My address to ITM PGDM 2023 Batch

Dean Prava Das, Director Dr. Mohan, dignitaries, and my dear students, thank you for having me here today to address the inaugural PGDM batch of 2023. It’s an honour to stand before such a talented group of individuals who are embarking on a journey of knowledge, growth, and transformation. As a kid I thought Superman was real. As I grew up, I jumped from concept to concept. Thinking that power, strength, position or even elaborate paraphernalia can make you a superhuman, a superman. I still believe that any one of us can be a superhero. It’s just that I now know that’s its empathy above anything else that can make us superhuman, a superman. Empathy and caring for others are probably the highest qualities that you can ever aspire to have. It’s rare and is becoming even more so as the world gets more connected online, but we disconnect emotionally. First, care for yourself and give yourself a chance. When we move out of our homes and get a chance to spend the next few years building ourselves, it’s a great time to start fresh. It’s a new paradigm where you can mould yourself any way you want. Treat this as the beginning of new things; it’s a new day. I have been in your shoes and have sat here numerous times. I know it’s pretty hard to pay attention and listen to a speech. I will keep it short. But as you embark on this new chapter in your lives, I want to share some insights that I believe can shape your mindset and fuel your success.

• Act with an infinite mindset: Only two of the 10 smartphones sold in the world are iPhones, with a 20% market share. But Apple garners 50% of all revenues, 85% of all operating profits, and 90% of all free cash flow generated by the mobile phone business globally. Do you know why? There is a fascinating story about how we play infinite games. Simon Sinek has extensively discussed the concept of finite and infinite games. In his book “The Infinite Game,” he explores how these two types of games relate to leadership, business, and life. Sinek explains that finite games are those with clear rules, known players, and a set endpoint. The goal of a finite game is to win, and there is a defined winner and loser at the end. Like the cricket world test championship, we just lost. In contrast, infinite games have no predetermined endpoint or winners. The goal of an infinite game is to keep playing and perpetuate the game itself. The players change over time, and the focus is on outlasting the competition rather than winning outright. Examples of infinite games include life, relationships, careers, and business. Life, careers, and relationships are infinite. They only end with the end of the player for the player. Life moves on even without us. Only infinite players continue because there is no end. Simon told a story about presenting at Microsoft and Apple education conferences a few years ago. He says 80% of Microsoft executives spent 90% of their time on how to beat Apple’s latest product. While 100% of Apple executives spent 100% of their time on how to help teachers teach better and how to help students learn better, He mentioned that Microsoft had given him a gift, a Zune (music player), at the time. When he didn’t get anything from Apple, he couldn’t resist dropping a word into the ear of one of the executives about how it was better than the iPod touch he had, to which the Apple exec replied, “I have no doubt.” He was highlighting the fact that there may always be better technology, but that they were in it for the long term and that what they had was also excellent. Run your life as if you are an infinite player. Don’t play for small goals. Set audacious, frightening, and incredulous goals. Plan to survive all wars; take measured risks, but take risks. Only those who start can reach. How do you act when you are down and out, defeated and tired? That will define you.

• Delay gratification: an hour of exercise today, every day, is multiple hours of life later. Numerous studies published in ‘The Lancet’ and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) tell us that exercise is the best pill, the long-searched elixir, the longevity hack. But who likes to go through the pain of lifting weights, running for long periods, or rucking? We like to feel comfortable in our 24 degrees ac and French fries. Comfort and gratification today are sure paths to ill health and premature death. People who arbitrage time will almost always win. The first order thought of instant gratification is a crowded path, ensuring mediocre results at best. Delayed gratification, which requires second-order thinking, is less crowded and more likely to get results. If you can work today, follow the process every single day, and focus on executing today, the future will be bright. Action over asks. The biggest enemy of success isn’t failure, but the conscious yearning for upcoming comfort. It’s the anticipation of completion when you are on the last few pages of a book, the yearning for comfort before your final exam, and the anticipation of happiness before the final 100 meters of a marathon. Let go of the anticipation of comfort and focus completely on the process and the journey you have chosen. Instant gratification can be the lingering question in your mind: “What if I had something better? A better college, a better teacher, more money. Yet, please know that every single thing you aim for is within reach—not by expecting but by doing. And doing it from the place you are, not from where you could have been. How do you behave when you can’t see results is what will make you.

• Work on at least one idea like your life depends on it. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell recounts the story of Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis worked in an obstetric clinic at Vienna General Hospital in 1846, where childbed fever, resulting from infection and sepsis, was rampant among new mothers. But it was rare in another clinic run solely by midwives. The difference, he observed, was that doctors shuttled among obstetrics, autopsies, and dissection, while midwives had no contact with cadavers. Ergo, cadavers were the source of disease, and it was carried by unclean doctors. Semmelweis told them to wash their hands and was angrily dismissed as a crank. Years after his death — ironically, from sepsis after a beating by asylum guards — Semmelweis’s theory was vindicated in the laboratories of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, where the germ theory of disease was formalized. Semmelweis stuck with his ideas, even at the cost of his life, but was eventually proven right. Success by the standards of the modern world may come early, late, or never, but it will surely elude all of us if we give it a half-hearted effort. Side hobbies produce substandard results. Seek pain, seek uncomfortable challenges, seek hard choices, and choose things that look hard today. If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path that’s more painful in the short term. Which path you choose when you are sure to get immediate comfort versus a lot of discomfort. This will define how much you achieve.

• Repeat: Repetition is the only way to succeed. Being in shape and losing weight has become a hobby for most people in metro cities. Our lifestyles are designed to make us sick over time. When it comes to losing weight, the first thing we attack is our food. We begin by either reducing the quantity of food we eat or some types of food we eat, like fried food or carbs, or by giving up how often we eat by fasting. Some people also opt to exercise—the rare ones. But our choices are mostly limited to what we can see and feel. The tangibles. But consider this: An average person burns about 2500 calories a day. 70% of those calories are just to keep us alive. That’s our base metabolic rate. We burn another 10% for digestion, called the thermodynamic effect of food. Just 5% is burned by targeted exercise. That’s a total of 85%. The rest 15% is a lesser-known term called “non-exercising activity thermogenesis (NEAT). This is the part that involves habits. It’s like getting up and fetching water, taking the stairs, and being more active. Few people pay attention to this because habits are hard, and good habits are harder. Success is based on your ability to develop good habits and stick to them. It’s about what you do consistently. Great things happen occasionally to those who do great stuff consistently. Be a disciple of discipline. Trailblazing chemist Dmitri Mendeleev came to scientific greatness via an unlikely path, overcoming towering odds to create the periodic table, foundational to our understanding of chemistry. He says, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Upon awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. ” Mendeleev didn’t dream of the periodic table. It was years of hard work, hours, and days of efforts that produced the most magnificent table known to chemists. And nearly half a century later, the Schrodinger wave equation showcased how the subatomic universe complied with Mendeleev’s discovery. Things will fall into place if we can repeat a pre-decided action that takes us closer to our goals. My four major execution checklists are: Read, workout, eat clean, and seek challenges every day.

• Fail, but don’t quit. The Many-Worlds Interpretation is a prominent interpretation of quantum physics proposed by physicist Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. It suggests that every possible outcome of a quantum event actually occurs in separate, coexisting branches of the universe. According to this interpretation, whenever a quantum measurement is made, the universe splits into multiple copies, each representing a different outcome. For example, if you were to travel from ITM to the nearest café, there are millions of ways you can do it, including going to the moon and then coming back. In the fascinating world of subatomic particles, like in modern movies like the multiverse superhero flicks, there are parallel universes. This means every single outcome happens in some parallel universe. So, whatever you think hasn’t happened, did. And things that you think have, may be they didn’t happen. Don’t waste time arguing about bad outcomes. Act, prepare, and rise another time. Treat failure as an attempt, not a conclusion. Life is hard; you will fail and feel miserable. Things wouldn’t work; there wouldn’t be enough clarity. But keep going. Keep doing stuff that takes you closer to your goal. Do you keep at it when you are told you can’t will define you.

Be empathetic. Joy comes from advancing, not competing. It’s understanding how others feel and being compassionate toward them. It happens when two parts of the brain work together, neuroscientists say — the emotional center perceives the feelings of others, and the cognitive center tries to understand why they feel that way and how we can be helpful to them. More and more, we live in bubbles. Most of us are surrounded by people who look like us, eat like us, earn like us, spend money like us, have educations like us, and worship like us. Hence we can’t stand diversity, we don’t understand differing view points. The result is an empathy deficit, and it’s at the root of many of our biggest problems. Just give your friends more time to respond and lend a helping hand. Plan to grow together; that’s why learning in an academic institution is done together. Because together, you can do what no one can do alone.

Thank you

June 2023