Optimising for purpose - Maksym Schipka

00:00

I absolutely optimize for learning. If I don't... I really like this saying where they say, if you are not moving forward, you're going backwards. There's no standing still in modern world, right? So wherever I am, whatever opportunity I'm looking at, I'm looking for opportunities to learn

00:28

What has not worked in your career so far?

00:34

What hasn't worked. I toyed a few times with this idea of setting up my own business. And every time I come to the conclusion, every time I come to the conclusion that it's not for me. So in essence, you could say that it's something that didn't work, right? And the main reason for that is the attitude to risk the background. And I'm wondering how many people out there are thinking, "Oh, I've got to do it. I really want to do it." Right. And I'm thinking in a similar way to mine, which is yeah, I could, but I have so many obligations. I have so many things that if I fail in them, then it's not only me. Who's going to suffer. There's so many people around me who are going to suffer. And I'm primarily talking about family. I'm primarily talking about extended family as well.

01:48

I was born in Ukraine. I started in Ukraine. I then studied in university in Russia, and I lived more than half of my life in UK. So you'd like to think that UK is going to be this country. United Kingdom is going to be the most defining to my personality, but it's surprising to keep discovering how many early days experiences are still limiting to an extent. And I would say that's what's hasn't worked and how to come across, how to conquer those limits is... Well, first of all, do you want to, second, if you want to, how do you do that? Because as I mentioned to you earlier, if you have nothing to lose, then you can afford to lose nothing, right? Because you have nothing.

02:53

If you have a lot, then losing a lot. Won't make a difference. You still will have the basics. At the same time, I come from the background where my family wasn't the most affluent. If I wanted a computer, I needed to solder one together, myself from chips. In the former Soviet Union, I remember being very, very hungry during university years, literally starving.

03:30

And a lot of those experiences I keep discovering are still defining me today. Despite the fact that I'm in a very different place. I'm a CTO in a successful company. I have been CTO for a few times. I have been through a few very successful exits in my career. And yet those experiences still define me a lot. And that's one thing that hasn't worked. I haven't been able to overcome those early defining experiences. Does it make sense, Ben?

04:03

It does it- and everything about that wanted- I wanted to say, is it reasonable? Is it reasonable that you still have that?

04:17

Honestly, at a logical level? No, it's not at a logical level. I know I will do fine. I know that I will find a job if I need to. I know that if I suddenly had no income today, I could survive for many, many, many years in the future. Not doing anything, right? Even if I wasn't looking for a job. And yet fundamentally at the deep, deep, deep level down there. I also know that there are people that rely on me on my income, on my well-being to support them. And while I can risk with my life and my well-being, I cannot persuade myself that the people that depend on me, that I can risk that, right?

05:17

And I know to be honest with you, here is an interesting thing. I've spoken to some executives that are much more successful than I'll ever be. I've spoken to people who have been run in the companies with billion-pound revenues and they have the same innate fear. They're hired executives and they never persuaded themselves to set up their own business. Despite the fact, they have so much experience, they have so much... They have so many ideas. They know how to do it just because their attitude to risk is very similar to mine.

06:10

So yeah, it's definitely not reasonable. It's definitely not logical, but it's at some different level. One of the defining experiences in life. I guess if I were born in this country and grew up in this country. I would know that no matter what happens. I would know from early years, no matter what happens. I would be fine, but I wasn't born in this country. And I don't know that deep, deep down. Yeah.

06:54

Where did you go from that? Right?

06:56

Yeah. It's funny. I really feel everything that you said there. And I think the reason why I pause is because I feel very grateful for the circumstances that I found myself in when I started caught because I had that, and you didn't...

07:35

It's nothing to be regretting. It's the way I look at it is turning your weakness into your strength, right? The opposite side of it is I've met many very cool, very exciting founders who are focused on one or two gigs in their life. And they're super committed, super passionate about it. And it's really, really cool, but they only know what they know. They only know what they've seen. I get the luxury through working with so many different, very cool, interesting companies, whether it's through due diligence, whether it is through helping them sort out their engineering or research departments, or whether it's sort directly as an executive within the company.

08:36

I get so many more chances to understand what good looks like from very many different perspectives. I've seen so many times how a founder can be so passionate, so keen to get their idea and they're investing so much time just in the wrong place. The idea is great, but because you haven't seen- because you are sort of reinventing it because you may be reading some books and the books are great, but at the same time, there's still theory. And there are practical limitations and practical, so ways to apply. What's written in those books.

09:24

The value I bring is I've seen so many different things and gigs in my life that I can. I'd like to think that I can generalize some experiences and I can apply the right things in the right situations. So that's the strength, that's the flip side of the coin, right?

09:45

Yeah. And you're right to say that there's two sides to every coin. And actually, you've made, whilst we started by talking about the thing that hadn't worked that by its nature has actually caused the thing that has worked. And now your profession is a direct result of the thing that hasn't worked and helping the people who are doing the thing that you are not doing. In the early days, what were you optimizing for? And how has that changed?

10:28

Good question. In the early days, it was literally sort of optimizing for... Well, I'm talking about, on my own, of course, when I live with parents and what you, there's a lot less responsibilities, but I moved out of my home when I was 17. And as I mentioned earlier, my family is not an affluent family. So I chose to go and study in one of the best universities in former Soviet Union at the time, which is Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, great university.

11:08

And my parents did what they can to support what they could to support me. They didn't realize that what they could do for me in that university wouldn't last me for a month, let alone for six months, which is how they budgeted for things. And I didn't feel that it would be the right thing to ask for anymore because I knew if my parents could give me more, they would give me more, right? So initially in the very beginning. It was about optimizing for survival for starting to make some money in the beginning just to eat. I mean, I'm not talking about anything. Remember Maslow's pyramid, right? It's very, very, very basic thing there just to be able to earn enough to eat.

12:05

And fortunately, the university did offer opportunities to earn money. So it was actually quite defining in my career. So my degree is in theoretical physics and cold fusion, but at the same time, there were a few organizations that sort of needed engineers, software engineers in the university. And you started year in the day and late in the evening of 6:00 pm onwards, or so you actually get on with some code inside of things. Assembler still remember that yes. Writing code in assembler.

12:46

So that was that but then after that, it evolved, definitely evolved. What I've done next was I got reached out by headhunters. Oh, no, no, no. The very first case was there was literally sort of an ad in the university hostel saying, oh, there's this company McAfee that needs engineers back in Moscow to work on some empty malware side of things. And back in the days, I don't know Ben, whether you remember this or not, but back in the days, if you wanted to work on a computer, if you wanted to do anything useful on it, because there were no antivirus solutions, really the first thing you do is you manually clean it up with the malware and then you actually are able to do things. And it turned out that I got quite good at cleaning out the lab, computers in the university from malware before actually know, I don't know, modeling stranger attractors, for example, right?

14:00

And there was an ad in the hostel literally saying, there's this company called McAfee. I mean, what do I know? McAfee's a name of the company that needed somebody to start writing the script definitions for how to identify malware and how to remove it. And I thought, "Okay, I could do that. I did do that sort of manually, but I could do that for money." And that defined my career big time. At that time, it was a little bit of a you optimize for survival. Then you're in a little bit in a limbo, right? You are almost looking at where life is going to take you.

14:45

And that's what happened to me. And that's how I started in anti-malware industry. And that's where I spent most of my career. That's where I have patience. That's where I did a lot of presentations interviews. And what have you?

15:01

So if back then you're optimizing for survival. If you fast forward to today, what are you optimizing for today?

15:13

Absolutely. For learning. And I think that's going to be the same. That's going to be the same for as long as my career lasts. I absolutely optimize for learning. If I don't... I really like this saying where they say, if you are not moving forward, you're going backwards. There's no standing still. There's no standing still in modern world, right? So wherever I am, whatever opportunity I'm looking at, I'm looking for opportunities to learn.

15:51

So you are learning in order to make sure that you continue moving forward. Is it that it's the learning for the sake of learning for the love of learning or is it that you've worked backwards from actually, I just need to keep moving here?

16:08

I love learning. I absolutely love learning. And then a side effect of it. That's actually a very deep question there. A side effect of learning is moving forward. I don't do learning not to move backwards. No, I do learning because I absolutely love learning. In fact, if anything you have, I have again, sort to contrast my career again, sort of more entrepreneurial side of things. I'm genuinely interested in way too many things, but what I've seen with the best entrepreneurs out there is they're passionate about one thing that go deep in that one thing you can't distract them from that one thing, they wake up at 5:00 am in the morning, they get back onto that one thing I genuinely am interested in a variety of things. I mean, guitar is one example behind me.

17:04

And I like the process of being able to do something that I wasn't able to do before. That's already again talking about Maslow's pyramid. That's a lot closer to the top. For me, that's self-actualization is about learning. And of course, one of the best ways of learning that I found is sharing my experiences. I don't want to go as far as teaching because teaching is something a lot more formal, a lot more well-defined, but more around some of my most favorite gigs were around getting engaged with a particular company to help them out, to sort out some big, serious, significant problems they were unable to deal with by themselves.

18:01

And by doing that, you end up meeting fantastic people and you end up learning as well. You end up learning about the new company you end up learning about. What's not working for them? You learn which out of your experiences are going to be applicable to that. And you learn which ones of them fail.

18:21

And when it comes to learning. I think it can be so challenging because there's two contradictions on either side. On the one hand, learning is something that we celebrate. We want people to learn lots of different things, and we see it as something that generally our society celebrates. But on the other hand, there's also a worry that maybe you'll always just want the next best thing that actually, maybe you'll just follow that dopamine hit and you'll keep trying bits out and you'll actually start a load of staff, and you'll never see things through to the end. How do you draw the line between the two?

19:09

It's definitely the downside of it. The only one way I found is be conscious about it, conscious about what you learn conscious about how you allocate your time. There are some indulgences, of course, but you've got to be clear and honest with yourself that this part of my learning is an indulgence. That part of my learning is something that's taken me forward. Some deliberate learning focused learning. What was it? Richard Branson famously said, if I knew everything, I know today about building the airline, I would never ever have started.

19:48

And that's the downside of learning, learn about the details of it. You realize how much more complex than you initially thought it was. Right? And you never start, which is not dissimilar to exactly what you're saying. In my case, I have a big lover of Evernote and I have sort of a big note there where I prioritize the things that, where I invested time, I review it regularly. So maybe once a month, the things that I've learned that I've invested my time in, and then I decide, "Do I want to continue with this? Or do I want to put it on the back burner?" There's always things that are always at the top, which are things related to my trade to my profession. I absolutely love being a CTO. I mean, don't take me wrong.

20:43

I have been brought up in this sort of context where I'm a company director first and a functional leader second, but it's the technology. It's the CTO side of it. That makes me happily wake up on Monday mornings. So whatever makes me a better CTO, right? Is definitely prioritized. Whatever makes me more relevant to my engineers, more able to multiply to amplify what my engineers are doing is definitely perfect. And it's something that I love because the amount of satisfaction I get from seeing a group of people, somehow magically, and that's a magic moment to observe absolutely magic, turns into a team.

21:38

I don't know whether you've been experienced it in your life, but group of people becomes a team. I don't know how to describe in words the difference, but every time you see it, you say, "Yes, yes." I know that's exactly what happened, right? And that's magical. And for that, you've got to be learning and understanding a lot more than your ability to write the best code out there, right?

22:07

So let's- learning's up there. Alongside learning, what role does status play in your working journey and if you have optimized for status?

22:26

Okay. Okay. No, that's a great question. Yes. I don't see a status as something, one boasts about. I see status more as the ability to influence more things. Okay. So does this matter for... I don't know whether you've heard of this metaphor called circle of doom. Okay. So what it talks about is the vast majority of people in their lives, right? So there's a circle of things that people would like to change and that's inside of it a much smaller circle of things that people can change.

23:16

It just so happens that the vast majority of people end up really frustrated about things that are outside of their circle of influence, but within their circle of things that they're not happy about. So back to status. I see status as a reflection of the fact that your circle of influence is as big as it can be within your interest, of course, right?

23:48

And that is something exciting for me. Yeah, definitely. I mean I like to not make decisions, but be accountable for the decisions that my department makes. I like that pressure. I like that sort of responsibility. And that's where the status comes in. The fact that it's called this or the other, I mean, matters little. It just so happens that in the modern world, in the modern society, in the modern companies, the people who have the biggest circle of influence are executives. I don't drive fancy cars. I don't leave in fancy mansions.

24:34

None of that is important. What is important is having the ultimate responsibility for a big set of functions. It's getting as close to being a founder as possible without actually stepping over into the risky area. Doesn't make sense.

24:54

And is that the limit? Is it that you want to get as much leverage as you possibly can up until the point where it tips into that territory?

25:07

I don't know. I wish I had that answer. I wish I had that answer Ben, because when I think about it logically, there's no reason as I say, there's plenty of ideas. There's plenty of opportunities. There's no reason there's no logical reason not to step over that boundary. There's no logical reason. But as I say, there's something fundamentally deep, deep down that some almost limbical brain level that says, "No, sorry, no further, no further." Right?

25:47

It's interesting to think if you took a step over that line, would it nourish you or would it be too much?

26:05

I would understand what I would get that I don't get today by stepping over that line, you Ben know firsthand all too well how executive teams work, right? It's very, very close to having every member of executive team to have in the full and complete responsibility for the company. I mean, if you look at British law, it's as simple as if you're an executive of the company, whether you're listed as its director or not in the eyes of the law, you are treated as one.

26:44

So I guess what it would give me is the ability to completely single-handedly define the direction of the company. But then how valuable is that? Because I hire really, really clever, smart people that are way better than me in their specific areas. So if I were the founder and the CEO of the company and I hired all those people and then decided that I'm going to be the only one defining the direction of the company, am I wasting investor's money? Am I wasting my time? And am I wasting my executive team's time?

27:24

So in other words. I'm yet to identify what it is that I would gain by stepping over the line, right? Maybe the feeling of achievement, of being able to step over the line. Maybe that's the biggest thing, right? That's breaking through my own barrier. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe it's something that I will want to do. Right now, I'm still figuring it out. Ben.

28:09

One of the particularly interesting things about your background is that you replaced the outgoing CTO at Clearswift and then were there for five years or so. And before Vortexa where you are the CTO now, and it must have been quite the... I don't think many people have a view on someone who moves from such a senior role in one company to a such senior role in another company and how that process works in your own mind and how you work through the decision-making there. How did you know that it was the right time to move on and do something different other than Clearswift? And how did you go through the process of deciding what to do next and choosing it?

29:05

I think honestly, that's one of the easier questions for that one. I have a very, very old answer that I used every single time in every single job that I ever had. I always work towards making myself redundant. I always work towards getting to a place where I've achieved, what I wanted to achieve in that company that operationally the company can absolutely survive without me, that strategically all the initiatives are either ticked off or well on the way. And there are clear owners of those initiatives.

29:49

And I start to feel either one or two things or both things. One is that I'm not using my expertise and therefore I'm starting to feel that I'm redundant. And the other one is I'm not learning. I don't have brand new difficult problems to dig deep into. And I'm not saying that every company I left and ended up in an ideal state, no, that's preposterous.

30:19

But what I am saying is that all the problems that needed to be solved were either operational with the right people there or strategic with amazing people, driving the strategic solutions to those problems without my input. So without the need for my inputs, of course, I'm always happy to make my inputs known, but...

30:49

It's super challenging when those moments, they're- there's no one moment where it happens, instead it builds.

30:58

No, you're absolutely right. But it almost feels like you lived through that, right? Because you're absolutely right. It usually builds over three to six months. I would say maybe six months is more likely you grow your team. You sort of make long-term best from day one. From day one when I look at mine like 36 to 90 days plan. I have end plan as well. It says that 'what do I need to do today to make myself redundant and not necessary in the future' right?

31:37

And you sort of take those steps. It's not always planned and not always goes according to plan, but you still sort make those incremental steps. And then there's a moment where you start feeling. So for example, with Clearswift, the moment was when we achieved something that the company was never able to achieve before we pretty much turned the company from brink of bankruptcy. It was a private equity set up to actually very good, profitable, strong company that was acquired for its strategic strength on the market.

32:18

And then I already saw that apart from of taking the company through the exit, everything else was well in hands well in hands. And I was thinking to myself, what's the next challenge? And it just so happened that at the time, the next challenge for that company was... So we went through the reverse takeover there, which was by the way, amazing experience in its own. But after a while, after several years having been acquired by the new owners, they wanted to do a bigger restructuring and shape up the bigger business to float on its own. And it became just misaligned with the learnings. For me, I've done that in the company before, as well as I saw how other people could achieve that within the company without me. And I wanted to see where else I could push myself.

33:24

So I have experiences of very different companies of private companies, public companies, VC-backed, private equity-backed companies. And I have only worked before Clearswift before Vortexa. I have only worked in one other VC-backed company, and I wanted to get that and see how the world, a venture capital changed and also apply my knowledge and my skills to a different set of technologies. Because if you look at my LinkedIn, for example, you see that the vast majority of my career is in cyber security.

34:05

But there's a stage in my life that, that I thought I had to ask myself. That was a defining moment I had to ask myself, 'Is cyber security the only thing?' 'Is that the thing?' Because I never saw myself just as I'm a security specialist. I saw myself a lot more of a sort wider responsibility CTO, right? Not just this cyber thing.

34:30

It sounds like there's multiple things happening here as you reach the list or if it doesn't sound like there's necessarily one thing that's tipping it. Sounds like over a period of three, six months, there are multiple parts to it that are causing you to think about something new.

34:48

Yeah. Yeah. And it's never one thing, it's never one thing. I mean, even looking at Vortexa, I saw an amazing opportunity to change the world and I'm not exaggerating when I was looking at Vortexa, I got to learn a little bit more about how the whole industry of seaboard energy trading works. And I was shocked and surprised because when you usually talk about trading, what do you think about, you think about high-frequency trading? You think about optimizing for milliseconds, microseconds even right?

35:26

And whoever gets there faster in using algorithm trading is going to win, but it's very, very different in commodities. There's so many inefficiencies there. There's still a lot of people that are trading just because based on who you know and what they know prior to Vortexa and our competitors, there was no single view of the world. And it's the opportunity to create that view the opportunity to optimize one of the oldest markets that existed there and make a difference, make a dent, make a dent in the world by hopefully making energy a little bit cheaper, making the world a little bit greener and creating this real-time visibility.

36:11

That was very, very attractive. It is a push and pull. As in every job change. It's always a push and pull on a push side of things you're no longer needed in the previous company. The challenges in the previous company are the ones that you successfully ticked off in the past. And there are other people more than capable of taking care of them, but also pull an opportunity to do something that potentially could have such a profound effect on the world. And I don't mean in the UK or Europe, I mean on the whole world.

36:51

How do you stack rank these different parts to it? Because perhaps a different way of phrasing. This question is what makes work meaningful to you?

37:06

Purpose, definitely purpose, big fan. I'm a big fan of Daniel Pink. By the way, if you haven't read his book 'Drive' most definitely recommended, I'm not exception. So then you'll think in his Drive talks about things that motivate creative people and software engineering just so happens to be a creative profession. One of the many creative professions out there, and there are three major pillars that motivate creative people, which are autonomy, mastery, and drive. Autonomy is the ability to choose when you work, who you work with, what you work on, et cetera. Quite a few things like that. Mastery is the ability to do your best work ever possible every single day, every single time.

37:53

And purpose is about why you're doing all that and really believing in the why. Purpose for me, definitely, especially lately, especially in the last, I would say five, 10 years, definitely has been 10 years. I would say definitely has been the defining factor, but I can be quite picky about the purpose because there are things that interest me. There are things that don't interest me because purpose by itself, wouldn't be the only one. The word you used earlier, which is stack rank. These priorities is absolutely the right word because purpose by itself is not the only thing that drives it. How interesting the challenge is.

38:59

I mean, don't take me wrong. There's a lot of, and I have nothing against enterprise CRM systems, for example, nothing against them. They do have a very well-defined purpose. They are very, very much needed CRM systems as well. They're very much needed in every single business and they're changing a lot of business lives. It's just not the thing that is of particular interest to me here in this organization. What I absolutely love.

39:29

I'm a big math freak. I mean, you don't know whether you see some of the books behind or not, but I really like mathematics and I always enjoyed situations where mathematics can solve some real-world problems. And when below the purpose you get to the mastery, which is used really clever, really hard, really difficult mathematics to figure out something that nobody could figure out before. That's the second thing, right?

40:03

And then of course the autonomy bit for me is what you earlier called status, which is I have the full, complete discretion around how I run my department. As long as what we do is super valuable and delivers the biggest value to the business and to our customers. I have the full complete discretion. So purpose mastery, autonomy in a reverse order in which Daniel Pink talks about it in his book and his ted talk as well.

40:39

It's interesting how learning fits into mastery there because in order to achieve mastery, you have to have developed a skill set that you can apply that will enable you to master of whatever it is that you want to pursue. But it's also interesting that in that moment. The example that you gave was mathematics and how you can apply mathematics in order to achieve mastery. Can you achieve mastery with more than one thing in that scenario? Can you choose that I want to achieve mastery with mathematics, and I want to achieve mastery with X and with Y or do you have to have a bit more clarity on what it is that you truly want to master and apply that with slightly more focus perhaps?

41:34

Yeah. So I don't think you ever sort of apply mastery in a well-defined subject. You apply mastery to solving a problem rather than you apply mastery to mathematics. For example, in our case, the problem is nobody has the visibility around the real-time movements of energy around the world. In order to do that, you need to be able to process 1200 messages per second, that are coming to your infrastructure, make no obvious inferences from that data, et cetera, et cetera. Mathematics is a big part of it.

42:17

And my personal passion of course, but it's impossible to achieve the goal to achieve the purpose by focusing on just one thing. There's so many things that need to come together. So where mastery comes into play it isn't in the ability to prove, I don't know for me, theorem, right? It's in the ability to apply that proof together with many, many other things that you've learned in many other places to solving this specific, proper problem that's in front of you, right?

42:54

That's where mastery comes in. Not at the subject level, not even at the departmental level, because quite often the mastery comes in around talking to customers about particular technical problems. So customer's comes to you and says, "I need this." "Well, okay, we can do that. You sure you need that?" And how many times in my career I've seen this customer comes in and says, I need this. The company sort of rushes delivers what the customer needs, turns out. It doesn't solve the customer problem. Rather what the customer wants not needs. Sorry. The company delivers what the customer wants asks for and it turns out it doesn't solve the customer problem, right?

43:39

But one part of mastery, one skill in the whole mastery story, there is to be able to talk to customer, to figure out what they actually need, what problem they're actually trying to solve, as opposed to what they want, what they think the solution is to their problem. And I've experienced it so many times in my career that the scale of understanding what it is that the customer needs as opposed to what the customer wants is absolutely critical in any startup, in any scale up in any late organizational public company out there absolutely critical.

44:26

And how would you describe your relationship with work now? After all of this time, all of these challenges having achieved in some part and element of mastery, a purpose of autonomy me whilst also pursuing these other parts of your life, where you're able to explore yourself and learn, how would you now describe your relationship with work?

45:05

I'm sure you are looking for more than just, I love it, right? So a real answer is it's absolutely the biggest part of my life. I mean, of course, I have a family and the family is super, super important to me, but at the same time I'm going to do what I can. I'm going to do what I need to do for the family. There's no questions about it, but A- I do it through work mostly or a lot of it, not mostly a lot of it is through work.

45:52

And B work is what gives me pleasure. I mean, I do have a few hobbies of myself, but those hobbies are more complimentary rather than opposing table tennis, for example, changing what you do. And even when you play table tennis, quite a lot, you get into that state of flow as a part table tennis. And you end up thinking about other things you end up thinking about work as well. It's a big part of my life. Maybe sometimes to the detriment of other parts of my life. Maybe some people would say that it's a little bit unbalanced in terms of the amount of attention, time, and interest that I have towards my work. But to me, the way-

46:54

Are they right?

46:56

Are they right? Not from my perspective, there's opinions out there. There's people who are going to think that they're right, of course. But from my perspective, I need to do what those two things first maximizes my impact on this world and B maximizes my enjoyment from this world. As simple as that two things only impact and enjoyment and maybe I'm selfish. Maybe I'm a bit egocentric, but at the same time, it's my life. I live it once. I'm sure there will be things I regret, but I'm sure there will be things I celebrate when the time comes, right?

47:45

And such a challenge because we reach the end of our life at some point and hear contradicting stories of regret. We hear that missed opportunities were there. We hear that we took too many opportunities and didn't spend time in the moment. It feels in both directions, there is some regret.

48:19

Very true, very true. Definitely. I'm probably more on the side of, although I'm passionate and interested in so many things, there were opportunities that I escaped because of optimizing for other things in between optimizing for survival and optimizing for learning, right? Some of them will I regret that maybe I will. But at the same time, I generally would like to think that your enjoyment of life is a function of you, not a function of life, right?

49:10

So how much you enjoy your life, depends on you and you alone. Nobody else, not the things outside of you. I am more glass, half full kind of person rather than half empty because it is possible. And I've seen it many, many times. It is possible to find things that interest you, that excite you in pretty much everything around you. All you need is a desire to look deeper, right?

49:46

It's not to say that one shouldn't strive to sort of improve or look for other opportunities. Now, that's not the case, but my attitude is be sure that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve. Be sure that you made a dent. Because for example, if I join an organization, which by the way, I see so many times on CVs of younger individuals nowadays, they spend half a year in a company and they disappear and then they spend half a year in a different one. And then you have a CV of five years' experience half a year in each company.

50:24

Some might say it's good learning, but I would say, I ask how much of a dent? How much of a difference has the person been able to make in each one of those? So when I come across a person who says, "Oh, I had nothing to learn." "Really? Did you not? Are you sure? Did you look deep enough?" Because just looking at your CV and talking to you, I can think of 10 other things that you potentially could have learned there. Of course, I haven't been there. Of course, I haven't done that.

51:00

So that's my approach around the opportunities out there and whether to take them or not. Sometimes it yields great results. Sometimes you think should have done differently. But then again, my attitude is it's in the past. What's in the past is in the past, look into the future. If you look into the future, deep enough, there's going to be other opportunities, different, not better, not worse, different opportunities.

51:33

Thank you for your honesty and your clarity and your singular focus. And at times to pursue what you think is right, because that level of conviction is rare.

52:01

It all came backfire either in 30 year's time when it's time 40 or 50. I don't know whatever it is. That's last for me, it can all backfire, but you've got to choose your reference points and you've got to choose your strategy, how you're going to live your life. Otherwise, you never get to live your life, right? So...

52:33

Yeah, I agree. Well, thanks so much for sharing it. I really enjoyed it.

52:37

Thank you, Ben.

52:39

Speak to you again at some point.

52:40

See ya.