Podcast Themes

Viral Doshi speaks about some of the intrinsic traits that students have and career direction. He also speaks about some gender biases that exist in the way students think about choices.

Viral Doshi speaks about how the financial context often shapes choices children make around the first and second degree. He also speaks about how 1st degree should often be about pursuing one’s passion while the second degree should possibly be about a particular career pathway.

Viral Doshi speaks about the fact that he has chosen to stay small and focus on excellence rather than scale and go after the large commercial opportunity in this space. He speaks about what gives him joy and how he thinks about the trade-offs between growth and flexibility to travel, spend time with family etc.

Hitendra Wadhwa wears two hats with unusual fluency — Columbia professor and spiritual philosopher. In this opening segment, he traces the deep roots of his worldview: growing up in India, his parents’ transformative encounter with Yogananda’s teachings at his age 10, and the mission that has anchored him ever since — to build a world that is beautiful on the inside as much as the outside.

Bill Burnett speaks about how we hold on to some beliefs about careers that might have worked for us given our lived experiences but are irrelevant in the world our children are growing into.

Bill Burnett speaks about how he thought about navigating through various choices and transitions and how he balanced pursuing his passion and being pragmatic in terms of providing for his family without swinging too far to one side.

Jaspreet Bindra names a quiet rearrangement: work stops being a lifelong ladder and becomes short, skill-driven tasks — intelligence will be on tap, so your edge is how you combine what you know and how you show up. This matters because identity anchored to a title loses purchase. The insight: leadership becomes a practice of choices — small bets, shipped work, repeatable judgment. Takeaway: build two portable strengths, treat each brief project as a learning lab, and lead from skill-combination rather than from a job label.

Jaspreet Bindra speaks about the impact of AI on job destruction/creation and opines on what the careers in the future will look like.

Michiel Kruyt speaks about how he takes various retreats (3 days, 10 days, 6 months etc) at various points in time and how that often creates the space for new things to emerge.

Michiel Kruyt speaks about how Ambition can be a finite resource which could empty at some point in time but Purpose can be a perennially replenishing driving force if we tune into it.

Raghu Ananthnarayanan speaks about the distinction between DOING and BEING. He speaks about BEING as a regenerative process, something that heals and nurtures. He also speaks about the need for coherence between what we are doing and who we are being at various points in time and not resolving this is often at the root of what people often describe as a mid-life crisis.

Raghu Ananthnarayanan speaks about some of his choices post his undergraduate degree from IIT Madras. He speaks about how he was influenced by the times he was in and the people he came in touch with (Student Revolutions around the world, Meeting Dharampal etc). He goes on to talk about how Dharampal urged him and some of his friends to spend a decade going deep in a subject before moving on to make a difference.