Summary of Session 1 – Sai Mathangi

As the first session of As I Evolve, we student leaders got the glimpse of a few of the numerous qualities to be possessed by a successful entrepreneur, and Rtr Pradeep Yuvaraj, MD and CEO of Prezantim, emphasized on The Art Of Story Telling , leaving the audience exhilarated and ignited.

Even before the session could start, the students from different institutions were encouraged to socialize and to ease the tension, we kicked off with an ice breaker where students were asked to switch seats such that we were not surrounded by people who we already know, on all the four sides. This definitely gave us an opportunity to talk to new people.

At the beginning of the session, we were posed a question as to ‘How to decide whether to watch a movie?’ to which answers like trailers, reviews were given and the narrator promised we would find answers to the question of ‘why should I spend time listening to Pradeep Yuvaraj?’ through the session.

The narrator chose to inspire us with a glimpse of his life story and how his inspiration first got kindled after reading the Rich Dad Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki, how that led him to leave the prestigious company that he was working for to become an entrepreneur instead. This was also fueled by the fact that he had been having a stable life with a stable job and his determination to establish something of his own. So he began his first ever business venture of racing bikes, which turned out to be a disappointing failure where he was not able to sell even a small percentage of the goods produced. He had the taste of his first failure as an entrepreneur at the age of 27 and was extremely dejected. But he never gave up and started the next few ventures which also bombed some way or the other. The society, cruel as it is always, was more than ready to point out his blunders of wanting to stand on his own and even tagged him as a ‘ serial entrepreneur’. We are always told to choose that path with less risks, stable job, stable salary, uninteresting life, and we are often failed to point out another path where we can establish ourselves in this world.

As a proverb says ‘ Fail fast to win faster’, we need to embrace failure as a critical part of the learning process and the idea of failing faster allows us to identify mistakes, learn from them and make necessary adjustments more rapidly.

The next part of the session involved an active exercise where we were distributed a paper that contained colored boxes. The instructions were to divide the particular colored boxes into a particular number of equal smaller parts.

It was noted that we were able to successfully do it for the first two, but the next two boxes which led the thought provoking question of ‘why?’ The detailed discussion that followed made us understand 3 important things; first, the complex versus simple ideas, the bane of the art of unnecessary complications, and how simpler ideas can have a better reach; second, the 360 degree perspective, like for e.g., the answer to the last square was there on the paper itself, just that we had to rotate it in a particular way to see it (I, personally, was quite amazed by this). This emphasized the fact that ‘perspective matters’ and its importance in problem solving. And third, ‘don’t assume’, like how we all assumed that the complexity of the exercise kept increasing with the squares and how this made us unable to solve the simpler last  yellow square.

Following that, the narrator read a snippet about the theory of relativity, which quite honestly no one understood. And then he proceeded to tell us a story about his friend Mohan, and how he landed on huge money, going to Las Vegas to spend it, how he got scammed by a girl there and how he lost his kidney in a funny situation. When someone asked to repeat about the theory of relativity, they weren’t able to do so, but the same person was able to frequent the entire Mohan story, with all the minute details. This alone quite literally made us understand the importance of storytelling to grab people’s attention.

The session concluded by establishing certain important components of a good story telling:

• simple
• making abstract ideas concrete
• converting facts into emotions
• bringing consistency with unexpected
• credibility
• story form

Stories are truly a powerful tool, enabling leaders to inspire, influence and connect with people in profound ways. The ability to craft and deliver compelling narratives is not just a skill- it’s an essential leadership practice that can transform how leaders communicate, motivate, and guide their people. In a world where connection and communication are key, the ability to tell a compelling story is one of the most powerful tools a leader can have.