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Ep 43 - Sheba and Vivek share a coffee
88 Plays3 years ago
Presenting a soul conversation over coffee with Vivek Govil. Vivek is the Managing Director of Oxford University Press and also an aspiring musician. More about him is on his Linkedin
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Transcript
Introduction and Beverage Rituals
00:00:02
Speaker
Delighted to have you in the podcast, where all stories are welcome and the masks come off. Hi Vivek. Hi Siva, it's good to see you. It's lovely to see you and thank you so much for accepting to have a chat with me, a soul brew with me. Welcome to Coffee and Soul and delighted to have you here.
00:00:25
Speaker
Thank you. I'm cheating a little bit because a few years ago I made a few lifestyle changes and I decided I shouldn't stop drinking as much coffee as I did. I now drink vast amounts of green tea, but that's what I've got in my cup. That's fantastic. It's your favorite brew and whatever that is, that works. I love my coffees, but now it's a treat. I sort of allow myself a nice espresso after a good meal or something. Lovely. So you have your cup of green tea with you.
00:00:55
Speaker
I do. Okay, so you'll just, I'll just pour myself my coffee. Yes, I think all of my soul brews is not complete unless and until I have the sound of the coffee. Absolutely. Cheers. Cheers to life. If I, if the cup is not too hot, if I, can I ask you to just nestle that between your palms and just sit back.
00:01:21
Speaker
That's pretty much what I do. Super. Just carry on with what you do and if you can just sit back, relax. With the cup in your hand and see if there's anything that comes up for you. Just close your eyes and relax. Any sounds?
00:01:42
Speaker
keywords, sites, anything that comes up. Yeah, no, I mean, I have to say I'm lucky because where I sit, where I sit here at the garden, just outside the window here, I can hear the birds and stuff to that, which is also a bit of aircraft noise, which is not quite as attractive, but it is rather nice when you sort of.
00:02:02
Speaker
shut your eyes and then it's the bird sound which sort of flows through. That is wonderful Vivek.
Musical Journey and Creative Process
00:02:09
Speaker
I do see that there are a lot of instruments. Are we sitting in some kind of a studio? Is this something that? This is my office. This is where, I mean, you're now in sort of the lockdown world. This is where I spend my days. But yeah, a few years ago I started, I've been playing the guitar since I was in college.
00:02:31
Speaker
My son is now a professional musician and thanks to him we ended up getting all this sort of super software on my computer and all this stuff. And I said well let me try my hand at songwriting. I did and I found, I don't know if I'm good at it, I mean I certainly enjoyed Thari. So I started writing and then being able to record the songs on the same computer.
00:02:56
Speaker
So this is my, yeah, so now it's my office and the recording studio, if you like. That's fantastic. That is so amazing. Go ahead, go ahead. I was saying it's not soundproof to anything. So when you hear my songs, actually, mostly it gets buried in the tracks. But if you listen just to the, to the, you'll hear the sounds of the dogs barking in the background or someone saying, Hey, are you ready for lunch or something? You know, that's all right in the mix.
00:03:21
Speaker
And I totally, I kind of resonate with that because that's the principle I use in Soul Rules as well that I'm not going to cut out sounds of life or ambient noise because it's part of the whole thing. So I'd love to hear, I've listened to some of your songs actually on LinkedIn and
00:03:40
Speaker
If I have the chance to do a plug, I think it's 13 albums up on Spotify. If anyone wants to just listen to it, I'm under my own name. So just tell us about it. I'm sure people will plug in. If you just go on to Spotify or YouTube Music or any of the major streaming channels, Apple Music, just look up Vivek Goel and all my albums will come up.
00:04:08
Speaker
And yeah, and you sort of see a little bit of a musical journey because in the first few ones was just a guitar and the first album is just the guitar and vocals. And then over time, as I've got more comfortable with the software and with all this stuff, it gets a little bit more complex, I suppose would be the thing. The songs themselves are just whatever comes into my head at the time and I sort of
00:04:34
Speaker
I'm fortunate I tend to sort of churn them out maybe one every couple of weeks or three weeks or something is I think my roughly my average. So yeah, it's just I mean, over lockdown, it's slowed down a little bit because I think there's less external experience to be able to write about because so there's a few ideas that pop because you're working in a smaller, smaller environment.
00:05:02
Speaker
I never knew this one. We were connected and talking to each other about 10 years ago.
Career Transitions and Work-Life Balance
00:05:10
Speaker
When you were in India and you were heading Pearson at that time.
00:05:15
Speaker
That's right. Yes. Yeah. And we'd spend some time together. And I had no idea. Well, I mean, you did talk about music, but I had no idea that this was such a I mean, it would it would turn into this. Did you know it? Did you know that? No, not at all. I mean, I used to I used to I used to play other people's songs because, you know, the sort of usual stuff that you do and mostly at drunken parties and stuff. But no, this is something that I only I only started doing about three or four years ago.
00:05:45
Speaker
So what was the trigger? The trigger was actually just the fact that I mean, that I had the opportunity was there because I had the software and I had the equipment to be able to record myself. And so I didn't have an excuse not to do it. And that was because otherwise, I mean, I'm sure there are a million
00:06:04
Speaker
songwriters out there but quite often if you don't have the, if you don't have a way to put it all together then it's a talent that doesn't get expressed. So I just had the opportunity and I said I took it so that was. That's wonderful, following your passion in this manner and then being so creative about it, just taking it forward. I think that is amazing. You continue to do your day job, right?
00:06:33
Speaker
I continued to do my day job. So from the time we worked together, I then moved with Pearson to the UK. I was actually following my, I was a trailing spouse. My wife got a very cool job in the UK and I said, okay, I'll come along and see what happens.
00:06:51
Speaker
Pearson was great for me, some really nice roles. But then I left Pearson in June 2019, so a couple of years ago now, and started a little company, I thought I'd do some consulting work and all that, but I started consulting with Oxford University Press, then got offered a role as an interim managing director for one of their businesses.
00:07:18
Speaker
Then when that finished, I thought I'd go off and do a, I had a, I had a rather, I think still thinking it would have been a rather cool startup, not quite a startup, a scale up opportunity to work with a friend to add a small business, which we thought we could build into something significant. But then OUP offered me the role of managing director for the UK business. That was just too good an offer to turn down. So it was, it's a,
00:07:45
Speaker
It's a great company. If you're running the UK operations, you're really at the heart of what Oxford University Press does. And it's a wonderful set of people. It's an interesting market. So I've been in this role for about actually just over a year now. I started there on the 1st, I think on the 1st of June last year. I had no regrets at all.
00:08:10
Speaker
Lovely, I mean this is like a dream, isn't it? You've got the job that you actually seem to really love doing and you're able to follow your passion the way that you are. I think that's, you're blessed.
00:08:21
Speaker
Without a doubt, I'm really grateful for what life has offered me. It's been a fabulous journey. I've really enjoyed every step of my career and made lots of really good friends whom I still hold close after all these years. And what I'm doing now is, I'm doing what I love doing. I'm doing what I think I'm pretty good at.
00:08:47
Speaker
And yeah, we live in this, I mean, and just in terms of life, I mean, we live in this little quiet corner, semi-rural kind of place. So you step out and there are cows in the field. Beautiful. So it's good to, I mean, there's the pressure of work, but there's all this, there's the music, but there's also the environment to be able to just de-stress and
00:09:12
Speaker
Sure, yeah that's fabulous. Tell me if you can take me through some of your key points in life and you already are exploring it but you know some of your defining moments like some highs, some lows, how has been your journey? What would you say about it?
00:09:31
Speaker
What are the key points?
Advertising Career and Industry Insights
00:09:33
Speaker
I mean, I suppose I've been so maybe if I describe the journey and then I can drop in. I mean, I mean, I've had a pretty checkered career. I mean, I started off after I finished my finish from the Institute of Management.
00:09:49
Speaker
I started off in advertising and I was with Linda S for some years. Loved that, worked on brands. I'm not terribly sure that I was the first brand I ever worked on was one which is a highly controversial one. It was fair and lovely. But that was my introduction to the big bad world of business city. And fair and lovely at that time was not a controversial brand.
00:10:16
Speaker
Oh, it was, I mean, I think if you thought about it, it had its challenges and we actually did some really cool work where we figured that this might be going completely off-piste. No, no, please go ahead. But actually the whole thing about fairness was we realized that what most people want is not, they don't aspire, no one aspires in India, no one aspires to a Caucasian fairness. No one wants that.
00:10:44
Speaker
What they want is actually sort of the skin that they were born with. So if you came from a community where you were slightly more dark skinned, your ideal skin tone was quite different from what the ideal skin tone for a community from a slightly fairer community might be.
00:11:05
Speaker
And so we tried convincing levers to say that we should just change the whole approach to saying it's not about being fair, it's about getting back the skin that you were born with. And it actually went all the way up to the Hindsan lever board. But I think then it was just such a big brand and they were terrified at the time to make the change.
00:11:27
Speaker
I know that they're making some of the changes now and it's 30 years, too late maybe, but at least they're making it. But anyway, from Lint as I went off and joined Gillette and I think that was the, they were a client of mine and they asked me if I'd come in to join the marketing team and I did, I loved it, I spent 17 years with them.
00:11:49
Speaker
I got to work on, I mean, you know, it was sort of a tiny little company when we started and by the time, by the time I left, it was a behemoth in India and
00:12:01
Speaker
got to work on at the time we had writing instruments was part of our was was part of our portfolio. So I was lucky enough to launch Parker pens in India. Okay. And so I went off and spent a few months in the factory and you haven't to learn what I made and what what makes them special and
00:12:20
Speaker
got to then work with Gillette. We had a joint venture with Luxor which is sort of a small family-run business. I think that was one of the biggest learning experiences of my life because there were three of us from Gillette who were parachuted into a company of 1200 which was run very much as an owner-driven company and it was a 50-50 joint venture and we couldn't
00:12:44
Speaker
We could never say that you need to do this because this is how Gillette does it. You had to take people along with you. You had to convince them of why this was the right way to do it. Incredibly stressful, but a massive learning opportunity. Anyway, I spent a bunch of time with Gillette. In between, I went off and became a headhunter for a year because I wanted to just be...
00:13:10
Speaker
I just wanted to try something different. So I did that, but realized that wasn't for me, went back to Gillette. And then the second big turning point was, I think I then got an offer from the, well, Gillette had got acquired and I didn't want to be part of the acquired company.
00:13:28
Speaker
I joined the Oberoi group as their executive vice president for sales. And it was crazy. I mean, I knew hotels as a customer. And my sales and marketing experience largely had operated with very small teams who were all under my nose. And suddenly I found myself running sales for this giant company, which had hotels all over the world.
00:13:55
Speaker
was having to travel to conferences in Las Vegas to convince the top American travel agents as to why they should use the hotels and stuff. And it was the first time that I'd actually managed anything of serious scale in terms of a team and in terms of a business.
00:14:18
Speaker
And just realizing that, yeah, I mean, I can do this as well. And it gives you this sort of confidence that you can then go on to do different things at a bigger scale than you have before. Then Pearson was, I suppose, the last big moment because it was a shift into education.
Shift to Education and Mental Health Awareness
00:14:41
Speaker
How was that? How was that transition for you?
00:14:43
Speaker
shifting into education. Interesting. Again it was fabulous because you know it's it's such a and many of the same things I would say about OUP here but I mean the the thing is that it's it firstly it is so fabulous to actually work in an industry where you know that you are doing good by what you do.
00:15:04
Speaker
So, you know, being in a mission driven environment is, I mean you can be a mission driven and you're in Gillette, but the mission was to sell razor blades now that which is a slightly different order of type of mission. So one, I think just the, what you were doing is really, really motivate.
00:15:23
Speaker
And secondly, it was a period of India at the time was just the opportunity was everywhere. This is going back to 2008, I think. That's right. So we went from being pretty much a company which reprinted American textbooks and sold them to you.
00:15:46
Speaker
to building a whole sort of education services business and making it more digital, making it more, we were growing at, I want to say something like about 30% a year of a small base, a tiny base, but I mean, that was the time where you and I got to meet and work together.
00:16:07
Speaker
But it was, so again, both for sort of discovering a space in which I could, which I loved. And secondly, it was my first time as a chief executive. And again, I just, I mean, I love the
00:16:23
Speaker
the breadth of what you end up doing and the fact that you just keep you bounce from talking about, you know, really the the detail of how you can make a better educational product to suddenly talking about, you know, we've outgrown our warehouse and we're looking for new warehouse space.
00:16:38
Speaker
So it was, that was tremendous. And then I'd say from there on, it's been a little bit of a, it's been continuity more than change. The current OUP role is fascinating because I have never actually, well, even though I've lived in the UK for the last decade, I was always in international roles.
00:17:02
Speaker
This is the first time that I was getting deeply into the UK market and it feels, for me, particularly coming from India and coming to what is not no longer a new country, but still a country that you don't necessarily know everything in its detail.
00:17:21
Speaker
getting to really understand the UK education system and the challenges that teachers and students face and what and you know it's yes it's a business but it's also a fabulous opportunity to learn about the community and the culture and all of that. Along the way I also managed to become a non-executive director of NHS mental health structures.
00:17:46
Speaker
Really? Oh wow, that's interesting. It's the mental health trust for Sari and so we deliver all the mental health services often through partners and we deliver the mental health services across. That's another area where you really get to understand
00:18:04
Speaker
a part of the community that is sort of invisible. Certainly I come from a position of, I mean, I've lived a very privileged and easy life. And even though I've had, I mean, I've had a bout with depression many years ago, but luckily I was able to sort of deal with it and move on.
00:18:22
Speaker
But then when you start, you know, when you realize that it's for a lot of people, it's not that easy to move on. And it is a lot of the issues which people face are much more sort of serious than what I did. So it's I know I'm speaking selfishly about my learning, but I mean, both of these have given me such an opportunity to actually understand the country I'm in and how little I actually knew in many ways of India at the time. I think I've come to understand India better because of my experience here, because
00:18:53
Speaker
Again, in India, I think I led a life of privilege. I had great paying jobs. I came from a stable family. And of course, you see, you know that there is a massive underprivileged population in India.
00:19:14
Speaker
But you can live in India without really seeing it. And in fact, it's almost a defense mechanism that to lead a happy life of privilege in India, you have to almost learn to ignore all of the rest of it, which I mean, I'm not ashamed, but I mean, I know I am a little ashamed to say that I didn't actually sort of see any of it when I was there. I just lived in my bubble and
00:19:37
Speaker
and was happy and successful in my bubble. Now seeing it in the UK and then applying the same learning to India, now when I, I mean, now I think I see, I understand it a lot better. Yeah. Now, you know, you're reflecting on something that's really, really important Vivek, and it's so true. What you say is we live a life of privilege and we just don't see it. I mean, we see it every day, but we've learned to completely whitewash it, you know? Exactly. It just blends into the background. You don't think about it.
00:20:07
Speaker
I think one of the things that happened during the COVID phase is that we were forced to see it. This is true. I think it really brought it home to everyone. I think demonetization first where you realized how it affected different people, the thing, and then COVID to a much greater extent, you realize this. Yeah. And you talked to me about, and you mentioned it almost in passing, but thank you so much for talking about mental health.
00:20:35
Speaker
talking about your own dealing with it. And you know, because this conversation today is so important, so important. And there's so many people who are now bringing it to the forefront. So people feel easy about talking about it. Was it very hard when you when you went through it for you to get out of it? Or did you have to was it? And if you're comfortable to talk about it? No, I'm happy more than happy to talk about it. Yes, it was hard. I mean, in my case, it was just this
00:21:04
Speaker
I've written songs about it, which I can share with you. Well, you sing us a song. No way, no way. All right. No, but that no, it was it was it was hard because you it's something that you, you know, it's even when you're going through it, it's you know, when you have when when there's something physically wrong with you, there are one, it's much easier to talk about it. There's sort of the people understand how to deal with it, how to treat it. And
00:21:33
Speaker
Often, I mean, of course, there are chronic illnesses, but often there are cures which work much faster. With mental health, you never quite, I mean, yes, there are lots of things that can help you. And I was lucky that I think I
00:21:49
Speaker
I understood what I was going through early. I went and met a psychiatrist early. We had a few sessions. I was prescribed some medication, which really helped me fight it.
00:22:06
Speaker
And actually, like I said, I'm really lucky, because in my case, even though the psychiatrist said you should continue with it, I thought I was being able to cope. And so I stopped the medication, and I was fine. And I've never looked back. I mean, even now, every once in a while, you can feel this thing lurking in the background. But I know how to deal with it now, and I know how to do this thing.
00:22:35
Speaker
really it was sort of something that was a serious problem for me for about three or four months and not much more than that so. Fabulous and here you are blessed really and to be able to have dealt with it but that gives people who are going through it so much more strength to say you can get out of it and it's like a shadow that lives there but you can always work with it and I think that itself is you know it's like our shadow never goes away does it?
00:23:02
Speaker
No, exactly. You kind of embrace it and maybe keep moving. You have it right in saying that way.
00:23:13
Speaker
I don't know if with this particular shadow if I embrace it, but I know how to keep it pushed away. If I'm suggesting that it's always lurking, it's not. It's just that at times when
00:23:36
Speaker
things are not going exactly the way you want. You can see it hanging on again. I'm here and you say, get the hell out of my life. I totally understand. You don't leave your hand on the stove longer than it's been. So now you are in the UK and have been there for how long? Just over a decade, actually. It was early 2011 that we moved here.
00:24:04
Speaker
Is there a metaphor for life? Is there something in adage or something you live
Philosophy on Life and Career Advice
00:24:14
Speaker
by? Or do you just pick up your guitar and strum your way out of it? I mean, what is it that you feel you fall back on?
00:24:21
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, this may sound a little trite, but there's a line I read in a letter which would be Ghatri, you know, the American folk musician. He'd written a letter to someone which there's a fabulous, it's on all the social media called letters of note where they publish great letters from people. And I saw this letter from Budhi Ghatri on there where he says, at the end of his letter, he says, take it easy, but take it.
00:24:48
Speaker
I don't know, in many ways that sort of, for me, I, I'm not, you know, I've done, I've done well, but I don't aspire to be a millionaire or a billionaire or anything of that sort. I aspire to do good work with nice people. And that keeps me that keeps me happy and
00:25:08
Speaker
And, you know, there are there are so many opportunities that I mean, take this, I mean, this chat, when you first asked me, I was I was really sort of nervous about it, because I've never done one of these. And when you say what the heck, I mean, it's a I mean, what's the dumbest question? Yes, exactly. So let's so take it, but you can you can take life's opportunities and take it easy at the same time. And I think you can be successful by while being a
00:25:37
Speaker
nice person and a good person. And I don't know what your what your rules on this call are about using, but I think there are too many people who think that in order to be successful, you have to be an asshole.
00:25:51
Speaker
No, there are no rules. But I see so much of that out there and you don't need to be an asshole to be successful. You can do it by being a good person, by being a nice person. And maybe some assholes get more successful depending on how you define success, but it's not my definition.
00:26:19
Speaker
Absolutely. That is so powerful what you just said. Would this be something that you would tell people who are just starting out or a younger Vivek? Is that a message? Because I think that's very powerful. So many people are hearing that you have to be a particular way in order to succeed. And I think what you're saying is so different.
00:26:41
Speaker
And so what do you, is that something that could be? I don't know. I mean, I'm not trying to sort of hold myself up as a role model or something. But I mean, I think it's important that you are clear as to what it is that you want out of life because I do find, for example, there's so many really bright young kids whom you see and
00:27:06
Speaker
And they could change the world. They could do amazing things. And then they will study the most interesting topics and then go off and become investment bankers. And I'm going to get into trouble with this because I have a lot of friends whose kids are way way down that route. But for God's sake, there is so much you can do.
00:27:32
Speaker
And I think that there's a financialized world and there's a real world. And the two are drifting further and further apart in many ways. And if you are bright and motivated and this thing, I mean, so I do, I'm sorry, I'm coming at this in a weird way. I do find that investment banking and there are some other professions at which do tend to put a premium on being a certain personality type.
00:28:01
Speaker
And I think if you want to go down that route, you have to conform in order to succeed. And I guess what I would say to anyone, and I do say to anyone, to anyone, if I get the chance to say it without criticizing their choices.
00:28:17
Speaker
or without hurting them as I criticize their choices. I mean, I do think that you can choose careers which will give you much more satisfaction, but they may not pay you quite as much and you may not find yourself in a tuxedo up on a, you know, at the Met Gala and that kind of stuff, but it's all right. I mean, that's
00:28:42
Speaker
But when you're a kid, I think most people have to find it out for themselves. Exactly. Because I know when I was younger, I was much more, I also believed that you had, not that you had to be an asshole, but that your success looked like that. It was the size of your bank balance which defined you.
00:29:05
Speaker
Actually, the time when I one of the times when I really learned about this was when that year when I was a headhunter. This was 2001. And I joined konferi 2001 was we just come off the dotcom crisis and stuff like that. So a lot of there was there was quite a lot of turmoil. It was a terrible time to be a headhunter because no one was hiring. But what I did find was that I would find a whole lot of people who would come to me and they had they had been let go by their company.
00:29:33
Speaker
they weren't able to tell their, they hadn't yet told their family, they hadn't told their friends. They would come to me as if I was sort of some, you know, a counselor to help them understand this. And I would do, I would play the part that I needed to play at the time. But it was such a, it was such a shocking thing that all these enormously successful people who I had, who I would have aspired to be like, actually that their entire self image was wrapped up in their business card and who they were.
00:30:03
Speaker
they couldn't even communicate with their family and friends about, I mean, because they felt that their family and friends would think less of them because they weren't in their job. And again, maybe the world has moved on because now everyone's got more used to being made redundant beings. So it's become more acceptable. But yeah, I don't think I'd ever want to be only define myself by my business card.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah, work is equal to identity for so many people, right? And the trappings that go with it. Yeah, absolutely right. And yeah, and so alternatives, looking at alternatives, looking at different ways of being, I think, although you say you're not role modeling it, in a way you are.
00:30:49
Speaker
which is fantastic because I think somewhere it's very important for the younger ones to see alternate success, what they define as success as whatever that happiness also has a part to play in this because people are just on this wheel that they don't get off and actually are so unhappy but
00:31:16
Speaker
I have a lot of friends, I mean, again, just on the role model front, I mean, I think I have a lot of friends now who have sort of given up their corporate careers and are actually spending much more time
00:31:29
Speaker
doing, you know, giving back. I think that is absolutely fabulous. I mean, I'm still working in a corporate career. I mean, I may be doing it in the space of education, but I'm still doing it for a paycheck, partly. But I mean, I do think that, I mean, if I look at, there's
00:31:55
Speaker
There's some people who've figured, OK, I've achieved what I thought was success and then spend the rest of their lives traveling the world and running up their carbon footprint and being, I mean, really, really happy lives, but a very self-indulgent life. And you have the other people who say, OK, I've achieved success and I'm going to actually do something for people who weren't as fortunate as me.
00:32:22
Speaker
and that latter group I think is the one I would look up to for sure. So Vivek, what would you say have been the key influencers in your life? It could be people or things or things people, instances, people you remember,
00:32:44
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, there's always obviously the usual starting points of family and parents who gave you a grounding. I think I'm lucky to have had a circle of family and friends who once share the same values.
00:33:01
Speaker
as I do and who help to keep me real because again one of the things that can happen as you go along is
Reflection and Influences
00:33:15
Speaker
when you're really successful and you start believing how successful you are, you need someone who's gonna keep you grounded. And yeah, luckily my wife and my kids and my friends are really good at this.
00:33:35
Speaker
So there's no chance to get a sort of a too big a head on that. But I think that's, but no, I don't, otherwise, I mean, I'm not sure that I have, you know, particularly specific mentors or the thing I read a lot. I follow a lot of interesting people on, I know Twitter is a dangerous territory, but I use Twitter to follow people who, you know, I follow a bunch of poets and artists and
00:34:04
Speaker
thinkers on there. And so there's a lot of influences which are shaping, which are presumably shaping my life. But no, I don't know that I would have been beyond, like I said, that circle of family and friends. I don't know that I have anything particularly unique to offer in that space. Yeah, no, I understand that. And that itself is unique, isn't it?
00:34:32
Speaker
I believe each individual has something unique to share, even though you say that you may not have. But there is something that you bring with your own particular flavor that perhaps no one else can. And what do you think that is? What do you think you bring as a gift to the people you know and to life, to human beings?
00:34:57
Speaker
I thought that question was going to end in the world type thing. So I was thinking, what do I bring to people in life? I don't know. I hope I bring, I mean, I think if it's one of those things, I mean, if when you enter the room, people smile, I think then you're good.
00:35:19
Speaker
I don't know that I always do it, but I think I'd like to believe that I bring a slightly calm, happy aura along with me, which makes people feel comfortable and relaxed and
00:35:38
Speaker
and then do their and then just be themselves or be good work colleagues or be good friends and it's not particularly insightful. I have to say that you know it sounds and exactly what I wanted to say to you is that it doesn't underestimate what you just said because that is it is perhaps one of the most important things is for giving a space by your being to another to be themselves. It's
00:36:06
Speaker
it's not easy and it's not often what people find that they run into. So a space where people can breathe and be is a very big thing. So if you bring that I think and I'm sure a lot of people will agree. I know that that is a quality you have and I'm sure a lot of people will agree. Thank you. I will take it as a compliment.
00:36:32
Speaker
Please do, please do. Also tell me, what do conversations like this? What's the value that it brings?
00:36:41
Speaker
I think for me, it's an opportunity to reflect on how I got here and what I do here now that I'm here. A lot of the times, I know that if you'd had the same conversation, say, 15 years ago, I may have given some of the same answers, but I think they would have been a little bit more trite.
00:37:05
Speaker
You know, it's like when you're playing table tennis, the ball comes in instinctively, you sort of knock it back over the net. But I think now it's probably happening a little bit more in its sort of slow motion table tennis, because I'm thinking about it a lot more. And I'm being able to sort of think about how I played that shot. So I think it's an opportunity for self-reflection. And that's certainly the value I'm getting out of it.
00:37:31
Speaker
Coming into this, I had no idea what we were going to talk about. So I didn't come with any expectations. Thank you so much for trusting me with this and just walking into this conversation. I really respect that and value that. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
00:37:49
Speaker
It's your forum. It's my forum. Wow. No, I think we've actually, I mean, in terms of describing who I am and how, what I believe in and this thing, I think we've sort of covered, we've covered most of, I mean, actually in, in much, both width and depth, much greater width and depth than I thought we would have in sort of 40 minutes. So no, I don't, I don't have any great pearls of wisdom or anything to say, but I mean, no, but thank you for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.
00:38:16
Speaker
That's the whole idea is to have a conversation, you know, and just a conversation and see what emerges from this. So thank you so much for making the time for this. It's been great to catch up with you again and to see, you know, the journey. No, likewise. Thanks very much. I really enjoyed it.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yeah, it was very nice. Thank you very much and all the very best particularly with the music whoever's listening in guys go and have a listen to all the albums Vivek's got out and I can vouch for it. There's some great songs out there and enjoy them and thank you so much Vivek once again for your time and all the thank you. Thanks Siva, that was great.
00:38:57
Speaker
Thank you for your time and attention and for being a part of Soul Brews with Siva. Until next week, keep the coffee swirling.