A new beginning : Talking about thinking on thinking.
Hello there!
I’ve been doing these regular updates since August’22 and the thing with doing things regularly is that you constantly need to adapt to the “new normal”. Whenever I fall off the wagon on consistency, chances are it is because I am trying to work from an older model that no longer works. So now, I want to reupdate my relationship with these updates. (no pun intended). Initially these were for me to actually have the “what have I done even” question answered each month, and honestly about a 6 months into doing it, that was no longer a question. I still managed to sustain it for a few more months. But now, what I am curious about is actually seeing how am I growing within the projects I am working on.
As we close the Fourth (??!!!) season of our podcast “Thinking on Thinking” this is the perfect time to reflect on my journey of making it and try this new format of updates. The first time I made and released a podcast was I think back in 2015/16 but I cant really find the link to it. The second attempt was in 2019, with a more narrative style podcast “flatline” with Amrita Sukrity and Charu Tak (Yes I do too many things with my sister). Both of these times, we never crossed the 7 episode mark. I do want to revive Flatline at some point but with the million things I wanna do, it will just have to wait its turn. But it is with this background, of loving podcasts and wanting to make one for many years that I brought up the idea to Kahran.
So when Kahran and I decided to make a podcast in 2022, our core idea was that we were having a lot of interesting conversations and having them somewhere where we could look back and see how our thinking has evolved. From my past experience, I knew the biggest challenge actually will be to continue on it, and make episodes after episodes.
When working on anything, there are two components. The technical/skill/science part of things and the emotional/creative/vision side of things; usually in my experience, it takes a few tries to get good on both sides. For us, in context of the podcast, we had several seasons to learn lessons and they really helped us take this podcast to the point where it is today that we love it. So here are the four main things we learnt as we went through the seasons.
Learning to talk earnestly : One of the first things that happens when one turns on the mic is that you become self conscious. You try and put on a performance. Its not very conscious, you just end up changing your tone, your mannerism etc. because you can’t really let go of how you’d be perceived. For us, the first season was basically us getting over this instinct. What helped was that we talked about things that really mattered to us, like success and failure, kindness vs niceness, cognition vs, emotion. It was a lot of exploration of common concepts that as co-founders one would expect us to be already in the know of.
Learning to work together : While this wasn't something we set out to do, I think Kahran and I have on record our conversations about some of the most important things that one needs to build success together in the second season. Like trust. Or how you should care about what you do. Decision making. And courage. It was interesting as we learnt how to also do the editing, and heard ourselves talk over and over again in the process of editing the episodes, we ended up learning the quirks of our own speech patterns, and it is very visible, especially towards the end of the second season that we were in a good refined articulate place, where we could also have good conversational back and forth with each other.
Learning to specialize : By the time our third season rolled around, we knew we needed some help with the editing, because as amateurs we had taken it technically as far as we could. We had a tone that we could reference to the producer, but we needed a professional touch. We also started more deeply exploring one of our new love. AI and how that impacts things, especially the creative process. But still something else was missing.
Learning to expand: Towards the end of our 3rd season, we both had a growing discontent with how things had been shaping up, and we had a long chat about what that is. One thing about creative work is, if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you will hate it. So with time you have to learn to evolve. From our conversation we realised, as much as we love talking to each other, we also were not learning new skills or new things at the same pace as we did in the first couple seasons. And so we decided to take the logical next step and do interviews. With a pleasant serendipity, we ended up talking only to women, which was a delight, and such an awesome excuse for both Kahran and I to talk to our friends. I really cant pick favourites, because I enjoyed each and every conversation. Taking the interview feels like I have a sneaky excuse to talk to my friends, and hearing the ones Kahran did felt like sitting in on intimate conversations my friends were having.
And now as we gear up to begin the next season, we will be talking to collaborators. Hopefully to understand more deeply people who are doing things together. Work, life, everything. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon!