Make Time to DO GOOD For Others and You'll Benefit as Well w/ Raj Mendhir

Transcript

[00:00:00] Raj: Always make to do good. Always make time to make an impact because I’m a firm believer that when you do good to the world, it will come back to you in whatever way, shape or form, but always make time to give back to the world and to do good and make an impact in the society. Right? There’s there’s so many hours in a day just allocate a small amount of your time.

It might be two hours on the weekend. It might be half a day.

[00:00:28] Amardeep: Welcome to the Mindful and Driven Podcast, where we help you to not lose sight of what’s really important whilst chasing your dreams.Today’s guest is Raj Mendhir, a serial entrepreneur. He runs his own consulting firm called Wippd and an Ed-Tech platform called Eqwippd. He started his career in both consulting and M&A before taking the leap to build his own business. His ed-tech platform aims to provide soft-skills education for the underprivileged backgrounds to help them not only in their business careers but also in their daily lives and best of all it will always be free. 

He’s also a keen sportsman having represented his county at both cricket and badminton. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.

Welcome everybody. This is my first real life interview with Raj. Thank you for having me. We’re in a beautiful location near Tower Bridge.

[00:01:14] Raj: Thank you for coming down and it’s a lovely location, happy to host you. And looking forward to being part of the first in-person podcast you’re doing.

[00:01:20] Amardeep: So the first thing I want to start off with is, what’s some common advice you disagree with?

[00:01:24] Raj: Something that a lot of people do, sort of spread the spread as gospel. It’s like chase your passion, follow your dreams. Do what you love, but one thing I would caveat that way is, do what you love and love what you do, but make sure it pays the bills because all when a good chasing your passion but if it’s not earning you a living and it’s not giving you the freedom to do what you want with your life, you got to, you got to take a call, you got to be very pragmatic about what you’re doing in life and giving yourself the freedom, to freedom to fail, or the freedom to fly is absolutely important. And it’s a common phrase that I typically use quite often with people wanting to sort of as their aspirations to chase their dreams. You’ve always got to be very realistic in terms of how you chase the dreams. At what point in life? What’s important? Because there’s certain things in life that are fundamentally more important than others.

[00:02:15] Amardeep: Yeah. I guess on that point, I heard this story about where people try to build the plane as they jump off a cliff. Whereas, what other people do instead is they’ve got the safety net at the bottom already. So it seems like they’re taking a massive risk, but what you don’t see is that they’ve had plans about it. They’ve got safety net from their other job or something beforehand, that’s going to pay their bills. And sometimes in this kind of online world, and when people look up to other people, they didn’t assume to see that. So they think, oh, everyone’s taking such huge risks. Whereas actually it’s a much smarter plan behind it. Is that what you did when you moved into the kind of entrepreneurship world, did you have that kind of underlying plan to keep yourself safe in a way?

[00:02:53] Raj: Oh, absolutely. I mean, as much as I’m a risk lover, I’m far from being a risk averse individual. I’m always very religious realistic as well. So like you said, right. A plane jumping off a cliff. No. Have the freedom to fail, have the freedom to fall, have the freedom to fly as well equally. No, it’s so, so important. There’s so many opportunities out there. Like you said, the online world, right? Everybody wants to jump into e-commerce or the online world, et cetera, because you hear so many success stories, but bet your bottom dollar, that’s probably only one to 2% of the actual population of people trying to tackle that world. So understanding what it takes to do well is equally as important to understand what it’s going to take to fail. Right. And failure is so important to factor in because it can make or break a person. And that in itself is a mindset thing.

[00:03:46] Amardeep: Yeah. I think as well, what you see sometimes when you do see photos online, you see it from people who then succeeded and it kind of just talks the image, right. But you say, oh, they failed, and they were then okay. Whereas some people would do fail and then go back to their other careers or they give up on it. And we have this survivorship bias where you only ever see the stories from the people who have a big enough to get audience for you to their stories in the first place. I just want to be careful with where you see that there’s tip of the iceberg of all the people who tried.

[00:04:15] Raj: Absolutely. I mean, the amount of hard work and the heavy lifting that goes in is, it’s phenomenal. I mean, I’ve been running businesses, building, failing many, many times. Succeeding as well. If I had my wins, I’ve had my losses and it takes resilience, determination. It takes a lot of grit. And one thing I will make very clear is that it’s an emotional roller coaster. One day you’re thinking this is a phenomenal business. And then the next day you’re thinking, oh my God, what am I doing? Do you have to be in the mindset to be able to sort of tackle this gauntlet. Right. It’s, it’s not so smooth sailing, as like you said, those people with the audience, they can talk about their success stories. That’s all well and good. But if you don’t prepare yourself for that failure potential, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and that is quite a big risk.

[00:05:09] Amardeep: Yeah. So when I quit my job, I’ve got a bunch of things I do on the side. Some of these ones I thought were very secure. So I was like, these are my bankers. This is going to give me enough money that I can carry on doing other stuff and be a bit more risky. But sometimes there’s things that you think are secure, fail as well. They take you by surprise. So whenever we’re in this kind of world, it’s good to have a little bit of diversity, I think. Just so that if one thing fails, you’re taking a lot of risk in one area, you at least know you’ve got enough to cover the bills from something else.

[00:05:37] Raj: That’s, I totally agree. And that’s like you said, risk management, right? It’s so, so, so important to strike a balance, right? You talk about diversifying your, your investments, et cetera, et cetera, your activities. But one thing I would make very clear and clear messages. You might see so many people out there doing a bunch of different things, but don’t lose sight of what is truly important to you and what you want to focus on. I mean, you’ve only got so many hours in the day, but focus on what you can do best. And when you talk about diversifying, one thing that is so critical to be aware of is, know your market, know where you’re investing your time, effort and resources because if you’re, if you’re copying someone or you’re following someone thinking, oh, I can potentially do that without necessarily knowing it inside out you’re effectively gambling. So if you’re going to put 5,000 pounds behind an e-commerce platform, but you don’t know exactly how to do it just go to the casino, put five grand on red. It’s just as good.

[00:06:41] Amardeep: Do you think there’s a time in the past where you’ve got that balance wrong, where you are either too risky or too risk averse. And how did you get through that? How did you kind of rebuild after that?

[00:06:51] Raj: So the most appropriate example of this was when I was running my first venture with a good friend of mine from university. We were running a recruitment business. Neither of us had experience in recruitment and it was a steep learning curve, but an enjoyable one.

Right. And yes, that I did struggle. I struggled to sort of strike a balance. The moment you stepped into the business world, you, your eyes open up to the world of opportunities that are available. And especially in the recruitment world, there’s so many different industries that you can recruit for that you think that okay. We can look at, I mean, we focused on banking, construction, and legit logistics. We dabbled in a few other ones, health care, nursing, care workers. And we try to take them too much. Yeah. And inevitably, you know, we have to scale back and realign and think, you know what what’s paid, what’s getting us the best return on cash within the business. We’re hiring staff in certain areas. Where are we getting our best return? So yeah, there has been a time where you get very excited about all these new opportunities, but you don’t necessarily think carefully about which one’s going to yield the best return I’ll take. I actually dive into it. And when you’re in the flow of running a business, especially something like recruitment, which is an incredibly fast paced business, you literally just crack on and you make, you make very quick decisions. Yeah. I wouldn’t say make rash decisions. You make very, very sharp decisions, right. And I guess being in that fast paced environment, it helps you and it teaches you how to make big picture decisions very quickly, and when you think about all aspects of the business, but yeah, over time, that’s, that’s something that I’ve definitely improved on and I’ve had to sort of take some tough decisions to not pursue some of the ideas that I’ve had in the past. But guess what? You’ve got to be pragmatic.

[00:08:49] Amardeep: Yeah. Because just think about that, when you say you’re increasing people in banking and nursing, and though they’re both recruitment, they’re very different fields and I think sometimes this mistake people make where it’s like, oh, I can do this one thing. So even for say, writing, writing an article versus writing for copy writing or writing with businesses can be very different. So you’ve got to be really careful about, because I can do this. I can do that too, and it’s going to be easy because there’s a lot of nuance behind that as well.

[00:09:17] Raj: No, I agree. I agree. And I mean, just for context, I was not necessarily the one doing the recruiting. I was running the business. So every time we looked at a new industry, we’d have to bring someone else in to recruit for that industry. And we came to a point where we grew a little bit too much too quickly and sort of doubled our workforce in two months then had to sort of really shave back, even though it is within recruitment, they are very different audiences that you’re recruiting for that you’re hiring for. And it takes an element of training as well for yourself.

[00:09:51] Amardeep: Yeah. I want to think that comes to the idea of preparing for success, because sometimes when things like blow up, so you had double your workforce, you’re not necessarily prepared for that. You’re prepared for like, some of the things are going to go wrong potentially, but when you think things are going very well, you’re not prepared for the overwhelm that comes alongside that. And people sometimes overlook that. It’s like, oh, just take as many opportunities as you can.

[00:10:12] Raj: Exactly. No, I agree. I agree. I mean, it’s so easy to get excited, like I said, and, and grow, grow, grow, but don’t grow too quickly. It’s been spoken about many, many times amongst many business owners that when you grow too fast, You increase the chances of falling flat on your face. That kind of happened to us. Right. And being, being the first venture that I was running, there was an, there were a number of learnings. It was a steep learning curve. They were costly as well, but those are the ones you remember the most, but nevertheless, life is a learning journey, and that’s, that was probably one of the best foundations from which to learn and then run my future ventures.

[00:10:52] Amardeep: But were you most happy you made those mistakes because it’s meant you learned the lessons that you could apply later on. Whereas if you took it slower, then potentially, you might have never known and then being doomed grant, trying to go too fast a day and have it fall, the harder the fall I guess because you’re further on.

[00:11:07] Raj: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, every failure is a learning opportunity, right? It adds to your wisdom. And that was a five-year journey building that business. I grew at 38 X over that period of time, which is, which is fairly reasonable for a service-based business. If you, if you tried to think about the regrets as you might want to put in better converse, in plain English, try not to be too myopic when you’re in business, you’ve always got to maintain a big picture and a longer term vision because the moment you start becoming quite myopic and only thinking, and sort of losing sleep over short term mistakes, then you’re going to get caught in a rut where you can’t focus on the, on sort of like the bigger picture of growing and building the organization. If you’re, if you’re running a business, you eat last. You are responsible for the livelihoods of all of your staff. Yeah. And if the business is not performing to that extent, you’ve got to make some tough decisions.

[00:12:08] Amardeep: And it comes back to me as mentioned at the beginning about chasing your passion, because if we’re chasing them to get very passionate about, sometimes you do become very wealthy because it’s so personal to you, for it to do well. Whereas you need to to take that something you set up, zoom out a bit, and think objectively, because if you’re really fighting [unintelligible] your passion about, It might be that you, if it was somebody else saying the exact same thing, but I call it, they should be doing that. That’s a mistake, but when it’s yourself, no, I can do this. And it’s something that you need to account for.

[00:12:35] Raj: The one example I’ll bring in for that would be one of my first startups post-it recruitment business. It was a graduate assessment center business, and I learned the art of detachment. Walking away from a business that I had invested my blood, sweat, and tears for 18 months. Something that I really enjoyed. I put in so much effort, so much resource. When it came to parting ways with one of the, one of the business partners in closing down the business, it was done with good reason. It was very pragmatic. I was thinking long-term rather than thinking short term and, and things that could be resolved as I’ve evolved in the entrepreneurial journey, I’ve learned to think about things longer term, like I said, rather than making those short term decisions and trying to hold onto a business, it’s all well, and good. If you’ve invested 18 months building something and then tomorrow you’ve got to make the tough decision to say, you know what, let’s call it a day. Having that heart of detachment and to just let go of a business and to call it a day is, it’s not something that’s easy to, it’s not something you’re born with. Right. And it’s not something that is easy to develop over time, unless you’re put in that situation in a number of ways.

[00:13:49] Amardeep: Do you find your balance a lot better because of the lessons you had in the past, or are there still things you are struggling with at the moment?

[00:13:54] Raj: So what I’m running at the moment is a startup consulting firm. So I work with early stage founders and first time founders as well, helping them sort of navigate the challenges of growing a business and helping them build in the right way and not making the mistakes that I made. If you have someone sort of in the background as a sounding board to guide you along the way, help you avert those mistakes, that is priceless. And something that I built through the pandemic, which was almost like a giving back initiative is a soft skills platform. Yeah. And that’s purely impact. Right. Users will never pay for that. The whole purpose of this is to really level the playing field for soft skills education globally. I mean, there are billions of people, young adults that come from underprivileged backgrounds. And so my sort of purpose and mission behind this project is to sort of really up-skill and equip all young adults globally, as many as possible as I can with the soft skills that are crucial to sort of being successful in the workplace, but also in life, right? Yeah. Soft skills are, they’re important, not only sort of as you build your career, but in your everyday, everyday walk of life, it’s really important to be aware of soft skills and be the best you can. So alongside the consultancy, I’m building this platform. It’s not free to build. And so it’s really a case of balancing my time between pumping out as much education through that platform. I think we’re at something like 800 articles in less than one year. So I’ve got a powerhouse team really churning out lots of, lots of education and content versus helping these founders and delivering my workshops and consulting with these small companies. So it’s a, it’s a really exciting journey at the moment. I think given what’s going on in this world right now, the humanitarian impact and aspect of the soft skills platform is quite timely, I think. Especially when most of the global population get access to it, to the internet, it just means that they’re able to access this education, free of charge. Yeah, and that for me is very close to my heart. And if I can impact as many people’s lives globally, I’ll be happy.

[00:16:13] Amardeep: Hi everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the episode so far. I want to take a quick break to ask you to check in with yourself. There’s many people struggling with balance and it’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s tips that my guests might share can hopefully help you along the way, but if you already feel overwhelmed or burnt out, it’s probably best that you ask somebody for help too. For some, this might be a friend or family member, while others might feel like they have nobody they can talk to. If you’re one of these people, check out the link in the show notes, it’s for United for Global Mental Health. They’ve got health plans all across the world, with people willing to listen on the other side. It’s important to let somebody know how you’re feeling. Now, back to the show.

It’s interesting cause it comes back to that kind of passion side of things where, what you’re doing for the consulting side is enabling you for the other side things, for the EdTech. So it’s like one is one area of your life, especially empowering the other side of your life, which is where you can make a huge impact. And did you kind of think in that way, when you were younger, that you’re going to want to use your businesses to fund another venture, which is more like impact or ways in which developed over time and you move towards this during the pandemic. How did that kind of come about for you?  

[00:17:20] Raj: So the building of the platform and the conceptualization really came about through the pandemic early stage, early doors, worked with companies globally, and I was seeing the impact, the COVID was happening on the job market globally. People are losing their jobs and they’re having to sort of find other opportunities. And I thought, you know what? This is, this is my time to sort of give back and help out. I’ve been lucky enough to be on the journey that I’ve been put on. Now, why can’t I bring other people into that journey and, you know, reinvesting the profits into the platform is probably one of the most important decisions I made in 2020, and probably one of the decisions I’m most content about. Yeah. Because of the impact it’s having. And it’s all, it’s all well and good building a business and reaping the rewards, but there’s always this aspect of giving back. And that’s something that I’ve sort of lived my life by is always helping those in need. That, to me was important. I thought if this is a way to give back and help those out there, I’m going to go all guns blazing and produce as much content and just educate the world as much as up as much as I possibly can. Right.

[00:18:34] Amardeep: Do you find it helpful, your motivation on the consulting side as well? Because you now knew that everything you’re doing for that side is then powering this impact?

[00:18:41] Raj: I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s a direct correlation, I’ve actually found myself in the last sort of six to nine months spending more time developing the platform then on the consulting side, right. It’s a more of a passion. But like you said, you got to be realistic about, about building a profitable business. And I wouldn’t say, okay, I’m able to help these founders, which means I’m empowering this side of things. Yeah. I look at it from a big picture. I’ve got the revenue generating side of the business and the consulting side. But I’ve also got the integrates comma, CSR side of things where it’s having a social impact. And the moment you confine your, your thinking into the answers on the mindset of, of this component is powering this component within the business,  you isolate those two mindsets, right. And you will find yourself thinking too much about driving the revenue to power that side, which means that you can’t find the passion in consulting with these founders. Because at the moment I have such a huge passion in the startup world. Those who know me will, will vouch for that. It’s something that I really enjoy. And it’s something that I, I will talk day and night about. Right. And so when I enjoyed doing the consulting, I’m not in the mindset of okay, every hour, I’m doing consulting with a startup, it’s going to power those articles is more of a case of right. I’m enjoying the time helping these startup founders and these first time founders get, find their footing, but I’m also equally enjoying the time building the platform and making an impact on the world. Yeah. As an example, I am now in touch last week with a charity that helps out children up until the age of 18 with sickle cell disease. Yeah. And bringing the soft skills education to such population. It’s a real honor, honestly. And so I don’t necessarily drive the profitability, the profiteering side of things to the impact.

[00:20:47] Amardeep: Yeah, I think what’s great about that is that you enjoy both sides where sometimes I know, for example, I did economics in university. There’s a lot of people who say, oh, I’m going to go into banking and I’m going to go into banking, which I hate, but I’m going to do that because I can then use that money for good, which what’s good for you is that you’re doing something you enjoy anyway, but that’s also helping you in this other side and I think it’s quite a good point for people listening is that you don’t need to do something you hate to make the money to make an impact. Ideally, you can do things you love on both sides.

[00:21:20] Raj: I totally agree. And that the, the evolution of the workforce today is, is providing ample opportunities for people to move from the traditional corporate world to, into the startup world, into the technology world, where the opportunities are so broad, right? There’s a full whole spectrum of new opportunities that you wouldn’t even thought about five years ago. And so people can really find that passion. In the work that they do and still earn a healthy living, but not necessarily say, like you said, in banking, right? The world is crying out for talent.

[00:21:57] Amardeep: It’s pretty long with me, right. Where I never thought I’d go into writing and going to all these other things. And sometimes you’ve just got to try things and then that might make you enjoy it. And then now I’ve got this plan and now I’m building things out because sometimes people don’t know what they want to do. And that’s where they’re stuck in a career in which they’re unhappy in. And sometimes you just need to try things and then by doing that, you’ll find these opportunities of where you can make a healthy living, like you said, doing something you actually enjoy.

[00:22:22] Raj: I mean, I graduated from NSC in 2009. Which is when the credit crunch just kicked in, irrespective of having LSE in the CV, no one was hiring because no one wants to spend. And so I had to find my footing in industry. Tech consulting and telecoms, and then working in a, in a SAS business. So 10 years ago, and I’ve always worked in small, small teams or small companies, which has really contributed towards the, the speed at which I’ve sort of evolved my learning, especially in the working world. Right. And I think there’s traditional routes of the graduate schemes and the professional schemes, I mean, if you’re going to go into accounting yes, by all means, go and aspire to work for a big four, because that’s the best training you’re going to possibly get. But if you’re not looking to go down a professional route, the opportunities are endless and you can, the more you spend time in, in small teams, the more, the more you’re exposed to, and the more you can learn over time. And like I said, life is a learning curve and the moment you have that freedom to fail the freedom to fly, you can always try new things, right. And that is when you not only learn about business, you also learn about yourself because you learn about your own skills, where your sort of values, your, your sort of state of mind is most valuable. Right? I’m a very resilient person, I’m a, I’m a grafter, I’m a very calm individual. I mean, when I was running the recruitment business, I had staff telling me, Raj, how the hell do you stay so calm when we get certain crazy situations when shit hits the fan, right? He got so many fires to put out. I started, he used to be normal. As you grow in as a leader, you, you develop these attributes and they’re so crucial to being successful in business.

[00:24:08] Amardeep: Yeah. And I had the same experience where I worked for a small startup for most of my career. So it was any, I think, 40 employees by the time I left and I was the fifth longest serving employee. But being in that scenario, it makes you learn quicker because you don’t have the safety net of 10 levels above you.

[00:24:24] Raj: Exactly.

[00:24:25] Amardeep: And I think that really helps in terms of my learning, like you said, because I’m forced to learn and it also gives you the opportunity, because if you learn something faster, you can then start taking control of it and start being the expert in that area. Whereas sometimes at a large firm, you can start feeling like you’re a cog in the machine.

[00:24:44] Raj: Exactly. You’re confined to that little box of your responsibilities. And you’re churning that day in day out, day in, day out, whereas in a smaller firm, you’re exposed to a number of different parts of the operation. And like I said, you learn quicker, you learn more and you learn faster because you have no choice.

[00:24:58] Amardeep: Do you think At the moment you’ve got the right balance? So you you’ve got your consulting business and you’ve got the impact through ed tech, do you think that’s the right balance here at the moment, or have you got other things you want to do? So obviously. You have other things going in your life. Obviously, you’ve got a partner, you enjoy cricket, you’ve got everything kind of going on. What’s the kind of an ideal lifestyle you want to build towards?

[00:25:18] Raj: I mean, Cricket’s such an important component of my life, but I also know that you need to work. You need to like work hard and the moment you have that flexibility to really pursue as many passions as possible, you’ll reach a very content state in life.

Right. I have a number of passions. Business being one of them, cricket being one of my big, my biggest passion. I’m very active, very sporty. Play cricket at the state level, play badminton at state level, I stay very active now, did martial arts for 15 odd years when I was younger and being active as it is, is such an important part of my life. But also cooking. Over the over lockdown, I found a real passion in cooking. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed cooking now and again, but cooking is therapeutic, I would say. My family is all from Malaysia, which is probably one of the biggest foodie nations globally. And I find myself cooking maybe four to five meals per week, and forever wanting to learn more. I don’t necessarily see work as work. I see work as a passion and I see everything that I do is something that I enjoy. And if you, if you have a, if you’re able to strike a balance between all the things that you do, you’re, you’re well positioned to, like I said, live a very happy life. Yes. I’ve got a pipeline of number of different projects that I’m very excited about. I would love to roll out, but also, from my learnings in time. Over the last few years, you can’t always roll out all the projects that are on the table. Right. So you’ve got to be very pragmatic. You’ve really got to take a, take an assessment and think right, which one’s going to yield you the best returns over. What duration is that? A short term win is that a long-term win and. You have like a gradual sort of iterative approach to reviewing projects.

[00:27:05] Amardeep: Do you ever take on projects, which are something, could you just read? Okay, so you’re doing good. Now we had tech right where it’s not necessarily one, that’s giving you the best return monetary wise, but it’s going to be a good return. With general happiness and your outlook on life. So you kind of say that into perspective as well. When you’re looking at which put it’s to pick up all the opportunities you have available.

[00:27:24] Raj: In the sense that the tech business. The impact that’s having gives to me the greatest reward. Yeah. Yes. The consultancy and all the various other bits and bobs, they are profitable ventures, but the impact that you can potentially have on the world’s population, that to me is priceless. And it’s probably more rewarding than running these profiteering ventures in all honesty.

[00:27:47] Amardeep: Yeah. So for the people listening at home today, if there’s one mindset shift they could make that you think would make a positive difference in their life, what would it be?

[00:27:55] Raj: Always make time to do good. Always make time to make an impact because I’m a firm believer that when you do good to the world, it will come back to you in whatever way, shape or form, but always make time to give back to the world and to do good and make an impact in the society. Right? There’s there’s so many hours in a day, just allocate a small amount of your time. It might be two hours on the weekend. It might be half a day, but make the time to make an impact on this world. It’s so rewarding and something that I’m a very strong advocate of, you know, working with vulnerable, vulnerable people, work when people from disadvantaged backgrounds, if you can help make their lives a bit better, even in a very small small way. You know, that’s priceless.

[00:28:45] Amardeep: It’s what I think a lot of people are searching for at the moment. And I said, it’s not as difficult as people sometimes make up. You just need to make a decision. Okay. I live,[unintelligible] week, whatever it is.

[00:28:55] Raj: Absolutely.

[00:28:56] Amardeep: And you can help people. It doesn’t need to be a massive plan that you have to think up for months and months and months, but you’re going to be hoping the people around you and making them happier. And it has that knock on effect, right? If you’re doing something good for somebody around you, they’re happier, which then makes them maybe do some good for somebody else. And it’s that domino effect. And it’s just brilliant for everybody.

[00:29:16] Raj: I totally agree. I mean, having that humanitarian component in your heart will be the biggest driver. I mean, even with the platform, with the EdTech platform, I thought about it one day. I mobilized a team within a week and I started building, I got team to stop producing the, producing the articles, the education, and obviously I’ll review it and started building the platform, which took two to three weeks. And I just rolled it out immediately. I took the firm decision. I’m going to do this. I’m gonna make it happen. I didn’t need a perfect platform. It’s still pretty primitive. If you go and check it out. But if you want to, if you want to do something, take action, make it happen and really act upon your intentions. I think that’s very important because a lot of people out there may be hesitant to pursue that, that sort of intent, because they may not know where to start, figure out where you can roughly stop and just get the ball rolling. You’ll learn along the way. No, nothing is perfect in life.

[00:30:12] Amardeep: By educating some of these people, they might get great jobs and that might then help them feed their families, which then puts me, puts their kids into education, or there’s all these kinds of things, which you don’t necessarily see, but that it just helped so many people without you actually getting that direct feedback. And I think sometimes people worry as much about the direct feedback that you get, where, oh, so set up for an article of mine. I said a hundred thousand people read it and I got a hundred comments. But what you don’t see the people who don’t necessarily apply. [unintelligible] email, but it’s changed them and has helped them. Instead of thinking about like, what’s the return I get from people messaging you or people saying, oh, well, we’re done. It’s also, what’s called the change at me. I don’t even know about. And that’s an incredible thing, right?

[00:30:56] Raj: That is the power of education. All right. It will always have some sort of impact on someone’s life, across the world. And you want to know where. And you don’t necessarily need to know where, because the moment you are, you have that intention of doing good and giving back to this world, really expecting that gratitude, almost negates the intent, right? So like you said, and I didn’t even think about this, right? That the soft skills training education could help that person get a job and feed their family and then provide their kids with an education. I didn’t even think about that. But now that you say that, it’s really underscores what you just said about the moment you seek gratitude in what you’re doing to give back. It kind of counters that intention.

[00:31:46] Amardeep: Yeah. And it’s been a pleasure to talk to you Raj, today. Where can people learn more about your platform and what you’re doing at the moment?

[00:31:54] Raj: So the platform is EQWIPPD.com. So that’s E Q, like emotional intelligence, E Q W I P P D.com. The consultancy is a WIPPD.com W I P P D. Find me on LinkedIn, Raj Mendhir director at WIPPD.

[00:32:11] Amardeep: And the final thing to wrap up on is, what’s one small thing that’s brought you joy recently?

[00:32:16] Raj: I think I’m just going to have to circle back to cricket.

Playing cricket, watching cricket. And I went to watch the test match at Lords, England versus India at that brought me joy and playing cricket this week is going to also bring me that nugget of joy as well.

[00:32:36] Amardeep: If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, I’d love it If you could leave me a five star review, it really helps get the message out further. Wherever you’re listening, it would be awesome If you could subscribe and share in your social media channels. If you want to see more of my work and advice, you can find all of the links in the show notes. Thank you again for listening and I hope you have a lovely day.