Having A Job Vs Building A Career: Scripting Your Journey To Being Extraordinary

Job vs Career: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

If you are a professional, it is vital to recognize that a job is merely a means to a paycheck, whereas a career is a long-term journey of personal growth, learning, career development, personal improvement and mastery. In this video, we'll delve into the significance of the job vs career distinction, exploring how it impacts your leadership, entrepreneurship, and overall success. Whether you're an expert in digital marketing or a thought leader in the tech industry, this video will provide you with valuable insights on how to cultivate a culture of lifelong learning, self-mastery, and personal development. So, if you're ready to take your career to the next level, watch till the end to discover the secrets to achieving excellence in your profession.

In this episode, Swami and Aswin explore the fundamental difference between approaching professional life through a "job lens" versus a "career lens." While a job focuses on immediate tasks and short-term objectives for monetary compensation, a career requires having a larger vision, imagination, and aspiration for where you want to be in 15-30 years. The discussion reveals how extraordinary professionals distinguish themselves through three key elements: they develop a portfolio of skills beyond their current role requirements, maintain a lifelong learning mindset with heroes and mentors to emulate, and have the courage to "disrupt themselves" every few years rather than becoming complacent. Using examples from Ilaiyaraja's musical journey and Nitin Paranjpe's rise at Unilever, the episode demonstrates how career-minded individuals prepare for future opportunities by building capabilities they don't yet need, while job-focused individuals risk losing relevance over time. The conversation concludes with practical resources for making this mindset shift, including the My TRUE Compass diagnostic tool that helps professionals align their purpose, mindset, and practice for extraordinary success.

5-point Summary

Job vs Career Mindset: A job is what you do today for money with short-term focus, while a career is a life journey requiring 15-30 year vision and imagination of where you want to be professionally.

Portfolio of Skills: Extraordinary professionals build capabilities beyond their current job requirements by studying what skills they'll need for their dream role (like a CFO learning about board management, fundraising, and industry trends even as an entry-level finance executive).

Lifelong Learning with Heroes: Career-minded individuals identify heroes in their field, study their biographies, and continuously learn from the best practitioners, while job-focused people stop learning and eventually lose relevance in their 30s and 40s.

Courage to Disrupt Yourself: Every 5 years, extraordinary professionals deliberately make themselves "comfortable with being uncomfortable" by taking on new challenges, saying no to attractive but misaligned opportunities, and pivoting to stay ahead of industry trends.

Purpose-Driven Career Diagnostic: Use tools like My TRUE Compass to regularly assess if your purpose, mindse

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Transcript

INTRO

Welcome to the second episode of Be Extraordinary. The first episode, the pilot episode, we discussed what separates the average from the extraordinary. It was a very high level understanding of why you require your purpose mindset and your practice to be aligned for you to understand the pursuit of or understand the path to being extraordinary from average. You also said that there is no such thing as average.

But there is a way to become extraordinary. 

Q1 Now, and like I told you last week, I wrote down a set of questions that I wanted to discuss with you in the same space. for anybody who starting their career or somebody who is stuck in their career, being extraordinary is a very lofty vision, lofty idea. It's not something that can, it's not a switch that you can suddenly turn on and become extraordinary. Therefore, there are lots of building blocks that need to be put together for us or them to understand how they can take it forward. And the idea is that to make everybody extraordinary, it is possible. Now, in that, the first question that I had written down was everybody is looking for professional success at some level. Now, some people achieve their professional success from a job perspective. Some people become extraordinary from a career perspective. And more often than not, the extraordinary achievers or the performers are the ones who more often than not have a career perspective to life rather than have a job perspective to life. So that warrants the fundamental question of...how do we approach professional success through, what is the difference between approaching it through a job lens and what is the difference between approaching it from a career lens?

Swami (00:02.523)

That's an excellent question Ashwin. Not often I am asked this question because very few people understand the difference between a job and career and many a times one mixes job and career and we use it very very loosely, right? Because people say, this is a career I am offering you and you may be actually applying for a job. 

Correct? So clearly the ones...who are extremely successful and you know when you looking at it from a professional success lens and a professional fulfillment lens. They seem to have understood in my own conversations with people, across the podcast, across geographies, globally whom I have spoken to, there is a certain sense of...how they look at their career and how they do the job that they are doing just now. 

So a typical difference between a job and a career is, a job is something that you do at a point of time for which you earning some money. So therefore you may actually finish your graduation, you may join and as a say a technical engineer or you may be joining as a marketing executive or you may be joining as a management trainee in an organization. So that's a job that you are actually getting in and you're being paid for it, right? 

Most often the job entails you to deliver on some particular short-term objectives, right? But a career is a little more larger canvas. So the person joining that particular job has to have an imagination of what that person wants to be in 15 years, in 20 years, in 30 years and therefore what are the portfolio skills that are needed to achieve that career success. I think that's really where I think the difference between looking at what you are doing today through a job lens versus looking at it from a career lens is different. That I think is the key. So a career when you look back is almost looking at one's life journey. Okay, one's life journey, right? 

While a job is about what you are doing today, what the role that you are actually being assigned and are you doing that task well? I think that's the difference between looking at it from a job lens and looking at it from a career lens.

Aswin Rao (02:54.68)

Got it. Therefore job is the immediate understanding of what your role is, what your designation is, what your compensation is. is today's problems tomorrow, it's a very short term thing. But career is more like you said a life journey. Therefore you need to have the imagination, you need to have a vision for your career. Correct?

Swami (03:19.235)

Exactly, let me explain it with a simple example. Let me take a finance and accounting professional.

You may be a chartered accountant or a company secretary and you might have joined an organization in the finance department, right? And you may be an accounting executive or you may be a finance executive, whatever may be your designation, that's the job that you've got. So there are certain role that you need to play for that job, right? But that person, when they join that particular job has to have a larger vision saying okay do I want to be the CFO of an organization correct so when I actually start having that imagination saying that I want to be the CFO of an organization right then what happens is the specific skills that are required for the job that you have been hired for okay is really something that is being looked at and you're being screened for it and therefore you are joining there.

But when you have a vision for yourself and an imagination saying I want to be a CFO, then there are a portfolio of skills that you need to be ready for which the current job may not need you to learn. So therefore for example, if I am a CFO, I need to know how to manage my board, I need to know what funding is all about, how do I raise funds, I need to ensure that I… at industry trends, forecasting, what does it take to put investments in multiple geographies. I need to understand about various industry growth rates, how are companies growing in different geographies. You may need to have a larger view of how you actually have to make your money grow for the company.

So when you have to have that perspective, maybe your first job may not allow you to actually have that perspective, but that does not mean that these portfolio skills are not needed for your career to be a financial controller or a CFO.

Therefore, you understand these skills of how to raise funding, how to get into an IPO, how do you ensure that you look at industry trends and growth, how do I manage money, how do I manage boards, how do I manage investors, these skills may be required 10 years from now, 5 years from now, 15 years from now, but you got to be an apprentice, learning it every day from the people who you look around, whom you may be reporting to or whom you may not be reporting to. So that I think is really about building a career roadmap versus having a constrained view of a job.

Q2 That's a nice point. A job view is always a constrained view. It doesn't mean it's a bad thing. A zoomed in version of your life is a job, a zoomed out version is a career. Some people, unfortunately, owing to the circumstances they were born into or live, they always have only a job perspective. So you'll see this person...

ContraMinds Podcast (06:23.718)

Yeah.

ContraMinds Podcast (06:31.822)

Exactly.

ContraMinds Podcast (06:40.977)

sick.

Aswin Rao (06:46.606)

not growing in their life. You'll see other people, his peers surpassing him or her and getting into larger roles and larger responsibilities. Therefore, and I don't know, but I have a feeling this is also an Indian thing of having a self-limiting belief. First, there are two parts to this. Do you think it's an Indian thing that having a self-limiting belief because for a large portion of us who are, I'm talking about the 35 plus crowd for example, we are probably the first or the second graduate in the family in the sense that we are either the first generation graduates or we are the second generation graduates. Very few of us are the third generation of graduates. Therefore, getting a good education, finding a job and being a good employee was the mindset that our parents always told us to. We were never again because of our circumstances we were expected to join a company and be an employee. Therefore that became a self-limiting belief that this is what I should be doing. Now my question to you is do you think this is an Indian thing and how does one person break the mould of having this self-limiting belief, having a job-constrainted view and becoming a career-oriented professional?

ContraMinds Podcast (08:01.873)

See, I am going to really look at it from a very very different lens from what you looking at Ashwin. I don't think it is a self-limiting belief. If you start to dream and aspire, okay, and not worry about whether you will succeed or not succeed in your dreams, in your aspirations, I think that's the first step to take. But do you even have that aspiration? I think the first fundamental barrier is aspiration and ambition. 

I am going to give you an example of somebody like, say, a legendary composer like, Ilaiyaraja. I'll take the South Indian example there.

I think the first was his aspiration when he was in a village and he was playing in his brother's troop, I think, where it was called Paavala Brothers and they were doing some programs. He had an aspiration to become a music director.

nothing stops him from having an aspiration. And many of us, I don't even think have an aspiration first. So when you actually look at a job, the first question I would ask is to get extraordinary, to be extraordinary, do you first have an aspiration? 

And the analogy for me is, did he know how to play the instrument? Did he know how to compose for a symphony? I don't think his thought...process at that time was about actually saying do I have these constraints. I think there was an aspiration. So the first step is to have an aspiration. If you don't have an aspiration, I don't think you will have this career view. You will probably have I need to do something small and just be there. So therefore the first thing is about having that aspiration.

Then what happened to him? He moved to Madras, now Chennai, right? And he actually was a guitarist with an earlier music director called G.K. Venkatesh and he was actually earning his life by playing guitar for G.K. Venkatesh, who was a music composer. So the job that he had at that time was to play guitar for composition that was composed by GK Venkatesh and therefore he had to do that job very well. So therefore there is no question that he had to do the job very well to ensure that he earns his monthly salary. But that does not stop him, if you go back to his life, it did not stop him from actually thinking what does it take for me to be a composer.

So he says that these are my portfolio of skills. So he said, these are my portfolio of skills that I need to have. Therefore, how do I learn Western music? How do I need to look at arranging an orchestra? Okay. How do I direct an orchestra? How do I learn Western music? How do I bring in different influences of music from different genres? He had to actually go back and start learning it. Whether it was needed for that day's job? Definitely not.

But he then said, if I have to be somebody 10 years from now, 15 years from now, being a composer for a film production, I need to have this portfolio of skills. So he went to Dhanraj Master, started learning guitar, then started getting better at it. And therefore, was he going to use it in that particular job that he was actually doing every day, not really. But what he really did was he went back and built all those portfolio of skills when suddenly one day he had the opportunity to direct for a movie in terms of music composition. He was ready with the portfolio of skills because he was then able to showcase his skill and that I think is having a career focus mindset versus a job focus mindset.

I'll give you another example. I'm going to give you examples so that it becomes what happens in real life, right? So let's take the example of Nitin Paranjpe. Nitin Paranjpe more recently retired as the Chief Transformation and Chief People's Officer of Unilever. When you go back and study the history of Nitin Paranjpe, just go back to LinkedIn and look at his career. He joined 1987-88 as a management trainee.

That was the job that he got, right. It was an entry level job that he got to be working in Unilever and that is really where he started. It was called Hindustan Lever at that time, right. But if you dissect and look at what probably made him reach where he reached by the year 2025, he has got about 37 years of experience today.

Aswin Rao (14:09.806)

I'm just looking at this profile here, yeah.

Right? Yeah. He went back and said, I want to be the best CPG executive in the world. Right. Maybe that is the vision that he started to have. Right. And then the job that he did was he was an area sales manager. Then he became a regional manager. Then he became a brand manager. Then he became a category head for personal care and home care. Then he became an executive director. Then he became the head of Unilever.

Then he became the COO of Unilever out of London. And then he became a Chief Transformation and People Officer. Now if you look at all the skills needed to reach there. He needed a sales skill, he needed a brand development skill, he needed to have category knowledge of how people buy brands and how people buy categories and finally he ended up being a Chief People's Officer. So therefore if you go back and look at where he started to where he ended up in his career, I would say the lighthouse or the anchor that he had was to be the best CPG executive or the professional in his life. Now, the way life took him was through various paths, Some around brand roles, some around regional sales roles, some around operational roles, some around category roles, and he had to prepare for all this as a part of the portfolio of skills to be the best to where he could get, right?

Therefore, the aspiration is more important, the preparation comes next and therefore taking advantages of opportunities then become the next aspect of how your career then starts to build for itself.

Q3 So that requires a certain like when you try to create or have a vision, therefore you need to have a great imagination of where things will be, where you will be, where there will be an overlap of what you're doing and with what is required in the industry. That takes great courage also, correct?

ContraMinds Podcast (16:35.437)

It takes courage,let me tell you what kind of courage is required. The courage to experiment. The courage to say no to opportunities that may look interesting and probably giving you a lot more money in the short term. Right?

Therefore you go back and say no, as a part of building my career, this opportunity though it may give me a lot more money, but it doesn’t... fall into the blueprint of how I want to build my career. So suddenly you don't jump from job to job. You don't say, hey, somebody is giving me a better designation. Somebody is giving me a higher pay package. Sure, those are important. I'm not saying they are not important. But if it fits into the career map and the portfolio of skills that you're building and you want to build, then you take up that role and that job.

Right? Therefore what is important is the courage to say no sometimes and the courage to say yes when probably your skills are not tested but it's actually you know in the kitchen that you have been building but you now have to apply it in the real world. Right? So therefore that's really the difference in how I seek courage.

Aswin Rao (18:09.132)

And when a career professional has that courage, the opposite of that for somebody who is limited by the job, therefore is complacent. Is that correct? Is that?

Swami (18:21.905)

See I think complacency is not something that I normally want to use because it is little bit negative. I would say being constrained and not having the imagination and therefore carrying a lot of blind spots. I would use the word blind spots. Therefore  you don’t have the road map and therefore you have a lot of blind spots. you basically are doing what you being given, you happy with it and there is a certain sense of what I call as, you know, I am happy with where I am, okay, which is not wrong. So therefore for example there are lots of companies, I can tell you that they are called Mr. Dependables. They are extremely good at execution, okay, you give them a problem and you tell them get this done, they will do it extremely well and they probably are the people to go to in many companies. So therefore the most important differentiation I would say is what is it that you want out of the job that you are doing, that's important. 

So therefore if you have a career mindset, then you have to say, you know what, these are the portfolio of skills that I need, therefore I have to prepare myself. Somebody else might say, you know what, I want to be the best at what I do, I may be an individual contributor, but I'm happy being where I am and I will actually be the best at it. Let me give you an example. Let me take the example of a...

I'll take an analogy of a music orchestra, say, let's take the orchestra example again. 

Not everybody needs to be a Zubin Mehta, right? I would want to compose. want to a runner, run my...complete orchestra with my compositions is what Zubin probably had a dream and an aspiration. But in his group, there are some great violinists, great saxophonists, right, who are actually saying, you I want to build and be the best in that instrument. Okay, so therefore if I'm best in that instrument, I'm always sought after. Right, so which means that

Aswin Rao (20:56.376)

Correct.

Swami (20:58.671)

The fact that you got to be best in anything that you do is I think the first requirement that is there. Therefore, in a job mindset, what happens is you are neither good nor bad at what you are doing. You pretty much running it like there is some movement that is there and you are actually flowing the way the wind flows.

Aswin Rao (21:27.564)

you're not incrementally getting better.

ContraMinds Podcast (21:29.249)

are not incrementally getting better. So therefore what I find is the ones who are extraordinary have this portfolio of skills, they have the aspiration and they are lifelong learners.

So they are lifelong learners saying you know what I need to get these skills, I know I not good at it and I have my heroes. So therefore I know that this person is extremely good at say how to raise funds. This person is extremely good at how they look at dissecting say a balance sheet. Somebody might be extremely good at analyzing industry reports. Therefore these skills become critical. I have my heroes for each of these skills. I go back, assimilate them and then I start building my own roadmap for how I have to be the best CFO in the world.

So therefore, most of them are lifelong learners and the ones who probably have a constrained view are not lifelong learners. I have learnt enough and I just need to extract some value of what I have learnt. So they tend to chug along and soon it hits them in their 30s and 40s when growth does not happen and what you earn does not commensurate with what you probably have as your competency. They start losing relevance.

Aswin Rao (23:01.528)

they start losing relevance.

Q4 So what you said then, there's a nice balance because if you have what I call the self-limiting belief, what you said as blind spots, let's actually use blind spots because somebody in a job has a blind spot versus somebody in a career has a vision. So you're limited by a blind spot, you are unbridled by your vision.

When you have a career, you have the courage. When you have a job, you are complacent or you're not looking to expand. And then when you have a career approach, you have lifelong learning versus you lose relevance as a job. if...you feel this is for anybody out there who is a little confused with respect to where they are in life. If you seem to have a self-limiting belief, you have to introspect. That is also what our My TRUE Compass does so well. Even I took the test last week. Correct? It helps you. It asks you questions that might look like very... that questions that will apply to everybody in the career sphere. But then the answers and the processing of those that information into insights is what makes

My TRUE compass also a very personal thing. therefore you introspect probably using the My TRUE compass, you figure out if you have a self-limiting belief, you figure out if you are complacent in life and if you are losing relevance, if you have blind spots and therefore to make the transition to being a career oriented person, what are the tips or tricks or tools that you would suggest? 

Like for example, you said when you spoke about vision and imagination, you spoke about having heroes in life. Correct? If when you mean heroes, it's obviously to understand how other people in the same field or industry or domain have lived life. Therefore, does it mean that they have to read more biographies, autobiographies, listen to podcasts? What tools would you give them? Resources.

ContraMinds Podcast (25:02.961)

So I want to pull back a bit about My TRUE Compass and then I will come back to the biographies. 

So the reason I think My TRUE Compass works beautifully is it actually tells you about your purpose. So you just go back and rank your purpose there. It just says, okay, what's my purpose? So I know my purpose is career, then that's great. So you know at least I want to build a reputation and a success in the professional area that I have chosen to work on. That's really what it allows you to identify. 

Then it also maps and tells you. What are your strengths? Seemingly the way you do things today, what are the things that you seem to be good at? And therefore what can you build further on? So that it gives a good perspective and that's really the section around the mindset. And then you have the section around the practice saying that if you good at this, are you putting them to practice?

Right? So it just is almost like a diagnostics if you were to call it. Saying it's my purpose, mindset and practice aligned and am I leveraging them enough? That's really what I think My TRUE Compass does. It's almost like a mirror where you look at it and then say, am I taking advantage of what I'm good at and am I doing it to the best of my ability every day and can I get better at it? So that I think is really what My TRUE Compass does. So therefore when you have a job versus a career mindset and when you want to build this pivot from moving from a job lens to a career lens, it's always good to start looking at saying, okay, where do I stand today and therefore what do I need to do to build professional and career success? My TRUE compass is like a springboard to get there. That's really what I think My TRUE compass does and I would sincerely urge people to go back and take my true compass because it just gives them some kind of a diagnostics about themselves and very often we don't spend time you know doing a diagnostics about ourselves.

Aswin Rao (27:28.728)

Great.

Aswin Rao (27:33.442)

I've never heard of career diagnostic as something that you

ContraMinds Podcast (27:36.107)

Yeah, so that's really what I think my true compass does. Now, answering a second question, what are the tips and tricks they are talking about? You are talking about heroes, right? So therefore, you know, reading biographies, listening to great achievers is one way of observing and learning from them. Okay.

Let me give you a couple of things that I do, which probably many others can add as a part of the comments and they can share it as a part of the community. One of the books that I think really gives very good insights is Poor Charlie's Almanac, which is Charlie Munger's book and it's a fantastic...you know, insight of life lessons that he has learnt. Right. And it is a fantastic way of reflecting whether you are, you know, doing things in a templated manner or are you observing, immersing yourself and are you doing it out of intent and is there a deep learning around which you are implementing things. That's a great book to read. 

The other one I would suggest is a book called Not For Bread Alone. It's the life story and the… and he talks about the philosophy of Matsushita. And again, a beautiful book where I think the title itself is so beautiful, not for bread alone. And that's really almost like a job mindset. So if you want to build a company like Matsushita, then you need a different mindset, which is really about a career mindset. And that, think, is a great example of learning what does it take to actually pivot from a job versus a career mindset. 

That I think is an interesting example for us to take. The other one is, if you want to listen to some podcasts, I'm sure Founders Podcasts is a great repository. It's got brilliant, I would say, anecdotes of what did it take for these people to achieve what they did and he and Founders Podcast takes great founders, great company builders and their life story is mapped so beautifully and there are life lessons that you can pick up and each of those life lessons are something that you will be able to resonate and look back and then say, hey, I can apply some of these principles to what I do today. So I would say these are the three resources that you could start off with. I could give many more, but I would say start with this and doing it in a disciplined manner every day is something that's very, important.

Q5 Correct. Because that would probably fall under lifelong learning when you say discipline because lifelong learning requires some kind of rigor. And that rigor can be only fed by curiosity. It can only be fed by some kind of hunger that you have. And like you said, that neatly ties back to the fact that if you see lifelong learning, it's not that you just pick up any book and read whatever you want and say that you learned something from it. It has to, when we especially from the professional career focus, once like you said, you have a portfolio of skills, then your lifelong learning is oriented through your portfolio of skills. Once you know what your skills are, once you're aware of those strengths of yours, then you start attracting resources and knowledge to enhance that. Correct?

ContraMinds Podcast (31:52.345)

Absolutely, I'll give you an example Ashwin. So when I started getting into marketing, right, I had a lot of choices, right. I had a choice probably to work for a large multinational bank. But I did not take that up as an option, though it was a high paying job. Okay. I decided to move into marketing, which was a slightly, if not… relatively low paying job, but I decided that I want to be in marketing. That's the first decision that I took. Okay, so that's a career decision not a job decision. Okay, then I ended up working in an agency, marketing agency, started growing there, but within that I said, okay, should I be in the mass media business or should I be in the say a database marketing business, which is really CRM and stuff like that and I decided to take up CRM, which is really a niche even in the marketing skill that was required.

Therefore, I decided to specialize in say CRM database marketing… kind of area. So then I started working on a niche and therefore the niche then started helping me further build my expertise. So therefore if you ask me, I used to read biographies of Lester Wunderman called Being Direct… okay which is something that I read and I used to look at Drayton Bird as my hero right so therefore I had my heroes there I you know Drayton Bird has written a book called Common Sense Direct Marketing which is something that I you know it's a bible for me right therefore I started doing all of that and then I started building expertise right but as I was doing that I was realizing that the world was changing to technology.  Right and marketing was increasingly becoming data driven and technology driven. Right, which is when I moved to taking up technology related initiatives in marketing. Therefore digital marketing, that's really the area that I started pursuing and got interested. So every five years I would say I would disrupt myself saying hey can you become comfortable by being uncomfortable.

That's another important career mindset that you need to build. So you need not do the same thing over and over again. You need to look at what's your professional, I would say trend in your industry, where is it moving? Look at which areas you need to really take a bet on, okay?That's really where you talked about this whole thing of having the courage and the risk that you need to take. Therefore, I picked up technology in marketing to be my core, I would call it the next pivot. And therefore, moved into analytics, smart tech, technology, that's really how I moved, right? And then I said, okay, can I do a startup? Therefore I did my startup, but everything was in marketing and that's really how I progress. And therefore the fact that I was hands-on, I was able to learn and do as I grew with experience is very very important and that I think is a career mindset and I was not looking at it only as a job. That I think is key.

Aswin Rao (35:43.694)

Correct.

I think there was a very powerful phrase you said, disrupt yourself.

ContraMinds Podcast (35:53.605)

Yeah.

Aswin Rao (35:56.076)

That... Yeah, very powerful thing to us to process, like you said, career diagnostic. The first thing should be how can you disrupt yourself because your competition is you when it comes to a career, you're fantastic.

Swami (36:11.205)

Yeah. 

And 

…after some time in your career, know, appraisals don't matter, promotions don't matter. It's about you having a beginner's mindset as you grow in experience.

Aswin Rao (36:18.648)

Correct. Correct.

Swami (36:25.893)

So you need to start looking at it and saying, am I good at what I am doing? Nobody is going to tell you you are good or bad. You need to have a compass, which is really why we call the product that we have today as My TRUE Compass. Therefore, it's very hard to have a realistic view of your skills, your capabilities and then working towards improving them.

Aswin Rao (36:38.808)

Correct.

Swami (36:51.835)

My  TRUE Compass is the bedrock of this thinking and that's really where this whole thinking around job and career is so important and so fundamental that if you want to pivot to a career approach to professional success then My TRUE Compass is a bedrock of where you can start and some of the tips and tricks that I spoke to you is about starting to do it. 

So for example, if you go back to the ContraMind Code, which is a newsletter that we publish every week, you know, it's, think, for 169 weeks we have done it, right, which means that it's more than three and a half years every week, what we read, what we listen, what we watch, what's our reflection and what’s our learning been, right. Therefore, that's really how we have moved. So which means that you are putting it to practice and you are doing it in a disciplined manner and I would say there is a compounding effect of learning and therefore that's how careers are built. 

In finance they talk about the fact that SIP does a compounded way in which your wealth grows, right. Similarly, in career, there is a compounded learning effect of how you keep incrementally learning and that has a multiplier effect on your career. I think that's really what is key. My TRUE compass is a bedrock and therefore don't look at what you are doing as a job. Have an imagination and aspiration on the larger career that you want to build and then prepare yourself with a portfolio of skills that you want to work on over the career span that you will be around. That's very, very important and that I think is the starting point.

Aswin Rao (38:48.952)

Got it.

Aswin Rao (38:52.494)

Fantastic. Yes, that answers the question very well. To summarize what we discussed, understanding professional success through the lens of having a job versus through the lens of having a career. 

We discussed having a job, approaching it through a job lens has a self-limiting belief, you feel complacent, you lose relevance, you have blind spots. But at the same time, if you have a career, you build vision, you build imagination, you build aspiration, you build courage and you build lifelong learning. Fantastic. So before we meet, next week for the next… next question that I have which I will reveal only next week. 

Q6

I have a one rapid fire question for you because you said disrupt yourself. My rapid fire question to you is in the last five years what has how have you disrupted yourself?

ContraMinds Podcast (39:50.159)

I never thought Aswin that I will be doing a podcast. If you ask me, I come from a background where I am not a convent educated student. Am I extremely good in my communication skills? would say on a rating of one to five, I would say I am at two. But I decided to say, I will make my mistakes. I will ensure that I will put up my vulnerabilities to the outside world and I will keep improving. So I have disrupted myself completely and I am learning through the process. Maybe in my 100th episode I will be as good as somebody else but clearly I am happy to make mistakes and again this… method of learning is really what I disrupting myself. And I know I have weaknesses and I willing to live and make this visible to others and yet I will keep improving. That is really how I disrupting myself.

Aswin Rao (41:01.902)

Okay Swami, thank you so much for this week. We answered the question of a job vs. career. Until we meet next week, take care and stay safe. Bye Swami. Bye Swami.

ContraMinds Podcast (41:09.413)

Thanks. Bye.