138: Giving Your Career a Jolt with Roopa Unnikrishnan

Pete Mockaitis
Roopa, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have such a fun, interesting, varied background. Could you take us to the world of women’s prone sports rifle where you are a Hall of Famer and a rock star in the field? What’s the story behind that? And could you tell us about some of your adventures and how those lessons may have carried over?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Oh, yes, of course. So it’s a rarified world not because it’s sort of difficult to get to, it’s because there aren’t that many of us out there, certainly not where I was growing up which was in India. It’s certainly not the obvious choice when you have a baby daughter, you don’t think, “Okay, here’s a rifle. Shoot.” “Give her a gun.” No, not the first thing that people think of.
What happened was my dad used to be in the police, and he tried all kinds of sports and I just wouldn’t take to it. So, I was poor running around the tennis court, not doing the soccer thing, and then one day he took me out shooting because he, as a policeman, had shooting competitions to go to. And there I was, at that point I want to say, 12, was given this gun and they said, “Oh, let’s see what she can do.” And given three instructions: where to point, how to look at the sights, what the target was. And I shot five shots and they went right through the center. And that was the beginning.
So, yeah, that’s how I started. And when the people around me saw that, they sort turned around to my dad and said, “Okay, this is what she was almost born to do.” So, you asked, “How does it sort of translate into the rest of life?” I have to tell you, before that I was certainly not the topper in school. I was sort of happy to announce to the world that I’ve even had an exam where I scored 12 out of 100 in language or something.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Because I just couldn’t be bothered to study. And then when I won, so after that shooting competition that was just for fun, but I insisted that he take me into the state championships. So I had clearly been switched on because that first competition that I signed on, I was surround by all of these grownups, and boys mostly, and I went ahead and I won, I want to say like, one gold and two silvers, and there wasn’t any stopping me.
And, literally, that term, that semester, the exams that I wrote, I landed up getting to be the second in the whole class. I went from being sort of 30th in a class of 35, to being second. So it was like I just realized, “Oh, this is what it feels like to be great at something.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
And I decided to do that all around. So, yeah, it’s a very special thing in my life and all that hard work. There were times when it was literally back-breaking and I am so happy I did it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is so powerful. “This is what it feels like to be great at something.” Wow, I guess my heart goes out to folks who have never experienced that sensation. And it’s like once you get a taste it’s like you’re off to the races, Rhodes scholar and the whole nine yards.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
That’s right. And the thing that reminds, I have kids now and I have friends and I coach people. I used to coach people. I don’t do as much now because of the book and other things, but I look forward to continuing. But one I tell them is it doesn’t have to be an Olympic sport. It can be anything in your life. If you can just sort of find a couple of things where you just feel in flow, and just recognize what that felt like, right?
Even if you’re jogging in the morning and when you feel that adrenaline and that sort of wellbeing, and you sort of cling onto that and hold onto that, and say, “This is what I want to feel most of the time. So let me try and engage at that level, sort of a higher level.” It’s fabulous. It’s a great feeling and it doesn’t have to be Olympic-level sports.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that. So, now, you do a good bit of corporate innovation consulting, but you apply some of the same principles to individuals in their careers. How does that kind of carry over?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yeah, I stumbled upon it, really, because I did corporate innovation and strategy work with inside of companies that I worked for and then when I was in consulting and now in my current role as well. And one of the principles there is to think divergently, right? To examine your assumptions about what is reality, your current reality, and question them.
You also have to sort of think in sort of extremes. What would be something that didn’t look like this look like? And, by the way, what would that extreme look like? So, if you assume you have to sell A then take a different approach and say, “What if we gave it away?” That is the extreme from selling, for example.
So, you do that on a daily basis. And then I would go in and have conversations initially just with friends and colleagues, and they would keep talking about being stuck, feeling down in the dumps because they didn’t know what was going to come because with the company or the industry was facing a downturn. And I started telling them, “But look at yourselves, you’re great at X. Yes, you’re an accountant in a bank but you’re also somebody who very quickly understands how to make the numbers work, how to make change happen.”
So I would sort of have these counselling conversations and I found that I was using the same approaches. Like, “Let’s first lay out what assumptions you’re working under. You’re not just an accountant in finance. Let’s break out of that thinking and mold, and now let’s start thinking very extreme. Well, if you can make the numbers work, what if you work in a space where they needed the numbers to work but in a place that you are passionate about? So let’s talk about you doing regulatory work for a company that’s in energy and solar energy. Like, would that make you happy?” “Oh, yeah, that’s different. That’s totally different, but I could do it.” Right?

So I would have these conversations. So I started finding that pretty much every technique, or brainstorm technique, or ideation technique really worked fabulously when it came to your career as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. And so you began sharing some of those in your book here The Career Catapult. So could you give us sort of the main idea behind the book? And then talk to us about some of the techniques and disciplines that we should apply in particular.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So, the core or sort of center of this book is all about constructively disrupting yourself, right, jolting yourself before a jolt happens to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So, in other words, let’s just face it. There are very few of us in the world today who are going to be lucky enough to have an easy career, right? There’s change happening, technological change, economic changes. You think you’re doing fine and your job moves. It changes from being mostly manual kind of job to something that’s being automated, whatever it is, right? Things are shifting on you.
So the first core construct is you should be ready, and not only that, you should jolt yourself before it happens to you. And the second element is use the techniques and the practices of corporations, the way they think about innovation. Use it on yourself and do it in a way that it just becomes a habit. So it’s not something you have to work too hard at.
So, you sort of keep practicing some of these ideas and techniques that I bring up, and they just become part of who you are and how you think so it’s not an effort. So that’s really the center of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then could you maybe give us a story of that kind coming to life there in terms of someone who had an insight or realization, “Hey, it’d probably be wise for me to jolt my own career proactively,” and how they did it and what happened to them?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
I like this story, I met this person from a startup Rado Kotorov. He’s now a serial entrepreneur. But he grew up in Hungary when the Iron Wall was still up. And the assumption was you study, you have a few, what you call, state-approved careers out there, and then you’re set for life, and you may not be the happiest person around, but you manage.
And so he was all set to go down the pathway of being a lawyer, and then the Walls come down. And here he was sort of in a way he got jolted, right? But rather than just, should I say, stepping back and saying, “Well, I could still be a lawyer,” he looked around and he said, “Well, I wanted to learn law and understand the legal mindset, the sort of problem-solving questioning mindset. Now that I have that, let me go out and figure out what I want to do, what’s happening in this world around me.”
So, here he was, sort of 19 or so, looks around and realizes what he wanted to do and what he wanted to access now that the walls were down, what’s to read, and have access to literature and sort of things that were not state-accepted, state-regurgitated. So he goes off and realizes no books around that he can easily access, and turns around and says, “What if I were to setup my own printing press?”
And learns the trade really quickly, does it mostly online, small shipments, small prints that he starts selling out at the back of his car. It just so happens that the person he’s working with was able to hand one of those books to a person who landed being one of the presidential candidates, it shows up on the candidate’s side table during sort of a TV interview, and everyone wants to know where this press is that is generating these great old masters and literature pieces.
Next thing you know he’s got a storefront and he’s shipping all over the world. He then decided, “Okay. So, now that I’ve done this and the world is moving fast enough, let me start doing other things.” So he teaches himself to code, he starts creating other startups whether they created coffee machines, etc. So this was a person who decided, “Life is going to shift and I’m going to learn to continuously scan my surroundings, decide what I want to do, make the change that I want to make.”
So then he started by making coffee machines because he realized he didn’t find good coffee all around him. So he worked from instinct almost but he was constantly looking, constantly creative, and he was building around him a community that wanted to invest and build his ideas out for him. So that’s sort of an extreme. That’s a startup kind of story.

Pete Mockaitis
If another story comes to mind we’ll take that, too.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So this person that I was talking about who was an accountant at a Wall Street bank here in New York City, a lovely person. I’d meet her during a party. She’d be full of smiles on a Saturday and then Monday evening she’d looked like she wanted to kill someone. So I said, “Come on, what’s the story here?”
And she basically said she was miserable, like every element of work was miserable. It wasn’t rewarding. Her whole life was about generating reports that then got torn apart. And I said, “Whoa, okay. You’re in this exciting city and all you learned of doing is getting one day out of the seven days when you feel like yourself. You might want to change that out a little.”
So, she actually reached out to me, I wasn’t sort of pushing her to change, and she said, “What do I start doing?” And so we developed this series of practices that she would work on. One was to really start digging deep, and I’m going now into some of my sort of principles I talked about, but really digging deep into her, what motivated her, what made her passionate, but what were her core competencies, what she was great at.
And, finally, what was she just not seeing that she wasn’t great at? So, the black holes is what I call it. Blind spots. And when we really started examining them, it takes some effort to recognize that there are blind spots. They’re blind spots for a reason. But I had her go off and talk to people who she was constantly sort of taking things rather personally. But once she started talking to people who sort of started almost avoiding her they sort of raised their issues of how her focus on certain elements of work was just not working for them. And she was such a perfectionist that in Wall Street things move really fast. It just wasn’t working for them.
So the more she saw this and the more she realized, well, it’s her blind spot but it’s not something she can see herself letting go off totally. So, given that, there’s a limitation to what she was going to be able to do and succeed at here. So, I said, “Okay. Now, let’s step back and say, ‘Is this really what you want to do?’ It’s Wall Street at the end, right? It’s about generating money.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Greed is good.”

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yeah, greed is good, right? Greed is good. “Is that what you want to do?” And she said, “You know, that’s, at the end, part of the problem is I really don’t feel it.” And I said, “Okay. Let’s talk about what you feel.” And the more I talk to her it was things like sustainable energy. It was environmentalism, big E Environmentalism. So I said, “Okay. Fine. So let’s now start creating, coordinating, understanding the trends. What is the part of environmentalism that feels like it’s going to be hard? Also, while we’re being environmentally appropriate and good for the world, is also going to be kind of hardheaded,” because she is that kind of person, she’s pretty wired up, “and really kind of focus on getting the numbers right, etc.”
And so the more we looked at it the more it was that the whole solar energy sort of space, it is all about sort of knowing exactly which grid you are going to send out your sort of collected solar energy into, how you’re going to account for it, how’s the government going to pay you, etc. It’s pretty intricate.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
And she said, “Well, I didn’t know this.” And the way she found out all about this was we basically signed her up for a series of conferences and had her go off and find out, like just hang out with these people whose day job this is.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yeah. And so what she was doing was both what I call stalking the trends and using her network, which I call sort of unfreezing the assets, really using or jolting your assets so that they’re working for you, in this case her network. And, finally, she was prototyping, because by going into these conferences and starting to think through, “Can I live in this? Can I practice being in it?” That’s what she was doing. She was sort of starting to live in this new reality.
So, once she kind of got to the point where she knew what this whole space was about and knew she was going to be excited, applied in a couple of places and, lo and behold, in about three months’ time, or four months’ time maybe, she was in California with a new job and happy as a clam. So, it takes effort. It takes some thought. You can’t plan everything out but you kind of have to live with it for a while and play with these ideas to make it work for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. Thank you. So you did bring a number of the disciplines you lay out in your book to life right there all in one fell swoop, one example. And so, could you give us maybe a couple, I guess, action steps and a definition for kind of each of your disciplines? So, the first one is dig deep to soar. What’s that all about and what should we do with it?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So this idea of digging deep, as I said, it’s about the three spaces. Understanding what you’re really great at or good at, or capable of being good at. The second is understanding where your passions are. And the third is knowing, learning and recognizing your blind spots. The first one is all about what you can keep growing and improving. The second is about sort of how you can nurture those passions, because that’s like having an inherent battery that keeps you going. And the third piece is about at least acknowledging it. If you’re able to address those blind spots – great. But if you’re able to understand them you’re already doing better than 80% of the people out there.
You know how the research says that if you survey a population and say, “Are you above-average driver?” people who drive, “Or, are you below average?” 80% of the people say, “We’re above average,” which is not possible mathematically, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Because everyone thinks or it’s actually more like 90. But everyone thinks they’re better at something than they’re not. So, if you can recognize, “Okay, I’m impatient or I tend to be long-winded,” you know what, already you’ve learned two things about you that you can start watching for. And once you start watching for it you can start addressing it.
So what I do in the first chapter is I create a simple way where people can literally create their self-awareness map. That’s an exercise I sort of provide, and it’s in my book and it’s on my website, too. If you go, you can put in “mycatapult” as the little code you can print out a little worksheet that allows you to create your own self-awareness map.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, did you give us an exclusive code? Oh, I like that. Here we go, benefits.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Lower case, no space, mycatapult.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So just go in there, and if it doesn’t work, you can start at least, you click in, put in a request and you’ll get the code anyway. I’m trying to make it easy for people to use my book and what I have in there.
So that’s sort of the beginning, right? Once you create this self-awareness map, you then walk away and you look at it. First you just capture the information.
And then I want you to just sort of sleep on it, think on it for a little bit and start looking at it and say, “What are the possibilities? If I’m really good at A, if I’m passionate about B and there’s C that I’m not really good at, what is that soup that comes out of that three of them getting mixed in? So, I’m really good at seeing the future. I love aerospace and I hate staying in one place. Guess what? I should actually be a futurist working for an aerospace creator or company and traveling all the time.” I’m just making this stuff up.
But you really should sort of start laying out these elements and almost creating a little bit of a match, a game of mix and match, to say, “What does this mean? What would this look like?” So that’s the first part is really delving deep and testing. So not just, “Here are the jobs I see on Monster.com, and now let me apply because I think I could do it.” Right? That’s not going to be as sustainable or fulfilling as creating some possibilities yourself and then trying to find them because there are lots of jobs out there that don’t get posted on Monster, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
It’s about you picking up the phone and saying, “You know what, I don’t see any postings but can you tell me about your company and what’s out there?” There’s a good chance something can come up from those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, perfect. And I was going to go there next with the following discipline is stalking the innovation and trends. You had a friend who went to a lot of conferences and learned all about solar energy. What are some other key tactics for world-class stalking?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
World-class stalking. I sort of talk about how you need to kind of keep this 360 view, and I use this. So this stalking comes from this idea when I first started thinking about how the people I knew who felt like they always knew what was going on. It was like they were like panthers. They were always sort of in the undergrowth, they’re constantly looking left and right, they didn’t stay still and then they pounce when the time was right. So that was the picture in my head and that’s why I call it stalking, right?
And one of the things you’ll find is it doesn’t come easy or simply but one of the first principles is read deep, broad and around the edges. What does it mean? So, if you choose a book, like actually spend time with that book. So I remember reading Anonymous a couple of years ago. It’s a book about the hackers out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I’ve seen a documentary. It’s fascinating story.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
It is fascinating and it was like a world being opened to me. And I can tell you, I spent, like it sucked me in in a way that I am, right away it sort of changed the way I interacted with technology forever. But the interesting thing is it was a space I would never have really sort of… it’s not the most obvious thing for me to start getting into, but it opened up a whole new space around security and cyber security. It’s a big part of the work I do now.
I do strategy work and it’s sort of opened up because of that almost serendipitous sort of accidental time when I started with this and then decided just go deep into that. So that’s one way, right? The other broad. So when you’re sitting there and you see something and you think, “I can’t believe people think that way,” that’s when you should read it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Challenge yourself consistently and constantly, right? If there’s a website that everyone who you know loves to hate, read it, spend some time. I’m constantly sort of getting into trouble or like chiding my husband because when we drive he listens to this radio shows and it just drives me up the wall. And he says, “But you need to know how the other half thinks.” And it’s a great way to think.
But beyond that, not just on things that you don’t agree, but things that you just don’t feel comfortable about. If you’re an artist, pick up a book about the physics of light. So it’s not too different from where your mind is at but it puts it in a different space. You want to know how light works but this is truly the physics of it. Maybe you’ll learn something new about how you can work your art, for example. So that’s the broad element.
And then there’s the around the edges, right? So, these days you have books, you have magazines, you have blogs and online resources, but what are the pamphleteers of today? It’s the Twitter, it’s the little feeds, it’s stuff on BuzzFeed, like actually take those things seriously and see what else is going out there because those are the weak signals about what could be instrumental in the future that you just don’t know about now, right?
So, I can tell you, when I first heard about the Kardashians, I was like, “What?” But the impact they have on just public discourse on even sort of social movements, it’s kind of interesting and I feel like in 10 years we might have a different opinion about them. But push yourself around that. So that’s one of those principles, and there’s a lot more in the book that you can follow. But things like participating in the action. So what I call hanging out with purpose.
So, reach out to these people you see as trendsetters or people who understand trends, and literally spend time with them, be daring and experimental. Just as when you’re in academic you sort of take yourself and make yourself go to seminars that maybe you’re not used to. Pick yourself up and sort of say, “Hey, I just saw that this set of people are off at this conference. I don’t usually do it but I have two days, maybe I’ll go there.” So, it’s hanging out with purpose is one way to do it.
And then, of course, the old-fashioned idea of scribing. Just write things down. You never know what will happen one day when you pick up an old diary of yours or a journal and you see an idea, things might spark. So just writing it down is a good way to make things real. So you’ll see more of this kind of advice in my book. Buy the book and you’ll see them right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure, and that’s fun. I wanted to follow up on perhaps the most important thing you said there, which is, what is your current opinion of the Kardashians? I don’t know if we articulated that explicitly.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Well, I can tell you the photographs still irritate me, but what I actually love about it is that they have shifted the way we think about body image, right? So, I have young children and the fact that there are these women who are off like in various shapes and sizes doing their thing is kind of fun. It’s good for me to sort of not have to worry about having children who feel like they have to go off and be anorexic to succeed. So, anyway, that is my first thought since you asked me.
But the second thought that I have is, “How do you generate buzz?” So the fact that they were able to create this empire, I would say, with very little, if you want, content. Now, if you had great content how much more could you do? And maybe having too much content is part of the issue. Maybe we live in a world where having just enough content is the way to go. So those are some of the things that strike me.
So when I write my strategy decks now I don’t try to put 35,000 ideas in there. It’s like, “Here are three things we want to do, guys.” And it’s much more successful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Thank you. And so can we talk a bit about the networking discipline? We talked about some hanging out in places and learning from folks. Any sort of tricks that you advocate again and again?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yes, so I remember when I was in college, in university, I remember meeting this guy who inadvertently left a spreadsheet lying out. In graduate school we lived in the same dorm, and he’d printed out this spreadsheet and he had literally, on the spreadsheet, the name of everyone he’d met that day at the party.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
And a little note on each person. And, of course, I can say we’re all a little cruel. We all looked at it, we laughed, we thought it was just a joke.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it said Roopa, exceptionally charming and beautiful, is the note he had.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
No, maybe part of the issue was there wasn’t much written there. I know. No, I don’t fully remember the details because, of course, it was a graduate school party. There may have been some alcohol served.
But the fun and interesting thing is after having been mercilessly, get cruel, not to his face, but just we made a lot of fun behind his back. But now I think about it I’m kind of advocating something similar but simpler. Like don’t create a big spreadsheet of everyone you know with little creepy notes about them. No, not what I’m telling you to do.
What I am, though, telling you to do is really sort of step back and look at your network and say there are people you hang out with because they’re fun. So that’s your fun network, it is what it is. But as you’re engaging, also think about the people who you have around you, who are your advocates, the people who will actually go to bat for you. If you want to try and experiment with a new career, who can you always sort of lean on to sort of open a door for you? You need to know that.
The second is really watch the people who are really curious about what’s emerging and just make a little note on it. So, if you know that James is always going to be the one, but if you also sort of say, “Hey, what is this whole thing with Bitcoin?” You need somebody you can talk to. You need a couple of people like that that you need to sort of talk to because, guess what, it’s going to be relevant and you don’t have to be in retail or financial services or anything for it to be relevant. It’s just a relevant thing for you to know no matter where you are in the economy, if you’re in the sort of traditional economy.
So make sure you know who’s out that you can have, either in the know or they’re willing to actually ask the question with you, and maintain this. Also, mind your current network for people who have sort of strength in important spaces. So, either they’re influential or they have, as I said, content or they’re advocates. So know who where your strengths are. And then once you really figured that out step back and say, “So I’ve got a lot of people who are really strong-content people, and I have a lot of people who are pretty influential, but not many of them are folks that I could count on to open the doors for me.”
So, then, you’ll start getting into that sort of problem-solving mindset to say, “Why? Is there something about me that I haven’t built that trust? What’s that going to take?” So that’s where the introspections starts. You have to really be somebody that people want to support and help in the network as well. So there’s work to be done in sort of helping build trust, and some of these is very reciprocally being somebody who can be counted on to show up and help out as well.
So really helping, sort of using, you’re jolting your network to be of help. It’s a little bit of work to just sort of step back, think about it, make your notes, figure out what your plan is, and start engaging. My husband and I joke that there was a point when I would know for a fact when a company was going through layoffs because I’d suddenly start getting these LinkedIn invites, and there’d be like 30 LinkedIn invites from company A, and I’d be like, “Oh, I see company A is going to do something.”
When you’re starting to send out LinkedIn invites and asking people out to lunch when you’re in dire straits, it’s too late. You got to have linked in a meaningful way, way ahead of time. You met a conference, like mental link right then, and if you can remember the person, if there’s a relevant piece of news in their industry, or you’ve talked about now, between you and me, Pete, I will be sending you notes about Kim Kardashian. No, I’m just kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
If you can remember things that actually are meaningful and interesting and fun, make that a true relationship, right? It can’t just be sort of, “Okay, here’s a person and in my spreadsheet I have her, she used to work at Pfizer so the next time I’m thinking of a job at Pfizer I’m going to ping her.” That ain’t a great way to engage with your network.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
It’s intuitive. But, Pete, people need to know that. What I found interesting about some of the younger folks I’ve coached is that they actually think it’s mercenary to use their network.

Pete Mockaitis
Mercenary.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yes, so one of the people, very connected family but she herself actually had a series of friends and here she was, six months without a job, living on a couch, and I just sort of almost pro bono was helping her out. And I asked her, “So just tell me who are your friends because you talked about all these great conversations, and it sounds like they’re all smart people.” And she lays out this list of like six people at Google, and these three people at startups. And I’m like, “Do you talk to them about work?” “No, we’re friends. I would never talk to them about work.”
“Okay, let’s take a deep breath here. If these are people who are engaging with you, and you’re an intelligent person, it’s about helping them see that them having another intelligent person in their company is a good thing, right? So this is about adding value in their life. This is not about you getting something out of them. It’s not mercenary. It’s about adding value.” It’s flipping that switch there as well. It’s important because the world is made of human interactions and you can’t look at everything transactionally otherwise you’re done for.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, Roopa, there’s just so much good stuff here. Tell me, is there anything else you want to quickly mention before we talk about some of your favorite things?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
I think the one thing I want for people, because I feel passionately about it, is manufacturing your own serendipity. Serendipity is this idea of a surprising piece of good luck. I sort of say good luck only happens to people who are prepared, right? The fortune favors the brave. Fortune favors the prepared. And so make yourself available to luck, sort of put yourself in places that you’re open to new opportunities.
So, in one of my chapters I lay out practices that you can use to not just have interesting things happen around you but you engage with them. The first time I invested was I had hardly any money, this was like late ‘90s, and I was walking down the street and I started seeing that just before the holidays all of these FedEx boxes. And I had a tiny bit of money and I said, “Clearly, people are really starting to do a lot of this thing called internet retail. People are buying things on the computer.” Because I wasn’t even sort of smart. At that point it wasn’t obvious that this is the thing to stay. But I said, “Okay, so at least for the next couple of years this is going to happen, so let me put some money in this thing called FedEx.”
This was my very first stock shares purchase and I still have it in my portfolio, and it’s like, I don’t know, 12-13 times what I had initially put in, it may be more. So, not only seeing something but then acting on it. Now, if I was super smart I would’ve said, “Wow, this retail thing is happening. Let me go setup a retail store online.” Now that is super smart, but I just wasn’t smart enough for that. But it’s okay, I did my whole buying share thing.
But, similarly, like be open. See what’s around you and take advantage of it because the technologies that are around us allow us to do much more with our insights than 50 years ago, so that’s the one thing I would put out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Great. Thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Sure. So, this one I wish it was more different, but it’s sort of very much in the context of how I feel. Some people say this was Gandhi who said it. Others say it wasn’t, but it’s still a great quote. And it is, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Right? And so this is very much about making yourself the instrument for change.
If you want people to be collaborative, start by being collaborative yourself. If you want to see more green happen, you’ve got to be more green, right? So I love that idea. And I sort of say that about careers. If you want to make your job happier, you kind of got to start with your own, how you engage with the work you’re doing. So that’s my quote.
But there’s a second thing I will throw in there, which I think is really important in the world we live in. It’s a very old Indian concept called satcitananda, true and everlasting happiness. So don’t go with the sort of ephemeral, right? Don’t go with something that last for a short time, and don’t put up with just okay.
So, you’re given a choice, “I’m going to go off and have a drink and just hang,” or I have the choice between that or going for a really nice long run. I’d say, apart from all the obvious reasons, the run is probably going to leave you with a lot more adrenaline and whatever else that is sort of generated in your brain but it is going to leave you with a longer-term benefit in your health.
So these are the choices we make every day. So that’s a trivial example, but in the sort of the higher example, I think the only time I ever chose a job because of the paycheck I was miserable. So every time I chose and sort of done something, a career step, which was based on the content of the work, and the people I’m working with, and the impact that the work would have, even when the going got tough I was perfectly fine. So I remind myself with that because everyone slips and I certainly can and have. So those are some ideas I want to put out there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So, this is, again, sort of interesting piece of work but it’s old-fashioned but I still think it’s worth talking about. Have you heard of the Hawthorne study?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right. Yes.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Yeah, which is that everything that you observe changes by the very act of observing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
It’s a fabulous way to motivate change in your life, right? If you’re sort of finding yourself in a rut, or finding your team in a rut, just sort of say, “Hey, we’re going to just observe this. We’re going to take notes about it.” In fact, my whole book is based on the fact that I get people to keep notes, take notes, think about it, just make a mental observation. I’m making them do the Hawthorne on themselves because that’s the first, that’s the beginning of change. So that’s why it’s old-fashioned but it’s a fun thing to remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And how about a favorite book?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
I have a book, it’s called The Razor’s Edge. Wow, I’m just dating myself.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fine. Let’s hear it.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
So, The Razor’s Edge is this idea of this guy who sort of basically a profligate, just drinking his time away. And he realizes that he loses his rich fiancée, when he decides to go traveling. And it’s by Somerset Maugham. That act of traveling sort of opens him up to incredible growth. So he starts questioning pretty much everything and comes back round to his old milieu. Such a change man that he changes everything around him.
So you can hear, and I read this when I was something like, I want to say, 14. So this theme of how you can change and you can make change happen for the better has clearly been part of my life for a long time, and you’re helping me see that. Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m happy. Thank you. I’m happy to help. I appreciate your help in here as well. And can you share now a favorite tool whether that’s a product or service or app or framework, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
That helps me be awesome at my job. I can tell you that podcasts. Now I’m not just catering to you because I say this to everyone around me. But about six months I started this new role where I land up having to drive to Stanford every day, but an hour-long up and a drive back. And I’ve started listening to podcasts and it’s amazing the stuff I’m learning.
So, talk about serendipity and new ideas just sort of popping into my head. While it’s been a way to kill time, it’s also a great way for me to learn about the world in a way that is easy to digest as well as actionable. So I’m constantly in rooms where I’m either I know something from pop culture or sort of something that is very technical, security and hacking. And people are like, “How do you know that?” And I don’t actually always say it’s from a podcast. I say, “Well, you know, it’s there.”
But podcasts are really doing the world a service especially at a time when it’s harder and harder to find good content out there that’s supported by grants, etc. So I love that it’s something that’s sustainable and there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there an articulation of your message that seems to especially connect and resonate with folks in terms of their nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, Roopa, that’s perfect”?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
It’s about not settling and jolting yourself with practices that you use for other people, for your job. So, treat yourself and your job and your career just as preciously as you do your work inside of your career. It’s not just sort of providing value to your employer. Provide ongoing value to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what would you say is the ideal contact information if folks want to get in touch or learn more about what you’re up to?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
I love my Twitter feed and my followers there, so @RoopaOnline, R-O-O-P-A-O-N-L-I-N-E is the best way to sort of get in touch with me directly and it’s easy to just DM me there or follow me there. And there’s my website which is TheCareerCatapult.com. Those are two good ways to get hold of me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final call to action or challenge for folks seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Absolutely. Don’t settle. Push yourself. You’re worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you’re worth it. I say that to people all the time. That’s awesome. Thank you.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
All right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Roopa, this has been such a treat. Thank you and keep on doing what you’re doing and I’m looking forward to checking out some of those resources that you mentioned there, and it’s been a pleasure.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
Thank you. I love what you do and keep at it. Thank you so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Roopa Unnikrishnan
All right.