Nikhil Kamath on why he would rather ask Gen Z for advice, not somebody 10 years his senior

Millennials and the younger generation today have to understand that success is a result of many things. Very often it does not come down to what the business is or who the person is in isolation but rather market conditions for what is being built at what point of time.

I am 36 today. People of my generation are really lucky because the last 15 years in India have largely been a big bull run where asset classes across the board have performed well. India has grown tremendously in this period. So to try and replicate that in the next generation might not necessarily be the best thing to do.

People have to be cognisant to what is happening in the ecosystem and not focus so much on regurgitating somebody else’s recipe because the journey and the path might be a different thing for everyone. People should not compare what person A has done to what they are trying to achieve because circumstances, conditions, all are drastically different for both the parties.

So what is success for you?
Success for me today is freedom. I consider the people who I work with as my friends. These are people I like hanging out with in my personal time when I am not working with them. So to pick and choose who you work with is a big privilege and to be able to choose what projects you take on, to have the confidence that you will be okay if one or two things do not work out and you can attempt them with a certain degree of confidence – these things are success for me.

What are the aspects of life that you regret, which you are rectifying?
Everything from my health. I wish I was healthier, I ate better, I worked out more, I slept more. I wish I paid more attention to my family, met my parents and spent time with the elderly, especially people who are unwell. I do not think you can get the time back. What you could have done 10 years ago you cannot do today and things like that.

There are many things I regret not having done in the manner that I could have but I think these would sit on top.

Let us talk about Gen-Z in India and abroad. What is their attitude towards life? Have you ever felt that you should have had this at that age?
This is a very interesting philosophy in isolation. We do not know what we want. There is this French philosopher called René Girard who talks about something called mimetic theory. We mimic what we think we want, based on our surroundings. So your peer group, your friends, your childhood all of these factors determine what you think you want in life. Very few people truly realise that we include what we actually want.

With all the noise in the world today with social media bombarding us from every corner with all kinds of weird gurus and influencers telling us about exaggerated versions of their own story and success stories and this is sold to us by the media, social media all the time on every platform. I wish that people including myself spend more time trying to figure out who we are as people, figuring out our flaws and the good things about us.

All of us are flawed. It is very important to recognise how you are flawed or how you are different from others and what good things about you are and then try and live a life where you are cognisant to both and you probably have a little bit more of a realisations of who you are as a person and what you want.

So in a nutshell, a lot of experience is needed. Do you think experiences are really important to reach the stage where you are now?
I mean of course it helps. My experiences seem stark to me because I am looking at them from my lens and by virtue of being in the right cycle with the right company at the right time, everybody’s experiences are relevant. You could be a 25-year old boy living in a tier two town in India. You have had your own experiences. The question is do you make the effort to focus on what these experiences were? Why do they occur and what can you learn from them? We are all experienced in our own way.

My experiences might sound exaggerated by virtue of people embellishing as they reiterate it; when one person says something and then the second and the third and the fifth person says it. By the fifth person, the version of your story sounds totally different from the first person account of it. We all had experiences and I do not think a 70-year old man is necessarily wiser by virtue of his experiences compared to a 40-year-old or a 50-year-old man. It depends on how you choose to reflect upon your experiences and what you learn and take away from those.

Is young India more mature now as compared to young India of 10 years’ back?
Definitely. The pace of evolution is definitely a lot more exaggerated today. If I were to look at how I was at 25 or 20 or 15, the 15-year-old kids of today are significantly more evolved. They are more intelligent, smarter. I often feel if I have to take advice about business or life, I would much rather do it from a 15-20 year old person now than from somebody who is 10-years my senior.

So the Gen-Z is definitely evolved probably smarter than every generation that preceded them and that trend will continue so it is really important for anybody in business to realise that ever so often in different cycles you will find younger people who are smarter, sharper, hungrier than you are and you have to kind of pass the baton along and you have to get more able people who are able to do your job better than yourself and give them the responsibility and the onus and like really trust in them to do better than you could.