The Nature of Being Unmistakable with Srinivas Rao Part 1 (of 2)
“Almost every creative choice I make is driven by one question. Does this make me curious? ”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Srini Rao
Srinivas Rao (aka. "Srini"), is the host and co-founder of the Unmistakable Creative podcast where he has conducted over 600 interviews with thought leaders and people from all walks of life. Unmistakable Media creates content across various platforms that inspires creative professionals to lead more courageous, productive, and meaningful lives. Rao is also the author of three Wall Street Journal bestselling books: An Audience of One: Reclaiming Creativity for Its Own Sake, Unmistakable: Why Only Is Better Than Best, and The Art of Being Unmistakable. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Inc, Business Insider, and The Blaze.
the ethos of unmistakable
“But the thing that you get from so many different people is perspective. And this is the thing that I see, this really was the ethos of unmistakable is that people will often see people who are successful, and kind of look at them as the blueprint for how they're going to be successful. But the problem is that, that doesn't take into account one really massive variable, you. And so as a result, they're kind of going through the motions and ignoring whatever it is that they could contribute to the world that would be very unique and very distinctive. I wasn't born out of the womb with this perspective, it was really formed by all these different conversations. And bit by bit, I just started to notice threads of things that interested me. And now, every creative project I work on is driven by the question, Does this make me curious? That's it. Is there something about this that I want to know more about? Alongside that, I have had to learn how to basically build the kinds of systems that lead to an abundance of creative output.
I’ve had to work my way through the same BS that everybody else does, in terms of challenges. Being of South Asian descent, you also have this whole cultural thing that, I know firsthand. Thanks to the whole Netflix insanity, I got to really witness that we have one of the most judgmental cultures in the world. So, you basically layer all this together and what you get is this sort of series of projects and things that I've done that I've cobbled together and called a career. And somehow, I get paid to do it, and people seem to like it.”
zero sum game & uniqueness
“When you see people, particularly in the online world who have achieved some level of success, and you say, Okay, I'm just going to do exactly what they did. There's no way you're going to get those results, because you're trying to mimic them, and so you just end up creating all these pale imitations of something that already exists. Now, the thing about being the best is that that's a zero sum game. In order for you to be the best, somebody else has to not be. If you're number one, somebody has to be number two. Status continually fluctuates, no matter what kind of status it is. The books on the New York Times bestseller list, some that were there this week, won't be there next week, and vice versa. And that's how media in general really works. Everything is just kind of going on and on. We're consuming so much every day, there's so much information coming at us. If I asked, What the first thing or first article you read on the internet this week? Do you have a clue? No, probably not, and neither do I because we're drowning in a sea of noise. And if you're trying to be the best in the sea of noise you've already lost because there are already people better. Somebody is always ahead of you, no matter what, because it's a zero sum game. But if you're the only person who does what you do in the way that you do it all, that becomes completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter.
Now, all that being said, the thing is that, you know, if you're competing with other people, it's always a zero sum game, because there's always going to be somebody who's going to win and somebody could lose. Whereas, the example that I used throughout my book was my friend Mars Dorian. Mark Dorian is this really brilliant visual artist who's basically had profound impact on the visual aesthetic mistakable. And Mars was really in a lot of ways responsible for the idea. I just took it and ran with it and turned it into a whole other thing, but he's the one who turned me on to it. He said, when I do something, I want it to be so unique that way.
I've done it, I don't even have to put my name on it, people just know it's mine. And I think that that's the case with most of our work to. You see something that comes through your Facebook newsfeed that's from us, you know, it came from us, like, there's no question who wrote it, or created it. And that's something that we've aimed for consistently. If somebody can get whatever it is that you're providing, whether that be a product of business, a service, whatever, better, cheaper, faster somewhere else, then they're gonna go do that. But if there's no alternative… Even when we met with a team that was going to be an ad sales partner, they had been very careful about who they work with. They had been investors introduced me to them. They picked, a total of maybe that 10 podcasts that were under their umbrella, all of them much bigger than ours way, way bigger. And I looked at them, I was like, well, then, Why on Earth are you guys even talking to me? And they said, because there's nothing else that sounds like what you do. And that, to me was the ultimate call point. I was like, well, that's good. Because, if we were if we were called the unmistakable creative, and we did sound like everything else, that would be disaster..”
his force multiplier
“Let's say that we all were given a map. And it's like, this is how you get from LA to Chicago. And we all take the same route. We'd be a caravan of idiots, all basically like sheep. As you might imagine, trying to do a referential encyclopedia check in your head of 1000 interviews is challenging. But they're some guests in particular, that really kind of informed how I think about the world, more so than almost anybody else.
Julien Smith turned me on to the idea of writing 1000 words a day, which I still do to this day. Some days, I write 1800. And I'm trying to push that quite a bit. And so that's one of those keystone habits. And in all honesty, everything I do kind of stems from that. One habit can kill 50 birds with one stone. I can write a newsletter, I can write blog posts, I can write chapters for books, and I can do it all with that one habit in an hour a day. It's kind of a force multiplier. But there's one other thing that always stayed with me from the conversation I had with Julien that has informed all the choices I make, and the way I look at technology. One of the things Julian said to me was, “the question you always want to be asking yourself when you see progress, innovation and technology, is what does this make possible that wasn't before?” Now, I'll give you an example of this. So let's go back to the early early days of the internet, say, you know, 1999, I was in college, the web browser had just become something that was accessible to laymen.
Fast forward to 2005-2006, we get social media just sort of in its infancy, and suddenly, desktop publishing becomes easier, building websites becomes easier. But then you fast forward to 2008. And Julien Smith was the one who told me, the iPhone came out. And when the iPhone came out, you got a combination or convergence of all these different technologies, right? You had two things, mobile devices, plus location tracking, plus the ability to unlock electronic locks. So that convergence made billions of dollars in innovation possible that wasn't before. What's interesting is now you're seeing like this massive convergence of all these things together, that is going to basically make it possible to go from idea to execution faster than ever. Suddenly, all this technical stuff becomes less value and the creative stuff becomes far more valuable. So that stayed with me.”
a natural advantage
“The other person who probably had the most significant impact was my mentor, Greg Hartle and you may have heard the episodes have done with him. They are a whole other level of different and he challenges me an insane amount of what we hear in this world. He challenges some of the things that my own guests have said. The most important thing that I've learned from my guests just to question the validity of what they say in the context of my life, and not to treat them as God's just because they happen to be experts in their field. Their advice may not be relevant to me. You know, like a billionaires advice. I think the one thing that's really important is that we don't think about context. One of the things that Greg taught me that has stayed with me, and it's not the most motivational message, but it's a real message. He said that, “most people try to do things where they don't have any natural advantages.” They go do something where they're literally not skilled at all, and then they're wondering why they're struggling. He makes this distinction between probability and possibility. The example he gave was one that was so absurd, just for the sake of making it easy for the audience to understand. So I'll give you my version of it. So look, is it possible that I could basically do LeBron James workout every day? Eat what he eats, follow his diet, etc? And then, play basketball every single day? Is it possible by some unlikely miracle of God that I could make it to the NBA? Yeah. Is it probable? Hell no. Like, the probability of me going to the NBA is zero. And yet, the problem with that is that when we don't consider those two things, what ends up happening is we set very unrealistic goals, and waste a lot of time working on things that lead us nowhere.
Consider Ryan Holiday as the example. Is it possible that my books will sell as many as Ryan's have? Yeah. Is it probable at this point? No. I mean, who has three New York Times bestsellers on the list at the same time? That's so unheard of that's not probable for most authors. One of the things that I think is actually completely misguided about the way that we go about personal development is to use outliers as our models for success. Because outliers, as the the book points out, have advantages that are hidden from us. I'll give you the example of my my podcast, right? So I won't, one of the things that's made me very reluctant to teach a course about podcasting is I don't know anything about how to grow a podcast, like literally, I know nothing about how to grow podcasts, because ours grew very organically and I had a tenure, here are the things you can't replicate from what I've done. These are the outlier vendors. I had a 10 year head start on what somehow became a massive cultural trend. At the time, people said podcasting was dead. Which is amazing now to think about that, but it was true. I had a mentor, who happened to have met me on Twitter. And for some reason, decided to take me under his wing and happened to be this incredibly savvy, really, really smart businessperson who could see what needed to be done before, you know, it was right before it's time to do it. Like he had this ability to see the future in a way that most people couldn't. Those are all really, you know, fortunate accidents that I could not replicate for somebody. You know, the skill that I have that I I'm sure I could teach us how to tell compelling stories via podcast, but I couldn't tell somebody how to grow a podcast cuz I don't know how. That's why even though we started before anybody else, we're still smaller than a lot of people started after we did. So those are the really big lessons that those are the ones where I feel like, you know, I've seen the most tangible impact, obviously, I have, you know, an encyclopedia of insanity in my head.“
the piece of advice that changed relationships
“Let's look at the the more sort of personal side of this. I think it's important to to look at the professional personal side. Ultimately, we don't work to work, we work to basically enjoy our lives than the people in them. One of my great fears was I would end up alone. And then, I dated a few girls and it was a nightmare. I was like, Okay, I'm not afraid of being alone anymore. That's over. I was like, I think I have some game here. Despite what people want to do matchmaking, the funny thing is that the fear went away. And it was replaced by another fear that one or both my parents dies before I get married, or have kids. And I talked to a guy named Frank Ostaseski, the director of the Zen Hospice Project. And I was like, well, Frank, you help people die. You're the director of the Zen hospice project if anybody can answer this question for me. It's you. And he gave me some really interesting advice. He said, “Don't wait for these big moments in your life to spend time with the people that you care about. Spend time with them. It's an absurd gamble to think that you're going to have the clarity of mind to heal the most important relationships of your life on your deathbed.”
And that always stayed with me as one of those things. That one little piece of advice changed my relationship with my parents forever. I mean, I still get into fights with my mom. My mom still gets on my nerves, cuz she's an Indian mom, I think that's just that comes with the territory. I think it's like something in the genetics. It's like, Oh, I'm an Indian mom, my job is to be a pain in your ass.”
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE on your favorite platform for listening to podcasts.
Please rate the podcast and leave a review, and of course share it with any friends who are ready to discover the Nature Advantage!
.