Onepod Podcasts

Subu

I thought I was good in Hindi until you joined the damn tutoring place. Until you joined, I was a favorite student. And after you did, I was never looked at like that with oogly eyes by the teacher ever again.

Vikram

Or the other cute girls in the tutoring class

Subu

Something funny that happened yesterday. I'm just wondering if I should tell you that or save that for later.

Vikram

I just blurt it out, all the funny stuff up first.

Subu

So my, my neighbor, right, my next door neighbor. That guy just says some of the darndest things. So my kid is two and a half years old now. And he has a four year old kid. Okay. And about six months ago he came by our place to drop off some toys, because his kid had grown out of it. And then we got chatting and then he asks us, hey, you know, this was six months ago, so my kid was two years right? So he asked us Hey, is your is your son still nursing? And I tell him Yes, he is. So you know you need to cut him off as soon as you can. I'm like Okay, thanks for the unsolicited advice, but Sure, I'll take it. Then I asked him I asked him so I mean, why do you say this was it hard to get your son off the boob? And then he's like oh, no, no, no, it was really easy my my wife cut him off in a single day. And I'm like man, How the hell did she manage this right so I asked him he know what happened how did you guys do this? So that it wasn't too hard my wife just applied wasabi on our nipples and and that's it so one had one session with the wasabi and my son went screaming and he never looked at the boob again. Oh my god, I was like okay, yeah, wait, wait, it gets better. So yesterday I saw him standing outside the house with his son and so since we saw him I walked over and you know along with my kid and we just said hi. And then you know we just got talking again and then I one other thing that is worrying me quite a bit is we live on a main road so the street right outside our house is a 45 mile per hour street and cars people real drive really fast and every time I open up my garage door or, when I opened up my front door my kid just goes running outside and I'm scared he's gonna run out on the street right? So I asked him Hey, you know did you have this problem. He's been living in the neighborhood for a long time. So I asked him you know, did your kid have this, you know, do this when he was like two and a half.

Vikram

So this time is solicited advice.

Subu

Yeah, exactly this time it is solicited. This, anything he gives me I'm asking for it right. The last time I didn't ask for it. But this time I'm like, anyway. So you asked me know, did your I mean, I'm really worried about my son running out onto the street. You know, did your kid do this? And he's like, Oh, no, no, my kid never did. This is like, how I mean, what did you do? This is Oh, we know when he was two years old. I showed him a whole bunch of YouTube videos of people getting hit by cars and bus on the road. Oh my god. And, and then I told him that guy, if he goes on the road, he's gonna get hit, get hit by a bus. And that'll be the last time he sees his mama and papa.

Vikram

My God, like, this is torture.

Subu

I'm like, absolutely peachy.

Vikram

I'm glad he didn't use wasabi on this lesson.

Subu

I don't know. But I don't know which one is worse, honestly. So I have a question for you. I was listening to the audiobook version of Surely you're joking. Mr. Feynman. Is it fair to say that that was one of our most favorite book when you are growing up?

Vikram

Yeah, just quite inspirational and all the stories and stuff he does. Richard Feynman is a very popular physicist from Caltech. It was where he worked last. And he was famously known for a great personality. He was a Bongo player. He was just a fun loving guy. So he breaks a stereotype that the scientists have to be really nerdy and really intense, guys. Yeah. So this,

Subu

I'm listening to this audio book. And it is really nice the guy, the narrator has done a fantastic job and really enjoying it. This is one of the stories in that book is it was post a post war. Once the war was done, once the Manhattan Project and his stint at Los Alamos was complete, and he went back to Cornell to teach and he was saying that he was very jaded with physics. He was jaded with life. He was just bored. I mean, you know, it's it. He's generally he hadn't applied his mind the same way as he did to solve problems before the whole Manhattan Project. Right. So he was really he was just disenchanted, I guess, with with all of this academics and all of that, and he was, and one day he was sitting in the Cornell cafeteria. And a couple of the students were just tossing around these paper plates which have a Cornell logo on it right now. Something about that situation, that scene of the paper plates flying in the air and wobbling in a certain way and the corner logo on the plate wobbling in some other way. All of that triggered something in his mind. And he started just to play around, he decided that, you know, he's just going to play around with physics to, you know, find love in it again. And he solved the equations to describe the motion of the wobbling plates that these students are throwing around. That is what led to him coming up with the whole quantum electrodynamics, QED, and which ended up winning him the Nobel Prize, you know, setting the theme for our chat today, what part did luck play in this whole story, one of the things that Feynman does, across many of his stories is he does attribute, he's very modest and attributes a lot of things to luck. He just says, Oh, you know, I was just at the right place at the right time. And that's what happens is Feynman attributing, you know, too much of this success, and especially if you take this specific paper plates situation, is he attributing too much of it, the luck, or I mean, what's going on here? What role is luck really playing, or how much importance should be good luck in the situation.

Vikram

Feynman was primarily disillusioned with physics. And he was bored, because he really didn't find problems to work on. And so one of the things that opened up his mind, to the world around him was kind of when he stopped thinking about physics, he stepped away from it, and said, I'm going to do physics for fun, it's not a job anymore. And so what his mind did, I think at that time was kind of step back from the problem. And instead of thinking of physics the entire time, he was noticing the wobbling logo on the paper plate at the cafeteria. So his very fact that he intentionally stepped away from a problem already set him up to observe something else. Now, how important is it that he actually observed that logo, he could have been looking somewhere else, he could have been looking at the paper plate and not even thinking two hoots about what is going on. Maybe he was even upset at the people in the cafeteria, who are having fun. But something in his mind wants to observe right? So definitely there is an element of luck in the sense that he was there at the moment that this particular phenomenon happened. But he is receptive to something his mind is looking for something his mind always asks the question, Why? Because if you and I saw that paper plate spinning around, what would we have done, we would have probably not even noticed it. And this is what brings me to sometimes observe my my own kids, right? Or kids in general. And they remember things, they noticed things. They know what color the kite in the park was. They know what color shirt their friends were wearing. They observe somehow as we become adults, we stop observing. And that is a problem in of itself, right? So even then luck shows up and stares at us in our faces.

Subu

Yeah, we don't recognize it. We don't do anything with it, right.

Vikram

So that is definitely a story of luck and being receptive to it. This reminds me of my own story, actually, when I was in grad school, I was working on this paper that described the noise in micro electromechanical switches. Because those are actually just thin metal membranes that just float around and they vibrate and that causes like noise in the switch. So I was trying to write equations to find out what is the noise that these switches create when they are used in making the tunable filter. So that was my problem. So I wrote worked out all the equations and everything. And for the longest time, I was like, compared to the computer simulations. My numbers are always a fixed value off why is it a fixed value of everything is a fixed value of that means I'm not entirely wrong. I'm just missing some element of it. Why is it so anyway, I don't know. Like, I thought about it for many weeks, and I gave up on it. And then I took this easy course, just because the professor was, you know, handling giving this course on electrical noise in circuits. And I took that class only because it was easy, and I had already a lot of work. I just wanted to get a good grade and not work hard. So I took that class, and I was just sitting there and he was explaining about, you know, peak voltages are noise voltages and root mean squared noise voltages. And at that moment, I'm like, have I been calculating peak voltages all this time? Maybe I should calculate root mean squared voltages all the time. And I'm like, wait, what's the difference between? Oh, wait, the difference between these two is exactly the number I've been missing the whole time. So the moment I went back and change that calculation, everything lined up every single thing, every case lined up. So it's kind of an example. Nothing. Of course, nobody gave me a Nobel Prize for this stuff. But the paper is even hardly cited by anybody. It's probably a very relevant topic to even write calculations on. But yeah, it's my little slice of Richard Feynman, I guess.

Subu

Yeah, I guess, because what you're saying is that, you know, sure, luck does play a part in success. But you know, it's, it's not just as binary as that, or it's not as black and white as that. You know, you need to essentially, be prepared to receive that luck in some ways. And you know what, whatever it is, you do need to prepare you for that. Yes, not just plain luck. So you are working on a problem and sort of identified this lucky situation. And if you were not working on it, or if you are not far along on that, or hadn't put in the hard work to, to form all those equations, you wouldn't have had this realization.

Vikram

Right, you have to go down the path in significant ways, and then step back away from it. And then that can help refresh your perspective on things. And you know,

Subu

this is, so there was this other book, which I was reading a few months ago, it's called Bounce, okay, by this author called Matthew Syed, who used to be a top ranked table tennis player in the UK. Okay. And what he says in this book is, this is one of the underlying themes of the book, which is you can't attribute success to luck, and he's very hard lined about, he's like, Look, luck is not the reason for success. The only formula that you that is that you can follow to be successful at something is purposeful practice. And luck really plays an ancillary role along your journey of purposeful practice, if something accidentally happens that reinforces this purposeful practice, right? which adds to it. He said that the only role that luck can play it just like strengthen your perfect purposeful practice. And that is he cites most of his examples are in sports. So he sort of went down this path of table tennis, he was getting, he was quite good at it. And he practiced many, many hours a day, right. And at some point, he was lucky to meet this one coach who sort of joined a school or whatever, it's, I'm sort of forgetting the story. But it's, you know, it's sort of approximately right. So he was lucky to meet this specific coach who ran a specific gym, out of a small space, which he had open 24 seven. So all all these students who he coached could come anytime of the day or night and practice. And because of meeting this guy, and because of him having this one place with the table tennis, what table that is room that's open 24 seven, it led them to practice even more, and then, you know, eventually he became like a number one kind of thing. And similarly, like, you know, if you talk about basketball, sure, I mean, you could be lucky with with if you take a sport like basketball, okay, genetics does play a small part, to set you off, if you're Six-five instead or six feet. To begin with, you have a certain amount of luck. But it doesn't matter if you're beyond that, if you don't use your height, or if you don't put in enough practice, then the guy who is six feet can easily beat the guy who 6-5 if he had, like, you know, purposefully practiced a lot more. So basically, luck, mostly plays an ancillary role is what this guy's says, his analysis. So

Vikram

is this along the same lines of working on the unfair advantage you have? The key is to identify the unfair advantage that you have, if you're a six foot five person, you already have the unfair advantage over somebody who's five foot five or six feet. And that automatically sets you up for some amount of success. You're not some giving up the hard work, the hard work has to happen. Right? So there are each of us has something that we are really good at. So does it come down to identifying that is that what we should do to enhance our own successes, success of being lucky,

Subu

it is capitalizing on the unfair advantage. You start off with some luck. So that is what the unfair advantages and apart from that, anything that happens to you you're also if something good happens to you along the path you sort of, you're also recognizing that, hey, there is a new unfair advantage that has sort of been added to your to your toolbox kind of thing, which you should continue using

Vikram

A lot of instances in science, for example, right have been purely attributed to luck. And I don't even know if that was an unfair advantage in that situation. Let me give you an example. Right? You know that the discovery of Viagra itself is completely a stroke of luck. Because, okay. Early in, like, I don't know, when exactly it was probably in the 1980s. They were developing it was actually Pfizer's drug, even then, they were using this particular the cardiac, whatever the risk of a heart attack and things like that. hemical compound to treat cardiovascular problems. And their purpose was to di ate the blood vessels in the heart, this particular compound work really well, n mice, and rats, and whatever animal testing they did. And then in the 1990s it was time to test on the humans, right? The human trials began and the drugs id very poorly. In human trials, it did not work at all. The heart did not, y u know, change be Yeah, it was supposed to dilate the blood vessels in the heart. It totally did not do that. But However, during these trials, one observant nurse noted that a lot of the men who are enrolled in the study always preferred to lie on their stomachs and never turn around. Because it was totally dilating the blood vessels in a place where they did not intend it to happen, at all. Amazing. So in what was this in 1998, I think they approved Viagra for erectile dysfunction. And so that's how it came to be. So it's like a classic example of pure luck, because it really didn't intend to do what it was supposed to do.

Subu

And there's a different opportunity that came knocking and they recognized it.

Vikram

Yeah, Isaac Asimov was quoted to have said, I believe the key points of scientific discovery come not when you say Eureka, but when you say That's funny.

Subu

Oh, man, that is a good, that's a good one. Is it all of these examples that we spoke about, right? It's, it's mostly to do with luck and success when it comes to career or sports or whatever it is, right? Okay. Now, I was trying to reflect on on my past and see if, hey, you know, how have I gotten lucky? You know, just being just sitting down, thinking about stuff and being honest, you know, to identify, you know, all the big things that happened in my life. And what part did luck play in it. When I thought about luck, the main thing that came to my mind is I kind of felt I really got lucky with meeting the right people, at certain intervals of my life. Let me be specific. Towards the end of fourth grade, there was this other classmate, right? And, you know, I was walking with my dad in our neighborhood, and this kid who was this other classmate, he recognized me and said, hey, you're this Subu kid, right? You're in my class. I'm your classmate. And I was a shy guy. So I would never even if I had seen him, I would, I wouldn't have said hi. So he and his dad were around, but they were washing the car. So he didn't tell ya, you know, you're my classmate. I mean, we have never spoken before. It's my birthday tomorrow, and I'm throwing a party at home. Why don't you come over? My dad was like, Yeah, sure. You know what, I'll bring him over. Don't worry. He's a shy kid. But I'll bring him over. So that started you know, so that I think happened completely accidentally, I was coming off like a bad friendship, which was really with my first friend. And I accidentally meet this guy and for the next four years, right, so this, this guy, Pradeep, I mean, he he became a very close friend, we used to hang out a lot. And he was really good for me. I mean, the best way to describe him, he really had initiative, that he was a very excited kid. And because he was a captain of our local cricket team. Because of him. I made the view he was the sort of guy who just show up every week and say, Hey, I met this new guy. Let's go hang out at his house.

Vikram

Oh, nice. Just what you needed at the time.

Subu

Exactly right. So that's what I needed. And so because of him, I ended up making a whole bunch of friends have started playing games he was really big into generally computer games. He had this console where he played Street Fighter a lot. He exposed me to that and then you know, every other weekend, like I said that he would meet this guy said, Hey, I met I met this new friend here and he has this really kick ass music system which has a five CD changer. Let's go check it out. Wow, five CDs, five CD changer, right? So it's sort of dating ourselves there. Hanging out with him meant I also hung out a lot with his family and he was brought up in a very, very good habits kind of thing. You know, you greet people when you meet them. You always you're wearing a clean shirt and a clean pant when you go out, they had a family friend called Uncle Bob, who used to come every now and then from Canada, who used to bring this discs, this 1.4 Mb discs with games in it. And from there, so we went from, you know, Street Fighter we used to play he had this 486 machine, right. And we used to play a ton of Commander Keen, and the Dangerous Dave and things like that. Yeah. And I think through him, right, I mean, because of him, I started playing essentially started playing cricket. And then, and he had this habit of celebrating everything. I mean, I'm sure he would mute all kids, I'm sure he didn't really notice he was doing this. He was that was his, that was just his personality.

Vikram

You mean celebrating what?

Subu

Celebrating in the sense when we would play cricket, right? And say if I took a good wicket, or you made a good catch, he would come and say, Oh my god, Subu. That is the best man you really kick ass at bowling. So, you know, I wouldn't have otherwise believed that I'm a good bowler, if not for this positive sort of reinforcement. And then I kind of think oh, yeah, you know what, I think I am good at it. And all of this sort of triggered this belief that oh, I can be good at something. From fourth grade until eighth grade, we hung out a lot. And through that he a lot of his good habits rubbed off on me. And I think I developed a my own identity through those four years. And you know, his influence. Thinking back I think his his influence is pretty clear. Because, you know, at eighth grade, he moved out of the school we studied at and he went out of town, we went to a different city. And I don't remember anything that happened in ninth grade. It was like, really, it was very uneventful. I don't remember any that happened. And then the next day after eighth grade, the The next thing I really remember is when we started hanging out in 10th grade. Yeah, right. So there was a clearly a gap of a year, right. So when I were this good friend moved away. And then after that, I ended up meeting you. And that was also under sort of strange circumstances. From 10th grade onwards, all the way through undergrad, we used to hang out a lot, you know, I spent a lot of time with your family, your mom, dad and grandparents. And since your family was so musically oriented, a guy like me, who never listened to any music developed an interest in drums. And, you know, being a drummer has since college become like a big part of my personality even today at work, you know, people sort of know Oh, yes, yeah, Subu, he's, he's the drummer kind of thing. So these friends I met at opportune times in my childhood, and young adult days, sort of shaped my identity, to a large extent. So I think that's where luck sort of ended up playing a big role in my life.

Vikram

Yeah, that's a nice story. I remember similarly, you know, when we were studying to go into those very famous Indian Institute of Technology, IITs to do our undergraduate education and all that, I was pretty certain, actually, that I would get in, and I would go to one of these premier Institute's my grades still then was supportive of that hypothesis anyway. But turns out when the moment came, the exact subject I flunked out on was physics, which is strange, because almost for the rest of my life after that, in grad school, and even at work, I do some form of physics now anyway, so physics has become my life. But funnily, I failed out exactly what I was going to do in the future for the rest of my life. So I was pretty upset about that whole thing at the time. I remember clearly I was really destroyed for a couple of years, even. Because it just went against, like so many things that I believed I would be doing right. Now, in hindsight, if you look at it, if I were going to go to a different university, especially what it is, I would have to move out of town. So if I moved out of town, I would have never met the rest of the band mates that you and I played with, and had a greatest time of our lives. The best we were like probably the best years of our lives, right? best years of our lives undergrad, the undergrad, Bachelor of Engineering undergrad days here. Yeah, still, we were what when you do something like that, right? 18 to 22. Because the other musicians came from the university you went to and the university I went to, or rather the colleges, we went to the colleges. Yeah. Yeah. So that became a big part of our lives, which it still is today, as we fondly look back on it. And through that whole process, is how I met my current spouse. better half, right, because she was going to interview our band. Right.

Subu

She was the traveling journalist who interviewed our band,

Vikram

The traveling journalist, roadie, and general provider of snacks and beer money because she never used to drink so she used to have a lemonade And then split the bill equally with us when we had tons of beers. And so he had the most expensive lemonade in the world. Yeah, so it's because of the whole thing that I did not go to that university, which seemed like really bad luck at the time. Maybe it wasn't luck. I wasn't very good at physics. But now that's what they set up my life today, right? I mean, now I have two kids. happy life. I did go on to do a lot of things

Subu

because of that happy accident. Yeah, of not getting into IIT.

Vikram

Of happy accident of failing. Yeah, turned out to be pretty great. Because I still do the physics I do. I don't think it really affected my career in any way. I'm still happy of what I do it my work. I do consider myself lucky. Now in hindsight, even though at that moment, it seemed like a really big axe had fallen on my head. You know what I mean? Yeah. So you had some things you can only tell in hindsight. Yeah.

Subu

And it's, it's nice, it's good to recognize this kind of a thing. In hindsight, I think.

Vikram

Because what seems to you today, something really untoward and unexpected, oftentimes plays out in ways you can't imagine at the moment, it takes time to tell you that

Subu

Yeah, you know, it's like, I know my my mom, every time I send her a video of my band playing or something, or a piece of music that we composed, she would always ask she'll she'll always ask me no one in our family like even ancestors, nobody really had any musical inclination. And how the hell did you get so deep into music? It was very clear because once we started hanging out and I used to hang out a lot at your place all that was there in your house was music, your dad in his 50s started learning violin, practically Pink Floyd playing on the on the music system, all day long,

Vikram

I've been listening to Pink Floyd since I was three months old

Subu

Three months old. Ah there you go! You and your dad would play, you know, dual guitars on Wish you were here. And you're singing with harmonies. And all this is going on on one side of the house. And on the on the say, the second floor of the house. And on the first floor of the house, your grandmom is singing beautifully some Carnatic song and then the so that your house is always filled with a ton of music. And I mean, it's obvious like how all of this, you know, soaked into me and I picked up an instrument and it became such an important part. So that was purely because I met you and your family. And we went to the same school forever right. But since we are always in different classrooms, we were only acquaintances like we never really became good friends until 10th grade. And what happened was, in 10th, grade, we went to the same after school, tutoring after school coaching class for Hindi for the Hindi language, right? And the thing is that I was bad in Hindi, but you You are very damn good.

Vikram

You think I was good. I was worse.

Subu

Okay, listen to this. Okay, I have a story for you. So I have no idea you had no business being there for this after school coaching program for Hindi. Because, you know, a part of the Hindi exam was that, you know, you would be given a topic and you had to write an essay on it. This is like one of the core parts of the Hindi examination someday in this after school coaching program, this tutor gave us a topic and the topic was something abstract, like, hey, write an essay or write a paragraph on the setting sun in Hindi, right? And I'm like, and you have 15 minutes. Okay, and then, you know, I just bum around for 15 minutes, and I write down some nonsense. And then the thing is that this tutor reads our essays out loud. Oh, God. How embarrassing. And the first essay she reads is Vikram's right.

Vikram

I don't even remember this essay now

Subu

Okay, hang on. So she reads out Vikram's essay first. And it's like, such beautiful Hindi prose. It's so philosophical. So it's about a setting sun and Vikram writes, you know, amongst a whole bunch of philosophical stuff about the setting sun. He says, Oh, you know, the sun setting is like a baby falling asleep in the lap of her mother. Okay. What and? Yeah. And, and I'm like, Oh my God, what a frickin nerd. He's making us look really bad. And then after that, and she has this big smile on her face. And yes, this is my star student. I really, she was celebrating you. And then she picks up my essay, and it has something I'm like, in 15 minutes. What am I gonna write about sunset, right? And I'm, I write some total nonsense like, hey, okay, when the sun goes down, I feel hungry. And then I start eating and I go to bed or something. I'm like, basically, I'm trying to keep it together here with 15 minutes and this guy goes about talking about the sun and birth mother and whatnot. Oh, my God. Talk about it. Yeah. So there you go. That's through the schedule. One of these days we were after after you embarrass the heck out of us. We were ready to go. home and I used to be used to commute with through public transportation, obviously, you know, just the local buses in Bangalore in India. And it was past sunset was like 7pm or 7:30pm. That's when the classes got over. And you asked me dude Subbu Where do you live? And I told you, you know, I live Okay, now, why does this guy even asking me where I live? I'm not sure like, I live in this place. And then you say, Hey, you know what? I think I live close to you. Yeah, and I'm like, No, you don't I mean, you tell me the place where you stand. I'm like, I haven't heard of that. I mean, that's nowhere close to my house. Okay, I don't know where and then you like, No, no, no, I'm pretty sure I live close your house. You know, there's a lake behind your house. And this is little path that goes around the lake, and on the other side is my place. And I'm like, wait a minute, I've been living in my locality. I've been living in this place for like, more than 10 years. If there is a lake behind my house, I I better know there's a lake. And I know there is no, no Lake there. And you're like, No, no, no, I'm pretty sure there is. You know what? To prove it to you. I'm going to come with you home. And then I'll show you there's a lake. So it was seven 730 in the night. I know I even in 10th grade, I was really scared of getting catching the wrong bus and getting lost somewhere in the city. So I always caught the same bus and I went home, right? It's always the same same route. And I was I was surprised this guy is just catching some random bus with me and coming home and I'm pretty sure he doesn't live close to my house. But you get on the same bus. You come to my place. And then we go walking. And what do you know there is a lake behind my house. I just didn't know it for the last 10 years. So because you did all this and we discovered that you know we do live close to each other from then on. We started you know, hanging out.

Vikram

It's funny, I don't totally don't remember my Hindi essay.

Subu

Oh, my God. Well, that's because you're the one who embarrased us just not the other way around?

Vikram

No, for me, it is always a nightmare. Because I really did not go to any tutoring like most people did. In our class did not go for math, I did not go for physics or any such thing. I had to strangely go get tutored to do Hindi. Because even now I consider my language ability to be pretty abysmal. And I see it when I, you know, hear Sam, my better half who can hear our language or a sound. And she hears so many things out of it. She hears the syllables, she links, grammar between the various languages she knows. And she's able to pick up languages so quickly. And I'm like, how do you do that? I have no idea how that works. You know, like, I think some people have the ability to hear sounds better and connect things better. Yeah, totally. I wonder how it Yeah, it's all a form of luck. It was luck. We ended up in the same tutoring class together, I guess. I guess it was lucky that I needed tutoring to begin with. Why do all my stories starts with failure.

Subu

Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. You know,

Vikram

so bad to be like, yeah, you're

Subu

sort of you're perceived failure in Hindi is what ended up making us meet each other essentially, exactly.

Vikram

It is not perceived failure.

Subu

What I take away is that, when it comes to events in life, there is something called as luck, which could put you on some sort of a favorable path when it comes to life events, right? Because you are not in control of the people you meet. Especially when you're a kid. You don't have any sort of an agenda. You're lucky you're not going out and seeking specific people to advance in carrier or whatever. You're just Yeah,

Vikram

I think that's something grownups do. They make friends based on how we can advance their career, which is exactly to me so strange. I just make friends because I like hanging out with them. You know? Yeah. So

Subu

I think you know, you know, as a kid, especially the kind of people you meet, especially friends and their families, and the people you hang out with, could be attributed to luck. But I think when it comes to something more definitive, like say career, or if you're, if your career is, say in in technology, or research or even sports, I think when it comes to career, I think luck plays a smaller part. But it sort luck plays a ancillary part, to help you help with that purpose, help you work harder towards your actual goal.

Vikram

But what about situations where it's pure luck in career, right? Think about joining Google, as an early employee, think about joining Apple as an early employee, you have no idea that it's going to become what it did. And now think about it going forward. Suppose you were to change your job right now and go join a startup. Which one would you pick? And would you make it big so sometimes that ends up being pure luck, of course you have to go to your job and do a good job of it. And I'm sure you would regardless. But that pure element of being the first 100 employees of Apple is just something you cannot plan for, or you cannot work towards right?

Subu

I will I mean I would challenge that a little bit. The reason I kind of feel like we are giving luck too much weight there, even in that case, is You know, as you go through your education, you do your undergrad, you do your graduate studies, you're preparing well for these examinations with the expectation that if you do well, it will prepare you for a good outcome. Now, when and what that outcome is, you don't know you're just preparing to give you the best chance for a good outcome. Now, the scale of how good that outcome is, like, you know, if it is if it is on a scale of 100, if it's 10, like, say, if you join a company like Cisco, which is pretty good, but you know, you don't really make a ton of money or versus if you join Google, that, you know, there's a small element of luck there. So what I'm essentially saying is that, you know, all the work you do is in preparation of a favorable outcome, you know, how favorable or you know, non favorable that outcome is? There is a relationship to how hard you put in I mean, if you didn't put in the hard work, then you wouldn't have gotten to Google anyway.

Vikram

So what you're saying is, like, let's look at early Google days, right? Let's say that, we have a class of 20 people of which five are really good. So these five go into the workforce, and one of them picks Apple, one of them picks Google and the other three, pick a company that I which I can't even name right now, let's just say it's a not as successful companies, right. But these five started in an even footing, let's say, but to happen to pick the successful companies and three did not. So is that where the element of luck comes in? Because they all got good jobs, which seems so at the time.

Subu

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there is a there's definitely an element of luck that if you just take the specific example of Google, like getting into Google, right, so I remember in back in 2006, when even I was applying to all of these companies,

Vikram

which is still a good time to join Google, I thought, yeah, it is, right. So this is

Subu

straight out of college. Right? It was, it was the hardest thing to do. I mean, getting into Google, and passing the interviews was one of the hardest things to do. And, and typically, at least in my case, I think, good four or five, four or five of us, I didn't get any call for interview. But at least four, four or five of my friends were interviewed. And they said, Man, it was it was a grueling interview. Didn't they have like 10 rounds of interview live in many, but there's like, a ton of them, right? And then none of them got through By the way, none of them actually made it through any of them. But when these guys came back, and I asked him what kind of questions so there was all these weird puzzles and things like that, but even the technical questions were very hard. So you had to be adequately prepared in order to get through it. So if you were a good student, but not adequately prepared, right, you may not have made that and you would have like, you know, gotten to one of the not so great companies. So that the element of luck I think comes in when you get interviewed in a company, the personality of the interview word also matters quite a bit, I have seen situations where two of us are interviewed by the same company, but my interviewer was much more friendly than the other persons and I actually happen to get an even though I know my friend is equally as good. Okay. So there are some, you know, some things which are not not 100% in your control. In order to get through, you know, I think there is no doubt you should be adequately prepared.

Vikram

Maybe at that time to overcome the differences of interviewers and things like that. If you are so good at what you do that there is without question that you are a spectacular person to higher then I guess anybody will hire you, right? So if you're on the borderline, you may fall in fall out. But there are people who are so far above the median that does not matter whether they get a good interviewer or not. Good interviewer. So that's where luck may not play a role. On that note,

Subu

should we call it?

Vikram

Yeah, it's a good chat. This one. All right.

Subu

Until next time, see you all. Thanks for listening. You can find transcripts and show notes at www.halflife.show.

Vikram

We'd love for you to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. And also write to us on Twitter @halflifeshow

2: Getting Lucky