In this episode of the Greenbook Podcast, host Lenny Murphy sits down with Pravin Shekar, a multifaceted entrepreneur, author, poet, adventurer. The conversation explores Pravin's approach to "unconventional decision making," emphasizing the importance of standing out by thinking and acting differently in business and life. They delve into Pravin's new book, "Convert Customer Bias into Business," which highlights how understanding human psychology and biases can enhance marketing strategies. Pravin shares insights from his extensive career, stressing the need for continuous personal and professional reinvention. The episode is a rich blend of practical business advice and inspiring personal anecdotes, aiming to motivate listeners to embrace their unique paths and create meaningful differences in their endeavors.

You can reach out to Pravin on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Pravin for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to spend it with me and my guest. Now [laugh], I was thinking before how to introduce our guest for today because he is a entrepreneur, an author, a poet, an adventurer, a renaissance man, the owner of the best mustache in market research, and just a joyful, joyful laugh.

[laugh].

So there’s the hints. Actually, I’ll just introduce you. So, Pravin Shekar, welcome to the Greenbook Podcast. It is such a joy to have you here.

Oh, Lenny, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure and always a pleasure reconnecting with you.

It has been too long. So I am—I was really looking forward to this one, so it’s great to have the chance to talk. And I meant everything I said. For our guests, for our listeners, Pravin is just one of the coolest individuals I have ever met in my life. And it’s just really, really great to be able to have the chance to talk. So rather than me kind of tooting your horn now, why don’t you tell our guests what you want them to know about you.

All right. So I’m Pravin Shekar. I’m an outlier marketer focused on all things unconventional. But just to talk about a bit on the conventional front, I’m the chairman and CEO of KREA eKnowledge, India’s leading healthcare panel company. I’m an angel investor, invested in a bunch of companies, a professional speaker on marketing, of course, and an eternal researcher who’s just started another longer-term doctoral research on unconventional decision making. So, chairman, CEO, angel investor, past president of the Indian Research Association, a contributor significantly to ESOMAR, trekker, photographer, traveler, poet, music producer. I love my life, and I’m living it. So that’s what I have to say about myself, Lenny. But research has been a mainstay all through. So back to you, Lenny.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s [laugh]—so I’m glad that I didn’t overhype the breadth and scope of all of your interests and abilities. You own that as well. Now we’re here today because we’re going to talk—you have a new book, and we’re going to talk about that. But you set it up with this idea of, you know, unconventional decision making. Let’s talk about that framework to get to this book, and then we can talk a little more about that. So kind of tell us about that perspective. How did you get there with that type of thinking and that focus on a conventional decision making?

The sameness is something that I tend to avoid, Lenny. So when you watch a movie, a movie becomes a hit, and there’s a slew of movies that are very similar. It’s the same with the book. It’s same with entrepreneurship. And all of a sudden you find that you are a part of that sameness, of that conformity, and you become a commodity. And the only way you can break through is by doing something different for which you really need to think different. You have to go against the grain, and there comes unconventional thinking, and there is a whole lot of psychology behind it. Why do only a few people think, act, and are different, while the whole rest of us are wanting to be, yearning to be, but yet do not take that step? So it comes down to, ‘hey... I want to be different. I decide to be different. I am different.’ And how do I stamp that difference on a continuous basis stems from this unconventional thinking, unconventional decision making and following through. And that is something that is a bug I caught on about a decade and a half ago. Trying to be different and being different are two different things. They lead together, but it’s different. So what goes inside it? How can one decide that I am going to stand out? By I, I mean it could be my personal brand, my entity, the company I’m representing, the product I’m looking at selling, or this podcast itself. How do we make it stand apart? The bottom line behind it is thinking, acting, and being different. So that’s the base.

Now, from a branding standpoint, obviously, that it’s kind of a no brainer, of course, right? You’re looking for differentiation and you get those components. But I think you’re talking about something that’s a little bit deeper than that. Something that’s kind of baked into the DNA—

Mm-hm.

—if you will, of the individual and or the organization. Have you done any—I’m sure you have—studying on what are the characteristics that separate somebody from being truly different and unique, or an organization being truly different or unique, versus just kind of posing as—

[laugh].

—as different [laugh], you know, if you know what I mean.

Yeah.

Something about the mind state, you know, what, what is that?

There are—of course, there’s research that’s been done, and I’ve done both primary and secondary. It all comes down to the intrinsic motivation as one of the key reasons that, ‘hey... yes, I want to be different.’ And the second aspect that immediately follows through is what I call creative destruction, which is ‘if I want to be different, which is the ocean or pool that I am in? What is the general thinking, and what can I destroy to make myself better?’ And third comes the scrappiness quotient. Scrappy has a negative connotation, but I am using it in the positive sense that I will do whatever I need to do to get what I want to do within the legal, ethical, moral framework. But can I get it done? Is there demonstrable proof? So these three factors, whether you look at a brand or you look at an individual, a personal brand, they come to the fourth. And the fourth point, of course, is the most important point, consistency. I mean, there are N number of blogs, and most of the blogs are very similar to the registrations in fitness clubs and gyms in the first week of January. By second week they’re off. So the fourth major important aspect in this case of deciding and being continuing to stand apart is consistency. But what I love most is the scrappiness quotient, Lenny.

Yeah. You and I both are perennial entrepreneurs and disruptors. And I’ve often asked myself, you know, why. It’d be easier to go to work somebody else, and I’d probably make more money—

[laugh] Yes.

—and do all those things, while also recognizing that I am a terrible employee. Before I became an entrepreneur, it was because I hated working for other people, and people generally hated me working for them [laugh] because of this focus on I want to do it my way and thinking I’m right all the time, which I’ve learned I often wasn’t, but my track record’s gotten pretty good over the years. But that doesn’t mean that someone who is different, maybe to your point, it’s just a different type of person. Does not mean folks that are not focused on creating that differentiation are wrong or worse, or defective or inferior in any way. It’s just a certain personality type that values this opportunity to kind of create difference in their life. Is that a fair statement? Would you agree with that?

It is absolutely a fair statement. You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to be different. You can do it in your own job. There are a lot of requests that come. I’m a professional speaker, and I speak to the mid and second level of management where they need to identify and talk a little bit more about what they do, their specialty, rather than just digging their head. They are good. They are pretty good in their work, but where they are not so good is letting the other people know what their specialty is. So what’s the point of being an expert if the others do not know or perceive you as being an expert in that field? And that becomes a significant point. But it’s a really good point that you mentioned, Lenny, because I’ve been an employee for a fairly short time, and I realized who I was, who I was not. But the problem also comes in that I’m responsible for a multiple set of companies and handle different CEO’s. It is cultural in nature because I grew up in the north of India and then I came down south where the culture is quite different that you have to confirm. You don’t look into the eye; you don’t toot your own horn; you just go with the flow is the culture here. And breaking part through that takes its own unlearning that is required, but it is necessary. Without a point of differentiation, who are you? What are you? What are you known for? What do you stand for? What are you a specialist in? Well, I need to figure that out, but if I don’t, then I need to have a system or an ecosystem that helps me find that.

No, that’s an interesting point too, the cultural aspects of embracing individuality or whatever to define that trait of being different. I actually didn’t realize that, that there was a difference culturally within the north and the south of India. Now I would suspect that in some countries, some of the Asian countries that are more homogenous by nature, that these concepts may be harder to inculcate because they are more—it sounds like southern India, that type of culture. Is that true?

It is.

Let me ask, actually, sorry, let me ask this a question.

Mm-hm.

Have you found it more challenging to communicate these ideas, to be embraced, because there are other barriers that aren’t just based on the individual but based on culture, politics, just social, macro social, economic contributors.

Culture and context is absolutely necessary for me to get the message across. And post-COVID, Lenny, I’ve got hundreds of colleagues all over India, some outside India as well. And once they shift out of this cultural geographical area back to their home base, home turf, there are changes in attitude, changes in the way of working and communication, which are natural. This is not a complaint. This is how it is. And therefore, if you need the same message to be interpreted exactly as you would want, then your communication style, the way it goes, has to change. Right? But for that which is coming back to the bias, I need to know who I am. And I also need to talk about the curse of knowledge. You and I are entrepreneurs. We are ideators. We’ve got several things. But if I do not translate, transport, the context, the idea, the background, the history behind which we arrived at this decision and the goal and just tell you what needs to be done, I will never get your buy in. And more often than not, the message is going to get diluted or diverted from whatever I would want to do. And India is huge. Asia, even though you say it’s homogeneous, every area, every region—I move 100 kilometers whichever direction I want. I mean, I can’t move due west. It’s the ocean. But I move anywhere other, the cuisine is different, the slang is different, the people dress slightly differently. And that’s just 100 kilometers here, which basically means the context and the culture are very, very important. And I also need to be aware of the curse of knowledge that they don’t know what I know. And therefore, it is my duty to let them know the context and then tell them or invite them as a part of the decision making.

Yes, and as you say that, I realize that the same is true here in the US, right? I mean, the difference between the south and the north or the east and the west. And, you know, that—certainly those differences exist. I’m just moving from Georgia to Kentucky. The culture in Kentucky is very different than the culture in Georgia, which most people wouldn’t necessarily think of. But anyway, we digress a little bit. So let’s talk about your book, so Convert Customer Bias into Business.

Right.

I suspect there’s a through line here on what inspired you to do that. So tell us about that.

Lenny, I believe that marketing is common sense. There’s no major jargon or layers to be piled on. It is common sense. And one of the tenets is ignorance is not an excuse. Why did this happen? Could I have done it better? Is there a different way to position? Comes down to marketing is nothing but human to human. I know you’ve got this AI sneaking around somewhere. We’ll cover it. But as I speak right now, marketing is still a human to human connection. We may use technology, but end of the day, it’s human to human. And the minute humans are involved, psychology, biases, stereotypes, everything come into play. And the sooner I understand a bit of it, I’ll be able to take better decisions suited to what I want and how do I get it through. So I wrote two books, in fact, back to back. Bias to Business is one. And the second one is How to Conquer Brain Traps, which is more personal, while the first one was business oriented. Well, of course, one of the targets that I have—I write every day, Lenny—is every year I take up a crazy target. Last year was a triathlon. Year before was the Everest base camp. This year it’s one book a month. And the Bias to Business was the first book that came out this month, this year, and the whole of this year it’s about the how to series: how to get more referrals, how to get more testimonials, how to be an outlier, how to network better, all the series of books that are coming in, including two poem books.

[laugh].

But Customer Bias to Business is something close to my heart because it consists of stories, different stories, different scenarios, and something I have done actively, which is there are Indian stories and Indian characters and Indian situations. Because 95 percent of the books that we get across the world are American situations, American idioms and phrases, which are very important. But I am writing to a specific audience which may or may not be exposed to that culture.

Very cool. So that is kind of a passion for you then is to take—

Yes.

Obviously you are—I think of you as kind of a very global person in experience perspective. I know that from, you know, the years of knowing you—and translating those learnings into the framework and context for the Indian culture to help. That’s fantastic. Do you also incorporate anything related to myth and, you know, that long amazing history in literature and religion and spirituality in Indian culture? Is that part of it?

Not this year, but I wrote about it two years ago, dwelling on Indian mythology and Indian history. So I’ve got a couple of books that have come out earlier. We can’t not write about it. It’s just so exciting for us to delve deeper into it. One of the books that I loved is called Throne Wars, which is merging Sun Tzu’s Art of War with south Indian history. So what happened in the history was real, the lessons; the screenplay was all mine. But we have such a rich, rich history, so many stories that are there, Lenny, that it’s a joy and pleasure. Of course, I love reading. I average about 60, 62 books a year. I have 1,500 books right outside in my own home library. So, well, reading feeds my leading.

Yeah, right there with you. We’ve been blessed for the past couple years to actually ensure that in our homes that we have a library, and we continue to have to buy new bookcases, which I consider to be a quality problem. Right? So [laugh] when it’s time for a new bookcase, we’re doing something right. And yes, the Indian history is just so fascinating. We could have a whole other conversation about that. We won’t get into it now, but there are so many interesting lessons and inspiration and, you know, really cool mysteries as well.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, when you, you know, study some of these things, like, you know, I think that you may have been documenting, you know, UFO’s back in the day.

[laugh].

And, you know, [laugh] there’s just really neat stuff in Indian mythology or what we call mythology. Maybe it’s—maybe there’s more history. Anyway, so how have you found the receptivity to that within the India market with your ideas around marketing, individuality, you know, creating differentiation? Is it making an impact?

It is. It is because everyone yearns to be different, Bill. Let’s say the inherent human nature is to get noticed. I want to get noticed. There is a bit of false modesty that comes in, but beyond a point, if you look at it when we go outside somewhere, don’t we look into the mirror? We want to be well dressed, we want to present ourselves well. It’s also a part that I want to make a good first impression. I want to make a good last impression. The same thing is true for a brand. You might say a brand doesn’t have a face, but a brand has feeling. It has emotions. Does it resonate? Does it impact the group that it has to? So it eventually comes down to looking into the mirror. Do I know who I am? Do I really know it? Who do I want to be, and what do I need to do to get there? Plus, the most important aspect in differentiation is perception. It doesn’t matter what I want you to think. End of the day, what do you think about it? What do you know about me, and what do you say about me or speak about me when I’m not in the room? To me, that is the epitome of branding. And isn’t that what we do in research? Finding out this is the assumption; this is the hypothesis I’ve worked on. Is it working? Well, my simple part is my branding working? Is you see me now, Lenny, I’m in yellow and black. My books are in yellow and black. That’s my personal brand. I pick up my mug. It’s picked with a huge mustache that’s coming in. So I am leaving visual cues, but it is by choice, by design, that I am leaving these cues. The minute you see a mustache anywhere, I want to be the first person to come to your mind, Lenny, and that is by design.

[laugh] You are my friend, you are.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, yes.

But a lot of people feel a bit of shyness. Oh, but I really want to, but... botch that butt. Kick that butt. I mean, literally or figuratively, but get it out of the way [laugh]. Put yourself out there.

[laugh].

Whether it’s you or your brand, how are you spoken about, how are you introduced are key aspects that I would look at now.

So in your—you talk about failure in your book as well as part of that path of learning, and I would totally agree. I look back at my life, and I see lots of learning experiences is how I prefer to think about them now versus failures. Although at the moment, they may have felt like failures. And those learning experiences help shape where we are and who I am and my—you know, everything that I do. And it’s funny that folks seem to really struggle with that concept. But yet in business, I think it’s accepted, you know, that, you know, we go through product design, ideation, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You want to fail fast and, and break things and then move on. Has that been a challenging concept to get across to your audience and folks that you work with?

Yes, and I end up using analogies. Now, let’s say, Lenny, you and I are at a conference, and we decide to cook something up and you cut your hand. And you’re shouting, bleeding, and all that. And I just say, here, put a band aid and be done with it. And the next day I cut my hand and the same knife, the same place, and I’m yelling and screaming and calling the whole world for the same type of cut. But I don’t want a bandage. I want a whole full-fledged cast out there in the whole world to know.

[laugh].

Well, this is a lovely phrase that we use in India, that my blood is real blood. Your blood is tomato ketchup.

[laugh].

So how is that feasible? Same cut cannot have two different reactions when it’s a cut from you. Come on, be a man. Mash it out. But when I get it, then I want the whole world to look at it. It’s a way that I—when I give this example, people say, “Yeah...” I said, “Yeah, that’s a self-serving bias that all success is because of me, but all failure is because of somebody else.” So people, the CEO’s who come to me to pitch for their business, I said, “Keep your pitch deck. Show me your failure resume.” “Ah, what is that?” “Show me your failure resume. Have you failed? If not, hey, dude, you’re not going to getting my money. You’re not going to get my money.” But wanting to be different starts from knowing who I am, which means I am there. If I want to be someone different, there’s going to be a lot of failure that’s going to come in.

So I love that. Our failures shape us as much as our successes. And whether you’re an entrepreneur or a parent, certainly—I know you have kids as well. Theres certainly times that I’ve looked say, “Well, that didn’t work the way that I intended it to. I mean...” [laugh] there’s, you know, so many things that we attempt, don’t go the way that we had planned, and realize, okay, I either need to do that differently or keep trying to enhance the skill or whatever the case may be if it’s something that I’m focused on. And it sounds like your position is that, that is, we need to inculcate that across every aspect of our lives and organizations and marketing efforts, that awareness of trial and error and getting better. Is that...

Oh, absolutely. No, we’ve got to remove the judgment and the stigma associated with it. And I’m not just saying it because it’s fashionable. How else will I learn? If I don’t openly talk about my failures, how am I going to acknowledge that, hey, I’ve got points to improve. And if I don’t do that, then I’m fooling myself. And what’s the point? Because the core of marketing, and this is something I give in most of my talks, especially to startups, Lenny, when I ask them the layman definition of marketing, advertisement and branding. In some cases they use it interchangeably. So I say in a layman term, when I know who I am, who I am for, and what transformation I’m going to bring about, I become a marketer. When I communicate that across various channels, that is advertisement. And end of the day, what do they speak about me, tell about me and my brand when I’m not there? What is the wiring inside that brain, the phrases that they use? That is branding. And I’m not going to get it right at first shot, which means there are several mechanisms that I would need to—several steps that I would need to go through that become a part of my failure resume so that when I have to repeat it, I look back at the failure model and say, I’m not going to do these things, but I’m going to try them differently. So absolutely, yes. There’s no judgment. And as a marketer, the first thing I say is, I don’t know. The context is different, so let’s find out. Which means I’m eliminating a lot of biases straight upfront.

I love that. So now I would also follow through on that. I think that part of that path of creating the difference is that holistic view of ourselves as the failures, the successes, those things that create lasting impressions in both our own self-perception as well as the perception of others. And that’s that iterative process of creating difference. Is that good, right, interpretation?

It definitely is. And I equate the path of being different similar to the path of a new idea. And there are three stages of any new idea. The first time an idea is proposed to you, Lenny, or anybody else, “That’s a nonsense, horrible idea. Ugh.” After six months, when somebody is actually doing something about it comes back, “Ooo, it seems like a good idea, but it won’t work in my company. It won’t work here.” After one year, when two or three have come out with their products, have made a phenomenal success out of that idea into their business, then you’ll say, “I always knew it was a good idea.” Right [laugh]?

[laugh].

And in your path of trying to be different, to come up with a differentiation for your brand, you will have to go against the grain. And like an idea, any new differentiation tactic that you propose, is going to be met with resistance. People are going to speculate, sneer, celebrate your stumbles, but eventually they will fall in line because only the different will survive and succeed. So that’s my take on it.

So for folks who are listening that are just now kind of grappling with this idea of thinking about the context of being different, I don’t know that that’s necessarily a framework that most folks use in thinking about either their own life or in business of this concept of purposeful difference. What are some tips that you could give somebody to start kind of embracing that concept and implementing that within their life?

Purposeful difference. That’s a lovely phrase you used, Lenny. And with your permission, I’m going to be copying that and using it.

It’s all yours. It’s all yours.

[laugh] What a beautiful coinage. How can you be different? Every time you think about trying to be different, there are forces inside your brain that those small voices that whisper, “Don’t do it, stick, conform. Why do you have to try? You may fall. You will be ridiculed,” et cetera. Well, those are the inner demons you’ll have to kill first. And the only way to kill them, silence them, is to do what you want to do, the first step. And then comes the external environment. The minute you look different, they’ll come and say, “What is this?” But they will get used to it, and then they will expect that from you. So a short answer to what you’re talking about, Lenny, is, once I know in general, this is who I am. This is what I want to be. You just have to go put it out there and follow through on that. And it’s the same thing that you have to do for your brand. You cannot design a brand very similar to Google because Google is successful. You can’t copy the same parts. What are you? Whom do you stand for? Because your target audience is somewhere else. If you are going to use the best on matrices and models to a rural Indian audience, it’s not going to work. And I’m going to give you a research case study example done by a researcher in India for a particular company, Darshan Bhai from Vini Pharmaceuticals. Lenny, if I may, I’ll finish the story in about a minute or two. But it’s very important for people to know that Darshan Bhai, Darshan Patel, the entrepreneur who started, was staring at failure because he wanted to enter the Indian perfume market, beat the three letter market shareholder. But his first product, 18 plus, was a colossal failure. And that’s when he decided, “Okay, if I need to be different, I need to focus on a particular micro market and let me go find out a little bit more.” So research was done. This was told to me by Priya Lobo from Ormax Consultants, who did the research. So for those of you listening in, I’m a huge research story collector. This was told by the founder of Ormax, that along with Darshan, they went down to rural India, the micro market of those three, four small towns, and observed the people, and by default, the middle class and below are extremely frugal. If they buy something, they will make it stretch. And for those of you remember from the seventies and eighties, the toothpaste used to be rolled right up till the end of the toothpaste comes out. Well, that’s exactly what it is. They hate wastage. They try to get the maximum out of it. And three, no differentiation between a perfume deodorant UD, Cologne UD. It’s just all scent, and it is sprayed on the body like a figure of eight because there’s not much water. So the men there used to have a bath only three or four, three times a week. So once these insights came in, it was brought back in. And they found out that the competitor was—the product had 60 percent gas and only 40 percent of the actual perfume. They reversed it, brought in something from China, which was aerosol-based, and the entire communication, their point of differentiation was that you get more scent per spray. And they showed a comparison on TV. That was the entire communication channel. And oh boy, in four months they made a significant dent in the marketplace purely on that. And that product was called Fogg, F-O-G-G, Friends of Good Guys. For a particular micro market, for a particular problem, using the insights created a significant differentiation, and now they’ve of course broadened it and have a significant share in the Indian market. So there it goes.

That is a great example. And as someone who also still does the toothpaste all the way to the end—

[laugh].

—and does a figure eight spray of my own cologne, oddly relatable. So the [laugh]... Yeah, but great example. Great example. Just thinking, you know, differently, and particularly from a business when you’re trying to solve a business issue, right, take that idea. I actually saw a—we’ve gone this whole episode without talking about AI, but I’ll bring this up because it was an interesting example—a new solution last week that you can test a business concept directly through and takes you through the kind of ideation into the early stage execution component automatically. That’s great. And my first thought was—well, first thought was, damn, I wish I’d had this, you know, through all the different things that I’ve launched and flopped. But the second was, well, what an interesting way to be able to really churn out ideas early on and create greater throughput of concepts once you’re over that fear. Right? When you embrace that a difference, you identify the opportunity. And I thought this could be a really great thing for innovation. You know, we could see a lot more companies kind of coming into the pipeline because the barrier to entry to test a business concept has just been reduced. So, I mean, literally anybody could utilize this tool very inexpensively to go through that early process. So I thought it was quite, quite interesting to see what happens when we unlock that. Because even if we think about the—you know, we think about businesses, and everybody wants to be Procter & Gamble or Unilever or whatever the case may be, but the artisanal component, right, the small business person, your wife making artisanal cheeses, we need more of that. We need more of, you know, small businesses, small entrepreneurs creating these solutions that are part of that mosaic of difference for different organizations.

Yes. Absolutely. It’s much, much, much required. Also, my pet peeve here, Lenny, is the whole world is seduced by the funded companies. What about the huge amount of bootstrapped small and medium sized enterprises that hold the entire fabric through? So the solution that you mentioned is going to be immensely useful for them because there is always a fight of resources. Should I do this, or should I do that? And if there is a solution like that that helps me test my ideas in real time with an audience, real or synthetic, it doesn’t matter at that point. But then that is a power in my hand, which I always call democratizing research. No longer is it in the realm of these four or five buckets of companies. Now as an entrepreneur, I have it in my hand. I can go ahead and take and do whatever I need. Is it right or wrong? Well, the market will tell, and I would rather go to the market and ask them straight up.

Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if that’s part of that—what makes that difference from an entrepreneurial standpoint is getting over that fear of failure and trying. And if we can decrease the barrier to entry, make it easier for people to try new ideas build in, kind of strengthening that difference muscle, if you will.

Oh... But, Lenny, do you know what the biggest hurdle there is? It’s called learned helplessness. That, “Hey... I’m stuck in this situation. I know it is painful, but I’m scared of trying something new. So I will just grit and bear it and continue to be in the same way.” And relating back to the example that you said, that if I am that small entrepreneur struggling with something, but there is a much bigger, better solution, I’m scared to try that and shake the entire boat. So I’m happy to grit and bear it and stay right there. But to get out of that stupor, that inertia, I need somebody from outside to come and give me a kick. It could be an advisor, a mentor, another company who comes and says, shake you up and say, “Hey... there’s something better. You’ve got to try that. It’ll save a lot of trouble.” That learned helplessness is another psychological phenomenon that we need to be aware of, that I cannot be in the rut and complain about the rut and not do anything about it. Well, I know I need to do something, but I’m better off here. So that shake up is also necessary. In answer to your question, when such newer technology solutions come, I cannot be an ostrich and dig my head into the sand. Well, I’ve got to sniff it, move along with it.

Yeah. Could not agree more. You know, I look back at my life, and I don’t think of myself as consciously reinventing myself in any way, shape, or form, but I’ve absolutely been a point of like, well, this has got to change, right? This situation, whatever this circumstance is, is unacceptable. I don’t like it. I feel like crap. Right? The emotional component, it’s not meeting my objectives, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I just got to do something different. And if that leads in a different direction, then so be it. Again, I’d love to take credit that it was purposeful. Often it’s just been pure damn luck.

[laugh].

But it is [laugh]... But the willingness to take advantage of the luck opportunity, I will take some credit for. So, Pravin, we can go on. And I know you’ve got—it’s late for you. And certainly the audience, we try and keep it short for them as well. What have we not touched on that you wanted us to touch on? Impart your wisdom from here.

Well, every four to five years, you need to shake yourself up and redefine who you are and redefine your purpose. I had one such shakeup moment a couple of years ago at a retreat, and 14 other strangers helping me redefine who I’m going to be for the next ten years. And the advantage of going in this stranger setup is they do not know my baggage. They do not know my history. For them, I’m just another person. And it was so nice to be countered, questioned. I had so many other devil’s advocate coming in that I found my purpose in life is to inspire creators, Lenny. And it’s just two words, inspire creators in whichever way we can. Which goes to underline that all of us will need to continue to shake ourselves up every four or five years so we do not get caught in the comfort zone or get stuck in any complacency because the world is moving at a fast pace. We don’t need to run. We can just be where we are and continue to change the world in our own small way that we can.

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And thank God for the people around us that either appear or are consistently there to help give us that opportunity to shake things up. Absolutely. That’s fantastic. So where can people find you, Pravin? Where can they find your book?

Oh yeah.

Amazon?

Yeah. So this year—I’ve published 18 books so far. Bulk of them are available in Amazon. But the books I’m bringing out this year is for a much smaller community because two of my advisors asked me the question can I create without bringing my vanity into the play? Can I not bring my vanity, not bring my likes or shares or comments? So this year I am writing and publishing to my smaller entrepreneur community, those who are part of my newsletter. It’s given away free simply because I’m writing for the love of writing. I’m researching, putting it all together for this community that has that particular need. So any of you who want any of my books, please write into Outlier, pravinshekar.com, and I’ll be happy to share them with you with the only request being you like it, pay it forward. That’s where you can come to pravinshekar.com. Get a list of my books. Reach out to me. I have a 48-hour email response because I tend to be offline four to 6 hours a day. So I take my time with my emails. But please reach out. I’m very, very active in only one social media platform, which is LinkedIn. So please reach out. I’d love to connect, collect, research, stories, collect failure stories, and look at learning a lot from you and hopefully helping you a little bit, as I learned two words from Lenny today, purposely different. Great [laugh].

[laugh] Well, I’m glad that there was something positive for you that came out of this. I learned a whole lot more. And plus just the joy, and I want to point that out, too. I hope our listeners recognize through the voice alone, there is a joyful quality to you that has always been there and is one of those things that I think struck me that if you’re not experiencing that joy that other people can pick up on as they do with you, then you’re doing something wrong. Because we’re not here to be miserable. We are here to find and spread joy in our own unique, different ways. And I just want to thank you for doing that because you’ve just always been such a fantastic example of that.

My pleasure, Lenny. And as I said, lovely connecting back with you. And we cannot have this big a break the next time around.

No. When there’s no reason to. So, you know, the world got weird. We all just kind of went and did our own thing for a little bit.

[laugh].

But it’s—it’s still weird, but it’s—it’s better weird now. I think it’s time for—

[laugh] Absolutely.

Yes. All right. Thank you, my friend. It was great to have you on. Really appreciate it. We’ll definitely—we’ll connect again. I want to give a shout out to our producer, Natalie, who keeps all the wheels on the bus turning round and round; our editor, Big Bad Audio; our sponsor; and of course, you, our listeners, because without you, Pravin and I may not have had the reason to reconnect. Right? So thank you for taking time out of your day to spend it with us. That’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Everybody take care. We’ll talk to you again real soon. Bye-bye.