common

I have no business writing this book. I’m neither a journalist, nor a professional writer. What I am, however, is curious. I was the kid who kept asking questions in class, the one who tracked teachers down while they were on their well-earned breaks to ask nice simple questions like, ‘So, how does the universe work?’

My day job is in the world of business, and I guess you could call me an entrepreneur. But I don’t want to unnecessarily glamorize it by making you think of shiny people getting out of shiny private planes into shiny cars, checking the time on their house-priced shiny watches, before passing the big shiny gate of their gigantic architect-designed home. That’s not me. My companies are all firmly part of the small-business world.

The reason for my profile is more to do with the journey than the numbers. I started my first business when I was fourteen, which probably seems quite old by today’s tech-entrepreneur standards, but back then it was considered quite a fresh-faced age to be in the cut-and-thrust world of enterprise. That business, Ultima Group, was in web design and software development, but we also had a little side-hustle called Independent Software Reviews. This was one of the first online magazines, and my colleagues and I reviewed computer games, software and music. We didn’t realize how early we were to the table as an online publication, and before long this side-hustle gained momentum and we were receiving over half a million unique users per month. Back in the early days of the internet this was a huge number. We built one of the world’s first content management systems (which we called the ‘flatpack web’) and syndicated content around the world. I suspect one of the only reasons we didn’t capitalize more on the success of this publication was that we were all kids. This business (and the publication) came to an abrupt halt as the first dotcom bubble burst in 2001, but the writing bug never quite left me.

My generation was perhaps the last to be habituated with long-form content; we grew up with newspapers, journals and books, rather than the omnichannel video, podcast and social formats that became the norm by the start of this century. We also saw the world shift rapidly as technology gained prominence in our economic, cultural and social transactions and ideas became visibly the new engine of power. We have always talked about markets, the economy, culture, society and politics as phenomena that exist outside ourselves, when, in fact, they are the product of ideas, of people. They are not apart from us; they are us. That was my ‘aha’ moment, though it took some time to brew.

Fast-forward to the year 2007. Combining a need to fix my frustration at the lack of long-form content and my desire to write, I created a blog. It didn’t even have a domain – it was simply thoughteconomics.blogspot.com, a very simple blog without any design templates on Google’s free blogging platform. The name Thought Economics was born of the fact that it was thinking, ideas, concepts – the products of thought – that create our world, and so perhaps my blog could explore that. My plan was simply to publish the occasional long-form article myself on a topic of interest and include interviews with interesting people I’d met or got to know over the years. There was no strategy here – it was simply a way of indulging a hobby alongside my day job(s). I didn’t want to editorialize or turn the interviews into opinion pieces, but rather I transcribed the conversations and posted them as they were.

The more interviews I posted, the more the traffic grew, and it quickly became apparent that there was an audience out there who really enjoyed long-form interview content in a way that was raw, unedited and (quite importantly) not behind a paywall. By 2008, I’d started to regularly get emails from readers all over the world suggesting topics and individuals they would like me to approach – and that’s really where I returned to that aha moment. I made a pivot (to steal the start-up parlance) – I bought the domain thoughteconomics.com, built a proper website (albeit in WordPress) and began my mission to capture interviews with the individuals who I felt had made a meaningful impact in our time.

One of my first big-name interviews was with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and this experience taught me an important lesson: be more prepared. Jimmy was the first household name to grant my humble little blog their time. I sent him the questions I wanted to ask, and his response was quite simple: ‘I’ve answered those all before, try again.’ From that point on, I committed not only to research every interviewee in more detail, but to work with them to prepare questions around the areas they were most passionate about, and most interested in.

Rather miraculously, and only a few months later, I had a call booked with one of my personal heroes, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin. I’d done some pretty nerve-wracking things in my career thus far, but here I was, early evening UK time, waiting by the phone in my office for Buzz Aldrin to call me. The interview went well, but towards the end a particularly memorable moment reminded me that I was doing something quite unusual. My dad was in the office, as we had planned to get dinner together that evening and, mid-interview, he came over to me:

Dad: Do you want a cup of tea?

Me: (Hits mute on the phone.) No thanks, Dad, I’m a bit busy here …

Dad: Who are you on the phone to?

Me: Buzz Aldrin.

Dad: Bollocks. (Laughs as he walks back to the kitchen.)

I’d almost lost sight of how incredible these opportunities were in the excitement of growing my new website, but the disbelief my friends and family had about who I was speaking to made me realize what an absolute privilege it is to be able to get one-to-one time on the phone with some of the most influential and interesting people on the planet.

After I’d published my interview with Buzz, a journalist from a major newspaper emailed me and asked, ‘So, how did you get hold of him? We’ve been trying for a long time.’ I get asked this a lot, and my honest reply is that I just don’t know. I just asked! Of course, for every interview I publish, what you don’t see is the slew of rejections. I would estimate that every interview I get is the product of at least twenty approaches, and hence nineteen rejections. Sometimes it can feel personal – in the process of writing this book, I reached out to one leadership expert in the USA, and his office replied, ‘Aren’t most of the interviews on your site fake? I’m sorry, this doesn’t pass muster.’ A pretty god-awful reply, which can trigger a whole host of emotions, until I remind myself that I’m approaching people who get asked for interviews constantly, individuals who have a natural guard up and also who will have layers of people around them, primarily to protect and defend their time. In many ways, Thought Economics has been an exercise in determination for me, to prove to people that it is possible to do absurdly ambitious things if you have the tenacity and resilience.

When I was approached by my publishers about turning some of my conversations into a book, I worked through some of my favourite interviews and was struck by the common themes that ran through a lot of my questions and their revealing answers. The first was identity and the eternal question of who we are, what our purpose is, and what our place is in the world. This also led to many questions about culture, the paste that binds us together – our art, our music, our literature, everything that’s really important and feeds into our ideas on identity and belonging. That notion of belonging extends to those fundamental biases we carry in our own society. Discrimination in all its forms has resulted in pain, suffering and inequalities through the choices we have made about who is in or out of our tribes and groups – and has often been the cause of the conflicts we have seen as a backdrop to most of human history. Alongside these obvious challenges, society has made huge progress in peacebuilding and the greatest governance experiment of our times, democracy, which has created the political, legal and economic framework on which entrepreneurs have created the innovations, ideas and businesses that have pushed our world forward, creating a backbone for our economy, providing employment, opportunity and solving many of our most pressing challenges. All of this, however, would be impossible without leadership, and in every single interview I have done, it is those leadership qualities – the ability to inspire, to pull people together, and achieve the impossible – that have shone through.

Without a doubt, there are gaps within these chapters. There will be major topics or individuals you feel are missing; there may be perspectives that have not been addressed, or truths that need to be told. Thought Economics is constantly evolving, and interviews are being added regularly. I’m passionate about diversity of thought and perspectives, and will always do my best to make sure that it is represented across the site.

The best and worst of humanity has come as a result of our ideas, and at a time when so much of our world is feeling culturally, socially, economically and politically unstable, it’s on all of us not only to talk openly and honestly about these issues, but to take in as much diverse knowledge and as many opinions as we can, in a bid to understand them more deeply, rather than simply skim-reading enough to troll each other on Twitter.

It is in the spirit of creating that depth of understanding that I am committing a minimum of £10,000 of the royalties from this book to two organizations: In Place of War, an international charity I chair, which works across thirty countries in communities impacted by conflict, using the arts, research and entrepreneurship to build sustainable peace and opportunity; and the University of Manchester, England’s first civic university, closely linked to Manchester’s development as the world’s first industrial city, and a place that is carrying out world-changing research in many important areas. Both of these are charitable organizations, and both are fighting for knowledge, the power of thought, to be the light that shows us ways to change the world.

It is an honour to share these conversations with you, and if you want to share your feedback, or have suggestions for any new interviews or topics, you are always welcome to email me: vs@thoughteconomics.com, or tweet @MrVikas.

Vikas Shah MBE

July 2020, London

www.thoughteconomics.com