Amit Basak: Leading Through Listening and Unlocking Potential

This episode features Amit Basak, a seasoned leader whose perspective on growth, culture, and leadership has been shaped by decades of experience across industries and environments. Drawing from both his professional journey and personal values, Amit shares what it truly means to lead with intention in today’s world.

The conversation explores the balance between performance and well-being, including how stress and productivity intersect and how leaders can create environments where people do their best work without burning out. Amit emphasizes the importance of active listening as a leadership tool, explaining how understanding others at a deeper level can unlock potential and build trust within teams.

We also dive into identity, resilience, and the long-term impact of early life experiences on leadership style. Amit reflects on how navigating different cultural spaces shaped his perspective and how those lessons continue to influence the way he mentors and leads today.

At its core, this episode is about building people, not just outcomes—leading with curiosity, creating space for others to grow, and defining success in a way that is both sustainable and meaningful.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's conversation is a special one. When you think about the people who shape your perspective early in life, it is really through one big moment. It is through years of observing how they think, how they lead, and how they show up for others. My godfather Amit is someone who brings a unique combination of clarity, discipline, and thoughtfulness to everything he does. Whether it's navigating high-pressure decisions, building meaningful relationships, or staying grounded in what actually matters, he operates with a level of intention that's hard to ignore. In this episode, we're gonna dive into leadership under pressure. How to think clearly when the stakes are high and what it means to build a life that is not just successful on paper, but meaningful in reality.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

And I think a few things. It's been it's been a journey. I think, in terms of my orientation there, I would at that time I was very focused on achievement, very focused on what sports I was playing, what team I was on, what grades I was getting, what classes I was taking, and looked at the boarding school experience as a precursor to or a stepping stool to college. I'd also say on a personal level, I was very insecure. Not to say I'm 100% confident now, but I was very concerned and scared about how I was perceived by my peers. And it was very important to me to have people's approval.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Interesting. Okay. And why where where do you think the insecurity kind of came from?

SPEAKER_02 2:11

I think, you know, I wasn't a typical boarding school kid in the sense that nobody in my family had ever been to boarding school. My parents were immigrants or immigrants from India. I didn't know, like I didn't know what LL Bean was when they showed up at Hotchkiss in Northwest Connecticut. And I remember wearing a Bill Blass suit instead of a blazer and khakis, because I didn't know I never I didn't own a blue blazer. I didn't know that it the the dress code. So I looked different, first of all, both in terms of my skin color and in terms of what I was wearing. It was a wholly new environment that I was unfamiliar with. And I didn't think I was prepared academically, and as it turned out, I wasn't. So I was so focused on achieving, and as I got started, I was actually at the bottom of the totem pole. The ultimate was not making the third soccer team and needing to play club soccer because I wasn't qualified to play any sport.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

You talked a little bit about, or you mentioned that achievement was kind of the top of your mind. How how do you think how sustainable is that mindset and has that changed in the last 30, 40 years?

SPEAKER_02 3:25

You know, I'd like to think I've adopted a growth mindset now, but I think having some stress around achievement can serve people really well. And if you think about a bell curve where, you know, on the y-axis, let me get this right. On the y-axis, maybe there's level of stress. On the x-axis axis, there's productivity. There's sort of if you're over here with little stress on the x-axis, you're not very productive. If you got some stress, maybe you get really productive. But if you get too much stress, there's diminishing returns and you start to come all the way down because you start to freak out and you burn out. And so I think things like having an achievement mentality can be helpful and serve people, but we need, I I have found that I want to be mindful of how much pressure I put on myself or where I'm getting pressure from to try and de-stress myself because my natural state is to stress myself out.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Okay. I kind of want to understand and I want the listeners to understand some of your roots, your culture, and your personal identity. So looking back on those early years of boarding school, those adolescent years, and then the change between high school to college, what shaped your identity and where did you feel that you belonged? And how and how is that and how what difficulties and challenges did you have to face when you were going through boarding school and then into and then to Yale?

SPEAKER_02 5:06

A lot of questions there. Do you do you want to you want me to start with my challenges and then talk about my identity?

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Because I think they're Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Okay. So the the challenge, challenges were simple. You know, getting into a great school, uh the pressure came largely from my father, who told me that honestly, if I and I love I idolized the guy, but he he had high expectations. And so he told me before I showed up at Hotchkiss that if I don't go to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton, he wasn't gonna pay for school. And and he wasn't kidding. And and and that's at a time where it's a it's a much more competitive time now, but that's at a time, and there's also you know, there I didn't have any legacy at any of these places, which makes which at the time made it substantially easier to get into these places. So there was that external pressure. Then there was the pressure I put on myself, which compounded that. And the challenges were I was unprepared academically, I wasn't very athletically talented, I didn't know what my interests were, I didn't have a lot of confidence, so I didn't make myself vulnerable to my peers, so it was hard to form relationships. So you put all that together, I wasn't doing well at school, I wasn't doing well in sports, I didn't know what to do extracurricularly, and I wasn't very popular because I wasn't forming a lot of friendships. So you put all that together, it's not a good start. And I think what clicked for me, Winston, and you know, someday I'm gonna get to interview you and I'll ask you how things started to click for you. But I had a wrestling coach in 10th grade named Ted Davis. And for whatever reason, the guy believed in me, and he put a lot of pressure on me to get better and better at wrestling. And I think I was by my senior year, I think I was undefeated. But between then, you know, between 10th grade and 12th grade, I made like varsity wrestling, which I never played varsity sport. I had winning seasons, and I started that started to teach me about self-confidence. And that self-confidence has been super and I trace it right back to that moment. There was a moment in practice where he taught me a specific move. It's called the chicken, and he showed me how to do it, and I did it, and people had a hard time getting out of it. And that success begat more got more success. We got more success.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

What role do you think confidence has? And I think that, and I think you could take it deeper into like kind of like how your mind works. And I think when you when you when you work out of your immigdala and you're in fight, fight freeze, and you don't have this confidence and you can't be vulnerable, and you talked about how it was difficult for you to connect with others, which is so important, especially at a young age. Connections are huge. How how did you kind of get out of that? And and what were some you talked a little bit about the wrestling, but what are some other small wins and maybe small relationships, and maybe it's Phil You know, I think to kind of get you to your confidence level.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

So you you mentioned the amygdala and how it's human to be in a state of fight, fright, and f fight, flight, and freeze. Aaron Powell And another way to think about that is I'm a believer in and practitioner of conscious leadership. And the foundation of conscious leadership is this notion that our mindset in our minds were either below or above the line. And if you think of the line, straight line, when you're below the line, you're in fight, flight, or freeze. And you are in a mindset where there's never enough time, there's never enough money, there's never enough love, there's you gotta argue to be right all the time. You and you make yourself feel better by proving other people are wrong. And if you can notice that, Winston, in my mind at least, if you can notice that, and shift above the line where you're kind, curious, and collaborative, where everything's a game, there's no drama. And that's when you can really fly, in my opinion. And that's when people are no one's a threat to you, everyone's an ally. And that's when you can free your mind to innovate and be creative, and really come up with new ideas and new ways to solve problems, new ways to run experiments, new ways to build businesses, new ways to experience your marriage, new ways to be a father, new ways to be a friend. So that's a big this notion of the line and being below and above the line, and having the awareness or the mindfulness to notice that, and then say I want to shift. That's a big big key piece of the puzzle for me.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

We I'm in a humanities capstone class here at VMS and and it's very philosophical and it's and it's really trying to find purpose and meaning. And I think that kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast because it's I think it's important for individuals to not put expectations on themselves and in terms of like a definite goal. So whether that's you know going into top 25 college or getting a 4.0 grade point average or making X amount of dollars this summer, I think it should be deranged for something more uh with a higher purpose and a higher meaning. So I think to to shift from identity into now family, I I think that it's it's a privilege in life to be able to come to become who you really are. And I think that's you could argue that could be the meaning of life. So now I would like to kind of get into your family and and how your your professional career can uh mix with your your personal life. And then I also want to talk about some maybe some difficulties with that, if that's okay. Sure. So you've had to you've experiencing raising two sons with autism. I mean, you could argue that's a defining part of your life. How has that shaped your sense of purpose as a father, as a businessman, as a husband, as a friend?

SPEAKER_02 11:19

It shaped every aspect of my life in very meaningful ways. And so taking a step back, my sons are 22. They're identical. They have what's called profound autism. Profound autism affects roughly 25% of the people on the autism spectrum and is characterized by being nonverbal, so often you can't talk. So that your IQ is, I think, roughly less than 40, and that you require 24 by seven support to in order to live. So you can't survive without somebody else helping you survive. Go to the bathroom, eat, make food, get out of the house, put on a coat, put on clothes. And so it's a it's tough being them. It's hard. And it's exhausting caring for them. And it's also very expensive to employ people to care for them. So how that's defined me is, you know, early on, like many things when you're young, you don't fully appreciate what the implications are of what you're going through and what the experience is, why you're going through it. So I kind of, my wife and I, and she really has been the primary caretaker for them, but my wife and I very much sort of put our heads down and did what we needed to do in terms of therapy for them, resources for them, speech, speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, and we learned a bunch. And like, you know, same kind of thing from an achievement perspective. Like when I was young, like I was gonna be the best autism dad of all time. Right? Because I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we're gonna beat this. They're gonna get better. And what we're dealing with is a gene mutation that's the root cause. So there is no cure, at least today. And so we weren't gonna beat it. And and so what I've learned around this, come back to your question, is that I've learned how to organize my life in a way where I I'm not saying I'm successful all the time, but where I try and get to some kind of a balance between my desire and motivation to care for them and make sure they're as happy as possible, along with my desire to be a good dad to my neurotypical daughter, who's two years older than them, along with my desire to be a good husband, along with my desire to have meaningful friendships, and along with my desire to have fun in my own life and do things I want to do. So that balancing act is hard because uh it puts pressure. The the hardest part is physically taking care of them, then being able to work around that to build a career that gives me and my family the resources to care for them, not only while I'm alive, but when I'm gone. Because they'll need 24 by 7 care. Hopefully they'll outlive me and they'll still need 24 by seven care. The other thing it's it's taught me, Winston, and this is probably the most meaningful. Well, there's two things. How to appreciate little things. So one of my sons hasn't stepped foot in our own backyard for 10 years, 11 years now. And so I remember what it was like to be able to walk around our block with him. And I feel great every time I'm able to take a walk around the block with my other son who is able to. So I like to say, like, it's really hard for something like a bad round of golf to bum me out.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Because it's given me a perspective to appreciate little things. So I'm lucky, super lucky there. And then number two, I've got all these angels in my life, these people who dedicate themselves to helping care for our boys, they're therapists, people who see them take care of them during the day. And these are people that don't make a lot of money, they've chosen a vocation, not a job, to help other people survive.

unknown 15:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Other people who can't talk to them. So imagine, imagine what kind of empathy and kind of what kind of kindness that requires of that person. And I see these people every day. So when I see somebody that is unkind, I choose not to be around them. And the way it affects my professional life is I've created a business with my partner whose mission is to create a place where people thrive. And the idea with thriving, Winston, is we all have our own innate innate strengths and weaknesses. And the trick is how do you overcome those weaknesses and how do you make the most of those strengths? And that's what I'm trying to do in my business. And so coming back to your question, like how has it affected me and shaped my life? It's affected everything. The whole way I view the world, whole way I experience the world, it affects what motivates me, it affects what I struggle with, it affects what I strive for. And all those meaningful people have motivated me. Remember, I told you I I avoid unkind people?

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

I'll tell you, my my my personal mission is to do meaningful things with people I love. So meaningful things means things that have an impact, a positive impact in this world. People I love means people that I love and respect. And I don't want to I don't want to do things with people I don't love. And I don't want to do things that aren't meaningful.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

It's it's about perspective and it's about how what lens you you you take this challenge, which is so immense. And then also this pressure that inherently that you have. I mean, I'm it's it's it's it's extraordinary how you can how you can deal with it and then come out on the other side successfully. But you you need a rock. And I remember we were on the phone a good while back, and you said that your wife is your rock. And I want to talk about like the idea of love in family, and and it doesn't have to be with purely just your wife, but it could be your friends and it could be the things that your son, your sons and daughters have taught you. But what is what does love mean to you? And w what is the idea of having that rock and that stronghold?

SPEAKER_02 17:47

It's funny you bring up the word rock and I'll I'll share why. So to me, love is everything, dude. Okay. Can I read you a quotation? Yeah, please. So this is a quotation from a theologian named Reinhold Nieber. He's a theologian I think he, I don't know, this quote is probably 50, 60 years old. But here it goes. Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. So there's a lot there, right? A lot to unpack, and I won't I won't pretend to do it justice. But what I'll tell you, what it means to me is what love is connection, and that's what I live for. And love is being connected to somebody that makes you a better person, that makes you a more mindful person, that makes you a happier person than you otherwise would. And love it also involves forgiveness. And so I make a lot of mistakes, man. I make a lot of mistakes. And in fact, I was doing some couples therapy with my wife a few months ago, and the therapist looked at me and he said, Man, you look like the rock. You just take it all in, persevere, and get stuff done. And my wife looked at me and she had tears in her eyes, and she said, Yeah, and I've been the rock for the last 22 years. We've been married, well, coming up on 27 years, but 22 years since the boys were born. And I don't want to be the rock. I want to be the flower. And we kind of unpacked that a bit, and I realized that I don't want to be the rock either. I want to be the kid. And what I mean by the kid is being somebody that's more carefree, that values having more fun more often. And so I think Winston, in my opinion, we all have many personas. And the rock served me well, particularly when I was early in my career or early in my days in boarding school, or early in the days of the boys' diagnosis, because it it helped me, it helped give me the determination. It helped me give me the perseverance I needed to get through those times. But, you know, when you get to be I'm 52, as you get older, and if you're just a rock, typically that doesn't end very well. That means like it it leads to all kinds of chronic illness, heart attacks from stress and not taking care of yourself physically and emotionally. And so coming back to your question about what does love mean to you, love is everything and everything to me in terms of connection. And I want to be careful about being the rock too much. The rock has definitely served me well in certain certain scenarios, but you know, if I'm just a rock, I can't be the kid and have any fun, and I probably won't have that much longevity.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

I I I liked how you talked about, and I and the word that came to mind was agency and giving yourself agency and giving yourself power to have that choice, to make yourself a rock, but then to also have the self-reflection to also be a flower. Some days and and it brought tears to your wife to say, I want to be a flower, I can't always be a rock. And I think that self-reflection is so important because there's so many people who are so stuck in their ways, and and it brings up this paradox of of choice and fate. And if you if you choose to continue to be a rock every waking day of your life, and you don't allow fate to take the wheel sometime and allow yourself to have some fun and and blossom and be a flower. And it brings up negative capability, which is being able to sit in that paradox and understand that, you know what, I gotta be a rock today. But then you know what? You know, if five o'clock tonight, I'm gonna blossom and and and enjoy myself and be present in that moment. I think that's so valuable, that skill, which you obviously have of being negatively capable of not like irritably grasping for truth and reason. Because I mean you could wake up every day, Amen, and and and ask yourself, why? Wow are you burdened with this challenge of raising two kids with profound autism, or why you have you have pretty probably awful days at in the office. So I I think that skill is so important for young adults to not to master, but to understand. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Well, I think the word do you use agency, Winston. Kudos to you. I'm proud of you for talking about that. Because again, coming back to conscious leadership, one of the first commitments in it, there's 15 commitments. One of the first commitments is I am 100% responsible for my situation. So if you go back to the line, when you shift above the line, what I didn't say is when you're below the line, things happen to you. You're at the effect of other things. When you're above the line, things happen by you. So this in in stoicism, there's this concept of like the thing that really matters is your reaction to the stimulus. What are you gonna do about the challenge you're presented with or the opportunity you're presented with? I fundamentally believe that I and you are very powerful people. And we can make the best of any situation we want. But it starts with our attitude and our growth mindset. So if we're reactive to a situation where we go in and start feeling sorry for ourselves or getting angry, fighting. Like we can do that. Or we can say, okay, what am I gonna do about this situation constructively? Or like, and that even you, I think you said the words, like I I need to be the rock today from eight to five, and then I want to be the flower, or then I want to be the kid. I I want to get to a point where everything I do is because I choose, not because I need to or shouldn't do. It's because I want to be the rock. I want to be the rock today. I got a bunch of stuff I got to work through today at work. I I just want to put my head down, I want to get it done. I want to get through it because I got this goal that I'm going after. But I want to do that mindful of the fact that, okay, I'm explicitly choosing to be the rock versus being programmed to be the rock. Because we all have programming. You you with me?

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like it's a mental paradigm that a lot of people are stuck in. Yes. And and I and I and I'm glad you brought up stoicism. And I and I've been trying to read a lot more. So Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Citroen. Good for you. And it's important, and it's really cool. And I think it's like control the controllables. And you hear it as a cliche on sports teams and and and these kind of these pep talks, but it it truly does have truth to it to control what you can control because it gives so much agency and power to you.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

These ancient cultures, and I don't pretend to be an expert on any one of them, but you know, a lot of the things, lessons learned from these ancient cultures, including things like stoicism, you know, they form the basis of modern sports psychology. Like I'm a huge New England Patriots fan. Mike Vrabel talks about identity, team's identity, right? And like a lot of these in sports, a lot of the things that people are coached on to excel come back, come back to the you can trace them directly back to some of these lessons from ancient civilizations and some of these philosophies like stoicism.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Before we move on to leadership and your leadership style, and I have a quote that that was on your LinkedIn. Looking ahead into the future, what are your goals and aspirations when it comes to supporting individuals like your sons? And how can how can we how can people get behind that and help them?

SPEAKER_02 27:10

So for my sons and everyone like them, I want to reimagine what's possible. And I want to create compete communities that have the individualized supports that are required for them to thrive in their way. I don't know what that looks like. It might be creating an environment where one of them performs routine tasks every day. It might be creating an environment where one of them can go swimming every day, it might be an environment when one of them can swing on a swing set every day, or some combination of those different activities. And today there isn't a robust marketplace and an ecosystem around them that is funded sufficiently to be able to do just that. And so a lot of it involves repurposing how money is spent at the state level. A lot of it involves looking for cost savings by finding new ways to serve them. Could involve technology and innovation. A lot of it involves physical community building, like the physical plant. A lot of it involves regulations. There are very specific regulations that limit creativity around how they're served and where they can live. And I want very much to not only reimagine what's possible, but then change those regulations, create those private partner private public partnerships, and run experiments and fix it. I'm quite determined to do this.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

I mean it's there. I mean, this just drive it, but it's also and I let me I want to rephrase my question because your determination is virtuous, and and which is which is rare. You know I it's not based off of monetary gain or personal gain or personal success and fame. I mean, it's based for a higher purpose.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Well, remember, I appreciate that, Winston, but I don't think it's virtuous necessarily. I am motivated first by putting my boys in the best possible position for them to thrive. In the same way I'm motivated to do that for my daughter, right? Because I love these people. So I want to make sure that you're aware, and I don't want anybody to get a sense that like I'm all that virtuous. I'm I'm doing this for them. But in doing this for them, I derive a significant amount of satisfaction because it feeds what I think my purpose is. So look, I'm I get to run a business, I'm a CEO. I'm probably like a BB plus. You know, I'm not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Pretty good. But not awesome. But but when you take, when I feel like I can take my entrepreneurial instincts, my leadership skills, my financial skills, my sales skills, my general management skills, my technology understanding, and a bunch of other things I've picked up along the way, and I put that together with my live experience with profound autism, and then I can apply that to creating solutions. That's what I call my zone of genius. That's where I feel like I'm dangerous. And it's energizing. It's energizing. It's like I get excited. It fuels me in a day where I can feel like I'm having an impact on things, a positive impact on things.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

I want to leadership is such a hard skill to master, and it's such a hard skill to get into. I want to I'll say two quotations. One is from Rousseau, and it's man is born free and everywhere he's in chains. And I think that there needs to be individuals to break those chains because it's hard for the for the average person to do that themselves, and it takes a leader, and it takes a courageous leader. And and then for your quote, you say that it all starts with our culture and our core values: excellence, integrity, accountability, and grace, which I've never heard. I've never heard someone say grace as a core value in a in corporate America. Where does that come from?

SPEAKER_02 31:50

So, first of all, I've not mastered leadership. I am very much a work in progress, and I'm sure you could find people on my teams that would be very critical of my leadership. But what I'm trying to do is be the best leader I can personally be, because that's what I can control. And to answer your question around grace, the idea, Winston, is in order to lead, people have to follow you. And people will have to want to follow you. And if you want people to follow you, I think they gotta respect you. And to earn people's respect, a key part, in my opinion, is actively listening, putting yourself in their shoes with empathy, and then turning around and saying, okay, here's what I heard you say. I can understand that for XYZ reasons. You know, I was just interacting with somebody on my team the other day, and I was giving him critical feedback, and I was like, wow, this guy takes feedback really well. And I said, Hey, first 10 years of my career when I was an individual contributor, I didn't take feedback so well because I thought some of the people giving me feedback because of my insecurity that I talked about earlier were just giving me criticism. And I wasn't measuring up and I went into fight or flight.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

And if if you can understand as a leader, Winston, that we're all human beings trying to get through this world in some form or fashion, and provide for our families in some form or fashion, love people and be loved, then you can hear them, you can relate to them, and you can unlock their potential. Okay? And our core values, excellence, accountability, integrity, and grace are a system. And the idea is if you have just accountability for excellence, remember we talked about the bell curve around pressure, that's when people burn out.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:02

Right? If it's all about gotta be excellent, gotta be excellent, gotta be excellent, hammering people. But if you're just graceful and it's empathetic and be like, oh, you know, I'm I'm sorry that you're in the situation, you're not gonna put any pressure on anybody to achieve what I call peak flow, the top of that bell curve. And so the core values are very intentionally chosen by me and my partner. And it tends to create a system within which or a pl or a foundation upon which we can simplify decision making. So everybody knows what it takes to get promoted. Everybody knows what it takes to get hired. Everybody knows what the consequences are if they don't meet our standard. They're asked to leave. And, you know, it's just it's just a lot simpler when we're very clear about the core values and the standards of behavior we expect that exhibit those core values. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 35:00

Yeah. When you when you're building this culture, how much collaboration and team team collaboration, because you can't do it alone, how how important is that to kind of build a team to help you create a culture for a bigger team, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Remember, neighbor, nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. Now, look, I don't love everybody I work with, nor do they love me. But I think we have respectful, meaningful relationships. And we have a common purpose, which is to create a place where people thrive. Okay. We have a common purpose. And if you can create a drumbeat of activities and behaviors around a common purpose, you can point people to a very clear towards a very clear directioning set of goals, it becomes a lot easier. It becomes a lot easier. It's almost like a sheet of music, right? Everyone understands what their role is and what their job is to achieve that common goal, objective, and you go. And it can be fun when you look at it that way. We're in this together. We're a team. There's no one person that's more important than the other.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Like the collection, the the collap, the collective unit will always be stronger than the individual. To to take that one step further, how how can you make sure that your ideas are heard and how can you let other people know in your team that their ideas are also heard?

SPEAKER_02 36:46

Well, that part of grace is creating an environment of psychological safety. So, in terms of making sure other people heard, you ask them and then you treat them with respect, even if you disagree. You know, you don't scream at people, you don't insult people if they have bad ideas, or you think they have bad ideas. So you encourage, you create an environment where people feel comfortable taking risks and communicating. And then how I get heard look, when you're a leader, it's a bit easier to be heard because people understand that you have some degree of power over their career, their compensation, at least as it relates to their work within your company, because of your role. But remember what I said about to leave means people are going to follow you, because people can choose to leave. And so I think a leader, a leader has to be pushing things the most on, and I and I think of a leader as a servant leadership model where I'm at the bottom of a pyramid. My job is to serve everybody else. I work for everybody else. And in this scenario, I think it's really important to be consistent in terms of your behavior, not to overreact to situations, to treat people respectfully, and to be very, very clear about the commitments you expect from people. I want XYZ done by this time. Can you commit to doing that? Great. And if people don't do what they said they would do, we've got to hold them accountable. And and you gotta treat people consistently, in my opinion, not play favorites because you like somebody or they're related to you or whatever it might be. Does that help?

SPEAKER_00 38:46

Yeah. I think I think that'll be unbelievably insightful for younger adults. And and you can you can take that that same philosophy to to sports teams and and class projects and going into college when no one is telling you what to do, and and you and now you have that this profound agency that you you didn't have six months ago. Now you have. And I think it's like now you have the choice to go one or two ways in how you treat people and how you get people to follow you. And I think and it also wants to further understanding your role, right? I mean, we don't need not everyone can be a leader, and not everyone can be a follower. And I think like understanding how you're gonna thrive within that little area. I mean, like you said, you said it was peak, peak flow, yeah, right? And where you can get to that on that on that bell curve. I think that's a good segue into the one of the last points, which is some advice for young adults.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

And I think I had this quote from Gandhi, and it's the future depends on what you do today. And I like that. And I think that shows that every day truly does matter. My question to you is what should someone do when they get into college? What are some a couple steps they can do to help them find a deeper sense of purpose?

SPEAKER_02 40:16

So we had a teacher at Hotchkiss that spoke, I believe it was a graduation speech my junior year, so not my senior year, not my graduation speech. And he said something beautiful, and he was talking about a poet whose a poem that whose name I forgot. But his his advice was get lost. Get lost. And I think as it relates to you, my godson, going to college, I would suggest on the one hand, one hand, that you get lost. And that means take a whole variety of classes. Try a whole variety of experiences. Extracurricular, clubs, drama, sports, leadership activities, travel. And that hopefully will help you figure out what you love to do. What you might be encoded to do. Okay? What you might be encoded to do. And at the same time, my advice is I don't know if this is controversial or not, is I think most colleges in America don't prepare people for real life. And I think a lot it's easy to go through college and walk away having not learned much. And having not learned skills that prepare you for life. And I'm talking about analytical skills, I'm talking about writing skills, I'm talking about maybe coding skills, I'm talking about teamwork, I'm talking about how to work well within teams, I'm talking about leadership, I'm talking about how to take feedback and realize that all feed get feedback is a gift for your own learning, whether you agree with it or not. And so I think it's really important, Winston, to be intentional around getting lost and learning. Really learning and pushing yourself, not necessarily for achievement, but pushing yourself to acquire skills and develop yourself so that you can take a hundred percent responsibility for your situation and position yourself to do things in this world that are gonna make you happy. Whether that's making money, whether it's having a positive impact, whether it's a combination of, but it's often not one thing, you know what I mean? But like, I don't think you're gonna figure out what your vocation is in college. But I think you can start the journey. And most importantly, again, you know, if you believe, if you come back to love, like you can form some of those relationships. You can have some of those experiences that are special, upon which there's some great like you know, I've done stuff with your dad going back to the age of 13 that have shaped who what I am. And those relationships, my relationship with him and you know, Uncle Clark, our other best friend from high school, like those are some of the most important relationships in my life. And I know you have good friends now, and you're gonna make some great friends in college.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

Right?

SPEAKER_02 43:51

So that's all part for me of getting lost. And by the way, you can get lost while working hard.

unknown 43:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 43:59

Like you could be in. Some architecture class working your tail off, putting together some model and get lost doing it. So they're not musicians of things.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

They're not. I like that. I think that I think there's and allowing yourself to get lost because a lot it's so it's scary and it takes vulnerability.

SPEAKER_02 44:20

Yeah, I I I remember kids when I was in college that took certain classes so they could boost their GPA so they can go to a certain law school or whatever, med school, or whatever they wanted to do. And that's one way to go about it. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. You've asked me for my advice. And my personal opinion is and I want you to work hard, by the way. But I don't want you to put so much pressure on yourself that you end up doing things for reasons that aren't consistent with your core values.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Okay. There's there's two traditions that we do that we talked a little bit about before, and and one of them is involving the audience. And so I created this website, thesearch-for success.com, where you can leave a question for the next guest, and an anomalous listener asked, What's one thing that you would tell your 18-year-old self?

SPEAKER_02 45:21

That's so you want me to answer that?

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Yeah, that's that's your question.

SPEAKER_02 45:30

Lose regret, choose fulfillment. I didn't know you were gonna ask me this question, but here's a book that I keep at my desk. It's called The Earn Life, and it's written by a coach named Marshall Goldsmith. And he lays out a series of exercises and a framework. And a simple way to think about it is what are your aspirations? What do you want to do with your life over the next five, ten, fifteen years? And then what are your ambitions? So, what do you want to do over the next month? What do you want to do over the next three months? What do you want to achieve over the next year? And then what are your activities? And the idea there, Winston, is like, what do you do during the course of your day? In an ideal world, our um our aspirations, what we want to do in five, ten years, our ambitions, our goals for the next three, six, twelve months, and our activities are all aligned. Okay. And and and if you can figure out that, in my opinion, I'm still working on this. If you can figure that out, you try you end up like forgetting or losing, minimizing regret. And you can feel during the day that you're doing something that's fulfilling. Ah, this makes sense of why I'm doing this.

SPEAKER_00 46:55

Yeah. The the last tradition is I I I pick a quote that I think will match with the conversation. So this one's from Brene Brown. Okay. Um, who's an author, and it's a brave leader is someone who says, I see you, I hear you, I don't have all the answers, but I'm going to keep listening and asking questions. And I think that, and I tend to kind of leave that quote for the audience, and I try not to give my two cents on it. And that's kind of how I uh wrap up the conversation. Amit, I mean, I'm so grateful that you said yes to this. And I think I'm also so grateful you're my godfather, and I think there's so much for uh that I can learn from you. And I'm impressed. I'm truly impressed by the achievements that you've been able to achieve in your life. And I hope I can see you soon.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

I'm looking forward to being out of your graduation. I don't know if your dad told you.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

Yeah, I heard thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

That means that means the world's an honor for me, Winston, and a privilege to be your godfather. And it's a joy to watch you grow and turn into the thoughtful, empathetic young man that you are. I don't think there are many young men that are high school seniors that quote Renee Brown very often. And that was a beautiful quotation, by the way. I'd love to talk to you about it when I talk to you next. Um we'll leave it, we'll leave that for next time. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Ahmed. Appreciate it.