Creating new things has always been, it's, that didn't exist before. It's always fun, it's exciting, and you have the opportunity to make an impact, right? So that's one thing. As far as those competitions go. The realization that students learn very differently than how we did when we were in school, right? Especially growing up in India and gonna school in India. Somebody would throw a 300 page book at us and we would have to, the way we learned was we memorized everything in that book. You memorized it, you didn't necessarily get to practice any of it, but the learning style that required that you memorize everything that was in that book, even if you didn't understand it that's changed now, right? Students learn in so many different ways. And coming from the industry, when I used to hire students from school, my biggest requirement or my biggest. Wish was that I want them to hit the ground running when they join us. I want them to start. Embracing the opportunities and start doing things. And I would wish that they had learned some of that when they were in school. So that's where the first comp, the competitions started, came about, was to go. Okay. The best way to teach is sure you have the structured classes and you have the projects in the class, but the best way is to create these competitions where students are forced to assume roles and as take on challenges if they would, if they were entrepreneurs in the real world. And how do you go about. Solving those problems. How do you think like an entrepreneur, how do you start practicing? One of the books I ra read about the Navy Seals had a line in there that really resonated. It says the more the it quote some to the, I'm paraphrasing here, but it said the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war and. So that philosophy is something that I believe in getting. The more we can prepare our students by throwing real world challenges at them, the better prepared they are when they actually have to deal with real world challenges that have. Real impact and real potential of, for solution, et cetera. So that's why the innovation competition came about. And, the motto of our school is experience innovation. They always believed in the importance of it and creating this competition and making students think out of the box, backed up with, great prizes,$50,000 in capital just for coming up with a great idea is has really been very helpful in. Getting students to think about, not just problems, don't just go out there and look for problems, but or complain about them, but actually try and come up with solutions for them. Because the people who are successful are the ones who, yes who identify the problems, but then they are trying to find solutions to them. So the innovation competition was an output of kind of that goal. The real estate competition came about from a similar goal when I was looking out there trying to find. Great hospitality, real estate competitions that our students could be part of, and I didn't see too many of them. So I said, then let's create our own. And so we went about doing that. Last year we opened it up to hospitality and real estate programs in the US and this year it's global. We have 32 teams from nine countries, four continents that are. Part of it right now, and again, it's been great learning. We've had the opportunity to work with Connor White at White Lodging, and that's been a great match because he is somebody in the industry who's very passionate about education, and we are an education institution who's very passionate about preparing students for the real world. So I think it's worked out well. So the goal has really been can we create opportunities for students to learn? Not just from books, but also from tackling a real challenge because once you've done it, it gives you the confidence, it gives you the muscle memory of having dealt with it when you go out there and have to deal with the similar division in the real world. And it's also a great story to talk about when you're applying for internships and when you're applying for jobs. You're not just talking about what you will do for the company when you join them. You're actually able to talk about all the great things that you've already done as a student that mimics everything that they deal with in the real world. So it's a win-win for everyone, and it's great learning across the board for us and for all the competitor competitors in the competitions.

Lan Elliott 14:32

I love a number of the themes that you touched on. One of them is being in the right environment that allows for innovation and embraces innovation, but also what you teach your students. Don't just identify a problem but find a solution. And you saw that what industry wants is the students to have hands on. Knowledge of some of those skills and developing an opportunity for the students to do that because of course people all learn differently, but I think a lot of. People do learn very well by doing something, by trial and error, and you've created that space, and I love that you have used your innovative mindset in order to do that for the students and for the future employers of your students and all the students around the world that partake in the challenge. So thank you for doing that for our industry.

Kaushik Vardharajan 15:27

Yeah, keep trying.

Lan Elliott 15:30

I wanted to turn to taking risks because you've spent 15 years working in, I think. It's not actually 66 countries, is it? I think it's 66 countries.

15:41

It

Kaushik Vardharajan 15:41

is

Lan Elliott 15:42

a lot of it. In Asia with HVS, you mentioned also in Russia and you've led development for Hilton and India. Now your A professor, those are major career changes. How do you prepare to take a risk on something?

Kaushik Vardharajan 15:58

Good question. I think, I think I, I drive my family nuts sometimes because I don't see these as risks. I just, I see them as opportunities to learn and grow. I think the realization that none of us gets out of this alive, right? That this time that we have on this small blue marble is limited and we better make the best of it. And think about the opportunities and not the risks because. What is the risk? If I don't take risks, I'm not gonna live 300 years long. That, that is pretty limited. So I don't see it as a risk. I see it as an opportunity to go do something new, learn something new, meet more people. I think when I was, when my son was younger and we would, he's 18 now and headed off to college in a few months but when he was much younger, we would have those conversations about what superpower would you like to have? And, he had some very. Geeky nerdy superpower that he wanted to have about controlling atoms. And I had two superpowers. One were, that I wished for one was I wanted to know every language in the world. And the second was I wanted to have the opportunity to know every person on the planet. Okay. And if those were the two superpowers I wished for. And so when these opportunities came up in my career, in my life, and to move to different parts of the world and do different things, I just saw them as. Incredible opportunities. I don't know if I shared this with you, but I still remember being in India about 10:30 PM at night. I had to get a call. I get a call from Mr. Rushmore. I see his name on my phone, and I jump out of bed and I go to the other room and I pick up, and he discussed the opportunity in Singapore with me to just oversee Asia-Pac and asked if I was interested. And I think the, I spent two seconds thinking about it and said, heck yeah. And he said, okay, we'll discuss this tomorrow. Let's regroup. I just wanted to chat quickly and I said, great. And while I was walking back to my bedroom, I realized I had just agreed to move us to Singapore without having spoken to my wife. So that was. An interesting conversation I had after afterwards

Lan Elliott 18:11

That's taking a different kind of risk. Gosh,

Kaushik Vardharajan 18:13

that was a, that was the risk in it all. And, but I think it has always been, I've always looked at the, look there are risks no matter where you are. It's somewhat like doing business, right? You are going to real estate. You can never eliminate risk. You can never, you can mitigate risk. You can do things and risks largely, we talk to our students about how when you look at risks, there are two big pockets, the risks that you can do something about, and there are risks that you cannot do anything about. And if there are risks that you can't do really anything about them then. Don't waste time stressing about them too much, right? It's just focus on what he can do to mitigate risks. But then really if the opportunities and the opportunities, not just financially, but opportunities to learn, to grow, to see new parts of the world and to be a better person. If those opportunities far outweigh the risks, then go for it. And so that's always the approach that I've taken. And so when. And the goal was always, yes, do I have. So in I never spent time thinking about the risks. Really the goal were, but the questions that I would ask myself were, have I learned everything that I can in my current role, or do I have more to learn? And secondly, when I move to the next role. Am I going to be the right person for the job and that, do I have everything that the job is gonna take and do I have the ability to give them what they're looking for and contribute the way they deserve to be contributed to? I don't want to take on a role just because I get to go to a new role. Am I the right person and am I the best person for that role? So that's really what I've spent more time thinking about. Yeah, the risks have never bothered me. I wanted to go work on an assignment in Afghanistan that came up. Unfortunately it, it got canceled and I couldn't go. But yeah, the risks don't bother me.

Lan Elliott 20:03

I think you were the only one that volunteered for that job in Afghanistan, if I remember this story.

Kaushik Vardharajan 20:07

Yeah.

Lan Elliott 20:09

I wanna talk about overcoming self-doubt because going into new things, always seeking out new challenges, one of the things that can happen is. The noise in your head saying, is this for me? Am I the right person? And I think overcoming self-doubt, dealing with your inner critic is something you actually help your students with. What are some strategies you use to stay positive to overcome that internal narrative?

Kaushik Vardharajan 20:40

Yeah. And that internal narrative, unfortunately can be quite powerful. I think we say things to ourselves that we would never ever say to anybody else outside, right? We are tougher and harsher on ourselves than you, we are with anybody else. And I think that's, and I don't think there's, I still haven't reached the level of enlightenment where that has gone away. I think that's still there. I think it, the way I address that is to say. Is we focus on, we hold onto to the things that we do well. We hold onto the things that we are good at, and we also have a develop a clear understanding of things that we do not know well. Because I do see there is the inner voice, but then there is me and. If, and one of us is gonna have that is gonna be doing the talking. So it can be the inner voice, which comes up with this long list of things that I'm bad at or I could actually list down. These are the things that I don't know. And when I talk to students and they tell me they don't know something, we have come according to a practice of saying we add. To the end of that sentence, I make them add right now. Okay. So say, I don't know this right now, because what you know, what you don't know is temporary. It can change, it could be something else. Students don't believe me. They just roll their eyes when I tell them Financial modeling is easy, right? You'd gimme a week and I will teach you how to do financial modeling. Like it's this big thing that looms over everything that they're worried about. And I tell'em, it takes a week, gimme a week, and you, so just when you start, I want you to tell me, I don't know, financial modeling right now. So we just write down what are the things that we are not really strong at right now? What are the things that role requires? What are the thing, what of those things am I great at? Which is why? They're talking to me, and which is where I think I can create value, and what are the areas that I need to get better at because I'm not great at them right now, then I have an action plan and then I can start working on it. So I think it's either that inner voice coming up with this endless list with no solutions and it's, it's a long list of things that I'm not great at, or I can sit down and create a list myself and say, okay, these are the things that I need to be successful in that role. And realizing that. I'm never going to be perfect, and every day is an opportunity to learn and I'm gonna, and my goal now is to learn from anybody and everybody. It can be the junior most analyst on the team, it can be every student who's in my class, because they all have different perspectives. They all have different experiences and backgrounds that they come from, and I can learn from them. So as long as I'm learning. I can keep checking things out that box. So I think that really helps if you have a, if you have a framework for it, I think it really helps overcoming the self-doubt. And Steve Rushmore told me once I, my first NYU investment conference that I was allowed to go to, I was petrified because I was in this room with thousands of people and I didn't know anyone. And I saw Steve Rushmore, he came over and he told me. And he said, what happened? I just told him that I was nervous about this, and I remember him telling me, don't worry about them. They all started out the way you were and they all walked into the school once where they didn't know anybody. So go out there and do your thing. So I think as long as you know you're starting, you'll get better every day.

Lan Elliott 24:11

That is a really great lesson to not worry about what you don't know. Yet.

Kaushik Vardharajan 24:15

Yeah.

Lan Elliott 24:15

What you don't know today, there's always time to get better practice. Yeah. Don't worry.

Kaushik Vardharajan 24:19

Yeah.

Lan Elliott 24:19

Practice.

Kaushik Vardharajan 24:19

Yeah. Plan for what you don't know. Don't worry about it.'cause worry is wasted. If we have a plan, the moment we have a plan for what we don't know, then I think a lot of the worrying goes away because our brains are constantly on fight or flight mode. And I think once you know this is what I need to do, our brains can switch focus and say, okay, now I know what I have to do. I can go. Actually, I have some control over it instead of just that voice inside my head that keeps going on at three in the morning. That doesn't help.

Lan Elliott 24:49

That's great. I love the plan, so make a plan of how you're going to overcome it. I wanted to touch on utilizing humor because I understand your students get to enjoy many dad jokes in class, but I think you also use humor to diffuse maybe anxiety in your students, or when something seems difficult, it can be a great tool. Could you talk a bit about how you bring humor into conversations to help you?

Kaushik Vardharajan 25:22

Okay. I think claiming that my students enjoy my dad jokes is a stretch. I don't think I'm, I've reached that stage yet. But I do, at the risk of exposing it, I do put a line into my syllabi somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Saying, if you see this, email me a dad joke for extra credit. And that's a way to see if they actually read the syllabus. And secondly, it adds to my repertoire of dad jokes, which I can then use, right? And I can tell you nothing is as bad for your ego. As a dad than an 18-year-old at home who keeps rolling his eyes every time you try to be funny. Okay. So I don't get to try them at home. I get to try them at school. And I think it was a while ago I looked at life and I said if you wanna be successful in life at that time, my perception was you need to be incredibly good looking or you need to be incredibly rich. I lucked out. I didn't really have any luck with both of them. And I said, okay, then I better develop a sense of humor and a personality to if I want to get through life. So that's when I think it started. But yeah, like I said earlier the realization that none of us gets through this alive. And while you're here on this journey, you might as well have fun going through it and. So the sense of humor initially started as, it's as a defense mechanism in some cases, but then it really became a way to, to connect with people, right? Because we all crave connections. We all we want to get. It's not just. Titles, doing businesses with titles. It's people doing business with people and getting to know people and connecting with them. And laughter is the common language in all of the countries that I've been to. A smile is the best passport you can have and a best visa you need to just get anywhere in the world. So it helps. And yeah, and with students I enjoy it. I couldn't fake it, I truly enjoy it. Two years ago, all of us at the school, we went to an improv club and as an, as a group activity. And we learned how to do improv and I've been doing standup for a while, since when I lived in New York. So it's fun, I think being, that's always been exciting and fun and interesting. And then being in the classroom is like a performance and again, getting students to stay engaged because and. Helping them also realize that it's, don't take yourself too seriously, right? This is not a, this is not a sprint. This is not, life is not a zero sum game. You don't, it is not meant to be an intense series of conflicts and fights and struggles to see who gets ahead. It is. It's an experience. So enjoy it and in incorporating humor into it helps me get the word across and helps keep me young.

Lan Elliott 28:13

That is wonderful. And I learned something new about you doing standup. We need to talk about that some more at another time.

Kaushik Vardharajan 28:20

At another time

Lan Elliott 28:22

I realized. We're running short on time, but I did wanna ask you two last questions. This one is my favorite on our podcast, which is, what advice would you give to your younger self? Or what is something you wish 22-year-old Kashic knew?

Kaushik Vardharajan 28:38

I wish I had, all of these things that I know today. Of all of those things, I wish I had taken the time to enjoy the journey, right? I got, I moved to New York when I was 22, living in New York City, which I'm biased and I might get flack for, but I think it's one of the, it is the great, one of the greatest cities in the world and getting to live there and work with, and I had some amazing roommates who are doing incredible things in the hospitality industry. Shout out to Mark Owens at. At at Colliers now, I think, and he and I were roommates and just working for a great consulting firm. I wish I had taken time to enjoy the experience. I was so focused on all of these the rat raise and trying to work on more assignments and work with better clients and work on bigger deals and. Make more money and all of those things that I did back then, what loomed over me was, all of those things that my origin never having been on a plane before, the first person in the family to have left the country to go to study and all of this responsibility and the need to prove myself. Not just at HVS, but also everybody back home. The 1 billion people back in India who were gonna be disappointed if I didn't, if I didn't make it. And all of these additional pressures that I took on, I wish I hadn't. And that's what I try and teach my students is enjoy the experience.

Lan Elliott 30:05

Thank you for that. Coming to the end of our discussion, and I was wondering if you had one final bit of advice for our audience, keeping in mind that the mission of its personal stories is around empowering personal success.

Kaushik Vardharajan 30:21

Okay. Everybody who knows me will tell you that if you ask me for one, I'm gonna give you two. Okay. So don't mind. So please indulge me as I give you two key themes that I think are really important. One is the fear of no. So in my Intro to Hospitality class, which I teach, I have an assignment that's called Go For No. Every week, the students are required to go out there and ask for something where they know the answer is gonna be a no, but they have to do it anyway, and they have to go back and keep doing it. And the reason I make them do that is because beyond this, beyond our fear of no lies, this entire universe of a life not lived right, it's being afraid to ask somebody out on a date. It's being afraid to ask for. A promotion or a salary increase or a new job or there's so many things that we don't ask for because we are afraid of what the answer is gonna, that the answer is gonna be no. And so the one is to just tell students and young people who are watching this is, don't be afraid of it. Keep. Go out there and you want that? No, because if you keep going out it and it doesn't bother you as much, it's going to make you ask for more things. And someday you're gonna get a yes. Like one of our victories and we celebrate our victories in the class. Like I think one of the most fun one was when the student got a free at Starbucks and the whole class was through, they were like, got a free refill at Starbucks. I, I. I apologized to everybody in that Starbucks store who had to deal with all my students after that. But that was one. The second thing is I often have students who come plop themselves into my office and say, professor, we, I have no idea what I wanna do with my life. And I'm like welcome to the club. And we start, we, they have all of these concerns about their careers, and you can't. Blame them for it, right? You look at the state of the world today and the level of uncertainty and volatility out there. It is it's challenging for all of us and especially so for students who are just getting ready to start their careers. And so we sit down and the conversation I have with them is, okay, let's talk about your career. You're so young. You're gonna have 10 to 20 jobs in your lifetime. Half of them don't even exist today. That being the case. How do you worry about something that you don't even know exists out there? And you could start with a great company. Have a great boss. You could just, but maybe you just started at the company at the wrong time or the, wrong type space in the economic cycle, right? And or you could have a great company, great market, really bad boss, and you couldn't survive it, or you had really bad teammates. There's so many things that can impact your career that you have no control over. The only thing that we do have control over. Which nobody can take away. Your fancy car, your fancy watches, your house, all of that can be taken away in a heartbeat. But what cannot be taken away is what you know, right? So if how much you make and how successful you are in a company, depends on how much then let's shift focus and F, and instead of thinking about a career plan, come up with a learning plan. What are the things that you want to learn? What are the things that the market values? And if you focus on learning, then the earning will follow. So don't again, worry about, going back to the old con, the point I was making about risks and why worry about things that you don't have control over. Let's focus on the things that we do have control over, which is in this case. Is learning. So as long as we can learn you're worried about AI and how it's gonna change the future of work, then go learn AI courses, right? You can either shape it or be shaped by it. So yeah, so I think it's just really embrace people saying no, and the more noise you get, it means the more questions you're asking and the other is just keep learning every day. I think those would be my two kind of final pieces of advice.

Lan Elliott 34:10

Wonderful advice. Thank you so much, KHA. I appreciate you and thank you for coming on and sharing your wonderful advice. I love your spirit of always learning, challenging yourself, and if you ever have doubts, make a plan. Seems like a great way to go. So thank you so much for coming on.

Kaushik Vardharajan 34:30

Thank you for giving me the opportunity. You have had such amazing people on your podcast that I listen to every single week. And I'm so delighted to be joining them on your podcast. Thank you again for the opportunity.

Lan Elliott 34:41

Absolutely. And for our audience, if you would like to see more wonderful interviews like Kashic, I hope you'll join us on our website. It's personal stories.com.