Asheesh Advani
Asheesh is the CEO of Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide, a global NGO dedicated to educating young people about entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work readiness. With offices in over 115 countries, the JA network serves over 10 million students annually and is one the world’s most impactful NGOs. Asheesh is an accomplished entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Covestor (a financial marketplace acquired by Interactive Brokers) and Founder/CEO of CircleLending (a social lending company acquired by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group). He helped pioneer the social finance industry by working with regulators and credit bureaus to develop guidelines for peer-to-peer lending and crowd funding. Asheesh’s experiences have been chronicled in case studies at Harvard Business School and Babson College. He is actively involved in the World Economic Forum as a member of the Civil Society Advisory Council and Global Agenda Council for the Future of Education, Gender, and Work. Asheesh is a graduate of the Wharton School and Oxford University, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar.
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There is a short story from Hindu mythology about two brothers that my mother used to tell me when I was young. Both brothers had the same teacher and were about equal in ability. One of their assignments was to go out in search of someone who could teach them new skills. The first brother returned and said to his teacher, “Everyone I met has certain skills that I do not have, so I can learn from everyone.” The second brother returned and had concluded the opposite for his teacher, “I have certain skills that each person does not have, so I cannot learn from any of them.”
When I look out the window, I see a world filled with people from whom I can learn. I see a world filled with opportunities. I see a world where young people strive to become more confident by learning new things – and where most learning occurs by interacting with others. When I look out the window, I feel impatient and think there is so much more to learn, so much more to do.
Seeing the world in this manner does not make me a popular person at dinner parties. I’m too optimistic and don’t have much capacity for gossip. Seeing the world in this manner does not make me a great project manager. I usually assume that employees who miss deadlines have good reason for doing so and seek to understand their need before passing judgment. Seeing the world in this manner does not make me the best husband. My wife, whom I’ve been with since our freshman year of college, does not appreciate my sunny outlook when she’s had a bad day and needs someone to commiserate with rather than look for silver linings. (I once made this comment, for example: “Even though your 7 a.m. meeting did not show up today, at least you got a chance to have breakfast alone to plan your day.”)
When I look out the window, I see a constellation that includes optimism, gratitude, and a thirst for learning, which are linked together like the Big Dipper. Let me explain.
Optimism is not something that you’re born with. It is learned over time. Gratitude – being thankful for what you have – breeds optimism. In my family, we have developed a practice of telling each other three things that we are thankful for on a regular basis. My wife started this exercise with our kids while driving them to the school bus each morning. The first one or two things are easy to identify – a good grade on a test, a goal scored in a game, a dinner that was followed by a favorite dessert. It becomes harder to find a third thing and nudges the mind to turn neutral and otherwise negative experiences into positive ones, for example, missing the school bus, but still getting a ride to school; dealing with a health issue for a loved one, but still being able to care for them. The mind starts to develop the habit of looking for the positive in everything.
I don’t fully understand why I look at the world in this way. My friends once tried to figure it out. I’m part of a forum group of eight friends who meet monthly, organized as part of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). During a forum retreat, we hired a professional moderator who asked us to dig deeper to understand each other. In my case, the group explored my relentless optimism and learn-from-everyone outlook on the world, asking questions about my past, probing my childhood experiences, seeking inner demons that would explain my behavior traits. The conclusion was that, as a young immigrant from India, I had tried hard to fit into my adopted homeland of Canada. Growing up, I watched movies and tried to emulate the main characters. I was like a sponge, learning from everything and everyone I could, so that I could fit into my new surroundings, particularly during my teenage years. Therefore, I must have inadvertently turned each negative experience into a positive experience as a coping mechanism to avoid unhappiness. This created a habit at an early age that became a lifelong, ingrained practice. I don’t really know if this psychoanalysis is accurate or not. For example, I don’t understand why others with a similar immigrant experience would have had different outcomes and behaviors. It seems clear to me, however, that optimism, gratitude, and a thirst for learning are inextricably linked in my personality.
I am currently working as a leader of a nonprofit organization that teaches young people to have a similar can-do attitude that I developed in my youth. The organization is called Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide. Founded in 1919, it has grown substantially over the years and has spread to over 115 countries – as diverse as Gabon and Sweden – with programs reaching over 10 million young people per year. We like to say that JA activates youth for the future of work. I am convinced that one reason for the growth of the organization is the hunger and desire for entrepreneurship and self-confidence that pervades today’s youth. I travel a lot for my job and everywhere I go, I find that young people love learning if it is presented to them in the right way – as a game, a field trip, a business start-up project, or a chance to shadow a manager or leader in the workplace. Young people crave positive feedback and they want to learn how to become confident, if someone would just tell them how to do it.
Self-efficacy is a multiplier, a skill that makes all other skills possible to learn and master. Some people call it self-belief or self-confidence, but the meaning is similar enough. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura1 tells us that there are four ways to increase self-efficacy:
Of these, the first (mastering skills) is overwhelmingly correlated with learning self-efficacy, and that makes sense: success begets success. If students practice setting a goal, working toward it, staying with it in spite of setbacks, and achieving it, they’ll learn that such a process will work in the future. The next time they need to learn a skill, they’ll believe they can.
I see this every day in my work at JA, especially though the JA Company Program. Middle- and high-school students roll up their sleeves and start a flesh-and-blood company, complete with a business plan, company officers, a product that has to be manufactured or assembled, suppliers to source, bills to pay, and customers to woo. The JA Company Program is often a student’s first experience being a CEO, CFO, CMO, or any number of other jobs, and instead of reading about famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, they’re creating real products with real colleagues and earning real revenues. Living it and experiencing it give them a taste of what’s possible in a manner that can’t be fully digested from a textbook. And each success (individual ones and those shared by the team) sets the stage for the expectation of future success.
Students also learn self-efficacy by observing others achieving success, but the correlation is a bit less strong than with hands-on skill mastery. Still, whether observing their peer groups or adults, students who see others believe in their abilities to succeed – and then actually do so – are more likely to believe in their own future successes.
Until I met Marshall Goldsmith, I didn’t fully understand the power of daily routines to improve self-efficacy. Marshall’s book, Triggers,2 is a prescription for taking personal responsibility for behavior change and recognizing environmental and psychological triggers that set you back. One of Marshall’s recommendations is to use a daily routine of “active questions” that measure our effort, not our results. For example, if you’re facing a challenging relationship problem with your friend, don’t blame your friend, your social circumstances, or your bad luck. Instead, he recommends asking yourself daily (daily!) what you have personally done to address the issue. Self-efficacy is borne from personal responsibility.
When I look out the window, I see a world filled with people who I can learn from. I see a world filled with opportunities. I see a world where young people strive to become more confident by learning new things – and where most learning occurs by interacting with others. When I look out the window, I feel impatient and think there is so much more to learn, so much more to do.