From CEO to Founder Coach - Evgeny Shadchnev

00:00

Our happiness, to a significant degree, depends on us meeting our expectations. And if the expectations are, hey, let's see where my life journey takes me and what I can learn from it. It's kind of impossible to fail it.

00:24

When, in your working life, have you felt furthest away from your best work?

00:34

I think I felt furthest away from doing my best work at an internship at the university. I was an intern at a railway company. And one thing I remember from that time is that everyone went to the office on time at eight o'clock sharp, left at five o'clock on the dot. The same with the lunch break, I don't remember, maybe 12:00 to 13:00. And in between, everyone pretended really, really hard to look useful and productive. And a few days or weeks into this environment, I realized that the way it looks from the outside and what actually happens day to day in terms of work done are two completely divorced realities. And I remember, it was both funny and a little bit strange.

01:47

But to answer your question, I also realized, maybe for the first time in my life, that there is something about this place that tells me that I don't belong here in some kind of a fundamental way, and I will never be able to fit in, be one of them, make a career, or to somehow be satisfied.

02:13

It's almost, as you say that, it sounds like the first experience of existential angst in some way, like in a controlled way. How has that existential questioning accelerated since?

02:30

I think, throughout my life, work has been central to my identity, to how I think about myself, how I feel about myself. And I know it is true, to a significant extent for everyone. Well, actually not everyone. This question makes me think that, for example, my parents were quite different in this regard. For my father, work was central in his life. Where my mother, family was central in her life. And of course, both of them worked and both of them had a family, but the priorities were different.

03:10

But for me, work occupied a central place in how I see myself in the world and how I fit in, interact with others, think about myself and my own growth. And so, my journey to figure out what is it that I do? Why do I do it? How do I do it? Who do I work with? Where it's all going. It meant that work has always been far more than just a means to pay the bills.

03:46

It's interesting that you followed your father's kind of definition there rather than your mothers.

03:57

Of course, I'm like both of them in different ways. But when it comes to work, I think I inherited both. I was about to say workaholism. Is there such a word? Basically, how do you call people who are workaholics? From my father. But also, looking back, I think both my father and I also use work as a means to escape from other areas of life, just as a way to avoid what might be difficult maybe in the social or personal or somewhere else and focus on work because it's kind of a socially acceptable and a well paid way to avoid doing something else.

05:08

It's better than lots of other things, I can imagine. Do you see that as positive or negative or both?

05:22

It's certainly both. Work shaped, and continues to shape me as a person, to a significant degree. And it's been a source of incredible personal and professional growth. Well professional, obviously, because it's work, but also on a personal level. The work that I choose to do and how I choose to do it forces me to grow as a person. And I'm very, very grateful for that. At the same time, I do sometimes wonder, to what extent work is central to my life. For example, it's far easier for me to do work and do something productive and exciting work wise, than to have fun just for the sake of having fun, just like kids have fun when they go and play for the sake of playing. And I know that, for other people, it's different.

06:34

Whilst parents can shape our views of work. So can our geography and our place of birth. How has being born in Russia influenced what you've chosen to do?

06:55

So there are going to be different parts to the answer to this question. So the first part of my career was in technology. And I studied computer science at university, and I worked as a software developer throughout my twenties. And that was a safe and obvious choice that was perfectly aligned with what living in Russia and growing up in Russia was telling me to do, what my parents expected me to do. For them, and for me, in my late teens and early twenties, work was meant to be interesting, hopefully well paid and in an industry which is expected to grow. And technology ticked all those boxes. I was a geek when I was a kid, I loved hanging out with computers. And it was an easy choice to make.

08:14

With entrepreneurship, and now I'm talking about my thirties, the second part of my career, when I founded a business and my career changed from technology to entrepreneurship. I think that was the first moment when the expectations of my culture and what I wanted to do professionally started to diverge. By that point, I was living in London for several years. And in Russia, few people, at least when I think of Russia when I was growing up there in the '90s and early 2000s. In Russia, few people think about work or, let alone, entrepreneurship as a primary way to fulfill your dreams. And my parents, as a result, didn't really understand or support my choice. To them, it looked like I'm doing something risky, whereas I could have continued my fellow promising career as a software developer.

09:29

And later, in the last couple of years, when I shifted again and made the pivot to being a founder coach, it even further divorced from the expectations of my culture, my upbringing and my parents because, frankly, I think that my parents suspect or think that what I'm doing for a living is borderline fraud. Because I tried many things, but I genuinely struggle to explain what I do or why founders would pay me money for what I do, or how it actually works from the inside.

10:21

On top of this, in Russia, to this day, few people reach out to coaches, therapists, mentors, or anyone else for the sake of personal and professional development. So I feel like the further I progress in my career or the more things I do, the further away I am from the expectations of my culture, my parents, my upbringing and, in a way, what I expected even of myself as a child growing up in Russia.

11:07

How do you handle that, Evgeny?

11:09

I'm extremely grateful that I had a chance to move from Russia to London many years ago, because I don't think I would be able to do what I love for a living and feel really aligned with it if I stayed in Russia.

11:41

So it's almost a case that, whilst your geography has had a big impact early, in some ways, by shifting your geography, you can see the positive benefits of shifting your geography too, by putting yourself in the center of a place that gives you what you want in some way.

12:06

Yes. And also, moving to a country or a society, and not even London or the UK specifically, but let's say the Western culture in general, that is more aligned with my own values. In fact, this is the topic that comes up in my conversations with my therapist on a regular basis, specifically, to what extent my identity and my life experience is shaped by me trying to fit into a society that I didn't quite fit into. And as a child, I didn't have any other society, and I really wanted to be a part of it, like any kid does. And it wasn't until I became an adult that I felt that, no, no something just doesn't work here, which is a whole other conversation because it will take us into politics. Something doesn't work here, and I moved to London.

13:22

Such a large part of how we discover our best work is our ability to listen to our inclinations and the deepest pulls of our gut and our soul and our values. And it strikes me that it must have been just that bit harder in your circumstance. How did you develop the ability to listen to them?

13:50

I remember in 2015, an executive coach called Jerry Colonna gave me a book by Parker Palmer called Let Your Life Speak. It's a very short book, and it's a brilliant one. It's a brilliant book that I recommended to so many people since. And the central premise is that, before you tell your life what you want from it, you must listen to your life what it tells you about who you are and what you should do for a living.

14:33

And this idea, this shift from choosing who I want to be, what values I want to have, what career I want to do, shifting from that perspective of telling my life what I want to do with it, to listening to my life, what it wants to tell me based on what's already happened, what my experience is, what kind of work I have already done was a really important shift for me. And listening to my life eventually led me to the realization that I should step down as a chief executive of the company that I was running to focus on working with other founders as a founder coach, purely because it's so much more aligned with who I am.

15:27

Before we go into the experience of stepping down as a CEO, how did you listen to yourself there? What practices or processes did you come across that helped take you to that place?

15:52

For me, my main practice has been meditation. The practice of slowing down, being more present and observing my thoughts without reacting to them. To a less extent, journaling. Journaling is helpful, but I never had a consistent daily practice. And I know that many others do. And just reflection on my own, with my friends, with my coaches. I worked with several coaches as a founder. And with all of them, the same question came up again and again, something is not quite right here. What's going on here? What can we find out or understand about it? And the combination of all of this, daily meditation, occasional journaling, discussions with others, eventually led me to the realization that I need to do something else, and the company would be better served by a different CEO.

17:17

What happened next?

17:19

There wasn't a single point. There wasn't single line of before and after. I remember I was discussing this question with my then chair, chair of the board. And on several occasions, we used to have a regular breakfast talking about my work as a CEO. And on many occasions, I was mentioning that this doesn't feel quite right, or I feel like there is a misalignment here, and I'm considering that maybe the company would be led by someone else one day. So we are not doing anything about it, but the way we are exploring and discussing it for quite a bit.

18:04

And eventually, the day came when we met for breakfast as usual on Friday morning. And I said, "Claudia, I think I need to step down. Let's talk about what it means." And then it took us over an hour. Sorry, over a year, not an hour. It took over a year to actually put it into practice. And funny enough, what we didn't know back then is that it was Claudia, my then chair, who then became the next CEO of Makers.

18:48

Talk me through what parts of yourself were talking to each other there. Like, what were they saying?

19:03

That's a good question. Just like literally everyone else, there are plenty of different parts of myself that are in constant conflict with each other. There is the right identities of the founder and entrepreneur and the meditator who just wants to mitigate 24/7, and the identities of the partner or a son or an active member of society, someone who just wants conventional success in terms of let's just make as much money as possible and build a unicorn, and someone who is absolutely not on board with all of this and just wants to do something really meaningful in the moment.

19:56

And navigating all of this was challenging in a couple of ways. One thing I particularly struggled with is the voice inside of me that told me that great CEOs don't quit. I remember, there is a book called Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And somewhere in the middle, he says, " What separates good CEOs from great CEOs is that great CEOs never quit," or something along these lines. And for quite a long time, I was thinking to myself, but I can't quit. I'm a CEO. I want to do a good job and, therefore, I can't quit. And whenever I would talk about it to friends or coaches, everyone, of course, challenged this assumption and said, "No, come on. It's not as black and white." But for a while, I did struggle with it.

21:03

And another internal conflict, or another challenge that I had is a very arrogant, in a way, fear that I don't really know who else is going to lead this company. I care about it so much and I built it. And if I step down, is the company going to die? Is the responsible thing. And the reason I say it's arrogant is because the hidden assumption here is that I'm the only person in the world capable of doing this job, which is not true, of course. And if anything, the new CEO leading the company right now is so much better than I am. And it's such a joy to know that someone else is leading the company in a very, very competent way. But a few years ago, it was not intuitively obvious to me. And of course, the catch 22 here is that, unless I accept that maybe there are other people who could do an even better job, I will not find those people because I will not even start a conversation.

22:18

Have those voices continued since? Have they whispered to you? And in what way?

22:25

Yes, they continued, although the content somewhat changed. There is a voice that I've noticed that is trying to tell me that what I'm trying to do with my life, being a founder coach, is wrong because, basically, my career so far consists of two big parts, entrepreneurship and technology. I've got experience with technology and education in computer science and I know how to start a company. And in today's world, when everyone is starting businesses, and there are so many opportunities, this combination of tech and entrepreneurship just feels like a golden ticket, go and start another tech company. I can come up with an idea, probably build the prototype, raise money, build the team and so on.

23:23

And there is a part of me which feels like I'm not putting all those skills to good use. But at the same time, if I take a step back and try to listen to all the voices in my head, I also notice that the work I'm doing today is much, much more aligned to who I am deep inside than starting another company would be. And this is not to say that I will never start another company. Who knows? I genuinely don't know.

24:02

... another company, who knows. I genuinely don't know, but for the moment, what guides me in my professional journey is a sense of, am I doing good work for the right reasons? Am I doing it well? And here I'm quoting... And another thing I learned from Jerry Colonna, the coach that I mentioned earlier, I remember he said that it's important that we do, no... Good job, done well, for the right reasons. Three things. It's important to do a good job. It's important to do it well, and it's important to do it for the right reasons. These three things stayed with me ever since I got to know him 2015.

24:55

It strikes me that the reasons beneath your decisions are changing or at least they have changed over time. Is that true?

25:11

Absolutely, because I've been changing my priorities quite a bit. For example, if we had this conversation maybe 10 years ago, I would tell you that the most important thing for me professionally is to build a successful company. What I didn't know back then or what I didn't want to know, maybe I knew, but I didn't really want to know it, was that I felt like, unless I build a successful company, I will not be okay somehow. That I needed a business card or a URL or some story to say that I'm okay, because I've done that. Since then, I learned that, first of all, building a successful company does absolutely nothing to do internal feeling of whether I'm okay or not and the same applies to making money or nearly anything external, but also, that it's possible to feel okay, content grounded, regardless of what I do professionally. This in turn enabled me to do different kind of work.

26:41

What are you optimizing for at those points? Is it happiness? Is it love? Is it enjoyment or success? Why is it?

26:57

I would say in my twenties, throughout my twenties, I was optimizing for navigating my feeling of insecurity. Just making sure that there is enough in my life that counter balances it. It wasn't until later that I started getting to know my insecurities more directly and getting to learn and understand them directly, instead of trying to manage them by doing something else. Today, many of them remain, its just I'm slightly more comfortable with them, but today I'm also optimizing for doing work that gives me joy and feels aligned with who I am. I remember just a couple of months ago, when you and I were at an offsite over senior management team at cord, at some point I asked you what would be most helpful for me as a coach and a facilitator? You said just be yourself.

28:45

At that offsite, I felt like I was doing my best work, helping the team to find alignment and be heard and reach conclusions in general have productive conversations. In those moments when I wasn't really trying to do anything, I was just being myself and this moments of alignment, of just being myself and at the same time, knowing that it's beneficial for others and being paid in the process, all of this just feels like magical combination. It doesn't even feel like work, it's those moments when the separation between life and work disappears. It's just me being in the world is deeply satisfying, beneficial for others, and works in a way that enables me to call it a profession and pay the bills.

29:51

The way that I asked that question was almost looking to the external, like these emotions or specific feelings of happiness or love or enjoyment or joy or success. But in some ways what you're saying is, it's not those pillars necessarily, but it's this intuitive ability to enact our true selves. Whether in that moment, it's happiness or whether in that moment it's enjoyment or whether in that moment it's success, because there are so many multiple parts to ourselves. We can never say, we just want to go with this type of thing forever. It's more that we need to enact how it feels and what we won't talk to most for in that moment.

30:50

Be aware of what's happening in every moment and be present to it, and know how to express it and how to do it in a skillful and helpful way.

31:08

How do you balance that with a whereabouts you are at in the stage of your working life? Because if you are at a latter stage, you have a greater foundation to be able to draw upon you have more experience to draw upon, but in your earlier days, it's kind of a catch 22, it's kind of an existential problem, existentialism problem. It's like I don't have enough information here to be able to make this decision.

31:46

That's why the earliest stage of our careers. I think it's such a great idea to just try many things, try different things, try different jobs, try different projects, try working with different people. One thing which guided me from an early stages of my career was gravitating towards people I wanted to be like. I remember I was looking for a job as a software developer in my mid twenties, and I was taking every interview I could get, even if the company didn't look particularly attractive because I saw it as a practice. So if anyone wanted to interview me, I said, "Yes. Okay. When can I show up at your office?" One day a recruiter called me and suggested I go for an interview at a small internet marketing agency in Camden, which didn't look sexy at all.

32:56

The only reason I said yes is because I said yes to everything as a policy. I remember going there thinking, I'm only going there to get some interview practice and maybe learn something new. But when I left... And it was half a day of interviewing with five different people. When I left, I remember leaving with a feeling, I don't care about what they do. I don't care what internet marketing is. I don't care how it works or what my exact job is going to be, but I want to be like those people, there is something special about those people who interviewed me and they want to be like them and they want to learn from them. Joining that company turned out to be a brilliant decision. I learned so much over the next few years that I stayed with them. I did learn a lot from those people that I met there.

33:48

How has learning and education influenced your choice of work, besides that moment?

33:58

It's interesting that my choice of work has... When I think of when I think about the choices to change my career specifically, to leave software development or to step down as a CEO, these decisions have mostly been influenced by forces outside the formal education setting. I felt like school and the university prepared me reasonably well for the initial stage of my career. As in study computer science and go get the job as a software developer, but when it came to... Okay, what's next? Do I want to... even if I stayed within technology as a software developer, there are so many different choices there. I think from my mid twenties onwards, I was guided mostly by people I came across or things I learned elsewhere. For example, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, was a huge influence on me through his... We never met in person, but he wrote dozens, if not hundreds of brilliant essays on entrepreneurship for early stage founders. I remember reading them and thinking, this is the kind of work I want to do and kind of people I want to hang out with. Effectively his online blog, his website was the influence that pivoted my career towards entrepreneurship or towards startup the startups more specifically.

36:00

That's interesting that the company that you founded was also focused on education.

36:09

That was so unexpected. I would never have guessed that I would start a company focused on training and education. If anything, at the very beginning, I didn't really think I would spend a decade of my life building it. I saw it as an interesting opportunity. I saw if demand on the market, it felt relatively obvious. It was worth a shot. My co-founder and I decided to give it a shot, but once we started actually building it, and training people, and placing them into jobs as software developers. I think what I learned at that moment is that the experience of helping people to change their lives in a meaningful way is somehow deeply, profoundly important.

37:13

I realized that for me, that company is not about revenues or an exit or any other conventional metrics. What I love about makers, and why I was building it year after year, was that we are helping people to change their lives. When we saw the feedback from our students, time and time again, they were using the very same words. The experience of going through makers was life changing. I had a job I didn't like, now I've got a job I love. I'm paid the same or more. I'm doing much more interesting work. I'm excited. I see different prospects. I learned how to learn. I learned what I'm capable of, and this experience of helping others to transform their lives was also, one of the experiences that ultimately led me to coaching, because in a way I'm still in the business of helping people to change their lives, except that instead of running a training and recruitment company, I'm now working one to one in a much more focused and of course, a slightly different way with my clients.

38:44

When you look back... Some ways as you talk there seems like can just me, that pattern makes sense. The story looking back, you can connect the dots. What decisions have you made in retrospect that you think have had a negative effect on the work that you do, and how have you then attempted to overcome them?

39:17

One decision that I made implicitly was not investing enough in my own personal and professional development throughout my career. I think I... Especially when I was building my business, I was spending near all my time on execution, trying to work hard and do my best as opposed to learning how to do better work, be more efficient and maybe focus on more important things. So looking back, I wish I spent more time on reflection, professional development, external input. Today, I'm trying to do all of this by taking courses, working with the coaches, supervisors, therapists too. Basically I'm allocating a fairly significant part of my time and attention to reflecting on how I do what I do, instead of just instead of just doing it all the time.

40:34

One other decision that I often think about is, in 2017, I think it was 2017. In 2017, the business faced a very, what felt like a monumental decision, whether to shift from B2C market to B2B market. We started working with consumers directly, but over the first few years, we realized that we don't really understand how to build a business purely in the consumer space. The only viable path that we could see towards growing the business, advancing on our mission and building a real good company was refocusing on the B2B sector. This decision made a lot of business sense and we made it and I'm glad made it, but back then in 2017, I was acutely painfully aware that this is the point when the direction of the company is starting to diverge in some meaningful way, from my own personal mission.

41:56

My own authenticity is something which is deeply important to me as a founder. I felt like I was trapped in an impossible situation of either, I take the company in the direction, which makes sense for a company, but doesn't feel fully aligned with me, or I take the company in the direction, which is fully aligned with me, but I can't really explain how it will lead to a successful and profitable business. Back then, I effectively and quite consciously decided to ignore this disconnect and focus on building the company focused on enterprise services, what I wish I'd done at that point was to maybe reflect more deeply if I was the right person to lead the company in that direction. So in a way, I combined two questions and one business pivot and my personal role and looking back, I think I could have separated them.

43:17

It makes me think about when it became clear that... There was a moment in time, a couple of years ago with cord where there was a decision to make about who could use it. Is it just the very best people that you could possibly imagine, this top 10% that we put on a pedestal in this exclusive club, or are we getting cord to as many people as we possibly can? It was an extraordinarily difficult decision, and one that feels like there's lots of parallels because from a business point of view, companies only want the very top people, but from my own point of view, that's not why I'm doing it. I care deeply about more people around the world doing their best work. I don't want to minimize that number.

44:20

In a similar way, I feel we decided to do the opposite and make sure that we set a threshold that was as low as it possibly could be. So you have to already have experience doing the jobs that you are talking to someone about, but in an odd way, that also gave me so much because it helped me really deeply reflect on what it was. I could kind of feel that, this doesn't feel comfortable. Why don't I like this decision? What is that? Then over time, it's really been a gift because it's enabled me to think, "Okay, well, what is it that wasn't satisfying then? Why wasn't that decision really obvious to me?"

45:16

In some ways, the reason why we're talking now is because there are so many other obstacles to being able to find your best work, you need access to a decision maker, but you also need to understand the psychological barriers that we've put on ourselves, and you can learn from the journeys of other people. There are so many parts to it, and by making sure that barrier was really clear, and we were open and transparent with every user who wanted to use cord, and we made everything up front and by leaning into our broader vision, it somehow... I was able to find that route, so deeply empathized with that decision, because they're so extraordinarily difficult.

46:09

This is why you're a better founder than I was. You navigated it by finding a way that makes sense both to the company, and you personally.

46:23

Why didn't you spend more time on your personal development Evgeny?

46:29

It's an interesting question because on the face of it, I had excuses like, there is work that needs to be done and it feels like a luxury to do it while my team is working really hard or while I'm deprioritizing it, or maybe it looks and feels expensive if I'm talking about coaching or going on a leadership course, but these are excuses. I think on a deeper level, I didn't really have the guilt of slowing down and reflecting in a more conscious way about what's going on. It's almost like... I think I spent my hours, days, if not years, living unconsciously just being carried away by work. Wake up, there is something in the inbox. There is something in the calendar. I do it, we set goals, and there is a lot of work that just carried me instead of me taking a deep breath, stepping back and saying, okay, no, let's pause for a second. Let's stop all this.

48:03

Let's pause for a second, let's stop all this chaos, and let's actually ask questions about what needs to be done in the first place. And this is a skill. This is a skill that I wish I learned earlier, and this is a skill that I only learned when I saw it in other people, it was not something which was role modeled for me in my family or at university.

48:36

If I go even deeper, I think I can also see some an insecurity around not being a great CEO to begin with or not being the right founder to begin with. I think a part of me was just afraid that trying to do something about it will make me even more painfully aware of how incompetent I am, which then got in the way of actually doing something about professional growth. So a combination of all this, being carried away, not really knowing how to slow down, and not really knowing how to see and address my insecurities.

49:33

In what other circumstances have you got in your own way when it comes to figuring out where to spend your time? Because between your deepest inclinations and your conscious mind there is you, and you will trap and stop and get in your own way and it'll stop you doing things or saying no to things that you could have done or should have done.

50:16

I think it's a process which continues to this day. To this day, literally daily, I'm watching myself doing what I do, reflecting on how it's going and seeing all the ways in which I'm not always helping myself from small things. Well, relatively small, as I probably spend more time reading news and social media than I should or could. To larger things, for example, there are areas of my life which I suspect could benefit from more attention and more training and more learning that I'm not paying attention to yet.

51:37

And so day to day, I'm trying to see it, accept it, and also do what I can about it. Also accepting that I will not be able to do absolutely everything because it's an endless list. So it's a never ending process. But what I think has changed over the years is the feeling that instead of being carried by the external world, by my to-do lists, by calendar, other people, clients, and so on. Today, I am more often able to slow down, take a step back, look at the bigger picture and ask myself, "Okay, these are all external forces that want something from me. And I see it, but what do I want? What makes sense? Which direction do I want my life to go? What do I need to pay more attention to?" And from this perspective, from this point, I can make much more conscious choices.

52:56

How have your insecurities helped you in your working journey?

53:05

I think I'm deeply grateful to my insecurities because without them, I don't think I would've moved to London, started a company or done other things because my insecurities gave me energy to try to do something about them, essentially trying to counterbalance them. And as a side effect, I'll learn new things or build a company or build other projects. So it is a bit of a paradox that things that are sometimes so unhelpful in our psyche and things that can be really painful and difficult can also be a source of energy because we sense that something is not quite right here. And we are trying to act and often this action is positive and beneficial. Because looking back if I was just more comfortable with myself in my twenties, would I have built a company? Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But if I did, I probably would've built a very different company and I would've done it for very different reasons.

54:36

It's fascinating that negative things can be positive sources of energy. Insecurities, death, and reflecting on death and contemplating death in advance. Are there any other negative parts of life that you think can be a source of positive energy?

55:06

What's often considered negative is stress, but that stress is also what's required for a system to grow and become stronger. Like when we go to the gym, for example, the reason we go to the gym is to deliberately experience some physical stress by lifting weights or running or doing something with the body, so that the body could respond by becoming stronger. I like the analogy of the gym because it's something that all of us are familiar with and we know that, "Okay, short campaign here results in a healthier body." And it's also quite obvious that going to the gym is not the same thing as, let's say, doing 10 years of hard labor, where physical stress is quite literally going to kill you. But the same is with psychological stress.

56:11

If we are constantly stressed and we feel overwhelmed week after week for a long period of time, eventually it's going to crush us. But at the same time, if our life is genuinely key and we experience more intermittent periods of manageable stress, we can respond to it by learning from it, growing, becoming more resilient. And this internal will make us stronger happier in life, in general.

56:52

Oh, it's just so difficult to find the middle ground.

56:56

It's difficult.

56:58

I feel like at any point I'm either pushing too hard or not pushing hard enough or giving myself too much time to reflect or not enough time to reflect and relax or it in some parts it's so hard because you can feel stress and you can feel relaxed, relaxation, but you can't feel the moment with which you found the balance that's right for you. There's no trigger point that says, according to your character, this balance of stress and calm is correct. Your brain never tells you that.

57:43

In a way there is no label that gives us final answers on how we should live life. We are trying to navigate it all the time. We're trying to learn all the time. We are trying to figure out what's enough and not enough and where the points are. But it's not like there are clear, final answers that we just have to discover. And then everything will be easy and clear. Our lives are constantly changing. The world is constantly changing and we are constantly changing and it's a never ending process of adaptation.

58:22

We've spoken a lot about what we put into work and what we strive for, what we optimize for, what we are heading towards. But what we've not done is spoken about the opposite, which is, our expectations and the role that our expectations play in our working life. I think a lot of us spend time, never really thinking about altering our expectations, but instead spend time altering our day to day. How do you reflect on work and the expectations that you set for work?

59:10

One thing which helps me is a yearly reflection practice around the new year. I take a few hours, maybe half a day to go through a yearly reflection template, looking back at what happened last year, what I'm planning to do next year and how it all fits together. It's one of the practices which I found quite beneficial to reflect on where my life and my work is going and whether the big picture still makes sense. Also, I noticed as I've been reflecting on this question over the last year or two, is that right now, I think about my career and doing my best work much less in terms of specific goals and specific milestones, as in build a company of a certain size by the certain date, or make a certain amount of money in a certain way.

01:00:41

Instead, I think more in terms of how closely aligned I am with what I'm doing and what needs to happen. So how closely am I aligned with what I should be doing and what needs to happen to improve this alignment? And the answers can be very pragmatic, like be more active on social media, which is why you've seen more videos of me on LinkedIn. But the driver behind it is am I doing the work that I love? What do I love about it? What I don't like about it, and what needs to happen to stay on track. So it's almost like following a trail and making sure that I don't deviate from it by looking around and listening to myself.

01:01:50

It's interesting that we spend so much time. I mean, we've certainly spent a large part of this talking about self-reflection. But there's a big part to it too, where an investment in the complete opposite and in a reflection of nature and expectations and the external parts to life is also equally important because understanding those in their entirety in some way can give us a more enlightened view on how we go about meeting the world. If doing our best work is perhaps a meeting of our unique gift and the needs of the world. Then if self-reflection is enabling us to reflect on our unique gift, it would make sense to spend an equal amount of time reflecting on the needs of the world and those around us at that time.

01:02:53

Yeah, absolutely. It's doing our best work is not just about us. We do work with others and for others and staying attentive to what the world needs is crucial here. The way we work, it's a relationship between me and the world. And both parts are equally important here because if I'm doing work, which feels pleasant to me, but the world doesn't need it. Or if it even actively harms the world, then it's not quite right either. So again, going back to this idea of good work done well for the right reasons.

01:03:52

How do you distinguish between the needs of the world, the needs of other people, and then the needs of our capitalist society. Cause it can sometimes be very difficult. The economy rewards certain skill sets that sometimes might not be what the world actually needs. But the system that we live within optimizes for that. How do we counteract that, do you think?

01:04:20

That's a deep philosophical question that invites us to simultaneously find a way to feed into the existing system, the existing way the world works and change it in the process. And an old quote that comes to mind is that, probably one of the most popular in the world, is, "Be the change you want to see in the world." That's the way to both engage with the world by being the change, but also change the world by being part of it in a certain way. So from this perspective, I'm trying to avoid two extremes. I think one extreme would be to say, "No, the world is as it is. And yes, capitalism, climate change, social inequality, injustices, all of this exist and is horrible, but this is how things are and they can't really do anything about it."

01:05:29

So that would be one extreme, but another extreme could be, in my opinion, to ignore how the world works today and try to fully demolish it to build a better world tomorrow. This kind of thinking gave us, I think quite horrible social experiments in the 20th Century. But what I'm trying to do on a personal level with my life and my work is to stay in the middle, to be part of the system, but have as much awareness and clarity on how exactly I'm contributing to it, benefiting from it and how my way of being also changes the entire system for the better. So to make it slightly more specific, the way I express it in my work, in the way I charge my clients is that I effectively have two rates.

01:06:43

I charge full commercial rates to most of my commercial clients. And this is a very capitalistic relationship that enables me to have a business and work. And at the same time, I also don't charge anything at all to several of the founders that I'm working with as a way to pay it forward, give back and support the founders who would not be able to afford my services at that time. So in this way, I'm being both part of part of the system while also doing what I can to hopefully change it, maybe in a small way in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully in a meaningful way for the people I'm working with.

01:07:48

And in an even wider context, how has nature and listening to nature enabled you to find your best work?

01:08:06

That's an interesting question because for many years, when I lived in London, I felt like I will never leave London because London is obviously the greatest place in the world. And this is a great city. I love London to this day, but then in my thirties, I started to notice that I'm spending more and more time outside London in nature when I have a holiday or when I just want some downtime, when I want to reconnect to myself. I remember there was a one particular stressful moment at work. And the following day, I literally woke up in tears at 5: 00 AM crying because I just couldn't help handle the stress. And what I instinctively did at that moment was to book a few days by myself in nature. I went to an Airbnb in a forest and spent a few days hiking, listening to music, reading poetry, and listening to the trees.

01:09:24

And that was deeply restorative. I instinctively reached out to nature when I needed it the most and later a couple of years ago, I genuinely surprised myself when I moved to Portugal from London, more or less on a whim, I came to Portugal on holiday and didn't really think much about it. But having spent some time by the ocean in a small, quiet place, which is far less busy than London, I also felt strongly that I'd like to live closer to nature. I'd rather hear the birds rather than a national rail line, where I was living in London next to a busy station. And, and so I moved to Portugal and not even to Lisbon, but to a rural area, which has excellent nature, that I find that deeply, deeply grounding and restorative.

01:10:46

And why do you think that grounding has helped? What has that grounding given you in your working life and your ability to make decisions about what work you do?

01:11:02

It helps me to stay present and to remember who I am. What I sometimes reflect on when I look at the stars and the trees and the ocean, and just nature around me is that the nature is not trying to get anywhere or be anything other than what it is right now. There is a poem. I can't really recite it off the top of my head, but there is a beautiful poem by, I think, David White that essentially it invites the reader to notice that every tree, every bird, every creature is fundamentally themselves in the moment.

01:12:02

... And themselves in the moment. If I don't understand that the tree is not being lost or distracted, and it's just a tree in the moment, then I'm somehow lost myself. Just this felt experience of looking at the tree and quite frankly realizing, okay, you've been standing here for years and you are just standing here right now and you are not trying to get anywhere. And here I am in my life, and this is me and my feelings and my life experience. And I'm not being distracted by my thoughts thinking about next year. In this moment, we are both present.

01:12:54

As I'm listening to myself, I realize how weird and esoteric it all sounds, but all of this helps to... All of this helps me to just remember that the present moment never, almost never has any problems. All our problems, or what we consider problems, exist in our thoughts, either in the past or in the present. Either we're worried about what we did yesterday, or we're worried about, or planning what we are going to do tomorrow. But in this very moment, like this moment, not just this second, but fraction of a second, there is usually no trouble whatsoever. And nature helps me to remember it.

01:13:46

Also, the energy feels very different compared to London. It just feels like in London, when everyone walks at five miles an hour, just by default, because everyone is starting, or it feels like everyone is starting their day with a double espresso. I can't help but be swept away by the very same tide, the very same energy. And living in nature just helps me to slow down, take a step back, and be more present and more connected to myself.

01:14:23

Oh, there's two bits I'd really love to dig into there. Interestingly, as you were talking about nature and it being a... It almost sounded when you were saying it, as if it was this thing that was bigger than you. That is greater than you. And I think that has so many links to other schools of thought and philosophy. I mean, to take the opposite example, you have someone like Jordan Peterson who says, get the biggest responsibility you can possibly find, put it on your back and shoulder it. Don't optimize for happiness, optimize for fulfillment and your ability to be able to hold this big boulder on your back. But in some ways, what the two say is, there is something... If you can anchor yourself towards something larger, if you can put yourself in some kind of wider perspective, then you can find that route more clearly somehow.

01:15:28

Yeah.

01:15:28

I think what you're talking about is our desire to belong. Our desire to feel not separate, but be part of something bigger. Be it family, our team at work, society and nature, or the Universe, as we understand. It's scary and stressful to feel separate and lonely. Loneliness kills. Separation kills. And being, feeling, like we're an integral part of something is deeply, deeply satisfying. As humans we are incredibly social animals, because hardly anyone can genuinely live by themselves. We're all integrated in one way or another into networks of other people. And we just literally can't survive on our own, without others helping.

01:16:42

Says an extreme introvert.

01:16:44

Yeah, yeah. But there are psychological needs, but also there are just physical needs. Who can get all their food and medicine and water and shelter and whatever, and everything else they need without help of other people. If you drop me in the middle of a forest, on my own, without any of the tools, I'm going to be dead in about two days, maybe faster. And so will you.

01:17:17

I think I would die faster than you, but okay.

01:17:22

Well, it looks like we're talking about even hours, not days. But even if we forget the human to human connection, and just feel our place in the Universe, we also want to be connected to something bigger. And this is where our desire to connect to nature, and by the way, also the religion in many of shapes and forms comes from, we want to be part of something greater ourselves. And we're looking to be relevant and meaningful and somehow integrated into something bigger. And from a completely different perspective, it's not about getting there. It's about recognizing that this is how things are to begin with. We are already part of this world. We are literally made of star dust. We are just part of this crazy process. We can't even imagine us existing in any kind of meaningful way without being deeply, deeply connected to the nature, other people, civilization, society. And so on.

01:18:46

In some ways, it's the... I can't imagine... If you had moved from London to Portugal in a different context, and you didn't have those insights, on the one hand going out of London gives you the ability to get away from the energy that's so high. But there's a fear factor there because hang on a minute, am I going to be missing out? There's all this stuff happening, what's going on? And in some ways, as you spoke through that, I was thinking, oh my goodness, you're not undershooting the energy. It is by connecting so deeply with nature and the moment, that you are able to... You're almost upping the ante, your energy's almost at a higher level. Or perhaps if you didn't have this context, in another world, you would have that FOMO. You would worry, because you wouldn't be having gone to Portugal, connecting with something else that was larger than yourself.

01:20:14

I certainly experience both. There is a heavy dose of FOMO as in "oh my God, there are people in London and events in London." And by the way, next week I'm going to London specifically to take part in an in-person event. There is this. I see it and I accept it. And at the same time, there is also the desire to work, grow and create, which is driven not by pressure from the outside, like FOMO, or the need to have a certain status, or have something external and hard driving me.

01:21:08

But as we discussed in our previous coaching conversations, almost like a childlike curiosity. There is this entire world, and it's so wonderful and there are opportunities, and there is energy. There are so many things I'm grateful for, such as the ability to work, my experience, by connections, a laptop in front of me, good health, and I've got plenty of interesting books to read. And there are so many things that could be done. How can we do it?

01:21:46

And so, I think I experience it both as a negative driver, like FOMO about what I might be missing out on, but also as a positive energy that comes not from trying to do as much as possible, but quite the opposite. By slowing down, and then getting to the point when I feel like, okay, nothing is pushing me to do anything. And from this perspective, what's going to emerge. And something emerges. Instead of watching Netflix for 12 hours a day, or doing absolutely nothing, it turns out that when I slow down to a halt, something else comes out of it. But it's a different energy. It's a different quality.

01:22:43

And I also realize, and this is a massive disclaimer, that the reason I can even talk about all of this, is that I am, and have been in an incredibly privileged position of being able, after I step down as a CEO, to move to Portugal and take a few months of doing nothing other than slowing down. Reconnecting to nature, reading books, taking courses on coaching, again learning and developing myself, but slowing down without any pressure of, okay, how am I going to pay my bills next month? And instead, just focusing on, what's going to emerge if I don't force it.

01:23:38

As you've spoken through that, it makes me think back to your parents. How so much of this relies on the ability to be comfortable with being a bit strange, or at least in that context. And I think this is the same in so many circumstances. If you're building a product a lot of the time, what is it Marc Andreesen says, "there's no bad idea, just bad timing." You need to come up with those ideas that feel counterintuitive. How have you got over the fear of being strange, going against the grain?

01:24:30

I don't think I've overcome it, or at least not in full. And there is a big part of me which is trying to fit in and be like everyone else in a way, which goes all the way to my childhood. Not even my parents, but my school experience, where I felt like I couldn't fit in. I didn't fit in. And that was maybe not traumatic, but a very uncomfortable experience for me as a child, because I grew up feeling, internalizing, and believing that there is something wrong with me, and I'm not okay. Others are okay and I need to change something about myself to be like everyone else.

01:25:24

And to this day, I explore this dynamic with my therapist. But at the same time, the older I get the more comfortable I become with just being myself. And if it looks weird or unusual to someone else, if it doesn't follow what my culture, or my society, or my parents expect of me, that's just how things are. And in a way, being in touch with myself, my values, what feels important to me, it felt sense at some kind of almost semantic level. It just feels more important than getting a fleeting sense of security out of feeling like someone else approves of what I'm doing. So both perspectives are very much alive for me.

01:26:38

And how do you anticipate your reasons and your inclinations and the motivations that are guiding your work, to change in the future?

01:26:51

That's a great question because I've got no idea. And the reason I say I've got no idea is because one thing I learned is that people, including myself, are really bad at predicting how their preferences, desires, and values are going to change going forward. If you asked me 10 years ago how I'm going to evolve over the next 10 years, I would not give you the answer that would be anywhere in line with where I am today. So one thing is that there are all kinds of reasons why psychologically we are really bad at predicting how we will evolve, because we can only see the world from our current perspective. And we quite literally can't see the next increase in complexity.

01:27:55

And the second reason why I'm trying to remember that I don't know, and it's okay not to know, is because if I don't have a very specific idea, it gives me space to evolve in unpredictable directions. I see it as my, not responsibility, but maybe responsibility. My responsibility to myself to grow and develop, and I don't really know where it's going to take me.

01:28:43

I look at older and much wiser people as pointers and guides, and they inspire me. But they inspire me to keep growing so that I could become more myself, and express myself fully, rather than being like any of them individually.

01:29:09

Is there a unique advantage to accepting that you can't predict what's going to happen? For example, you may increase the likelihood of spontaneity or randomness. You may build up a network where the network effects of the multiple things that you've been doing as you follow your curiosity can emerge.

01:29:43

Yes, and there is more. If there is no specific idea of how I should evolve, it opens me to possibilities, to consider other things, because I'm not going to say no to something just because it doesn't align with my idea of how things should be. It leaves me open to opportunity, open to what's happening, instead of trying to stick specific path.

01:30:21

But another thing is that our happiness, to a significant degree, depends on us meeting our expectations. And if the expectations are, hey let's see where my life journey takes me, and what I can learn from it, it's kind of impossible to fail it, because life will take me somewhere. I will learn something from it. Something is going to be different, and there will be something enjoyable about it. But if I formulate it in very strict terms, by the age of 45 I should be worth a hundred million dollars, or whatever, should attain a degree of enlightenment, according to this meditation map, or literally anything else, that will confine me by itself.

01:31:17

And so as the result, I'm still growing, and learning, and meditating, and reading, and training, and connecting with others, and trying to grow. But more with a sense of, wow, it's interesting. Let's see where all of this takes me, and let's adjust the process on an ongoing basis, instead of trying to get to a specific destination.

01:31:51

Only a rare soul could understand themselves with such clarity and share it with such generosity. And thank you so much Evgeniy.