Welcome to the third episode of ‘Outliers: Season of Resilience’ in these challenging times of Covid-19.
Since we started this series of podcasts with Ravi Venkatesan’s “Hobson’s choice of saving lives versus livelihoods,” and followed it up with a bluntly honest conversation with the Printo founder Manish Sharma, who described “A Crisis as a self-discovery process”, the pandemic, if anything, has worsened.
I really hope we all emerge out of this more resilient and sane.
In this week’s Outliers podcast, I bring you another candid conversation with Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha who has disrupted some of India’s biggest banks and financial services companies with his innovative and bold approach. Add to that his bootstrapped startup journey, which illustrates how to build a company that matters without raising monies from a VC.
Nithin, who is now busy navigating Zerodha through the pandemic crisis, is not new to volatilities. After all, he started out as a trader when he wasn’t even 20 years old.
“I think if you don’t make peace with your worst possible outcome, you’ll end up being non-sane and in a position where you’ll make irrational decisions,” Nithin tells me in this podcast.
“Over the many years, I’ve matured. So, today every single thing I do, before I do it, I know the worst possible outcome, I try to make peace with it saying, ‘Dude, if you do this, this will happen. Are you okay with it?’ Only if I’m able to make peace with it is when I go ahead and do it,” he explains.
“So, now what happens is you know once you’ve made peace with this worst possible outcome anything else that happens, it actually feels like a bonus,” Nithin adds.
Finally, this ongoing crisis is also a unique opportunity to shed old habits that don’t matter and add ones that are value-accretive to our life and work.
As Nithin says, “This is the time to go back to leading a monk’s life.”
Thanks again to Sehar Dabur who is helping us bring you the full transcript of these conversations week after week.
Stay safe. And stay resilient.