Need for a Sustainable Mindset Among Youth - Aswin Sarang | AIESEC UAE

So I was actually working on a presentation to come here and talk about green technology and sustainability and stuff. I spent the last 2 days, you know, I was a little bit confused. What do I talk about? Because you guys are youngsters, most of the information that I'm going to come here and talk about, you already know. It's just a Google search away. And even if I were to do it, I would most probably ChatGPT it, right? Same like you guys do. But then today morning something happened. I was working on something, but today morning something happened. My colleague here, his name is Naufal. So Naufal, today morning he showed up, and when he showed up in the office, he had a ball in his hand, a small ball, and was all covered up. Apparently, on his way to work, he decided to buy a goldfish. Okay, he bought one goldfish, okay, and one ball. There were some bubbles and stuff inside. Yellow in color. I didn't get a chance to take a good look at it. And he brought it to the office. His idea was that, you know, he's going to put it in the office and it's going to look nice, right? I don't know if he was feeling lonely in the office, maybe he needed a friend or something. I don't know, he didn't tell me about that. So he brought it to the office, he put it down, and I was looking at it, and I looked at it for a while.

What?

It's a small bowl, okay? The water is filled up to 3/4 of the bowl. When I say a small bowl, it's this small, okay? And that's only fish, okay? And the fish is just floating down. And I was looking at the fish. For me, it looked depressed.

Okay.

Why did he decide to, you know, bring a goldfish into the office? Because it's a goldfish, right? Goldfish looks nice and it adds— it's more like an accessory to the office, right? It's just gonna float around, looks nice. Maybe someone's gonna ask about it and it's a good conversation opener. But at the end of the day, Just a single fish in a small bowl. What do you guys think about it? Give it a thought.

She's also lonely.

Yeah, she's lonely and she has very small space to move around, not much water. That's not its natural habitat. I asked him, he told me I gave him a house. Okay, like I took him from that aquarium, I gave him food, I'm giving him food, I'm giving him a house. You know, that's what he said. But then, is he?

No.

No, right? Doesn't look like it. How many of you have aquariums at home? Oh, you're gonna lie? Come on, come on, be honest. You do. Okay, maybe you can explain to me why you have it. Okay, do you want to talk about it?

Yeah.

Okay, sure.

So we wanted a showpiece, like, you know, something that makes our house more lively and beautiful. But also we had a long life desire of having a pet, so we got that in terms of fishes. Very easy to manage, very easy to live, and quite adaptable. All we had to do was buy them a good amount of food, have a good clean purified or filterization process in our aquarium, And yeah, give them like, you know, daily care, just like looking for the waste and just cleaning up with the filter too. So it's very quite less maintenance and very easy. And also they are beautiful, and you know, having them in water is a very good attraction of our house. So a very easy maintenance, yet beautiful, and yet simple elegance. So we have those.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story. What do you guys think? Hmm? Nobody looks inspired about the story. If I didn't talk about my goldfish, I mean Naufel's goldfish, you might have taken that as an inspiring story, right?

Maybe.

Maybe, maybe. But think about it. She started— she was honest, she's very honest. She said it's a good showpiece. She started by explaining that's a good showpiece, right? And you have a lot of fishes, right? A lot of fishes in there. And, uh, can you show me how big the aquarium is? Very big. Okay, is that enough? Hmm?

No.

You don't think so, right? You guys have a lot of passion. You're all working towards your dreams. If I restrict you to a single office, will you be happy? And I'm telling you that you're gonna stay in this office, you're gonna work the same job for the next 40 years. Are you going to be happy? Okay, let's just expand it a little bit more. I'm going to restrict you to that city. Will you be happy? Okay, let me just restrict you, expand a bit and restrict you to a country. Will you be happy? You guys have to be loud. I want to know everyone's opinion.

No.

No, right? Let's just say you have plans to stay in the country and build a family here and build a career here. But maybe that's the plan, but you still don't think that, you know, you don't want to be restricted still, right? Why is that?

Just knowing that you're restricted makes you want to go outside that restriction.

That's a belief system, right? You always want to explore more, right? Curiosity. There's so many things, right? Every living organism has that. Now we are gonna catch a bunch of fish, we're gonna put it in a fish tank. Doesn't matter how big, right? If you have more money, we're gonna spend on a bigger tank. Doesn't matter if you put the most premium air filtration system. Doesn't matter, you're still restricted. Are you guys starting to think?

Yes.

Okay, now I show up here. Okay, I bring in a lot of information in terms of green technology and sustainable innovation. I'm gonna give you a 30-minute lecture on that. It's not— I don't think it's gonna be of much benefit to you because of course carbon emissions didn't reduce even if— even after we switched to EVs. A lot of countries moved to fully electric, but problems didn't solve. We still have global warming problem. We still have wildfires. All the problems remain the same even after in the last 40 years we've been doing things sustainably. Why is that? Ideally, even if you look at the data, right, we did have few people interested in data as well. Why isn't the data changing even after all these initiatives?

Because we're restricting them to use specific methods.

Exactly. There's something wrong with the way we're doing things. If you want to change the world, you have to change nations. If you want to change a country, you have to change—

People's mind.

You have to change the country itself. If you want to change the country, you have to change the province. You want to change the province, you have to change the state. You want to change the state, you want to change the city. And if you want to change the city, you have to change the village. And what is the building block of a village? It's families. If you want to improve your family, you have to change yourself. You have to change yourself as an individual. Sustainability isn't about doing things. Sustainability is about having the right sustainable mindset. You don't have to go to Ivy League colleges to learn these things. All you have to do is get out of your house, just look at the life around. There's so much to learn from that. You understand what it's like to have a sustainable mindset? This is the beginning of everything. You need to have a sustainable mindset. Based on your sustainable mindset, you will make certain choices in life, certain decisions in life, which eventually leads to improvement of the planet. Agree or not? Are you guys starting to think?

Yes.

You're gonna go outside and you're gonna start looking at things, and with this mindset, you wouldn't agree to many things that's happening around you. All right, so we're gonna move forward, okay? So there is— you see the problem, right? There's something wrong with the way we're doing things. So if I come here and talk about the latest innovations in EV technology, is it gonna add any value to your life? Is it gonna add any value to the way that you're thinking about things? Someone's gonna talk about it, right? The discussion has to pop up somewhere. You're the future generations. You have so much responsibilities on your shoulder. Not only you have to fix the problems we made, you also have to fix your own things and build a new technology and innovate. The kind of responsibility that you guys have on your shoulder is quite big. See, there's 4 kinds of people in the world: one who creates the problems, one who solves these problems, one who thinks it's not my problem. So I don't care. Then 4th people who has no clue about the problems or solutions, you can label them as ignorant people. So it's a matter of which team that you want to be on. You want to be on the side of problems, or do you want to be on the side of solution, or you want to be on the side of, okay, it's not my problem, I don't care, or you just want to live a blissful life where none of these problems matter to me. But eventually it is going to get to you. Right? When you start paying more on your bills, when petrol prices go up, when you start to get a job and get a vehicle and start paying for, you know, petrol, then you realize, okay, now it has become my problem. You guys are all the decision makers of the future. How do you make a decision?

Based on your mindset.

Based on your mindset, based on enough understanding. There is a saying in an old scripture, if a swan wants to fly, it needs 2 wings. Okay? The one wing is knowledge. The second wing is action. Having knowledge isn't just enough. You also have to take action. See, I haven't given you any new information today. I just told you, question the things that you already know. See if this information is the right fit. See if it's benefiting you, your environment. Your result— you as an individual is a result of your environment. If your environment is not healthy, you as an individual cannot sustain. The air that you breathe is not good enough, it's going to create problems for you, correct? If the environment that you're in, be it air, be it water, if all these things are contaminated, you're contaminated because the same elementals that you see outside, you're made of the same things. That's why it's important enough to have a sustainable mindset.

Okay?

You guys wanna know more? I have nothing else to offer you. I didn't come here to offer you anything. I just come here to help you guys think better. Because information's out there. I can only store limited amount of information here. I can come, give out a nice presentation, you guys are gonna read through it, show a bunch of data, but I think That's not going to make you question. That's not going to make you learn more. So it's a serious problem. That's why you have to bring your attention to it. See where you can contribute. I'm a polymath. I do multiple things. I have multiple skill sets. You can Google me up. You'll find it. Also, you also have to become that. You also have to learn multiple skill sets. Because if you want to contribute back, like I said, you need knowledge. Second part comes taking action. Now the important thing about action is any action that you take, you have to see through its end. This way you will build the humility. Humans need to have humility.

Why do we need to see it to the end and how does humility have to play with it?

Could you say that again?

Why do we have to see our actions to the end and how does humility play into this whole concept?

Let's just say that you want to make a difference. Forget about world problems, right? Let's just look at your problem, right? Let's just say, let's take something small. Maybe you're ambitious and you want to build a career, right? You gathered enough knowledge. Now you're taking an action. Now when you take an action based on your awareness, based on your knowledge, you might not know, or you might know what the outcome would be. But is the outcome set? Outcome can change. How would you know what the outcome is? You'll have to see it to the end. 2 things can happen. You either will learn what not to do or you will learn what to do. Both lessons are important. If you learn what to do, it'll take you to the top or take you where you want to go. If you learn what not to do, you will not end up wasting time repeating the same mistake. You have to learn to love your failures. Okay, actionable insights are always better. Expertise matters. Okay, so see your actions to the end. God bless you all.

Okay, okay, thank you so much for your space. I think definitely I'm— I don't know about you guys, but I'm thinking from different lens and I'm questioning everything. I'm like, is that real? Let me just Google it. Let me get answers for something. So yeah, thank you so much for letting me feather out my thoughts first.