Those Who Choose Courage

<This is the script of a talk I gave at the ThoughtSpot Beyond conference this week. You can watch the video here. >

With 1.3 billion people, why did India choose to honor this seemingly ordinary man with a postage stamp?

To know the story behind that, we need to travel back to the 1950s. The man’s name is Dashrath Manjhi. He was born into a poor, lower-caste family in the north Indian state of Bihar. He grew up and became a coal worker, like many others around him.?

After getting married, he realized that coal mines weren't an excellent way to make a living. So, he moved to a village named Gehlaur with his young bride, Falguni Devi, to make a better life.?

Things started well for them. He would work all day on the farm while Falguni took care of the housework and brought hot lunch for him every day.?

One day, like any other, Falguni was bringing him his lunch. On the way, though, she slipped and fell from a ridge. The injuries were severe, and Dashrath and the villagers rushed her to the hospital. The nearest hospital was almost 60 kilometers away, which in the 1950s India, just ten years after gaining independence with poor infrastructure, would take many hours.?

Tragically, she didn’t make it.?

A devastated Dashrath returned to the village. After mourning her death, he realized Falguni would not be the last person to die in the village because of the poor access to medical care.?As the crow flies, the hospital was only a little over 10 kilometers away, but going around the mountain between the village and the hospital made the journey six times longer.??He decided he would make the hospital accessible for the villagers by cutting a road across the mountain.??

First, he tried all the typical paths. He petitioned the government, attempted to recruit the villagers to the cause, etc. But nothing worked.?

So he took matters literally into his own hands. One morning, he walked to the top of the mountain with whatever tools he could find and started chipping away at the mountain by himself.??

At first, villagers on both sides of the mountain thought he was crazy, that this was ridiculous, impossible even. But he didn’t listen to them. Day in and day out, he kept at it.?

Every day in the morning, he will do his climb up the mountain and work till sunset. After a few months, he even started working in the nights, if there was enough moonlight.?

He started the project in 1960, and he finished cutting the pass in 1982. Yes, after 22 years!

Today, if you ask Google maps for directions to the hospital from the village, it will prompt you to take Dashrath road.?

Part 2: The path to a better future always goes through the gateways of courage

I know that there’s no dearth of inspiring stories like this. After all, we live each day with so many of these stories unfolding right in front of us.?

Whether it’s the story of Dashrath, the mountain man, or?

The story of Professor Sarah Gilbert and Dr. Katalin Kariko, who fought against institutionalized sexism in academia to develop the vaccines helping us win the battle against Covid-19,?or?How Greta Thunberg and Susan Solomon sparked an international conversation, against all odds, that’s brought climate change to the front and center or?How People like Wangari Maathai, the queen of trees, or Malala Yousafzai, both Nobel Peace Prize recipients and education advocates, are inspiring millions through their life’s works

If we inspect these stories, we find two common themes in all of them. I want to talk to you about those themes today.?

But before that, I want to clarify that I am not drawing a parallel between what we do in our everyday work at the office and what these extraordinary people had to deal with in life. Instead, I want to highlight those two themes, for I believe they can inspire and guide us.?

The two things are:

First: There’s always a catalyst, a singular moment, that triggers their revolutions, like snow falling for weeks on a mountain and then an avalanche triggered by just one rock. It could have been his wife’s accident for Dashrath.

Second: After recognizing their moment, they begin their revolution without fear, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

Part 3: It’s easy to miss the moment as it’s happening.?

This global pandemic has been a life-changing experience for all of us. We are still living through it, and it will be many years before we fully understand its implications. If we summarized the changes that happened after Covid-19 in terms of online shopping, at-home deliveries, work-from-home, and attending conferences virtually, we have missed the big picture altogether.?

Today, we’re witnesses to a new revolution, a fundamental realignment between consumer choice and vendor preferences.?

We are moving from a vendor-centric world to a consumer-centric world.?

This is as consequential as the Copernican revolution, in my opinion. Before Copernicus, we believed that the universe revolved around the earth. All we had to do was look up in the night and could see that all celestial bodies were doing just that.?

Later, we came to realize that, forget the universe, we weren’t even the center of the solar system, that we were just another planet circling the Sun.?

Instead of a consumer circling a Walmart looking for parking in this new world, Walmart and Amazon are circling consumers’ homes, phones, tablets - looking for a way in.

This change is fundamental and irreversible. Every home, every consumer, is a unique endpoint for vendors to understand and cater to.?

This changes everything for your business, both at the front-end and the back-end. How do you rebuild the supply chain to hit all these millions of homes, not just thousands of malls? How do you give each consumer a delightful and personalized user experience for payment, marketing, and delivery??

What is at the center of it all? Data. Every company needs to rebuild its business on data. It’s the only way to see and treat the consumer as an individual.?

If you think of yourself as a data professional, this is your moment. This is our moment.?

This new world does not accept summaries and averages. Aggregates are designed to hide the individual consumer. It’s not a bug; it’s the sole design purpose.?

When we say that dashboards are dead, we think of it as moving toward a world where every consumer is a unique individual. This isn’t just an aspiration; instead, it’s a demand from the modern consumer.?

Since history began, acts of revolutionary courage have preceded every moment of meaningful progress by a few, like Malala or Wangari Maathai.?

But, change isn’t easy for people. Revolutionaries always encounter resistance. As data revolutionaries, you too will find resistance within your organization.?

People will say that we’ve just moved to the cloud, and isn’t that enough?. Or that operational dashboards don’t need to be interactive because they aren’t used to making decisions, anyway. Or that it’s ridiculous to think that the vendor who has worked for you during the last decade can’t serve your needs for the next decade.?

But, history shows us otherwise.?

As I mentioned, revolutions rarely start with widespread popular support, but they lead the charge anyway because it’s the right thing to do.?

They show that people who have the:?

• Courage to step out of their comfort zone
• Courage to fail
• Courage to contradict the norms,?

Always end up creating a better outcome for the world and make it their legacy.?

I don’t think the mountain pass is the true legacy of Dashrath, just like being the first African and Pakistani woman to be awarded the Nobel peace prize isn’t the true legacy of Wangari Maathai and Malala.?

I think courage is their true legacy.?

I hope that anyone who passes under the gateway named after Dashrath will remember that.?

There are many quotes attributed to Malala. But, I like this simple one a lot. She said, “Life isn't just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide.”

Every breath we take reminds us to live courageously and do something a little bigger than ourselves.

I wish you all many, many courage-filled years ahead.?