S4E5 – “Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” is THE dreaded interview question. And you know what, it’s okay not to have answers! Your career path is exactly that—a path. One that deserves exploring. In this episode, Subha and Hasita discuss the evolution of career paths and how they’re not all that linear these days.

Discussion Topics: Where do you see yourself in five years?

• Adapting your career to a rapidly changing world.
• Upskilling for an ‘unknown’ future.
• Building a complementary (but interesting) skillset on your own terms.
• Opening yourself up to a wide range of career experiences.
• Reflecting on your career so far to navigate the future.

Transcript: Where do you see yourself in five years?

Subha: Welcome to another episode of Small Talk with Rainkraft podcast! It’s truly interview season at home, as my firstborn gives quite a few college interviews. And so Hasita, I must ask you, where do you see yourself in five years?

Hasita: I literally say that was a career trajectory so I wouldn’t be asked that question. But here we are.

Subha: Isn’t it just the worst? I mean, five years is a long time.

Hasita: It has been a long time. And I think it’s only becoming longer in some ways, the pace at which the world is changing. Do I sound very old? I don’t know, but it really feels like things are changing very quickly. And I think the world really does belong to those who can really ride that tide over and over and over again. And I’ve seen this with, you know, folk in the family, I’ve seen it with friends, older colleagues, the people who’ve been humble enough, I think, and open minded enough to keep reinventing themselves, they seem to do just fine in life. It’s a very curious thing.

Subha: It is and I think that those who are kind of reinventing themselves for those of us who are seeing them, from an outside view, I have a feeling the individual is not so much reinventing, but just continuously living in the present. They’re just continuously saying, hey, what do I want to be doing today? What do I know? And hence, what’s the gap? And what else should I know? And just continuously working on the person they are today knowing that the future me is just going to appear.

Hasita: Maybe very different. Subha that reminds me of a very particular person. And she was a colleague to both of us at one point. In fact, she started out as a client with RainKraft, and then she started working with me, and now she’s in her third role in the time that we’ve kind of known her. And I think that’s so true, because every time I talk to her, it’s always very reassuring, because she sounds like someone who was exactly where she belongs. And I envy that so much, you know, in the sense that I look at her and I see someone who’s not afraid to, I was thinking that it was reinventing.

But I see now that all she was really doing and she was doing it with so much passion, but she was being present to whatever opportunity presented itself. I’m just thinking, to go from being somebody’s client to somebody’s employee it’s not easy, especially on the ego. I’m saying it’s not always an easy transition to make.

Subha: And then many times the biggest barrier is the ego. Right? What will people think, or how can this be me? And that’s sometimes the biggest barrier. I get you and I think let’s spend some time on something that’s been on my mind ever since I heard Shankar Vedantam ‘Talk about Future Self’. Let’s really talk about the future self and today’s self.

Hasita: For sure. I’m excited.

Subha: So the question really that Shankar Vedantam, who hosts the very popular hidden brain podcast is posing is, do we really know what the future holds? And what he’s trying to say is that we don’t know what our future self is going to look like. And he takes it to 20 years from now, or 20 years, where we are very well able to see that in hindsight, this is the journey I traversed, and this is how A version of me became B version of me, but who I will be 20 years from now I really can’t see that today.

And so that got me thinking, how much should I worry about that future self? Or what should I do in kind of readiness for that future self?

Hasita: Honestly, I think even on a systems level that is proving to be true, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when we were in college, we were taught JavaScript and some of us went on to study Python and a lot of other programming languages, which I’m sure are still relevant today to some extent, but the reality…

Subha: Reality you just reminded me that I learned basic and COBOL so thanks for that.

Hasita: So yeah, I mean, you’re just proving my point which is that we live in a world of no cold. I mean, you and I can go on Wix or Webflow and build a website. I mean, I’m sure it’s not going to look extremely petty but it’s going to do the job. And frankly, our children are probably not going to be as invested in learning programming languages as we were and for us, that was a game changer.

Like at that point, if you didn’t know programming, what were you? A dinosaur, and today if you know programming then what are you? A dinosaur. So, I mean, how do you even kind of then look forward to that future and what do you prepare for? I mean, I’m sure I want to be excited about the future and I want to think about my place in the world in that context, even in a professional context. But I have no visibility is what I feel. Do you agree that that’s true?

Subha: True. And also, I’m just thinking back to how we linked some of these skills to the person that oh, you’re very good with logic and hence, you must know programming or hence, you must do coding. A little bizarre now that we look at it, that coding is not really the skill. So you could have deployed it in different ways too, it could have been encouraged in different ways too. But yeah, to come back to this it’s really about I think, today, what am I doing Can I break it down for myself? What are the parts of me that I’m using in a way?

What are the parts of me that I’m enjoying? And what do I want to add to that too, to actually make it more enjoyable, and enjoyable in the sense that it’s useful to me, it’s productive, or it gives me a source of income, or it just gives me pure joy like that enjoyable is for each of us to define. I was reflecting thanks to this future self, past self, you know, conversation in my head and I was reflecting on my career and I kept saying, Oh, for 15 years, I was a banker. And honestly, I don’t think I was a banker.

I was somebody who, every day went to work, and truly enjoyed running an operations slash process shop. It was about the process, it was about, whether is the workflow the best that it can be for the customer that we are serving. Are we using the best technology? Are we using our people to the best of their capability? How can we make this better, faster, easier, simpler, etc? And hence, I was actually industry agnostic.

Hasita: And the funny thing is, I feel like maybe you may not have come to that conclusion if you have not gone through that journey, and it’s just so true for all of us, that as much as we want to be in this business of predictive intelligence about our own careers and professional paths sometimes you just have to be in it and that’s something I’ve personally experienced, and you know, as well over the last year or so, is that there are certain aspects of the business to which I’m well suited and then there are some aspects of the business at which I positively suck.

Am I allowed to say that? I don’t know. So it’s just about being in it and then knowing, and just imagine, we have so many things today, you know, we can be podcasters, we can be artists, we can be scientists, all from the comfort of our armchair actually. So how do we really go about figuring out even to say that, hey, this is something I see myself enjoying five years from now. And the reason this actually came up is because I was talking to my daughter about how I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 13.

And then I realised the quantum of physics involved. And then I kind of decided not to throw myself into that, to that extent. Do I regret it? No, I actually don’t. I think I would have been a lot more miserable studying for being an astronaut, than I am doing whatever I am doing today. So how do you even go about just sometimes I think being curious enough about the world, right?

Subha: On a side note, I’m a little disappointed you didn’t say throw yourself into the deep sea, but moving on.

Hasita: I’ll do more of that this year.

Subha: I think it’s becoming more and more clear to me that it’s really about the present self. I guess it’s unfair to say very little right? We can’t all just kind of keep doing stuff without any notion of where we want to be or what we want to achieve. But having said that, as I said, I was a banker, but I didn’t want to be the CEO of an investment bank or something like that. It was about the day-to-day work, the process, the people, the technology, seeing new technology, seeing new ways of doing things.

And in a way, because that was my day-to-day that I enjoyed and kept contributing to or kept kind of honing my entrepreneurial journey was an extension of it. And now I can see it, that it was an extension of it that, hey, you have to do new stuff, what’s the best way to do it, what’s the best process, how do you get the right people for you, what are the tools that you could use, what’s the good technology to use? I think a lot of the work that we’ve done Hasita, has been easier, because for both of us, we share that mindset that, hey, if there is a tool, we’ll try it out and we’ll figure it out on our own and we’ll see how best it can serve us.

So whether it meant kind of building our websites on our own learning WordPress learning Wix or it meant just thinking about how this podcast journey started. We said, Hey, there’s a tool called Anchor, and you just have to record and upload. So if I can figure out the tool, the talking part, I’ll also figure it out.

Hasita: In fact, I remember the days when we used to just do it on the phone on an anchor link. I think both of us had to join the call. It’s kind of interesting to think about where it all started. But yeah, you’re right. I think sometimes your hindsight is 20-20, like, you can look back and say, Hey, I started there and I’m here now and this is exactly the process I followed, which is sometimes a problem that I have with a lot of business and leadership biographies and autobiographies as well because I do wonder how many of them knew what they were doing when they started out. And it’s just, you know, as much as we say, Hey, look, to the future, have some goals, have some ambitions.

In fact, I think January is the season for having goals and resolutions and ambitions, and so much of that. But maybe it really just begins with smaller mindset shifts. And if I had to really say, Okay, this year, I’m going to think deeply about who I will be five years from now then how do I go about it? Is there a process at all?

Subha: Again, using that bit of hindsight, but also saying, how do I make it useful for me going forward, and I think what has served both of us really well, is that we cast a pretty wide net, in terms of what we are open to consuming, and trying and experiencing, and not everything that we try, we are good at or we’re successful at or in some of the things we don’t even enjoy. But at that moment, when we try something, we kind of give it our all. I think like, there was a time when we said, hey, audio is happening, audio is where things are shifting to and both of us were like evangelists for clubhouse like, there’s no tomorrow.

Hasita: We even had our own room or something, didn’t we? As we said, this is going to be where we build our audience of 10,000 people, but as we know that didn’t happen.

Subha: But it was just our way of understanding audio as a medium, technology around audio, how do you kind of speak or how do you gather an audience, how do you address that audience in what is essentially a monologue or a dialogue. So it’s really keeping ourselves open to newer experiences, not everything. And then there are some which you don’t learn from also, which is fine, you move on.

Hasita: Which in itself is learning I suppose that okay, this is something I know I don’t enjoy, like, you know, it’s fine. So, fair enough.

Subha: Like, I know that when GST came in, there were quite a few entrepreneurs who were saying, this is very easy to do, you’re the business owner, you should know how to fill in that file to the second decimal point and upload it on your own, etc. Fair enough. I learned it, I know how to do it. But I can also outsource it.

Hasita: No, I just learned from your experience and I outsource it too. I mean, speaking of things we don’t enjoy. But you’re right, in the sense that we couldn’t have found that out, had we, not A had some personal or individual experience, or B learned from some exclusive experience. And maybe I should read those founder biographies a little more carefully. Why not?

Subha: One of the good ones that I read in the early days and that’s because I joined the kind of founding batch of upGrad on entrepreneurship was Ronnie Screwvala’s book I think ‘Dreaming with your eyes wide open’ for similar such title, where it’s about that just to your point of those biographies where they seem to know where they were headed, his was very clearly that, hey, I just kept trying one thing after the other, and took a lot of big risks and went into areas like cable TV, etc., where it was an unknown, but used the skills that I had and the experience that I had till that point to say, how do I make this work?

But the thing that got me thinking about this wide net is why do some of us consume so much. And I think both of us have had that experience where a friend or a colleague or someone we know will say, Hey, why are you reading about that? Or why are you watching that? Or why are you listening? Like it’s the breath is pretty wide right, from British dark humor to.

Hasita: Catastrophes involving airplanes, investigative journalists bought airplanes, if I had to be more precise.

Subha: To really small-town crime.

Hasita: Emily in Paris.

Subha: Yeah, Emily in Paris, which is as fun as it gets, but it’s still about marketing. That wide net, to me, is the most useful trigger for what I do next. Because something I read somewhere, something I listened to somewhere, kind of just out of the 20 things like one or two sit in my head, and then it becomes a conversation in my head, and then it becomes a conversation with you perhaps and then there’s some output from it.

Hasita: That’s so true for a lot of work we do as well, right? Wherein it’s not all coming from one manual or one guidebook that says, hey, follow these four steps, and you’ll get to where you are, but it’s more of that gathering of information, almost like how you gather, I think fruits in a basket, if it could be described that way knowing that it’s always there is some comfort. And I’m kind of reminded of this anecdote about why do dogs stick their faces out of the cars, even though they get bugs in their eyes. And the answer to that is that there’s joy in the journey. And I thought that was quite a beautiful story.

You know, it’s valuable to be curious in and of itself, I think and the end result, you know, to answer your question Subha, where do I see myself five years from now? I think I’m going to start by looking at myself five years prior, and just kind of look at the journey itself and see what led to what, and how maybe that is something that can be continued going forward as well.

Subha: Yeah, and I think for the listeners, if I may, like, the takeaway, that would make me happy is to just not worry so much about that one version of your future self, which is, for whatever reason, fixed in your mind, but worry more about, or think more about, what is that journey to my future self going to be like, what is the different things I’m going to do, what are some of the things I’m not going to do, what are some of the new ideas that I’m going to let enter my mind because today, a lot of what the ideas that do reach us are so heavily filtered by algorithms and what you’ve already consumed, so to be mindful of that, and say, Hey, what’s that one thing that today I came across, but I don’t know about so then shall I just spend two minutes on it. And honestly, folks, it just takes a few minutes here and there.

You know, listening to one podcast, and there was a mention of Ship of Theseus. And then I said, Okay, what is this Ship of Theseus story? And it’s a very nice story about how the ship was getting rebuilt, or you know, like patchwork or work done on it or repaired so many times that then the existential question came that is this still the Ship of Theseus? And so that person 20 years from now, because there’s so much patchwork done on us, parts we are adding, parts we are taking away, new experiences, new thoughts, new ideas, some good, some bad that is not the same you.

Hasita: And I think that is the beautiful thing about the journey itself that we get to be those ships, the patchwork ships that are different tomorrow than they are today. I like that idea. So which ship will I be 5 years from now?

Subha: Oh, no, that’s the new interview question, which ship will it be five years from now?

Hasita: Hopefully not the Titanic.

Subha: I love how you can go dark so quickly. So I think the future self is going to happen one way or the other. You don’t have to say Hey, I can’t do anything about it. You also don’t have to plan for it 200% but focus on today and step by step you will get there and that you won’t be able to predict that when you look back it will be a very different version than what you thought all that is fine. But enjoy today and see how you can expand your horizon, your view, and your thoughts today.

Hasita: Sounds amazing.

Subha: Bye, folks. Catch you next time.