Vikrama Dhiman: preference

Transcript context

…Wow, there's so much meat and wisdom in what you just shared. I want to go in so many different directions. Maybe just to follow on this last thread, did you go through something like that yourself where you have this sense of yourself that hindered you? Okay, awesome. You're nodding your head, if you're not on YouTube. Can you share that? Yeah. So I'll give an example of when I joined Gojek. The very first thing that I learned in my career was SQL and Oracle. And I was very proud of the fact that my data skills are awesome and I know several frameworks and I know several tools and so on. And when I joined Gojek and I saw one of your guests, Crystal, and I saw the work that she was doing and her team was doing and I just immediately was like, "Yeah, no, this is not... I'm nowhere near", right? And similarly, I also thought that my communication skills are really good and my product strategy skills are very good, but then I worked with people like Dito and people like Sidu who was so good at their craft that it challenged me to see that okay, what is it that I am missing? What is it that I am doing wrong? And it auto-calibrated me in my eyes on where it was, but that also created a hunger in me that this is what I need to fix. And I immediately corrected my assessment of myself that I'm not the strongest product manager on data. I'm not the one who knows all the strategy pieces or even strategy frameworks or how to bring everything to a strategy point of view or communicate it from an effective perspective. And then I started framing I'm still in a learning phase. When I see that I'm not in that phase now, I try and make myself humble by interacting with people who are far smarter than me on different scale or reading different books, or watching podcasts like yourselves. And that keeps you grounded on the fact that okay, you are always learning. And I also found that seeing yourself as someone who's a learner is an enabling story to tell yourself, okay? It may not be the most exciting story, it may not be the most memorable story about yourself, but it is definitely one of the enabling stories as well. Similarly, I think one other thing that I used to say about myself was more that I'm very high agency PM. But as I started working more in Southeast Asia, I learned that mindfulness is also very, very important, that not every team, not every culture will work with you in a very hyper aggressive style. But you still need to get the work done. And I'm still learning on that and therefore, I've started using a word, I don't want to be a high agency person, I want to be a mindful agency person. And so these terms are very important because these are the stories that you keep telling yourself and these also then start shaping your behavior. I do feel that I have a lot to do, I have a lot to learn on these skills, but these things definitely keep you grounded and you keep coming back to the learning phase again. It's interesting that when you saw Crystal being incredibly good at working with data, you just realized, "Hey, maybe I'm actually not very good at this." And your reaction wasn't, "God damn it, I'm really screwed and this is really depressing me", it's, "No, instead I'm going to try to get better at this." And that reminds me some of the feedback I get with this podcast, those people are like, "Man, these people are so good, I'm never going to be this good. It discourages me from thinking I will ever be super successful in this career." Clearly, you have a different approach. Do you have advice or guidance to folks that are sometimes discouraged seeing people being so incredible and helping them actually continue to level up in this rate of change you talked about versus just like, "Nope, I'm never going to be that good?"…

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