What I highlighted in June 2023

Articles

• Max Read's profile of Mr. Beast in the New York Times Magazine

  Even within this context, Donaldson stands out for his dedication to understanding how YouTube works. For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year. After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”

  I thought of the somewhat famous Jeff Hammerbacher quote, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.". Not that Jimmy Donaldson is the best mind Gen Z has to offer but it sucks to imagine that many of the most talented millennial and Gen Z will spend so much of our brainpower understanding and use algorithms or AI technology. And maybe end up missing the forest for the trees, in terms of social impact.

• CJR profile of Defector

  Defector’s co-owners anticipate single-digit revenue growth from subscriptions this year. Meanwhile, one of their old enemies, Barstool Sports, was recently acquired by Penn Entertainment, a gambling conglomerate, for three hundred and eighty-eight million dollars. When I asked Ley about that, he didn’t express envy. Instead, he compared Defector to a neighborhood bar, no pun intended. “This is our little business—we just need to have these margins, pay our employees, and that’s it,” he said. “No one who owns a bar is thinking, ‘I can’t wait for NBCUniversal to come offer to buy my bar for a hundred million dollars.’ If you think of it as a business that you’re running with your friends, it becomes a lot easier to just be like, ‘Yeah, we’re having success, and that’s all we need.’”

  We need more public coverage of businesses like this. Those who are doing good work, at a reasonable scale, paying and treating people well. And not hyper focusing on growth quarter over quarter because of board, investor, market, whatever pressure.

• Adam Bryant in HBR on leadership

  In this article I’ll explore the mental shifts needed to become a leader and to handle the challenges you’ll encounter in your new role. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team’s performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences—your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones—when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.

• Profile of Daniel Bard and his struggles with the Yips

  When treating athletes with the yips, sports psychiatrists try both to alleviate their anxiety—with breathing exercises, therapy, and the like—and to fool their brains into accessing deep working memory rather than the misfiring part of the brain. A golfer might try putting with the opposite hand or distracting himself by counting backward from three before swinging. A tennis player struggling with her toss might do little math puzzles just before serving. Debbie Crews, a sports psychologist who has published several studies about the yips, told me that the goal often is not to eradicate the yips but to outsmart them. This turns out to be very hard to do.

  Even with how professionalized and developed the discipline of psychology is, I find it is under-theorized and under-utilized in the world of work. This profile was a nice way to get into it via the professional sports angle. But, generally, especially as the economy moves more into services and knowledge work, a stronger command of and defter use of psychology will separate good from great leaders and professionals.

Movies

• New movies I enjoyed over the last few weeks:The Civil Dead, Polite Society, You Hurt My Feelings, Rye Lane

• Old movies that were either rewatches or first time around and I loved: Four Lions, Opening Night,The Parallax View,

TV Shows

• We started a rewatch of "High Maintenance" and it's just such a good show
• "Beef" was very good, especially the first third or half
• "Jury Duty" is hilarious and felt truly novel
• "Smartless" was a nice guilty pleasure binge
• "Daisy Jones and the Six", "Platonic" and "White House Plumbers" were fine

Podcasts

• I recently started listening to A Typical Disgusting Display, featuring comedy writers from the world of Family Guy. It's fine, pretty funny. But it has made me wonder, what it is about white guy comedy podcasts that are so comforting to have in my life. Maybe its that we were all brought up on sitcoms, The Simpsons and 90s comedies that were primarily written by men like this. So there's some sort of comfort blanket effect of just having the voices of guys like Mike Birbiglia and Conan in our heads that feels soothing.

Lessons learned and the next mission

During the first decade of my career, I learned valuable lessons while pursuing mission-driven work across various industries.

1. In politics, I witnessed the importance of using data to inform decision-making. From polling to fundraising to voter turnout, the significance of data and technology was evident. In 2011, I saw the emergence of ideas that have since reshaped the entire industry.
2. Working on a tech marketplace taught me the importance of deeply understanding buyers and sellers through data to create successful products.
3. In journalism, during a period of upheaval and uncertainty, I recognized the importance of data, strategy, and operations in transitioning an established organization to its next iteration. I also learned the importance of organizational culture, which is difficult to measure but can often determine the success or failure of a mission.
4. I have discovered that most organizations in healthcare are operations organizations. Healthcare is a deeply human endeavor and, maybe more than any other sector, can benefit from modern leadership approaches, data and technology. There are huge opportunities to improve the status quo for everyone involved in this endeavor. Especially patients.

I am now applying these lessons in my next professional venture. I have joined Gokul Mohan, Stephen Stewart, and the CareHarmony team as Head of Business Operations. I am excited to bring my experience in data, technology, operations, and leadership to achieve their mission to deliver personalized, coordinated care to every patient. I hope to share more lessons from this part of my journey in the future.

In a subsequent post, I will write about the significance of mentors and cross-sector experiences in shaping my own perspective on pursuing socially-minded, mission-driven work.

Lessons I learned from my first #layoff

I have been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn in the past months. It feels strange to be back on social media in the realm of negative emotions, especially during a tumultuous time in the job market. (Leaving Twitter, Insta, FB, etc years ago after professional overuse was one of the best things about leaving politics and media, tbh).

Allow me to place a rock in this river of bad feelings and feel free to swim around it. This rock is called "thoughts I've had since being #laidoff last year for the first time in my career."

• The structure and culture of LinkedIn make it difficult to grieve. Regardless of where you are in your career or your role's development (whether you've just started a new position and are excited to learn or you were feeling stagnant and ready for a change), a layoff can abruptly alter your expected trajectory. It's important to mourn the loss of your anticipated path. However, social platforms are an awkward place to engage in mourning. Even the rest of my list skews toward positive framing, it's hard not to feel that gravitational pull on these platforms.
• All stories have ups and downs. Obstacles are a part of the overall satisfaction journey. Through numerous conversations with peers, mentors, and friends, one theme has repeatedly emerged since last year: everyone who is content and fulfilled with what they're doing has encountered obstacles in their past. Satisfaction, by definition, requires overcoming challenges. In the long run, a layoff can serve as one such obstacle on your path to where you're meant to be. However, during the low points, it's hard to see it that way.
• It's good to put your struggle in perspective, but not to undermine it. Particularly for mid-career or senior professionals who may have more options or a runway, it's easy to dismiss negative feelings in favor of making space for those with fewer opportunities. While it's important to consider your struggle in the broader workforce, undermining it, especially to yourself and your close friends and family, is unhelpful. It goes against building an inclusive community that recognizes everyone's experiences and avoids false distinctions between employee types.
• Movement is a low-cost and effective way to combat feelings of being lost. After many weeks of feeling adrift, trying to understand why (there's no really satisfying answer), and contemplating my next steps, I decided to take action. For me, this involved reaching out to people, having coffee chats, making phone and video calls within my network. I also volunteered with nonprofits and startups in my areas of interest. The act of moving forward itself was beneficial. Also, actual physical movement is extremely beneficial (I've run almost 800 miles since my layoff!).
• The absence of feedback and data can be disorienting. After spending years working in teams with trusted peers and leaders, finding myself in a feedback vacuum felt strange. I found therapy, relying on close friends and family, and volunteering to be helpful in finding a different path toward feedback and data.

This experience has been memorable. I've learned just as many lessons from being laid off as I have from any job I've had. I hope these thoughts resonate with someone else on their journey. I look forward to sharing more about my next professional endeavor soon. However, I wanted to take a moment to capture these thoughts and acknowledge this challenging period.

What I highlighted in most of March and April, 2021

I've been working on a long form writing project since mid March, so my writing, reading, watching and listening has been different from normal. Here's some of what has stuck with me in the last few weeks.

Articles

• Pankaj Mishra on Edward Said in the New Yorker

  “To be a Levantine is to live in two or more worlds at once without belonging to either,” He noted that Said’s preoccupation with representations rather than with material interests, and his prioritizing of racial inequities over class and gender oppressions, had proved especially useful to upwardly mobile academics who came to American universities from the developing world. Politicized young people today are unlikely to confine themselves to Foucault-style discourse analysis when they confront the crushing realities of inequality, gutted public services, mainstream racism, and environmental calamity. Naipaul, in Said’s view, had acquired his gilded Western reputation as a truthteller about the developing world because he elided the West’s damaging presence in it, while depicting Asians and Africans as intellectually helpless and politically confused.

• "What if, despite everything, you should have kids?"

• "Elite Panic"

  Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. But if we trust in people’s better angels, give them honest information and allow them a bit of autonomy, perhaps they will accomplish more than we can imagine. Faced with a genuine crisis, we just might surprise ourselves—again.

• Min Jin Lee on how reading taught her how to write about her immigrant family

• On the decline of Western left-leaning culture in India and the rise of nativisit, Hindutva, culture and politics

  As we proceed in the 21st century India and the world will confront two simultaneous dynamics: modernisation of the nation-state and the rise of indigenous non-Western cultural and political movements, and further international global connections and coalitions. Instead of a homogeneous world dominated by Western “Davos Man,” what we will see is a world with difficult to define texture and protean affinities which might seem ideologically nonsensical.

• Arundhati Roy on India's second COVID wave. Which is harrowing to watch from a distance. And even scarier as my family members fall sick and deal with the worst of the worst.

• A good essay pointing out some of the core tensions in the new right coalition and how difficult they will be to reconcile

• I did not know about Keynes's coauthors, like Joan Robinson

Movies

• I liked
  • Shiva Baby,
  • Ordinary People,
  • Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar

TV Shows

• I watched 3 seasons of Billions. And I'm not sure they were very good at all.
• I watched S1 of The Bureau and liked it, but didn't fall in love like a lot of people online seem to have.
• We're almost done with our rewatch of Mad Men. It goes off the rails a bit near the end.

Podcasts

• Alison Gopnik on Ezra Klein is always great. As I come up to the edge of parenting in the next few years, I'm looking forward to a lot more play in my day-to-day life. For more "explore" mode rather than "exploit" mode.

What I highlighted the week of March 7, 2021

Articles

• This 1988 essay in The NYT Book Review by a recently naturalized Bharati Mukherjee is more than 30 years old but still incredibly inspiring and a call to arms for immigrant writers that doesn't quite seem to have been taken up.

• Good interview with Stripe's Patrick Collison who is always a pleasure to read.

• The New Yorker had a somewhat surface-level piece on the spread of conspiriacy theories among Evangelicals in America. There's a lot more here, though, of course.

• The Baffler's satirical essay on how to become a Silicon Valley intellectual was pretty much on target.

• Caitlin Flanagan's long read in The Atlantic about private schools was fascinating and scary. But I would have liked some more introspection about why she sent her kids to private schools after seeing early versions of their problems from the inside.

• I loved Lee Isaac Chung's Minari and this short essay about how he started the process of writing it was wonderful. As was this appreciation by Alexander Chee.

• Vivian Gornick's descriptions of her journeys through feminism are quotable from start to finish.

Movies

• I rewatched some 80s, 90s and 2000s movies this week:

  • Boomerang

  • Presumed Innocent

  • Michael Clayton

  • RoboCop

  • Nobody's Fool

TV Shows

• We continued our rewatch of Mad Men. And started Wanda Vision, which hasn't really clicked for me.

Podcasts

• I started listening to "Smartless" with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes. They get great guests but I'm not sure it's a very good podcast otherwise.

Food for Thought: Expanding definitions of success

I gave the following talk on March 9th, 2021 at the Asian American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Food For Thought event.

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If you only take one thing away from today’s conversation, I hope it is my email address: samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. I would love to meet you, find out more about your interests and passions, and see if there’s anything I can do to help you in any endeavor. During talks like this, especially in the remote era, it can be difficult to have a meaningful connection. But they can be a good way to get to know a little about me, my interests, background and experience. And, from there, if you feel compelled, we can have a more in depth conversation where I can learn about you. So I hope at least some of you take me up on the offer to correspond over email, set up a phone call, or find some other way to continue this interaction past the hour or so that we have set aside today.

Today I’d like to talk a little about definitions of success. Especially the kinds of definitions we in the Asian American community may have grown up with. I’ll try to demonstrate my thoughts on this through two narratives. In one, I’ll describe some basics about my background, academic and professional experience. In another, I’ll do the same, but focus on some things I’m proud of that may not meet definitions of success we usually discuss.

Here’s the first version of my life so far:

• I was born in New Delhi, India. When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Bloomington-Normal, IL, not far from Champaign-Urbana. In high school, I was a swimmer, singer and did well academically. After 9/11, my interests in foreign policy and international relations bloomed.
• I came to UIUC in 2006, to major in International Studies, study Arabic and learn about the Middle East. While here, I participated in a number of student organizations including Chai-Town, AAA, ISA, Student Alumni Ambassadors, and probably others I’m forgetting now. I also worked a couple of jobs in Urbana-Champaign, coaching a swim team and working at a real estate office. I went to Dubai to study abroad and travel around the Middle East. I went to DC to intern at a political polling firm. I met some of my best friends here at UIUC, many of whom I talk to every day even though we’re spread around the country.
• In 2010, after graduation, I joined the University of Chicago to study more about the Middle East and get more academic training in the social sciences (most of my interests, at the time, were in political science and sociology, especially around the Internet and the Arab Spring, which was starting to take shape at the time).
• After a short 9 months of intense classwork and research, I finished my MA, decided I didn’t want to pursue a PhD like I once thought, so I went into the job market instead.
• A few months later, I got a job working for the Obama presidential re-election campaign. For 15 months, I worked in a dynamic organization, with great coworkers and mentors, on a discrete, meaningful problem. I learned new skills, built a professional network that I still rely on today, and got to live in Chicago, a city I love.
• In January 2013, after a successful first job, I moved to New York City, to work for a growing technology startup company called Etsy. For 2 years, I, again, learned new skills, worked with people I liked, on problems that I found meaningful and important.
• In 2015, a colleague from Etsy who had gone to work for the NYTimes reached out and asked if I might be interested in working in the NYT newsroom on a new team that was coming together called Audience Development. They needed people with data skills like I had. I had always been a news junkie, I thought journalism was one of America’s most important industries, and the NYTimes was a premier institution facing some tough challenges in the digital age.
• For the next 2 years, I learned about the readers of the NYTimes, supported editors and journalists as they tried to understand how their work was being consumed in the world and worked on urgent problems in a storied 160 year old company.
• In 2016, after contributing to some big strategy projects, I made a bid to become a strategic leader in the newsroom. With support from mentors and based on the knowledge and relationships I had developed, I became a Senior Editor for Digital Transition Strategy. For the next 3 years, I got to work on a number of projects from helping create and roll out new tools and workflows for journalists, training them in new skills like data analysis, supporting leadership in strategic projects like hiring, operations and redefining what we cover and how we cover it. I felt like I was blessed to be in the middle of the world’s most dynamic newsroom, working on interesting, impactful projects.
• In 2020, as the COVID pandemic struck, many of our 2-3 year plans became 2-week plans as we had to take the entire newsroom remote. I also started to realize that I wanted to find a way to work on some of the immediate problems we were facing as a country at this time.
• I reconnected with some of my friends from the Obama-world, and we founded a small nonprofit called Fellow Americans, to create information that would help people during COVID, help them vote, teach them about Black Lives Matter protests, talk about Climate Change and address a number of topics. By the end of the year, we ended up working directly with the Biden campaign to help elect a new president for America.

So far I’ve told you a narrative about my life that seems pretty great. If you saw my resume or found me on LinkedIn, you’d probably think I’m a pretty successful person. In fact, my guess is that the kind of people you regularly hear from in forums like these, or on podcasts, or the news, or on social media are people like this. And they are often trying to understand and recreate the conditions or causes of their success, so you too might be successful like them.

Especially in Asian American circles, success is usually defined by things like your grades when you’re in school, your salary when you get a job, the status of the company you work for, or the valuation of a company you’ve founded. Whatever the measures, the focus is on success. And success is pretty narrowly defined.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to retell my life story again. But this time, I’ll reframe the story slightly. Everything I’ve mentioned is still true. But there were a lot of other things that happened in that time. I went through obstacles. I had to ask people for help. I had to build patience and resilience. I had to take a deep look at my life and ask difficult questions of myself. And over time, I learned to see these things as successes, too, in their own way. So here’s some of that same story, but with a different emphasis.

• By the time I came to UIUC, I held my academic skills as one of the core parts of my identity. When I regularly got Cs and Ds in my Arabic classes, my confidence was rattled. During my junior year, in an International Law class, I was accused of cheating on an exam. This was a devastating experience for me. I remember coming in and asking Dr. Chih at the AACC for advice on how to handle the accusation. I remember breaking down in tears in his office, worried I might suffer consequences for something I didn’t do. Thankfully the charges never went anywhere and my poor performance in Arabic classes didn’t turn out to be the albatross I feared it may become.

  In my non-academic life, one of my lasting memories was trying to introduce more culture-based programming in the SAA and facing rebuttals every step of the way. It was clear that the organization was not thinking about its non-white constituents and had no interest in doing so. I remember one meeting in particular where I tried to mount a case for culturally-specific programs to incorporate more POC alumni in our strategy and how much push back I got on that idea. But I also remember a couple of my peers who helped me make my case and how we bonded.

  I learned important lessons through these experiences: to differentiate between good grades and a good education. To rely on people who believed in me, especially in trying times. And to build alliances to create change from within an organization.

• When I entered grad school, one of the reasons I decided not to pursue a PhD was because I realized right away how much more trained my peers were. If we were supposed to be starting at the same starting line toward a PhD, it felt like they were already two laps ahead of me. And the market for PhD grads was looking abysmal then and has only gotten worse since. So shifting my focus and going in the direction of more statistics and computer science training ended up putting me in a better position after graduation. Letting go of one of my dreams—to obtain a PhD and pursue a career in academia—ended up being one of the best things I did for myself. Here, too, was an important lesson in being open to change.

• After grad school, as I went about looking for jobs, I ran into many “no”s. In fact, most of my applications didn’t even result in “no”s, just silence. One of the jobs I wanted most, at a social science research lab at UChicago went to a classmate. I felt a deep sense of rejection. The few months that I was babysitting, tutoring and trying to find a job in Chicago coincided with a deep depression. I hit rock bottom. I tried to commit suicide. A hospital stay, investing seriously in therapy and taking medication for depression and anxiety started me on a years-long path toward addressing and learning how to care for my own mental health needs. I would say, of the things I’m most proud of in the last 15 years of my life, my experience with anxiety and depression, and my resilience in developing new mental habits is at the top of the list.

• In my jobs in politics, tech and journalism I’ve constantly faced anxiety related to imposter syndrome. I’m a young professional, these are high profile industries, each has its own contexts, practices, culture and jargon, and there are plenty of challenges when you’re trying to contribute to or lead a team in any organization. I’ve had to learn to be patient, to use good judgement about how to create change from within, to accept my own limitations, to build relationships with peers and managers to accomplish our goals together.

• I’ve also had to learn that people older or more senior people don’t always know more than me. Just because they have a “higher position” doesn’t always mean they got there through merit. But it does mean they often have more resources, connections or experience. Reframing my relationship to leaders in this way has helped with my imposter syndrome.

• Over time, some of my most cherished professional memories have been working through challenges together with a team. The experience of identifying a challenge, working on it collaboratively, and realizing that I now have the skills to take on the next set of challenges feels much more rewarding than any specific success by itself. This sort of resiliency and skill-building became the success, not any job title or salary or award.

I hope you get a sense for what I mean when I say definitions of success, especially from the kind of people you see as “successful” most often, and especially in the Asian American community, are too narrowly defined. I hope as you continue in your time at UIUC and as you enter the next phases of your life—academic, professional, personal—you’ll broaden your definitions of success to include things like

• Asking for help
• Changing your mind
• Walking toward challenging things
• Developing resilience and belief in yourself

I’ll end where I began. If anything I said today resonated with you or made you consider having more of a conversation about these topics, please reach out at samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. We can email back and forth or find some time to talk over the phone and I’d be happy to help in whatever way I can.

Thank you. I look forward to our discussion today. And to getting to know some of you more in the coming weeks.

What I highlighted the week of March 1, 2021

Articles

• Matt Yglesias on the Washington Post about the uses and abuses of anti-racist approaches.

  Nothing is gained if the different parties in this debate call each other racists or invoke the specter of “white supremacy” to discredit their opponents. The affordable-housing question requires dispassionate analysis, not the censoriousness and scolding that might be appropriate for combating expressions of traditional prejudice, such as redlining.

• A long interview with Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC's former Chief of Staff and one of the architects of the Green New Deal.

• A short, good, essay about political words being far too abstract and removed from the lived experience of everyday people

  But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

• This 2008 profile of Katie Couric has many great lines, especially this one which captures my feelings about true change and progress

  That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked.

• Jill Lepore's review of Nicole Perlroth's new book on cyberhacking is, well, scary. But it strikes familiar notes.

  The arrogant recklessness of the people who have been buying and selling the vulnerability of the rest of us is not just part of an intelligence-agency game; it has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades.

• I loved this Stella Bugbee piece about "Zizmorecore" NYC fashion trends

• Jay Caspian Kang on Asian and Black relations in America, especially in the wake of Anti-Asian violence

• This essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom about Dolly Parton, even after consuming endless amounts of Dolly Parton content and theories, was a barn burner.

• Parul Sehgal reviewing the NYT Book Review is a self-recommending.

Movies

• I watched and sort of liked:

  • People Places Things

  • I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore

  • Coming 2 America

TV Shows

• We continued our rewatch of Mad Men.

Podcasts

• I made it through the whole archive of "Working it out with Mike Birbiglia" and enjoyed most of it. It was similar to "How To Be Amazing with Micheal Ian Black," which I listened to a few months ago and also enjoyed.

• I really liked Lee Isaac Cheung's Fresh Air interview about Minari

South Asian American Leadership Conference Talk, UIUC AACC

I gave the following talk at the South Asian American Leadership Conference at the Asian American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on March 4, 2021. The theme of the conference was "Resilience" and the title of my talk was "Mentorship, Practice and Servant Leadership."

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Intro

Hello. My name is Samarth Bhaskar. I graduated from UIUC in 2010 with degrees in International Studies and Communications. Thanks to the AACC for inviting me today and to you for attending this workshop. I hope to speak for about 20-25 minutes to set some context for our time together, and then I hope we can have a conversation with comments, questions and answers all together. Since our time is short, I’ll jump right in.

As my first point: I want to congratulate you on being leaders. I don’t know any of you but the fact that you showed up to a leadership conference today is a signal that you’re leaders. I imagine that many of you hold leadership roles in your lives already. Some of those roles are officially designated as such. You might be a vice president or president of a student group, you might be a supervisor at your workplace, or you might TA a class on campus. Other roles are probably more unofficial. Maybe you’re the roommate who herds everyone together to do apartment chores on time. Or you’re the family member who picks where to go out to dinner, when we used to do such things. There are big and small ways in which you’re already a leader and already exhibiting leadership qualities in your life.

One of the first steps you can take toward being a successful leader is to think of yourself as a leader. Thinking of yourself as a leader primes you to take responsibility for your growth, your actions, how you approach your peers and people who look to you for leadership. So showing up to a leadership conference is a great start. Check that off the to-do list.

Secondly: I want to say something that might immediately undermine everything else I say subsequently. I don’t think there’s much I can say here today that will make you a better leader. I’m going to try, but in my experience with leadership conferences and classes, you’ll probably remember little to none of it as soon as our time together is over. And that’s ok! Like I said, even just showing up here together is a positive thing. You could have been sitting on your couch day-dreaming about a trip to Insomnia Cookies, but you showed up here instead.

I think we can do two things to address this. The first is that you can note down my email address. It is samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com. After our hour or so here today, I hope some of you will reach out to me and we can find some time for a phone or video call so I can learn more about you, what you’re thinking about or focused on these days, and how I might be able to help you. That’s probably the best way I can directly help you. I wish there was some other way to have meaningful interactions these days, but this is basically the best I’ve found. So if any of what we talk about today resonates with you or kicks off a thought or question, please reach out to me.

The second thing we can do is change the context of our time together slightly. Instead of me imparting some knowledge about leadership or sharing #LeadershipHacks, let’s consider this a conversation. I’ll share some of my background, experiences and ideas about leadership. They’re mostly stories about my academic, professional and personal journey. With some theories or ideas about what leadership development can look like. And you, listeners, can consider how or if these ideas apply to your life now or in the near future.

UIUC Background

I’ll start at the beginning. I was born in New Delhi and raised in Bloomington-Normal, IL, not far from Urbana-Champaign. I came to UIUC in 2006 with fledgling interests in foreign policy, international relations, and the Middle East. 9/11 influenced much of my academic, political and social interests as I came out of high school. While I was at UIUC, I got involved in student organizations. I ended up playing a leadership role in T.E.A.M, Asian American Association, Indian Student Association, Student Alumni Ambassadors and Chai Town. Most of what I learned as a leader in college happened in these environments not in classrooms, conferences or workshops.

One big exception was LeaderShape. Do any of you know of or have you participated in LeaderShape? It’s a multi-day leadership conference that’s been around for more than 25 years. I believe it is still available, although may be altered to fit remote needs. If you get a chance to attend it while you’re here, I highly recommend it. There was something about that conference: the fact that we were all staying at a remote location off campus, that we had lots of unstructured time for writing, reflection and conversations, the way activities and small groups were structured, the number of people who attended and chaperoned; many specific memories still stick in my head. And I remember leadership lessons from it more than any other singular event.

But beyond that, the leadership skills and lessons I picked up at UIUC primarily happened in small, day-to-day interactions with students, faculty and staff. Instead of a body of knowledge, I now realize leadership is more a style, an approach and a set of habits. And it’s probably best learned through apprenticeship. This is why most of what we’ll do today won’t really matter. The things that will truly teach you how to be a good leader will happen in small moments throughout your time at UIUC and beyond. Leadership is something you’ll practice, now and forever basically indefinitely into the future.

You’ll practice first by emulating mentors, so you should very mindfully acquire good mentors. Mentors can be all sorts of people: family, peers, teachers, coworkers. Look for people to learn from in all parts of your life. Finding and cultivating mentor relationships was something I first did (knowingly and unknowingly) at U of I.

Mentors

I had mentors of all sorts. People like my Chai Town friend Sid, a graduate student at the time, who indulged my interests in reading about and discussing news events. And who, when visiting my family one day, told my Dad that he believed I would go places in life. That my interests and talents would be useful academically and professionally. His belief in me helped me believe in myself and helped me convince my parents that I was pursuing worthwhile things in college.

There were people like Dr. Chih at the AACC, who helped me as I led multiple student groups. Dr. Chih’s leadership in creating a place like the AACC gave me a home base for all my outside-the-classroom interests. And watching him and other student and faculty leaders over 4 years gave me models for the kind of leader I might want to be.

People like Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, who taught a course in comparative political science at the time (maybe still), who again took my interests and passions seriously. And just by the fact that he was himself (when you’re the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi you can’t help but carry a certain weight in any room you enter), I felt emboldened to pursue my interests more seriously. He was interested in learning about me and providing advice, and this filled my sails. People like my sociology professor Jennifer Carrera who pushed me to think deeply about my interests in the media, to interrogate my assumptions about race, the internet, the Middle East and held me to a high academic standard.

Mentors come in all forms. The art of finding, pursuing and engaging with mentors is worthy of a whole conversation in and of itself. And it’s something I’m still trying to figure out every day. For now, I’ll just leave this point here by saying: consider mentorship a central part of your leadership development journey. Find, pursue and engage with mentors of all sorts. Especially ones who believe in you. Make learning from them a top priority as a leader.

Practice

The next step in leadership development for me was practicing it in day-to-day interactions. This didn’t feel like leadership development, mostly it felt like living my life, but in retrospect most of what I learned about leadership while at UIUC came from small interactions, day-to-day challenges, and problems I faced as an individual or as a member of the small communities I was a part of. When I think back on my time here, more than any specific lesson or idea about leadership, I think about road trips with my acappella group where one of the members needed advice on a relationship or how to deal with his family. And how listening or being kind in that moment was the best thing I could do. Responding empathetically to the needs of my friends was, it turned out, a leadership quality.

Practice also looked like group meetings where I advocated for culturally-specific programming that accounted for a diverse student body instead of homogenous programming that looked like what student groups had done for years and years. It was difficult to advocate for that. I was the only person pushing for it sometimes. I faced pushback from others. But I knew it was the right thing to do, and I had to work hard to build coalitions of like-minded people to persuade others to come along. I failed many times and succeeded only a few. It was through these experiences that I learned how to shape my approach to leadership. These experiences helped me find out what kind of leader I was supposed to be, to lean into my strengths and abilities rather than try to be something I’m not.

Since UIUC, I’ve continued to learn about leadership through mentorship and practice. Professionally, especially for my first couple of jobs after graduation, I prioritized joining teams and finding managers from whom I could learn a lot. This was important for technical skills I needed to learn as a data analyst. But also important for organizational skills that have become useful over time. Things like: how to manage an effective meeting, what good feedback looks and sounds like, how to lead through influence and persuasion rather than authority, or how to balance the competing needs of leadership and staff in an organization.

One of the best places to practice some of the tenets of leadership are with myself. Although leadership is mostly understood as a social thing, something you do outwardly, in a way that affects at least one other person outside of you, I would say that much of what leadership is made of applies when you’re alone, too. The person you’ll lead most in your life is yourself.

The things I do when no one is asking anything of me—reading, writing, meditating, watching movies, listening to podcasts, exercising, cooking, cleaning—all these things teach me things about myself and about the world. They set my habits and shape my personality when stress is low and the pressure is off. So when stress increases in a professional or personal situation, these habits can kick in. Very little of what you’ll do as a leader will happen for the first time in a high pressure situation. When the opportunity to lead arises, you’ll likely respond by instinct. Shaping these instincts and behaviors when you’re alone is good practice.

So, as was my experience while at UIUC and in my life since, leadership has primarily been something I’ve learned and honed through mentors and through deliberate practice. I recommend all of you give some serious thought to finding and courting good mentors in this phase of your life, and hopefully in subsequent phases, too. And that you develop some deliberate practices to sharpen your leadership skills throughout your life.

So that’s a little bit about the mechanics of leadership development. That still leaves a big question unanswered: why should we work on leadership skills? To what end? What do you do when you’ve acquired these skills and you find yourself in a leadership position?

Servant leadership

Here I want to talk about servant leadership. Is this a phrase familiar to anyone here? It has been in and out of vogue for longer than most of us have been alive. The American version of Servant Leadership traces back to Robert Greenfield in his 1964 book of the same name. Greenfield was an executive at AT&T in the middle of the century, where he researched management, leadership, development and education. The main tenets of his philosophy can be summarized in 10 or so principles. Things like: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community. These things are not difficult to define. I bet you might be able to define them yourselves by just hearing them enumerated.

The idea of servant leadership is also present in South Asian cultures. “Seva” or being a good “sevak” was a central tenet in independence movements, in Hinduism and Buddhism and more recently has even been brought up in political environments like PM Modi calling himself the “Pradhan Sevak” or Prime Servant of India. I’ll withhold any more commentary about how appropriate or inappropriate those terms are, politically, for now. But suffice to say, there are strong cultural and historical connections between servant leadership and South Asian culture.

More than any specific definition, servant leadership is again better understood as an approach, a set of habits and attitudes or a set of values. To me, servant leadership is an idea I come back to when I feel like leadership is frustrating or challenging or when I don’t know exactly what next step to take. In these moments, I stop and ask myself: “how can I be of service to the people I’m leading?” I don’t always do this at the right time. I don’t always do this in the most graceful or patient way. But the times when I’ve stopped and asked myself this question, then asked the people around me this question, and then earnestly set about trying to serve them, have been among the most satisfying leadership moments in my memory so far.

For example, between 2015-2020, I worked at the New York Times. For most of that time, I helped lead a team that was responsible for the digital transition of the NYT newsroom. The Times is a large, historic, traditional, organization. It was founded in 1851, it is still majority owned by its founding family the Sulzbergers, and it is arguably the most powerful journalism institution in the world. To manage the transition from a premiere print newsroom to a premiere digital newsroom was no small ask. Time and again, the team I helped lead was asked to take on huge projects like training 1600 journalists, across the world, in new publishing workflows and systems. We trained hundreds of journalists in data analysis skills. We created systems for goal setting, feedback, and setting and evaluating editorial strategy.

These projects had to strike a balance: we had to push the organization to change quickly but not so fast that the staff would feel overwhelmed or unduly burdened. Whenever we ran into difficulties, we tried our best to go back to basics. Listen to staff. Persuade them these changes were worthwhile and the right thing to do. Build consensus and buy-in so people felt ownership of the changes, too. Increase our empathy with people who were working very hard and being asked to do a lot. Provide opportunities for airing of grievances and healing. As much as possible, approaching these challenges through the lens of “serving” the organization, its leadership, its people, was worth trying to get right.

One of the things I learned to do through this approach was to see the importance of storytelling in leadership. As leaders, one thing you’ll be entrusted with is people’s attention. What you do with their attention, how you choose to serve them, what stories you choose to tell them will be very important. At the Times, it became very important to craft narratives that reflected back onto the staff that what we were doing was hard but that it was working. We were staying true to the important tenets of journalism while changing the way the organization worked, or who worked there, or what kinds of editorial choices we made. When we were successful in telling this story, people felt motivated to take on challenging things. When we failed, frustrations grew.

In fact, I’ve come to believe in the last few years, some of the strongest failures of leadership in our society, even at the national political level or with our media, are failures of storytelling. Our leaders have failed at this core responsibility. But I digress.

How to develop empathy

The development of these skills is as much a personal project as anything you’ll learn at work or through mentorship or leadership books or classes. How you go about accomplishing this task will be as unique as your own fingerprint. Some of you might try therapy. Some of you might dive in and start your own company and become a leader on the job. Others might read books or attend talks or get more academic training like an MBA or JD. Some of you might realize that you don’t want leadership positions in every aspect of your life, so you’ll take a step back at work or at home and let someone else take the wheel. Your path will be yours to shape and walk down.

I’ll mention something that may sound counter-intuitive but I’ve found it very useful in my own journey in developing some of these core servant leadership skills: watching movies, reading books, listening to podcasts, engaging with art, listening to music and writing. Engaging critically with art is basically an unparalleled activity when it comes to some of the key aspects of developing servant leadership qualities. One of the most important qualities servant leadership requires is empathy. Art is an empathy generating machine, as Roger Ebert once said. Art helps you understand the world, different people in it, your relationship to it, and what you want from it, in ways that almost nothing else can. And it’s pleasurable, to boot!

I hope many of you are fans of these things already. And maybe some of you already think about your relationship to art in similar terms. But if you just think of it as something you do with your free time, something you do to “turn your brain off,” I encourage you to reconsider that. Even if you think art isn’t doing anything to you, try to decipher it more and see how it may be changing you. Spend time thinking about movies and books and music and so on and see how it can help you with some of those servant leadership qualities. Read books like “Better Living Through Criticism” by AO Scott to develop critical habits.

Open for discussion

I’ve been speaking for a while and I promised I would leave time for conversation. So let me wrap up here.

Find and cultivate mentors. Practice leadership in your day-to-day life, especially when you’re alone. Consider leadership a servant position. Engage with art to expand your empathy. And email me at samarth.bhaskar@gmail.com to talk about any of these things and more if you’d like.

Thank you. I’m eager to know if any of these things struck a chord for you or brought up any questions. I’ll do my best to moderate a discussion for our remaining time.