How to build a career of purpose
In May 2021, we had a fireside chat with Roshan Paul - founder and former president of Amani Institute, a school that develops professionals for the social sector and co-author of ‘The New Reason to Work: How to Build a Career That Will Change the World’.
Through his work, Roshan has launched hundreds, if not thousands of careers of purpose. In the fireside chat, we talk about where the rising desire for work with purpose comes from, the range of options in impact careers, the skills we need to build such careers and how we can tell the stories of our careers more effectively.
Watch the full recording 👇, browse the key takeaways below 👇👇 and find a full transcript of the chat👇👇👇.
Key take-aways
8:34 Where does the trend of purpose-driven work come from? And why now?
It’s an age-old desire, for instance: the basics of religion center around doing good for other people and the planet.
Big global shifts seem to bring more people to do good, e.g. 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, climate change, the pandemic. They have left people questioning what they are doing with their lives.
Companies that have a larger purpose than profits seem to perform better than those that do not.
That’s no wonder: pursuing a higher purpose can give you a sense of fulfillment and sense of happiness.
14:23 Yet…Why does the quest for purpose create so much anxiety?
Roshan explains that anxiety around finding purpose stems from a lack of information. Career progression was anchored around pursuing traditional professions such as banking, teaching, medicine. The shift has people opting for nonlinear careers.
Whereas 20 years ago the options of working for purpose-driven organizations was limited to UN agencies, a few social enterprises, government agencies, now there are many microfinance institutions, consulting firms, sustainability organizations and the range of options has grown.
18:10 How can we align what we do to our purpose?
Roshan suggests the following tips to help you get started;
Identify the issue you are passionate about addressing. For example, climate change.
Narrow down to the specific issue such as renewable energy, marine life conservation, wildlife conservation, sustainable travel..etc
Explore job options in the identified field and the skills you already have or need to learn to work in that area.
Consider volunteering in the field to connect and learn from the people already in the field.
23:25 True or false: making a living and making a difference are mutually exclusive.
“In some ways it’s the quest for more and more money that is leading humanity to some of the problems we are facing today” - Roshan
It is a myth.
Having a purpose-driven career should be motivated by other factors aside from making money.
As changemakers, we are trying to solve problems caused by the unending quest for growth and money.
But…There are very well-paying jobs in the impact sector in the various global NGOs and the private sector.
29:12 What skills do you need for impact careers?
Creativity and innovation
Leadership skills
Communication: social media, interpersonal skills, storytelling, branding
Management skills: project management, financial management, technology
These are basic skills required for most types of jobs but what makes them different in the social impact space is how they are applied. We teach that at Amani Institute.
37:19 What would you advise people working in social impact careers who are frustrated when they can’t solve the problems they seek to address?
Think of a career with purpose as a marathon not a sprint. Many of the problems have been around for millennia and they are not easy to solve in one lifetime. Take small leaps and focus on the impact you see. Be patient with yourself and your cause, and invest in things that keep you grounded
43:38 How do you tell your story more effectively in the impact space?
People are moved by stories. Every story has a beginning, middle and end. Every story has a protagonist (you) and a moral of the story(lesson). Look back at the defining moments in your career, in your life and convey the story in a human way.
“Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason we did it.” - Roshan
FULL TRANSCRIPT
AM: Hi, everyone, welcome. So good to see you. And first and foremost, welcome Roshan.
But before we get started, I just want to make sure that I've given Roshan a proper introduction. Roshan was educated at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he studied with, amongst others, Marshall Ganz, who was kind of the godfather of storytelling - which is why I thought of you as a guest essayist for Brand The Change on storytelling.
You started your career at Ashoka. And then had this massive insight that we weren't actually training professionals for the social sector. So how we make a difference in the world is actually a profession and a skill.
You found at the Amani Institute with the goal of training those impact professionals and after 10 amazing years in which you've probably educated hundreds, if not 1000s of people and started many people on the track of creating a difference in the world, you have now stepped out of Amani and you're pursuing a new chapter in your life.
The reason why I wanted to have you speak to us in the brand change community is that a lot of us are building careers or purpose or attempting to do so. It's obviously incredibly hard and I know that you have a wealth of knowledge and you have an upcoming book on the topic as well. So it's really lovely to have you on board.
AM: a lot OF people around the world ARE looking for careers of purpose, a way to make a difference right now. where do you think that is coming from?
RP: I would say, big picture, that modern psychology is actually finally catching up with ancient religion and what it's been saying for centuries. I'm not a religious person, but I do know that whether it's Christianity, whether it's Islam, whether it's Buddhism, all religions have the main messages to help other people and do as much good for others as you can. And today, psychology is catching up with that.
There's lots of research showing that when we have a larger purpose than just ourselves, making money, or, you know, feeding our family or achieving our own highest promotion— when we have a greater purpose than that something to do with helping other people something to do with helping the planet, we actually end up leading more fulfilled, and happier lives.
You know, one example comes from this organization called the Happiness Research Institute. And they did a study that showed that when you account for all other factors, having a purpose is the single, larger purpose and making money is the single largest predictor of job satisfaction out there. So that's one. I think it's also being driven in more recent times by some big global shifts. 911, the financial crashes of 2008 and 2016. And for many people, and the kind of right word shift for global politics and society, climate change, COVID as well. All of these have meant a lot of people have questioned what it is that they're doing with their lives.
My own career started off when I was looking for a job, just finishing college and 911 happened, and the US had a lot of violent conversations. And meanwhile, in India, my home country was also struck with terrorist attacks and really bad, violent ethnic riots in Gujarat. And I was graduating and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I realized that it can't just be about making money, there had to be something more important out there. And that's just my own story. But I know so many people who said that they could have been in the Twin Towers very easily in 2001. Or they lost all their savings in 2008 and they realized, “What am I working for if it's just all about money?”
So I think that those are a couple of the drivers. One of the things that are making it easier, of course, is technology. And the fact that it's cheaper to have a good life today, thanks to technology than it ever has been. So many things that even the poor today take for granted, would have been considered unimaginable luxuries 100 years ago. So our lives are constantly getting easier because of technology. I'm not saying there are no downsides to that. But I am saying that it allows us to know that we can meet our basic needs easier than we ever could in human history. And that allows us to think more broadly, about what we want to do with our lives and how we can make a difference in our lives.
And then finally, I would say, a lot of academic research coming out of the private sector shows that companies that have a larger purpose than making money are doing better financially. So the bottom line, you know, the profit is actually getting better if the company explicitly talks about having a larger purpose than just shareholder returns. And those companies on the stock market outperforming companies that don't, large private equity investors are starting to say they're more likely to invest in companies that are trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change. And that's causing huge ripple effects. So I think there's a lot of these different factors that are coming together, and pushing all of us to consider our careers in a different way than maybe our parents did, 20 or 30 years ago.
AM: having a higher purpose gives you a sense of fulfillment and of happiness - that seems very logical. But at the same time, everyone I know who's trying to pursue that career of purpose has lot of anxiety and about finding that purpose, let alone putting it to practice. Do you recognize that? Why is it so hard for people to figure out what the purpose in their life is or how to bring that into their work?
RP: Yeah, absolutely.
I think I was fortunate to grow up professionally in the social entrepreneurship sector, where I was surrounded by people who had been blazing this path forward.
And, you know, I've met 500,000 changemakers, and social entrepreneurs who have been doing this without even questioning it in their minds. So for me growing up, as I was starting my career, it was easy to find these people and be inspired by them. But I recognize once I started getting into the work of helping more people to join the change-making movement, so to speak.
Yes, it is a big source of anxiety for a lot of people and I would say there's a couple of reasons for that. The first is that we still don't know a lot about careers with purpose. And as you mentioned, we have a book coming out in the fall that I'm writing with my co-founder. We're trying to demystify a little bit what it means to have a career with a higher purpose or a career of impact. And I think most people don't have much of a sense because the traditional knowledge we have about careers is ‘a good career’. What's a good career? A good career is where you're in banking, or law or technology, whatever. And that's kind of how we're conditioned to think about it. And most people don't realize how large the range of opportunities in social impact today are and how much they've grown, especially in the last 20 years.
So whereas when I was starting my career, you probably only had UN Agencies, big NGOs, a few social enterprises and government. That's what you were choosing from. Today, you've got on top of that, micro-finance institutes, lots and lots of consulting firms and research agencies, businesses with sustainability or impact departments and more social businesses than ever before. So the range of options has grown much faster than society's comprehension of that.
About two years ago, in India, my organization, Amani Institute ran a series of conferences across the country, to do what we call ‘demystify social impact careers’. We brought people from different walks of life together to kind of help the larger society understand that there are so many more options than ever before.
So I think it's partly the fact that we don't know what the options are, and partly the fact that we're still conditioned to think of a ‘good career’ in very narrow and limited terms. That is leading to a sense of anxiety. And I think that if we were to look at the social sector, something in need of branding would probably be a combination of getting the information out there telling really good stories of people who build these careers and showing what's really possible. Not just at the level of people who have Nobel Prizes but also ordinary people who are making these kinds of choices in the lives that lead. And hopefully, that's what we're going to try and do with the book a little bit.
But it’ll just be one more attempt out there and I think it's kind of a drip, drip, drip, as Seth Godin says— we just need to keep pushing on this as well, so that people are aware of their options, and hopefully, therefore, reduce the anxiety that comes from following them.
AM: And so what tip would you have for people that are trying to align what they want to do with what they believe in?
RP: I think there's a few. There are a few different tips that I might have.
Obviously, the first thing to do is to realize what it is that you most care about addressing? And that doesn't have to be one thing. That could be several different things. Maybe you care about climate change. But that's a really big field, right? Within climate change, do you care about renewable energy? Do you care about wildlife conservation? Do you care about the impact of natural disasters on communities? Do you care about sustainable travel? What are the options within something like climate change?
So each of these fields, whether you think of it as climate change, or education, or poverty alleviation, each of those has about 10 or 15, or 20, subfields within that. So I think exploring the different options for you within the field or the cause that you care about and then looking at what the job options are or the organizations in those fields that might be interested in someone with your skills. Then understand truly, what your skills are. What are you bringing to the table? Where can you get more skills that are needed? And then I think it can be a little bit of a detective story to try to go through what all the options are and identify where you best fit.
And now perhaps for some people, they just want to do good, they don't have a particular cause, like climate change or gender equality that they care about but they really want to use their design skills, or they really want to use their programming skills. Then I think you actually have so many options that it just makes sense to get started as soon as you know. Wherever you can find a local organization that you really care about. Find a friend, fellow alumni from your university or your school, who's doing work that you admire and offer to support them in some way. Whether you can spend some of your evenings or weekends doing freelance design work for them.
You know, in our book, one of the characters in our book is a freelance graphic designer who finds her way into a career of impact just by volunteering her services during her office hours. But if you do that in your off-hours, you could find other ways to contribute. So I think depending on which way you're trying to enter the space, whether from trying to contribute your skills, or whether it's trying to find a cause that you're really passionate about, I think the most important thing is to get started. More than anything else, start small. But above all, just start and you'll find your way.
It's really hard to, again, our education forces us to do things like analyze and research and think of all these possibilities. But it's usually much easier and less anxiety-provoking if you just get started at the narrowest possible opportunity and then see how that grows over time.
AM: it's more of a ‘prototyping your career’ kind of attitude than ‘I need to dive into this for the next 10 years and this is a major leap and massive investment’.
RP: Exactly! I think, again, we're so conditioned by society, by our parents, by our academic backgrounds to think about what's our dream job.
And to find that and do that, and nothing but that. But, you know, I think for most of us, let's say you're on this call, and you're under the age of 40, which maybe most of you are. You know when you’re under the age of 50, you're going to be working and you're not even halfway through your career, right? Especially if you're under the age of 30, you're going to be working for longer than you've been alive. So there's almost no wrong step you can take, I would say.
Our careers are long. And again, thanks to technology, we're living longer lives and will be productive for longer periods of time as well. So you've got lots and lots of time. I had a few. So I see that as something liberating. That whatever you do next, you can find your way to something excellent, rather than trying to find the dream thing just from inside your head, or by doing online research.
AM: for anyone who wants to dive into this topic of prototyping your career, the book, Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett, is a great tip.
AM: you mentioned: “You can start with volunteering”, or “you kind of have to make your way into this”. there's this belief that making a difference and making a living are mutually exclusive. Do you think they are mutually exclusive? And I'm guessing you don’t, but I'm curious how you would unpack that?
RP: I think a lot of it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how we just don't know what all the options are.
And most people don't know the wide range of options there are and I'll start by saying that to some extent, there's some merit to the fact that you can't make a lot of money by doing good. I think that that's right because in some ways it's the quest for more and more money that is leading humanity to a lot of the problems we're facing right now.
Like that the environment and the planet can’t handle our quest for unending economic growth. The financial crises that we've lived through in 2000 to 2008. A lot of that comes from the greed of people who just want more and more. And so, as changemakers, many of us are trying to solve the problems caused by the unending quest for growth and money and greed. So to some extent, there is some merit to the fact that if you're working in social change, there's got to be some limits to what you're pursuing.
And I think that that's backed up by the fact that modern positive psychology research and others show that there are diminishing marginal returns to money. There's a certain amount of money at which making more money doesn’t make you happier. And that is much less than you would think, right?
I think, about seven or eight years ago, the answer in the US, let's say the West, more broadly, was around $80,000 a year, the more you make towards that, like, if you're making $50,000, then 60,000 makes you happier than 50,000. If you're making 60,000, 70,000 makes you happier than 60,000. But once you cross that 80,000 mark, whether you're 100,000, 150,000, 200,000, or whether that's a million, you're not actually any happier.
And that is that. I don't know what those numbers are today. But I think that as a general principle of humanity, there is a point where more money is better. And then after that more money doesn't make you any happier. And I think like, we don't know that because our modern society hasn't caught up to some of these truths that are coming out of modern psychology. So we have this quest that more money is the key to happiness, but we should know better by now.
So I think all of that's on the side of here's why it's happening. And then, on the other hand, I would also say that it's increasingly not true as well. So there are many purpose-driven jobs where you can make a great salary. You know, I bet many of you don't know that if you work for the UN or the World Bank, you don't pay taxes. So all of your money is yours. You know, increasingly, a lot of private-sector companies are having departments in, you know, sustainability and Chief impact officers. LinkedIn keeps poking me, like every two days telling me that Amazon is looking for a Head of Social Impact in India. And I finally changed my LinkedIn profile to say that I'm not living in India anymore. But you know, that's Amazon, right?
Microsoft, like all of them, is looking for people. And those companies pay pretty good salaries. All of the big consulting firms, whether it's McKinsey or Bain or Boston Consulting Group, have social impact practices and they also pay pretty well. Social businesses can sometimes pay quite well.
And, and I love this question in a funny way, actually. So around 2016, I did a TEDx talk in Amsterdam. And one of the things I was saying in my talk was that working in social impact means you'll make less money, you'll work harder, and you will fail more, but you'll be happier. And I returned to Kenya, where I was living at the time. And my Kenyan staff were upset with me. And they said, “Why did he say the thing about making less money? It's not true!” And one of my colleagues, at the time, who worked for Amani Institute, our organization a local social enterprise in Kenya, we were paying him more money than his wife who was working at Standard Chartered Bank and they were the same age. So that's when I realized that the money we were paying was better than banks in Kenya. And I was like, hey, I'm a good employer. But I think people aren't aware that you can actually make a really good living in this. I mean, I have family members working in five-star hotels in India that are halfway through their careers making less money than we pay entry-level staff at Amani Institute in India. So, again, there are a lot of possibilities of having a good salary in the sector and I think that the branding of the sector hasn't caught up to reality.
AM: Could you unpack what kind of skills you teach at Amani institute that you believe are at the core of a good career in social impact?
RP: So at the Amani Institute, we boiled it down to four buckets of skills.
And we boiled that down based on a lot of research into higher education, a lot of you know, polling of employers around the world, in terms of what they are looking for and what we felt universities are not doing as well and where we can make a contribution that universities were not making.
And the four skills we narrowed down to were firstly, creativity, and innovation skills. That for many employers is the number one thing that they care about. Secondly, is leadership skills. Third, is communication skills, and that means both things like branding, or social media, things like that, but also interpersonal communication skills, things like storytelling, and giving feedback and listening well, and so on. And then lastly, kind of a grab bag of what we call management skills, but you know, from financial management to technology, to project management and so on.
Now, I think that those four things will serve you well, regardless of your career, whether it's in social impact or not. Because again, these are things that universities aren't doing so well at providing and all employers need them. What makes them different in the social impact space is sometimes how they're applied. And that makes a big difference as well because some of the challenges that you have in social impact, or let's say, in government, you have to apply it in a different way when you don't have money to throw at the problem. I can't hire McKinsey to come in and give me solutions. I gotta figure this out on my own. I can't motivate my staff by providing them huge bonuses that are double their salary at the end of the year. So I've got to motivate them in other ways. And perhaps these staff wouldn't be motivated by money anyway. So how do I build a different set of leadership skills than what a business school might provide?
These are the kinds of skills that we explore at Amani Institute and help people learn. Not just what the skills you need are but also how to apply them towards the cause that you care about or towards social change?
AM: I imagine in maybe a decade, we're gonna look back and think, it's amazing that we weren't teaching this skill before.
AM: When you think about all the people that you've seen, go through the Amani programs, what are some of the surprising or interesting ways that you've seen people create careers of purpose?
RP: Yeah, of course, there are so many stories and it's hard to pick one or two.
But if I were to think about stories that surprised me, one example is one of our first Amani fellows from Brazil. His name was Morris. And he was a relatively young guy in his, I think, the early 30s when he came to the Amani Institute, and he ended up creating a platform for older people, who retire to find purpose and employment in the second half of their lives.
And it's something you wouldn't necessarily think a 30-year-old would be caring about or would be motivated to do. And when he came to Amani it was just an idea. But it's really grown now. And it's now the reference point in all of Brazil and Sao Paulo for people to find meaning and employment in the second half of that career. They run large events. They've got hundreds of 1000s of Brazilians on their platforms, and so on. And I think that that's a beautiful story of a kind of empathy and caring for another generation. So that's one story.
Another one that, you know, I love to tell because it came directly out of our work in social innovation is the story of a guy from Switzerland and a guy from India, who created an organization in Kenya to help youth who live on the streets in Kenya to give street tours in Nairobi.
So when tourists come to Nairobi, and they want to get a tour of the city, rather than go to a tour company, these guys helped to create a company where young youth from the streets are the ones who are giving the tours. And through giving these tours, these youth, who would otherwise have been to prison, or who have a few prospects in life can actually make money and come out of poverty. And some of these young people who started off with them are not living in the slums anymore, have partners in middle-class areas, and are helping the next generation themselves. And our two students got the idea from a course that we were doing where we used a tool that you guys use a lot, probably as brand professionals— Reframing. And so they reframed their question from “how can we help youth in the slums in Kenya”, to “how can people in the slums in Kenya help us”, and it was that reframe that allowed them to come up with this idea.
They've now turned the company over to Kenyan youth from the slums and neither one of them is directly involved anymore. And that company is now I think number one or two in the Airbnb experiences and TripAdvisor recommendations for things to do in Nairobi. And it's grown really well.
So that's just a couple of stories. And I'm aware that I've told stories of entrepreneurship. And those are, in some ways, the easiest stories to tell, because they require less context because there was nothing and then there was something. But of course, the majority of our fellows are not entrepreneurs, and they are doing incredible day to day work inside organizations. What we call intrapreneurship. Sometimes, being a fabulous first-class employee in a change-making organization or being a consultant or freelancer, those stories are harder to tell in a short talk, because you'd have to give so much more context, but they're no less powerful and meaningful than the stories of entrepreneurs.
So I'm in touch now with people from eight or nine different cohorts. And when you see their careers evolve on LinkedIn is quite interesting. We see people who are now doing innovation, the UN Refugee organizations, and you see that you see their activities, scroll by and it's definitely interesting and fulfilling to kind of see that happen, I'm sure.
AM: I've noticed that people who pursue a career of purpose, find out that actually, it isn't a band-aid to all issues. yes, it gives you greater happiness, but it also can be quite frustrating, and hard. And you see a lot beneath the happy LinkedIn, newsfeed updates, there's sometimes a lot of heartbreak. how would you recommend people to take care of themselves while they support others?
It's really important to be aware when you get into the business of solving social problems, that these problems have been around for millennia, right? And they're unlikely to go away anytime soon. That doesn't mean we shouldn't give everything we can to make them go away. But be okay, that you may not end poverty, or educate all children in the streets in your lifetime. And, I actually find that liberating. I don't feel like I need to make sure that you know, there's no poverty left in the world by the time I die. And I think sometimes we put the pressure on ourselves to say, “I've got to solve this problem in my lifetime”, and that's unrealistic I feel. Some of these things are reflections of the shadows of human psychology. You know, if you look at trafficking today, it's like out of the shadow of slavery, I would imagine and that's been with us, you know, as long as humanity, these problems aren't going to go away anytime soon. But we can do our best to make a contribution towards that.
I actually find that liberating, not depressing. And I think once you've accepted that, then it becomes obvious that what you've got to do is to prepare yourself to give everything you can in what time you've got on the planet. And that means to take care of yourself over the long haul, it's not like a 10-year sprint and I've solved human trafficking or there are no hurricanes causing refugees anymore.
Some of these problems may actually increase in the short term thanks to inequality or climate change, or polarization and things like that. And so I think what's really important is to realize that I've got to take care of myself. Like what they say in airlines, “Put on your own oxygen mask first, before helping someone else”. That's valuable. Because if you don't put on your own oxygen mask first, you won't be able to help anyone else. And so I think it's important for us to, to take care of ourselves so that we can do a better job of taking care of others, or take care of the planet for longer periods of time, which is what we all need.
If in the short term, you really need to make some money to educate your children or to take care of a sick parent, do that. There will be time to come back to leading a life of purpose in the long term. And again, it's not a sort of mutually exclusive thing, you can make money and take care of your parents and have an impact all at the same time. So these things are all possible to do together but realize that it's going to take a while.
And so ways in which you can prepare for that is being patient with yourself, investing in the things that make you a whole person, whether that's relationships, whether that's your hobbies, music, whether that's your spiritual practice. Whatever that may be, and so on.
So invest in the things that keep you grounded and whole, over the long haul. Those are a couple of things that come to mind right now. There are a number of other variables that matter, such as making sure that you have empathy, but not too much empathy, so that you're not bogged down by the suffering of others, and burnout or get depressed. You know, there's a whole bunch of other variables as well. And we'll be sharing all of that in our book coming out the second half of this year. But you can also learn more about that by taking a course at Amani Institute, where we talk about that quite a bit. And, you know, I believe applications for our next classes are ongoing until the end of June. So if that's something that's interesting for you, you can look at it there. But those are all ways in which you can learn better how to manage yourself, as much as you manage the change that you want to see in the world.
AM: Can you tell me a little bit more about telling your career story more effectively?
RP: Well, I actually think that my career story is fairly easy to follow because unlike most people in my generation, I've only had two jobs in the first 20 years of my career.
For the first 10 years, I worked in an organization called Ashoka working in social entrepreneurship. And for the last 10 years, I co-founded and have been leading Amani Institute. And so I think it's fairly unusual actually, to have just two jobs before you're 40.
But either way I tell that story, is that I made the decision early on coming out of university to build a career in social impact and to work in social entrepreneurship. And for the first 10 years, I made a career out of supporting social entrepreneurs, all around the world, to help them grow their organizations and increase their impact. What I didn't realize was happening through that period was that I was building a path towards having a career in social impact and 10 years into this career, people who thought I was crazy when I made the decision to say no to a big fancy consulting firm and go work in a nonprofit in India for a fraction of the salary are the same people calling me and asking, “How do I build a career in social impact, as well?”
So I realized that, unknowingly, I had to build some knowledge about how to do this. And so the next 10 years of my career became about helping as many people as possible from all around the world, also make that switch to a career in social impact or purpose career, however you want to call it. And that's what I did for the next 10 years of my career. And so for me, fit neatly into these decade long sprints or decade long eras. First 10 years of supporting entrepreneurs, the second 10 years of being an entrepreneur and supporting other people.
And as you said, I've stepped down as CEO of Amani Institute. I'm taking a year off at the moment, just to rest from it and figure out what I want to do next. And then I don't know what the next 10 years or even five years are going to be. But I'm sure that it will involve taking what I've learned about social entrepreneurship, taking what I've learned about leadership development into something new. And I don't know what that is just yet. So that's kind of how I'm telling my story. And the arc of that story is one that I think has fairly easy to follow markers.
If I was to give general advice to people, it's realizing that people are moved by stories. And so if you can tell the story of your career, as in a story, right, and stories have a structure, they have a beginning, a middle and an end, they've got a protagonist, in this case, you trying to solve a problem, you know, and overcoming that problem to making a change, and they have a moral of the story, a lesson that we can all learn from it, if you can start to look back at the defining moments of your career, the defining moments of your life, and see how to put that in the structure of a story, then you'll be good at conveying that story, that structure, conveying that story to other people in ways that will make them inspired and want to hire you to want to work with you want to employ you, you know, and that will make it easier for you. And so I think there are some basic principles of storytelling that can be applied to telling your own life story in this way.
AM: I imagine that this also becomes easier if you know where you want to go. So you know what you're trying to convey with your story?
RP: Yes, it does become easier if you know where you want to go.
And I think in some ways that that's important, but I don't think the way you want to go needs to be an unchanging destination. Right? It could be a changing one. Maybe where you want to go is finding purpose, right? Maybe where you want to go is, making an impact in your city in the next 10 years. It doesn’t have to be like the final, end of life, end of career destination. It could be a destination for one year from now, it could be a destination for five years from now. And that can change each time. So again, I would say, make that destination something that is tangible for you, and also therefore for your audience. And if that's an interim destination, that's fine. It's the journey, as we all know, anyway, not the destination. So pick a destination that is close by and not one that is ending poverty in my lifetime. That's quite far away.
AM: I also always love it when people's story ends with a question and they're still searching. And that also invites a lot of participation and conversation into your life, if you're willing, instead of always feeling like you need to provide the answer to this question, or there needs to be a closing point. Start with, how might I contribute, etc, etc.
It reminded me of one of my favourite quotes of all time, which is actually from a spy novel. So not from any deep piece of philosophy. But the line goes like this, “Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason why we did it.” Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers and I think that's a nice way to think about your career story as well.
AM: I think I need to read more spy novels.
Does anyone have a question for Roshan? Feel free to turn on your mic. There might be something in your own career that you're thinking about, that you might want to change or something that you're struggling with. I know we have different people with different vocations in different steps in the group.
JUNE: My question for Roshan is, while you were working at Ashoka, did you have an idea then that you would start the Amani Institute or did the inspiration hit later? Because you mentioned that you really wanted to work in social impact. But did you always know that you would end up starting a whole institute in this area?
RP: Thank you June. The answer is no, I didn't know.
I never saw myself as an entrepreneur, to be honest. And I actually have no background in education, no formal training and education, no professional background in education. We started the Amani institute in 2011. If you had told me in 2009, that 10 years from now, I will be invited to give talks on education and win awards in education, I would have laughed at you. Because I had zero background in education. So I did not know.
The idea came over time. And it actually came not from my background in education. But from my background and having lived through the challenges of building a career in social impact and realizing that there were teachable lessons that came from that, and from the lives of all the social entrepreneurs I had worked with all around the world. And that those questions that they had faced were common, whether they came from Chile, or South Africa or Indonesia, or Germany. And I think that it was the analysis of putting all of that together that really helped me come up with the idea.
Then there were many touchpoints in my career at Ashoka that eventually led to coming up with the idea for Amani Institute. And that would be too long to go into but a quick answer to your question is for the first eight years of working in Ashoka, Amani Institute didn't even exist in my imagination. And it only came about in the last couple of years, and then I left the show to pursue it.
AM: One of the things that your story always strikes me as is a very classic example of a customer insight. Which is where strong brands start. It’s that “aha moment”, there's this issue in the world that no one's addressing, and we could build a product or service around it. So you're, almost the classic example, which I think Amani is too and one of the examples that we actually show in the book for the insight generator.
RP: Yeah, absolutely. For us, it was the insight that our universities are failing us, and it's not their fault. Because they were fundamentally not set up to help people build careers. They were set up to be centers of learning. And if we were setting up a university today in the 21st century, there's no way we would do it like how universities have been set up since the 1700s. So that insight is what we use and helped us jump off the cliff to start Amani.
Ranjini: What are your thoughts on building social entrepreneurship skills in school children? From ingenious experience working at the grassroots level, I believe in developing capacity with incubation space training in rural areas.
RP: I'm from Bangalore too so it's nice to see a fellow Bangalorean over here.
I think that the earlier we can get started with building social entrepreneurship skills in people, the better. But I wouldn't even necessarily call it social entrepreneurship skills, I would take it one step below and call it creativity or innovation skills. The ability to see a challenge and overcome it, through problem-solving. I think this is what I'm looking for.
If we can, we can help people solve problems, and build the skills to solve problems. And I don't mean math problems, you know, from your textbook, but real-life problems. That would go a long way, I think. And if we're working with young children, then we have to work not just with the children, but with their parents. And you know, this may be different in different countries, but certainly in India, one of the biggest challenges to pursuing a career in impact is the role our families play in what career choices we make. Now, I know that's less the case in Europe, but in India, you can't make a decision about your career without bringing your parents or grandparents on board. So that makes it harder.
Sometimes our parents have even fewer ideas than we do of the options out there. We used to joke in Amani, India, that we don't just have to recruit students, we have to recruit their parents too. So we actually had an FAQ that the students could send to their parents about the program because we had to answer the parents’ questions and then the parent may get it. But they have to answer the neighbour’s questions or Aunties’ questions, you know. And so, so for us, branding in India had to also give not just the student, but also help the parent convince the neighbour or the Auntie why their child should do this program.
So I think in India, the parents will matter a lot. And that's possibly the case all around the world with young children. So it's not just about, you know, building the creativity and problem-solving skills in young children, but also helping parents. And teachers see the importance of that, that we need to do as well.
AM: That reminds me a lot of the process that I went through when you teach design and art schools. even in countries where the creative industries are massive, and there are careers aplenty, you still get the parents at the open day with the 19-year-olds, like, “Can my child make a living as a designer?”
RP: Yes, in many ways, that's the job description of a parent, right?
It's about your children and making sure that they will be cared for and provided for and they can care and provide for themselves after you're gone. And parents can't rest until they can answer that question. So it's like having empathy for parents while also realizing that they don't have the full scope of knowledge. And it's not their life anymore. So it's balancing those two things, I think.
JUNE: I'm an Amani fellow. what was the inspiration behind the amani curriculum? it's very diverse and considering the fact that you said you've not come from an education-based background, how did you put it together?
RP: Ah, Okay, so firstly, I would say that the curriculum has changed over the years.
So what you're doing now, you know, the basic principles and building blocks existed 10 years ago, when we were starting Amani, but a lot of it has changed as well.
How we built it was a combination of our own lived experiences, my co-founder, Elena, and I. She grew up in Argentina and had a very different career prior to Amani Institute than I did. But we both ended up working at Ashoka where we met and came up with this. So we reflected on our own lives and how we had people asking us how to get into this kind of career.
So that was one. The second was looking at what was wrong with higher education? Where was it failing? Where was it not meeting the needs of employers? Where was it not meeting the aspirations of students? And what could we contribute that universities were not able to contribute?
Again, we had empathy for universities, because we realized that's not what they're supposed to be doing today. And we needed to help them basically, or help people find another way than just universities to get the skills and the training that they needed.
So that was the second piece, the third piece was just like asking employers what they needed and how we could best design for that. The fourth was looking at the practices of the best principles of adult learning that are coming out in the field of education but are not being applied in universities. So how do we apply the methodologies, June, that you and Maria, Garcia and others have experienced? You know, very clear principles of adult learning that we're not used to, in our formal education systems.
First, I think it was looking at the lives of all of these, not just us, people who we can say have changed the world and see what have been the building blocks of their life? What are the core skills that they exhibited? And how can we start to apply those skills to larger numbers of people?
So there were a number of things, of course, we learned from other organizations like THNK, or McKinsey or other organizations that we admired and then built like a framework that we follow. And again, there's the constant process of seeing what works, adjusting it, receiving feedback from our students and Amani fellows and altering the curriculum to meet those needs as well.
So constantly updating and constantly changing. Fill out those call surveys you get, because they really take them into account when changing the curriculum and improving it as well.
AM: I have a comment from Joza that I think is quite nice. And Joza works with human rights advocates and I can imagine life is rough for them.
RP: I Yeah, it (human rights) is probably one of the areas within social impact that I have the most admiration for.
I think it takes real courage, sometimes physical courage to put yourself in harm's way for the sake of other people. And particularly in certain countries in the world today, where it's getting harder and harder to do that. My own country is one of them. I imagine the Philippines is another. And yeah, just lots of admiration for people who are giving their time to human rights. It's one of the hardest parts of the social sector. So keep going Joza. Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far. And keep going because the world needs you.
Needs all of you actually. We are all needed to do everything we can. So maybe that's a good note to end on. It's sometimes hard. Even if you're not in human rights if you have a privileged life as well. It's hard to find a life of purpose. That's how we started this, but there are ways to do it. There are lots of people who have walked down that path before and don't ever doubt that your contribution is needed. You know that you can make a difference because you absolutely can.
AM: Thanks so much for your time, Roshan. Thanks, everyone for coming.
More about Roshan Paul
Amani Institute | Follow Roshan on Linkedin
Roshan Paul & Ila Rabbat’s book: The New Reason to Work: How to Build a Career That Will Change the World