Utkarsh Amitabh, founder of Network Capital, argues against "follow your passion" and proposes ikigai, a framework combining what you're good at, what the world needs, and what pays. He built a peer-to-peer mentoring community to 50,000 mentors across 104 countries without paid marketing, and advocates replacing the gig economy with a purpose economy through radical collaboration.
Chapters
Follow your passion. Ring the bell. The phrase follow your passion has grown up by 900% since 1990. It's ironic that we live in a time where the phrase follow your passion is bandied about left, right and center. However, avenues to build meaningful careers are few and far between. We are doing our best to standardize creativity and democratize mediocrity, leaving Jack a dull boy and Jill thoroughly dissatisfied. You know, you don't find your passion by sitting under a tree and waiting for the metaphoric apple to fall. I was trying to do that. The apple never fell. That's where I stumbled into this beautiful Japanese philosophy of ikigai, which is at the confluence of four primary who you are, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The beauty of ikigai is that it transforms this wild goose chase of passion into experimental discovery of purpose. Try and imagine in schools, in boardrooms, in classrooms, what if we, instead of competing with each other, collaborated instead of focusing on our differences, try and explore synergies with this very simple idea that every single person in the world has something to learn and something to teach. I set up network capital in three years, in three years, without spending a single dollar on marketing, we have grown to become a global tribe of 50,000 mentors coming from 104 countries. Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, you name it, we have people from there. And you know what the first thing that I've realized? Young people don't want to build walls and firewalls. We want to build bridges across borders, boundaries. Differences don't matter to us. We wish to explore synergies. I took career as the focus point because no matter who you are, you want to build a meaningful career. So if you won't build a meaningful career by chasing passion, how is it that you're going to do it? So because everyone has something to learn and something to. I realized all we really need to do is to build a community and put forward a culture where sharing is incentivized. With this philosophy, we partnered with Government of India's ATAL Innovation mission. And for the past two years, we are on the process of building the world's largest mentoring program. Built on the philosophy of peer to peer learning, it operates at three levels. The first is our partnership with the government where young professionals, a lot like INC fellows, go from boardrooms to classroom to share why they do what they do. This process that bridges the boardroom classroom divide and most importantly, gives children mental models to think about so that they can build careers that they truly care about. It's not a wild goose chase of passion. It's an exploratory discovery of purpose. The second level at which we operate is trying to really enhance career intelligence. Even in this room, if you ask many people, why do you do what you do? The answers will baffle you. So what I've stumbled through, my adventure of building network capital is that the best way to do is to have people come forward and talk openly about their failures, their successes, why they did what they did, what they realized, and, and by sharing it at scale, magic happens. Allow me to nerd out a little bit. 50,000, 104 countries, good number. But the real power of a network, as Metcalfe tells us this is the Metcalfe law, not the Metcalfe that I played in. The play is actually the square of the trusted nodes. So 50,000 square, that's a lot of zeros. So if there's one thing that we've done really well is that we have scaled trust across borders, across boundaries. While politicians are talking about different things that are not working, celebrating war, we are trying to enhance trust. And as a byproduct of this democratizing career intelligence, we have seen offshoots come out. Delhi has a huge pollution problem. So one young woman started a network capital subgroup focused on trying to address the pollution issue in her own way by bringing together peers that she had previously collaborated with for work. That's the magic that happens when you bring different kinds of people together. Look, as we march into the future, one of the hardest skills that we'll have to develop is the ability to reinvent ourselves. And we can't reinvent ourselves alone. It's lonely, it's boring. I invite you to stop following your passion and abandon these kinds of phrases. Instead, follow your curiosity, Tinker away to success. As we speak, we are seeing a subtle shift from this gig economy, uber for X model into the purpose economy. And I invite you to join this purpose economy by radically collaborating with each other. The power of community is that it really takes the pressure off you as we march into the future, as we celebrate the future of work and the infinite possibilities that AI and other technologies will unleash. This human to human connection has the ability to change the world. Look, network capital is one peer learning platform. It's one community. We've stumbled upon an interesting business model and we've scaled. However you can either join such a learning community or, or set up your own. The beauty of peer learning is that anyone can do it all. You need to do is to shift your mindset from competing with each other for standardized goals that were set for Jack and Jill into collaborating with each other through peer to peer learning. Thank you very much.
