38: Sonny Garg
Image via Wind Systems Magazine
“And for whatever reason, in that moment, over some flaming saganaki, I said ‘Tim, my life sucks.’”
About Sonny
Sonny Garg is a vulture culture, bear hugger, sushi lover, fiction aficionado, and a man who has driven change on a scale that would please even his notoriously difficult to please father.
Sonny was born to Indian immigrants, who immediately began to instill in him what all immigrant parents instill in their children - unyielding drive and tenacity, an inhuman work ethic driven by daily doses of guilt and shame, and let’s not forget a constant sense of inadequacy stemming from trying to please someone for whom nothing short of perfection will ever be enough.
And, like many immigrant kids, Sonny has converted this tough love into a career spanning the public, private, and non-profit arenas, driving the kind of change that makes one wonder if he has cloned himself.
After a stint in research at the University of Chicago, Sonny served as Assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, leading the conceptualization and creation of World Business Chicago. Having earned his public service stripes, he was appointed a White House Fellow by President Clinton, where he served as a senior aide to the Deputy Director of the Office of Management & Budget.
After a successful exit in the startup world, Sonny began what would become his longest role yet, rising to become the Chief Information and Innovation Officer of Exelon, the $40 billion public utility, where he transitioned the company from coal generating plants into renewables, founded the Emerging Technologies department to identify and implement innovative tech, and served on the investment committee for Exelon’s venture fund.
Jumping back into the world of tech, Sonny launched and grew the Energy Division at industrial AI company Uptake, before heading to the investment side, working in seed-stage investments at DNS Capital, the family office for Gigi Pritzker and Michael Pucker.
Ever the giver, Sonny has been passing down his wisdom to the hungry young minds at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he is a Distinguished Executive-in-Residence.
Sonny earned an M.B.A. and a B.A. at the University of Chicago, and, as he wrote in his underground anti-establishment prep school newspaper “the other side,” isn’t it ironic… that he would eventually fulfill his father’s dream of one of his kids going to Harvard, getting his MPP from the Kennedy School of Government.
These days, Sonny helps early stage companies with go to market strategies, sits on the boards of various companies, and helps nonprofits make an impact.
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Max Chopovsky: 0:02
This is Moral of the Story interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, Max Jepofsky. Today's guest is Sunny Garg, vulture, culture, bear hugger, sushi lover, fiction aficionado and a man who has driven change on a scale that would please even his notoriously difficult to please father. Sunny was born to Indian immigrants who immediately began to instill in him what all immigrant parents instill in their children on yielding drive and tenacity, an inhuman work ethic driven by daily doses of guilt and shame and, let's not forget, a constant sense of inadequacy stemming from trying to please someone for whom nothing short of perfection will ever be enough. And like many immigrant kids, Sunny has converted his tough love into a career spanning the public, private and nonprofit arenas, driving the kind of change that makes one wonder if he has cloned himself. After a stint in research at the University of Chicago, Sunny served as assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, leading the conceptualization and creation of world business Chicago. Having earned his public service stripes, he was appointed a White House fellow by President Clinton, where he served as a senior aide to the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. After a successful exit in the startup world, Sunny began what would become his longest role yet, rising to become the chief information and innovation officer of Exxon, the $40 billion public utility, where he transitioned the company from coal generating plants into renewables, founded the emerging technologies department to identify and implement innovative tech and served on the investment committee for Exxon's venture fund. Jumping back into the world of tech, Sunny launched and grew the energy division at industrial AI company uptake before heading to the investment side, working in seed stage investments at DNS Capital, the family office for Gigi Pritzker and Michael Pucker. Ever the giver, Sunny has been passing down his wisdom to the hungry young minds at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, where he is a distinguished executive in residence. He earned an MBA and a BA at the University of Chicago and, as he wrote in his underground anti-establishment prep school newspaper, the Other Side isn't it ironic that he would eventually fulfill his father's dream of one of his kids going to Harvard, getting his MPP from the Kennedy School of Government? These days, Sunny helps early stage companies with go-to-market strategies, sits on the boards of various companies and helps nonprofits make an impact. His main challenge now is how the hell to adapt to being an empty nester now that his daughters, Talia and Olivia, are out of the house. Perhaps Pancake Mornings will be replaced with evening aged whiskey, Sunny, welcome to the show.
Sonny Garg: 3:02
Max, thank you, what a great intro. Wow, you do a lot of research, don't you? How did you find the Other Side? Did I talk to you about that or no? Where did you find that?
Max Chopovsky: 3:10
I think it was in the story that you told in the link that you sent me.
Sonny Garg: 3:14
Oh, okay, on the moth, yes.
Max Chopovsky: 3:16
Okay, okay, it's the least I can do. I got to show some respect to the guest taking the time and do some research.
Sonny Garg: 3:23
Well, you're very kind, thank you, and I'm excited to be here.
Max Chopovsky: 3:27
So you're here to tell us a story, so set the stage. Is there anything we should know about the story before we get into it?
Sonny Garg: 3:35
No, I think I can just dive into it. I can just give you the context as I go into it. All right, let's go Tell me a story. All right, I recall this story, my David Byrne moment, and it's from the song, the Talking Head song, where he eventually says well, how did I get here? And it was about 10 years ago and I was still at Exelon and I'd just been named to the Executive Committee of Exelon, which is like the top 10, 15 people in the company that get to oversee the strategy for the company and responsible for basically growth and ensuring that we are a competitive company. And it was a long-term goal. And, as you said, with regard to just like, I felt like it was the next notch on the belt, it was the next thing I was supposed to be doing and I had sort of done so many of those things that, whether driven by insecurity or driven by actual interest, it's hard to know sometimes, but taking all the boxes, going to Harvard, becoming a White House fellow, all those kind of things, and so it just felt like the natural progression toward being part of that inner sanctum of the people who ended up at Davos thinking they control the world, and it just felt like the next step in that journey. And that same day I was having lunch with a buddy of mine named Tim, and Tim and I had been at had done this really great program together at the Aspen Institute called the Henry Crown Fellowship. And the Henry Crown Fellowship it's one week every summer for three summers and you explore a number of different topics during those weeks. One is the idea of values-based leadership, another is the idea of from success to significance, and the third is the idea of what's a good life. So I've been thinking a lot about what is a good life. What does it matter? You read all these things and that was between 2008 and 10. So this is three years later, after it ended, and Tim was at Boeing and he was the senior executive there, and so we were sharing sort of our career paths. We're very similar and we were both very ambitious about that. So Tim and I were out in lunch and we're in Greek town and I said, hey, tim, I got the notice. Today I'm on the executive committee and Tim is a hugely generous guy, one of the nicest people I ever meet. He's a contrast in so many ways. He's a Marine and yet he's a guy who listens to Leonard Cohen and quotes poetry beautifully. I mean, talk about a rich human being. And I said Tim, dude, I'm on the executive committee. And he's like, oh my god, that's amazing. So I mean, you're an executive, you have a Fortune 125 company you know at the time was about 125. And for whatever reason, in that moment, over some flaming Saganaki, you know, I said Tim. I said Tim, my life sucks. And he just looked at me and bewildered and he said six words that changed everything for me. He said what are you chasing and why? And it just for whatever reason. You know I'd been through that whole what's a good life thing? I'd study that in college. Just that phrase, what are you chasing and why? Just so embedded itself in my head and I couldn't escape it. And I was just like why did I say my life sucked? Like I, on the surface, had everything I was hoping for, you know, senior executive, I had good standing in the civic community, I had a great wife, I had two great kids, we had a fabulous place in Lincoln. All that stuff that I was sort of thought I was seeking for whatever reason, was just in my mind at that moment, just didn't live up to what I was hoping it was going to be. And that night I went home, tim, and I would ask, when we learned this thing called just divide your life into four dimensions work, family, community, self and ask yourself what do you want in those and why? And I went through that. And I went through it and I was like okay, at work, what do I want? Well, I want to be a CEO. Well, why? Because I'm supposed to be, but that was like the best of the why I could come up with. Well, in the community, what do I want? Well, I want to be on the board of the art institute or Lyric Opera. Well, why? Because anybody who's important in Chicago is on those boards. You know there was no substance to it. When I went into, you know the idea of family, I'm like what do I want? Well, I want to be with my kids. I want to spend time out. They were going to be entering high school soon. I was never around. I was gone all the time. I was traveling. You know I had employees all over the country, so I was failing there. And then, you know, when it came to the why of the individual, I was like I want to be healthy, I want to live to a ripe old age and, you know, at the time I was about 25 pounds heavier. I was out every night with that devil of a gift from corporations, the, you know the expense account. So you know you can drink and eat and anything you want, and so I wasn't even taking care of myself, you know, and I had constant neck pain and back pain. You know, it's just this realization. That's why I call it my David Byrne moment. I just it was at that place where I was just like how did I get here and how is it that I'm living a life that doesn't feel like mine, that feels like it's between who I think I want to be. And it was really probably the hardest part was that sense of like I didn't have a good answer to Tim's question as to what I was chasing and why, and it's sort of that moment turned into years of exploration to try to answer that question for myself with greater authenticity and a feeling that was more legitimate as to who I wanted to be as a person versus chasing. I think what I realized was I was just tracing more and more achievements, more and more validation to the point that you know I'd become an addict. I mean, it's an addict to achievement and, like any addiction, it gets harder and harder to achieve right. So it's not, you know, and and it's destructive, you know. Going back to my family, I wasn't around, I wasn't loving the people I should be loving because I was pursuing these achievements. So that to me was like an inflection point that really changed so much of what you know I've been doing over the last decade and where I'm trying to find meaning.
Max Chopovsky: 9:47
Inflection points are so underrated and being able to recognize those inflection points is even more underrated. Why do you think you blurted out that your life sucks?
Sonny Garg: 10:03
One of the things I realized over time was that if you listen to yourself, you're telling yourself these things. You're just not listening to yourself, right. And I went back to the idea of my back was hurting, my neck was hurting, my body was telling me. It wasn't like I was out of you know, I was overweight, but I wasn't. I didn't have a chronic illness, but it was just like, oh, I, my body, was telling me something, and so I wasn't paying attention to that, and so I think there were just signals that, for whatever reason whether that was at an emotional level, a physical level, a spiritual level that I was just closing myself off to and I don't know how or why that snuck out that day. And but I do think to your point, which is an important part of these is probably that wouldn't have happened with many other people than Tim, because Tim and I had built a relationship of vulnerability. Our gift from the Aspen Institute was that when we walked into that room together, we set our egos aside and it was really about questioning ourselves. And so I think it was also the context, the fact that I was with him and I was used to exposing myself to him in a more authentic way, and he was. You know, he wasn't one I put the mask on. He was one I took the mask off with, and so just my guess is the combination of just how I was feeling, with being in an environment with somebody that I knew cared deeply for me as a person and I felt comfortable sharing who I was created the opportunity to say something that I hadn't planned to say.
Max Chopovsky: 11:43
That was your body basically going past the mask. Well, you hadn't, you didn't have the mask on, but it was your body basically going past those sort of guardrails and saying, no, I need to get this message out, it's like. It's like when you have somebody who's held hostage and they hold up a sign out of a car window. That just helped me Exactly.
Sonny Garg: 12:01
No, totally, totally no. I think that's exactly right, and it was a guy that that I knew would listen to that that cry for help, my good buddy Gene told me many years ago.
Max Chopovsky: 12:12
He said something that stuck with me. He said you can't graduate high school if you're getting an A in one class and failing the rest of them. It's such an interesting metaphor for our lives. You know, you weren't taking care of yourself physically, you weren't taking care of yourself emotionally, you weren't there for the kids, which is what ultimately kind of matters in the end and there are, I don't remember where I read this, but something to the effect of the things in our life that matter the most are actually easy to overlook in the short term because the impact will not be immediate. In other words, if you stop working out for a week, if you're gone from your family for a week, you're not going to ruin your health and you won't ruin your relationship with your family. But if you don't take care of yourself for years and you're an absentee father for years, then one day you'll wake up and you realize that it's too late to fix some of that, because the problems, the health problems, the relationship with your kids has suffered so much over those many, many years that now, all of a sudden, it's beyond repair. And it's so fortunate that we have for those of us that have people around us that we can actually turn to and ask for help, whether it's a more formal sort of request, or we're having lunch with them and all of a sudden something slips out and that person is smart enough to recognize. Oh, this is a cry for help. I gotta address this.
Sonny Garg: 13:52
And to your point. I read this really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, just talking about what we say in language, and it said when it comes to investments, our finances, we talk about investing and then when we talk about time, we say we spend time. And they said well, what if you start thinking about time as an investment and so, like your investment portfolio, there are different return profiles. Some of it you need to invest in and it's a long-term return, so that when you get to retirement you have your 401k. You've got things that have sort of compounded over time. But if you ignore them and all of a sudden you turn 65 and you haven't done it, you don't have any money. And so thinking about that in the same way that you just said was you've got to put that investment of time in things that have long-term returns. The hard part of that is the lack of the immediate gratification, and it's not something that is recognized and rewarded. Like I get promoted, I'm going to be in the newspaper, I mean whatever I mean, I'm going to feel that validation, I'm going to get that, or I can post that on social media, I can say things about it If I'm like, hey, I was playing with my kids and we went outside, who's going to care about that? And so I think it's so hard for those things that are investments of time, that compound over time, that don't have immediate validation, particularly in a society like ours which is such an immediate I mean, we want likes immediately, we want all that gratification. It's even worse then, it's probably worse than when I was growing up in terms of that need, for instance, and constant gratification. But you need to be shifting your mindset to be thinking about those, and I just wasn't. I was taking those for granted, as much as somebody would be saying, yeah, when I'm 65, I'll have a bunch of money, I can retire, and it's not going to be there.
Max Chopovsky: 15:48
How much of that drive do you think was due to wanting to please?
Sonny Garg: 15:52
your dad. I think there's just a broad cultural sort of context in which I grew up which is similar to any immigrant families that sense of sacrifice, that sense of hey, we're here, take advantage of what's there. I think, within the context of so I think that's just very much shared amongst a lot of the folks I grew up with from whose parents were immigrants. I think part of what was there's the upside of coming to the opportunity, and then there's the idea of coming to somewhere as an opportunity for growth and there's also that sense of like you're leaving something. And so, to a certain degree, my dad had both of those. He was coming here because he wanted the opportunity for himself and his family. At the same time, he had a strong dislike for India, like he felt like it was corrupt. He felt like it didn't give him opportunities. Had he stayed just the way he grew up, which was very poor, there wouldn't have been opportunities. So he felt very dismissed in his own country. So he didn't have a love of that country. So a lot of what we were raised with was assimilating. We didn't have Indian culture around and we didn't have Hinduism and religion. It was like you're going to become American and, by the way, you're going to become American by being as good as you can be at the things that America rewards most, but then those things that you can be competitive in, right. I wasn't going to be a great athlete. When I entered high school I was 4'10 and weighed like 80 pounds. That wasn't going to work for me, so the education piece was a big piece of it, and so it was a constant looking for signals as to how you be successful and then trying to achieve those right. I talk to some of the business schools sometimes. I talk to them about you're looking for that roadmap to success, and that roadmap tells you what you need to do. And then what you do is you master the how, right. Well, I got to get into a good college. Well, great, I'll get great grades. I'll get a good SAT, I'll get extracurriculars, blah, blah, blah. I got to get a good job. I got to. So I master the how. I just assume the what is the right, what? And I never asked the question of why, why do I want those things? And at some point everybody has that David Byrne moment. Everybody has that question, that existential why am I doing this? What is this about. You know it's just going to hit you. It hits you at different ages, it hits you at different times, it'll probably hit you more than once, but it'll happen right. And I never really asked the question of the why. Why do I want these things? I just assumed it's stuff that I was supposed to want. And so I do think, like the combination of the immigrants, my dad sort of view on it, but also the fact that we are organized societally to create addicts for materialism, consumerism, constant validation I mean like that's how we are organized. So it wasn't like his doing on his own, it was like it just the fact that his, the way he thought about it, aligned, the way the world was organized, that enabled me to go do these things.
Max Chopovsky: 18:56
And social media has even made it worse, because now you can immediately quantify how people think about you and how much they like whatever you're putting out there. You know it's, it's interesting. So I grew up in Kiev, in Ukraine, and we moved to the US when I was 10. And so the immigrant, you know, shame and guilt and pressure resonates with me because there was this whole level of well, you know, look at what we've sacrificed to give you this freedom and part of kind of what I was chasing, which was originally IT and going to GE before moving to Chicago to do real estate and then eventually video. A lot of that was before I thought about my. Why, you know? And the assimilation component is so interesting? Because I feel like at first we assimilate and this goes for everybody, but doubly for immigrants we want to assimilate to fit in, and it's not until many, many years later that we actually embrace our roots. We embrace our you know what makes us unique. But that can only happen after you've gone through, I think, the exercise of trying to assimilate and realizing that actually, no, the satisfaction is not in just being one of X, it's being one of one. There's a funny story about when we moved. So my last name is Chepofsky and my first name legally is Maxim. That's the Russian name. And shortly after we moved here we got our citizenship, got our passports and my parents this. Before I turned 18, they decided to change the name, change the last name and change everyone's first names because they thought Chepofsky would be really hard for people to pronounce. So my dad's name is Leonid and he changed it to Lenny. My mom's name is Ala and she changed it to Ali, a-l-l-y and Maxim. They changed to Max and Chepofsky. They changed to Chapman and it kind of harkens back to what people used to do at Ellis Island all the time. But I was like I like our name, I don't give a shit if people can't pronounce it. They got to learn to pronounce it. And so after I turned 18, I went back and I changed my name back to Maxim Chepofsky. But in a little dig at my dad I took off my middle name, because your middle name in the former Soviet Union for most people is just your dad's name, kind of conjugated. And so now I actually don't have a middle name and that's why, because I took his name off and like, are you going to change my original name, then I'm changing it back and I'm taking your name off. But yeah, the assimilation thing is a real struggle. Let me ask you this so, after you had that flaming Saganaki at the Greek restaurant with David and he asked you what you're chasing and why that was sort of an eye-opening moment for you what did you end up changing and why?
Sonny Garg: 21:56
I ended up changing a lot. First of all, I would say that what I didn't recognize at the time when I was starting the journey was that going back to this culture of sort of instant gratification, I think there's also a culture that leads to sort of like oh, I can find the answer to this question quickly. I'm going to take the course at Yale on happiness and then, if I do these three things every morning, I'll be happier. How do I fly down to Brazil and take a little ayahuasca? And it'll be revealed to me my purpose and all that stuff is good. But there's this great Franciscan monk that I started reading in the mornings, named Richard Rohr Father Richard Rohr, and he just talks about entering liminal space, and it is that space where you just got to give yourself time and sort of grace to just explore and try to figure it out and iterate. And it's a really uncomfortable space because we want to know, you know, we want to be in control, we want security, we want all of that stuff, and so part of it was just getting comfortable with not knowing and to give myself the time to say, look, I didn't love what I was doing at Exxalon at that point, but it was a good job and I was making good money, and so I gave myself time to go figure out, like, what is it that I really want to be doing? What is it that's going to be important to me? Right, and defining not a role or even a job or a company as to what I might go do next, but to start thinking about what are the criteria that define the way I want to live my life? Right, and some of that was in the world of work and the idea of what environment that I want to be in. You know, there's a great social psychologist named Kurt Lewin that talks about behavior as being a function of person and environment, and I think one of the things that I hadn't recognized because I was so ambitious, was that the environment that you work in matters, you know, versus this mythology that, hey, if you're smart, you're willing to work hard, you know you can be successful anywhere. That might be true, but you also might not be happy there, right? And so when I look at the business school students, you know we channel them into finance and consulting and we're like you will be successful. But those are very different industries and even within those, big investment bank versus a boutique boutique is very different, but we don't really get into the nuance of the environment with them. You know, we just want you to have a brand name and be able to drive towards that right. And so, in thinking about it, I ended up with five criteria that I was after about a year of thinking about it and talking to people and just, and there were. One is when it came to the work, I wanted to be in a space that was that was being disrupted, because I liked to think creatively, I like be imaginative, I like to, you know, and so I wanted to be somewhere where there weren't rules, where we were going to go, and you know we had to go figure it out. I mean because the utility industry is interesting and it was great to me, but at the end of the day, it's incremental, you know, you know. Two is I wanted to be with a group of people that wanted to win that space. You know that, because I really I did want to do something of consequence. I didn't want you know whether that was ego, I don't know what you but I wanted to do something that was that felt important. If it was, I wanted to do something that, at the end of the day, was net positive for society. You know that if we were good at this, it was net positive. I called that my McDonald's test because I was the time chief and innovation and information officer at Exxalon and McDonald's just had a new CEO and I was like, oh, I should go work for him. He's really he will love you to be chief innovation officer. And I was like I don't know man, like finding creative ways to make kids fat really isn't my goal in life, so I sort of, you know. So that was sort of my McDonald's test. And then the last two were probably the most important, and even the fact that I say them fourth and fifth and really they were one and two were probably says a lot about how I, at the time, prioritize these. The first one was I wanted to be with people who believed in values based leadership. People actually believe that when people come to work they feel good, that they feel they feel valued, because, a it's just the right thing to do. B you'll get a lot more out of your employees, right? You know there's a great professor who passed away. It was a Harvard business school named Clay Christensen, who talked about, you know, management being a noble profession, because how people feel when they come to work and how they feel when they go home and have dinner with their families is in a large part determined by how they're treated. And that idea of like somebody sitting around the table at night with their family, like I was wanting to do, and not feeling good about themselves really stuck with me, you know. So, creating that kind of environment and I didn't feel like Exxalon had that, you know we don't need to go into great detail that. But you know, subsequent to, after I'd left, I mean obviously they were indicted. They were, you know, they have a lot of legal troubles. They weren't on the up and up ethically, in fact, they did something illegal I was surprised by. And the fifth was I wanted flexibility with my kids because I'd missed so much time, and so I made a commitment to myself that I would be home for breakfast or dinner three out of the five work days. So one of the two, three out of the five work days, we were going to have a meal together, you know, my kids and I and with my wife, right. And so then I started looking for stuff that fit that criteria. And it was so interesting because I would find opportunities and I'd come tell my wife Julia. I'd be like, hey, this is such a great job. And she'd be like, she goes, yeah, but you'll be traveling. I go, yeah, yeah, but I'll balance that. And she's like, well, what happened to that fifth criteria of being with us and the girls? Right. Or like, hey, I'm going to go do this. And she's like, isn't the CEO kind of a dick? I'm like, yeah, yeah, but I've worked for dicks before. And she's like, okay, what about that fourth criteria? And it was so interesting because I was so willing. I was so willing to sacrifice the fourth and fifth ones of values-based leadership and family in pursuit of my own ambitions right, and it just took a while. It took a while to find the right opportunity and fortunately, you know, I was reading Crane's Chicago one day and I read about Brad Keywell, who's the serial entrepreneur here in town starting this company called Uptake. I was going to, you know, apply industrial AI to detect or predict component failures and mission critical assets, and I had spent a lot of time looking into that. As the CIO and the head of innovation at Exelon, I felt like I knew the space really well. So I just we had mutual friends. I called up Brad and said, hey, you know I'd love to learn more. And he said, yeah, come see me. So we, you know, talked, went over there and by the end of the meeting he's like, well, why don't you just come here and build the energy practice? And I thought, okay, well, let's think about these criteria. You know, big open space nobody owns, and still doesn't eight years later. Nobody owns AI. Here's a guy that is ambitious, who wants to build something and who has built nine companies, taking three public. He likes to do things. Is it net positive? At the time, I think, yes, you know, you can start thinking about the implications on people at work and, you know, in eliminating jobs Although I tend to think about what we were doing and a lot of AI is providing information that humans still have to take action on. And then Brad seemed like he was a values based leader. You know we talked a lot about a good life the first time we met. You know he actually said to me he said I can't believe you're a Henry Crown fellow. I wanted to be a Henry Crown fellow because I wanted to explore those good life questions and stuff. So I was like, and he had hired his own philosophy professor to tutor him on philosophy and a good life. So I was like, all right, well, this guy thinks about that stuff. And then you know, I just said to Brad, look, I don't want to manage anybody. I told him. I said, look, I'm an addict to achievement. I'm like I don't and ill, I'll ignore my family. I'm like I don't want to manage anybody, I just want to do deals. I will do deals, I will build this practice area because I want the flexibility of being with my kids and, by the way, I'm an addict. So I don't want an office and I don't want a title and I don't want an admin, I'm like I will do my own spreadsheets, everything. So I just sat you know, we had about 50 employees at the time and I just sat out in the open space with all the other, you know, all the other employees, of which most of them were, you know, between 25 and 35, you know, best thing I've ever done, best five years ever.
Max Chopovsky: 30:23
And you had to be so self-aware A, b, you had to be humble, right? And it's so interesting how, when you align what you're doing with that framework, that those two things just came naturally.
Sonny Garg: 30:42
Yeah, I mean, I think the humility was hard right, because, you know, and it's still hard, it's still, you know, like I use the word addict intentionally, even though I don't want to. I don't think it's that it rises to the level of destruction that other addictions have, right, but I also use it because it can be destructive. It can be hard to keep getting higher, you know, to get to high, and because you're never not an addict, right, and so like I still have to fight this, right, like I'll be, you know, I'll be reading about somebody I know or I'll be reading this and I'll be like God damn it, shouldn't I be doing that? Shouldn't I be at this dinner? Shouldn't I be at this fundraiser? Shouldn't my name be in the newspaper today? Right, and so I still get that and so it's still a fight. But it was to what you said earlier in terms of reevaluating the return on my time and like what was important. And there was a number of things. One was investing in relationships differently, I mean like true deep relationships, like how do I have more Tims in my life? How do I have that relationship with my kids and wife that I want, right? The other one is what I started calling opening the aperture and just sort of. You know, some people call it presence. There's just a beauty in every moment and I just, you know, when you're thinking about earnings per share and how do you go from $2.12 to $2.14, you don't even think about any of that stuff. You don't see the awe and the wonder around you, right? And I was totally missing that. And, again, it's not something you're rewarded for. You know, one of my favorite authors is Joseph Campbell, right, the guy who wrote the book, you know, the Hero with a Thousand Faces and talks about the hero's journey. And he says, you know, he's interviewed by Bill Moyer. It's a great series. You can find it on Amazon Prime called the Power of Myth. It's a five part interview with him and at one point he says, you know, he goes, bill, what's the meaning of a flower? Right? But it's just like that, in that moment, like, do you appreciate the beauty that is that flower? Do you appreciate, like, the magnitude of the gift, of what that is and what you are living with, you know? And so I think that that was a huge part of redefining what those sort of what a good life was in terms of like do you appreciate? You know, I'm looking, I'm sitting here and I'm looking out my window and I can see Lake Michigan, you know, and you're like, that's beautiful. Am I spending two minutes a day just saying, wow, you know? And? And it really does come back to so many of the virtues that we are taught in our faith, traditions or philosophy. That really can, I think, but at least for me, better grounds me. It's hard to stay grounded, but you know, gratitude, humility, compassion, grace, mercy, all those things, none of which you'll find in the hallways of a of a Fortune Hunter company, but those are really things that there's a reason we've been talking about that for thousands of years, because I do believe it, if you can ground yourself in those, you just had those moments of real inspiration and they will happen more frequently.
Max Chopovsky: 33:58
As you learn to become more attuned to it. You make a really interesting point about the fact that you don't get rewarded for some of those things that we notice. You know, a butterfly, a beautiful flower? I would take that a step further and say maybe we need to rethink what matters and what an actual reward is, because if you define a reward as monetary or social media followers or, you know, being at some dinner or having your name in the paper, then no, but maybe we're thinking about the wrong rewards, right, and so the struggle to always be in the moment and enjoy that moment for what it is, it's an ongoing struggle. For me personally, it's still worth it if you can notice some of those things. And I think have you read Rick Rubin's book? No, the one that he just came out with? It's really interesting because he talks about exactly that he goes. You know, art comes from two places it comes from within you and it comes from outside of you. And the way to be able to kind of harness the power of the ether to create art is to be acutely aware of it. But to be acutely aware of it you have to be well-practiced, and the only way to do that the only way to practice is to literally sit outside, close your eyes and listen, and maybe you'll hear a bird, maybe you'll hear rustling leaves. Open your eyes, look at what's around you. It's really, I think, underrated and, frankly, as an aside, it's what I think helps create great artists, because I think really good artists are sensitive to what's around us and then they can take that, harness it and translate it into something that the rest of us can relate to, whether you're a writer, a musician, a comic.
Sonny Garg: 35:54
Yeah, can I just jump in on that real quick? I agree, I mean I look to artists because I feel like they're the ones who are attuned to that, and so it leads me to two thoughts. One is I think it's really important, given that there aren't these sort of financial rewards or recognition rewards. You know, the community you have has to share those beliefs. They have to prioritize that, because if I'm like, hey, spending time with my kids, and I'm in a place where everybody's like, no, you got to be on the road and you got to be selling, or I'm like, hey, I'm just going to do nothing today, and they're like, well, why aren't you at the country club doing blah, blah, blah, right? So a lot of my change was actually changing who I spent time with. I mean who I was lit, who were close, who I decided to spend time with. Not that those other folks weren't fine and that's their choice, but like this was, I had to remake to a certain degree some of who I was spending time with and people I thought were more aligned with what I wanted. Right, on the artist front, I've always thought about there's this term in Japan called the iki guy, and it's this. You know, it's this Venn diagram of what do you love, what do you get at, what does the world need, what can you get paid for? And in the middle is supposed to be your reason for being. Now, that sort of scares me. It feels like a pretty big concept. But we saw, like artists when I think about that, I think about like most of us go to the world, come into the world and the world says here's what we need, here's what you can get paid for. Now go, get good at this. Right, go be. You know, and depending on your socioeconomic, many times it sort of dictates that you know, blue collar, go become a. You know, a construction worker, a blumber. You know my dad's going to be. Like, go to Harvard, become an investment banker, a lawyer. You know, what we love isn't. The world doesn't give a shit about that. You know they're like this is what we need and we'll pay you for this. Now, get good at this. And I feel like artists are so inspiring to me because they discover, like, what they love and they're willing, and then they spend all their time mastering their craft, which means you know what are you good at, and then they hope that the world will. The world needs it and the world will pay them for it. Right, I mean, there's no guarantee there? I mean, if I go to business school at University of Chicago, there's a really high likelihood that I'm going to make money. If I'm going to be a singer-songwriter, that's not going to happen. And you know, I always say to people like imagine me saying to somebody coming out of you know who wants to go into business look, you're going to make nothing for 10 years. You're going to do spreadsheets at Goldman for 10 years and at night you're going to have to wait tables to make money. Are you willing to do that? Are you kidding me? But I'm willing to be an actor, a musician, a painter and wait tables because I believe that's who I am, that's what I love. So I always look to artists because not only because of their acute senses, you know, their senses are so much more refined than mine are, and so I feel like they can appreciate things in a way that I'm trying to learn, and because they stay committed to who they fundamentally believe. Like you know the Mary Oliver quote that this is the one precious life, and they're like I'm not going to waste it doing something that I don't want to be doing.
Max Chopovsky: 39:12
And, by the way, their Venn diagram. The Ika guy would not even have what the world will, what I can get paid for, and I respect artists so much because they're going to say, okay, in that case I will give that up and adjust my standard of living and adjust my expectations so that I can continue to produce art because I can't not do it. So they say, even if I don't get paid for it, I'll still do it. Right, like that to me is so powerful. I have a younger brother who's 14 years younger than me and he's always wanted to get into music and I've always been supportive of him my parents, of course, were not originally and he moved out to LA and he made almost no money, way below the poverty level, just doing white label kind of music. And he ended up getting into crypto and selling music and FTs and he met a couple of people along the way that were instrumental to his career. He ended up getting written up in Time and Billboard. He got signed to CAA. He ended up becoming the second biggest NFT artist in the world behind Snoop Dogg, interestingly enough and made really good money and then he actually raised a million dollar kind of seed round with himself as the entity that was being invested in, so he could make, as he put it, I think, 40, $25,000 bets on different parts of his practice and kind of see which one paid off. When I've talked to him about his sort of path A, it was interesting because it was so nonlinear, similar to mine, which is the opposite of what your parents wanted for you, my parents wanted for me. They wanted predictability and you can only get that if you go into law medicine booth to McKinsey, right, like they're predictable paths with very, very obvious sort of turns and predictability. But an artist's path is anything but predictable. But what you have to have and what he had and what I had to have had to an extent what Rick Rubin talks about is and actually what you talk about is giving up control, being okay with ambiguity and uncertainty and just kind of knowing that it's going to be okay, without any guarantee of success. Right, and that's what he did. When I talked to him about it he said look, I was completely happy making close to nothing when I was doing what I was doing and I would have kept doing it. Now, of course, it's easier said than done sometimes looking back on it and saying, of course, now that I'm successful, I know I would have kept doing kind of the white label thing and leading the starving artist lifestyle, but that is something that I think we should all respect about artists and the arts.
Sonny Garg: 42:10
Yeah, and even one thing that you mentioned there that I think is super important that I had this sort of come to grips with and have a conversation with myself, but also my wife was this idea of how much is enough, how much money do you need? And at Aspen we read this great short story by Tolstoy how much land does a man need? And so it's just that, how much is enough? And so when I left, so my wife and I sat down and said, look, we've got a quality of life we like. It became clear that if we were going to, if I was going to make that same amount of money, it was going to be hard for me to do the fifth criteria of being with my kids. And so we just said, okay, well, how much is enough for what, the kind of lifestyle we want to live? And it was significantly lower than what I was making. And so when I actually met with Brad, I just put it on a piece of paper. I said I just need to make this much, and if I make this much, this is great and everything is upside if uptake does well, right. But I had to readjust my own mindset as to yeah, I can travel, but I'm never going to have a private jet or whatever, or, you know, I don't need to stay at a four seasons, you know, I'm happy to stay at a basic place. And so the money piece becomes a huge constraint sometimes as to what we believe are options. And it's funny. So, as part of my executive and residence of Booth, I'm helping particularly the executive MBAs think about what they might want to do, and I always ask them a question when we're beginning of like, if you didn't have to make money, what would you do? And it's fascinating to hear how it's. So many times it has nothing to do with what they're doing. Nothing to do with that. You know they're like, oh, that's easy, I would go into education or I would do this or that. And there are actually ways to leverage what they're good at in those spaces. You know like, oh, you love education? Great, why don't you be a CFO of an ed tech company? Right? But there's so many constraints that we put on ourselves as to the art of what's possible and so many times that's driven by the lifestyle that we think we need to be living and the money we need we think we need to be making. And you know, once you sort of play with that constraint a little bit like when I played with that constraint and said I don't need to make that much the number of opportunities that opened up were enormous versus I've got to be a C-suite out of Fortune 100 company.
Max Chopovsky: 44:34
Totally. Does it make them uncomfortable when you ask them that question?
Sonny Garg: 44:37
No, I think they feel liberated, Like they're like wow, no, I've never thought of that, I've never thought of that, right, and it's sort of it's a catalyzing question. It's sort of like Tim's question of what are you chasing and why it was catalyzing. And so it is, it's cat. It's like oh well, there's constraints I've put on myself, and it's not saying that they have to be mutually exclusive. You know, you can find a way, but you've got to be conscientious that that's a constraint you've put on yourself and then question that constraint, Right, I think that's the key piece, is to say. And then the other one is there's a great professor down at University of Chicago named Harry Davis, leadership professor, and he talks about challenging the shoulds. You know, and that's a lot of what we've been talking about, particularly, race is in an immigrant family. You should be this, you should be that, you should, and he's like you know, but those are constraints we put on ourselves. So I just find like just challenging the constraints sometimes can really release and reveal opportunities that you just didn't even know. A friend of mine calls it, you know, differentiating between fact and story, and we tell ourselves a lot of stories about these things, but they're not really grounded, in fact.
Max Chopovsky: 45:50
And what's worse is, sometimes it's not even us that put the constraints on us. It's sometimes our parents, it's sometimes society, it's sometimes the people we hang out with. So that's even more tragic. You know, it's not even us.
Sonny Garg: 46:05
Yeah, and but it's also we accept them. It is on us because we've accepted them without challenging them. That's true, right, I mean. So I always tell this story. Yeah, I always tell this story about, like you know, my grandfather was a guy at. You know, he grew up very poor in India under the British Empire and he worked at the railway system and for a good part of his life he weighed packages and put them on the on the cars. My dad would tell the story that periodically go to work with my grandfather and over time he'd see my grandfather train British officers in the ways of the rail system and those British officers would get promoted. And you know my father, one day he asked my grandfather, he said, well, why don't you get promoted? And my grandfather got really upset and he said, which means quiet. He said you know, we don't ask those questions. You know, it's their empire, you know. So he had his agency sort of stripped from him, right, you know he was sort of an indentured servant in his own country. Right, I mean it's. You know, I don't care how many great British shows PBS produces, it sucks being colonized, you know. But you know, I feel like we sometimes underestimate the amount of agency we have. And we do have a lot of choice, and those of us who have been well educated in the history of mankind have more choices, more opportunities, more things that we could go do than anybody has ever had, and yet so many of us sit around and whining about I can't have it all, I don't have this, I don't. And you're like dude, you've got so much agency. What you need to do is the hard work of figuring out what matters to you and then make those choices you know.
Max Chopovsky: 47:51
One of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou, because it makes things so simple and you can't really it's hard sometimes for people to hear it because you don't really have a way out it puts all the agency on you. The quote is if you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
Sonny Garg: 48:09
Simple. No, I love that. I love that. That's what my I love that.
Max Chopovsky: 48:14
So let me ask you this If we go back to your original story that you told, what to you is the moral of that story?
Sonny Garg: 48:21
The moral of that story is we need to be much more intentional about the choices we're making, so so that, and we have to be more reflective and intentional about those. You know that what I sort of did was hopped on an escalator and just sort of wrote it. You know, and I really wasn't asking, wasn't making choices that were informed by, by a deep reflection on are these things that are important to me? Right? And you know there's a great one of the pieces I mean Clay Christensen is known for, you know, his book, the Innovator's Dilemma. But he also wrote this article and then book called you know, how Will you Measure your Life? And he talks a lot about if you're not intentional, if you're not reflective, life just gets away from you. And that's why I call it the David Byrne moment, you know, because it's sort of well, how did I end up here? You know how did I get here? This is not my beautiful blah, blah, blah, right. And you know Christensen talks about the fact that he's like you know he goes, he was a Rhodes scholar. He goes back for his reunion. He's like nobody said when they were Rhodes scholars. Boy, I can't wait to be divorced three times and alienated from my kids, you know, and he went to business school with Jeff Skilling and he's like Jeff Skilling and he's like boy. I can't wait to be in jail for one of the biggest frauds in, you know, american business history, but it just gets away from you right. And so you have to be reflective, you have to be intentional, you have to appreciate your agency Like. You have to make choices, and when you are amongst the, you know my father, my grandfather, didn't have the same number of choices that I have, and the fact that I wasn't willing to make the effort to actually explore those and take advantage of that is sad. You know it's a waste. You know, give it to somebody who's going to take advantage of that. So I don't know if there's a single moral, but it is sort of this idea of you know we are gifted with agency, what people might call free will, and you know, and. But we have to be intentional and reflective.
Max Chopovsky: 50:32
And you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and not have all the answers.
Sonny Garg: 50:37
Exactly, and I think that's where you've got to. It's where I love you know, folks like Richard Rohrer and other philosophers and because they'll talk about you know, moving beyond sort of a dual mindset of good, bad, just simple black, white, that there's so much complexity and you just have to. There's a great quote by I don't remember I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who talked about you know. He said he said I wouldn't give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. You know, and I think as you're making your way to the other side of complexity, it's really it's really uncomfortable and most of us probably don't make it to that other side. So we default back to the simplicity on this side of complexity and then we're not really satisfied on that.
Max Chopovsky: 51:21
So that is such a great quote. You have to get through the complexity.
Sonny Garg: 51:28
I use that with my mentor in life as a guy named Harold Richmond, and this is another way I started. When I was thinking about, like, what I wanted my life to be, I started thinking about who do I really admire? It's people I know. Right, first, I can't be like, oh, I admire Bruce Springsteen. God I do, I love Bruce, but like I don't know Bruce, like people whose lives I've seen both professionally and personally, and you know you start real. It really helps you understand, like those things that are invested in that don't have immediate returns. You see those in people you admire and you don't appreciate it till you just kind of do the exercise. You know, like Harold was the guy you know I was lucky enough, he was my professor at undergrad and I was lucky enough to give one of his eulogies and afterwards everybody came up to me and said, oh, harold was my mentor too. It must have been like hundreds of people and you're like, okay, that's a good life. Like there was no return for Harold in those moments when he was mentoring somebody. I mean, there was probably joy for himself, but like it didn't advance his career, it didn't make him any money. Talk about an investment that had payoff later and so it was like, oh, that's what I wanted. So it was like gosh. You know, that's why I want to be an executive and resident booth. You know, I want to be that same kind of guy that Harold was. I want to mentor people. I want to be able to say, and, as Harold used to say, give them permission to think differently. Yeah, but I think thinking about who you admire starts to reveal what you think is important. It was eulogy values. Yeah, it's what David Brooks called eulogy values. You know, it's the eulogy versus the resume, and I think the best people are the ones that that those two things align, that they're not separate. You know, because the eulogy, the resume, is what you did and the eulogy is how and why you did those things. And if you're sort of a, you know it's like that scene from succession this year. You know, when they're given the eulogy of Logan Roy, right, they're like struggling to say something nice about the guy. Yeah, yeah, but you know, even those people that maybe weren't great in business. They'll always be at their eulogy Talk about how they were good to their family. To me it's like how do you align all of that stuff Right? So you're not a different person? That's the Eke guy.
Max Chopovsky: 53:50
Yeah, so we've talked about a lot of different books and sort of other forms of content. What are a couple of your favorite books that get storytelling right, or a couple of your favorite books period?
Sonny Garg: 54:05
I always come back to works of fiction and literature, just because I feel like those tap the side of my brain that I don't necessarily let it access. You know, the side of the emotion, the spiritual. Those are the kind of books that I really like versus. You know, a business book that says how do you become a better leader? You know, as a friend of mine, he's one of the, he's like you know, he's a coach. He says you know, better humans are better leaders, you know. So how do you just become better humans? But I think, too, the one book that I don't know why that really hit me at one point was the book by Julian Barnes called A Sense of an Ending, and some of it is really this question of like what if the story you've been telling yourself and you've been using as a framework and a lens by which you've made decisions turns out that you were wrong and that you didn't understand that situation in its fullest form? And you didn't, and it led you to make choices. That and it led you to think about people and make choices that, had you had that, you may have made different ones right, and so that was really an uncomfortable book from that perspective, and I really love that book, a Sense of an Ending. I mean, I would tell you, like I just said, fiction, but I had been reading or listening to the new biography of Martin Luther King. You know it's called MLK A Life by Jonathan Eyge, and the thing I love about that book it's it's is the fact that MLK was grounded in the idea of love, right, universal love, this idea of, in a way that and Mandela was the same way right, it was like they were loving even the people that they disagreed with. Right, they said I love you but I don't like you. But they saw the common humanity in everybody. And I just feel like I'm at a point where I really want to become better at that. And if you think about the extremes of the conversations we have in society today, each side is trying to deny the humanity of the other. You know, if I'm woke, I'm saying well, you're. You know, you're an asshole, I'm going to cancel you. If I'm on the other side, I'm like if I'm on the right, I'm like you know, you're on ethical, you're immoral, you're a horrible human being, you're going to hell. Right, and none of the great religions ever say things like that. They all say we're all, whether you have a deep religious sense, which I don't, but if you have a spiritual sense, you know that there's a divine in everybody and recognizing that. So I'm just trying to practice that and anything that gets me to to remind me of that. You know, I just feel like then actually is a better pathway to accessing the virtues that I think are so important for me to be better at, like gratitude and humility and grace and mercy, but I think they're grounded in a recognition of the beauty and the divine of every person. So things I can read or people I can read about that remind me of that, I think, then catalyze my ability, that reflection and that intentionality to take me back to virtues and say, okay, am I living these? Because otherwise I just don't find the space or sort of constructs around me that are encouraging that type of behavior.
Max Chopovsky: 57:29
Totally. I think part of that comes from understanding, having a sense of understanding and grace towards others. And one sort of approach to that that I've come across is when somebody does something you don't like, given the benefit of the doubt of the most generous possible interpretation of their action. So if somebody cuts you off in traffic, maybe they're going to the hospital because they have to go to the emergency room. Or if somebody is rude to you or says something short, maybe it's because they're struggling with something in their family. And it's easier said than done the vast majority of the time because we're so in our own worlds, in our own heads, that we just assume generally actually the opposite, which is the worst possible interpretation of their actions. But that's one approach that, although very difficult, is one way to look at it.
Sonny Garg: 58:28
Yeah, and it's hard to practice. It's why it goes back to the idea of intentionality and reflection. I mean, you've got to be doing that, and Richard Rohr calls it contemplation and action. Yeah, exactly.
Max Chopovsky: 58:41
So last question for you If you could say one thing to your 20 year old self, you could have a minute with 20 year old Sonny and assume that he would listen actually to what you were telling him. What would that one thing be?
Sonny Garg: 59:02
I think the hardest part is assuming I'd be willing to listen.
Max Chopovsky: 59:07
That's why I made that assumption, because generally the answer is he would never listen Exactly, I don't know.
Sonny Garg: 59:13
I mean, I'm trying to think about. Maybe the thing I would do is what sort of started with? Or the question Tim asked me was I gave him one piece of advice or said something I'd say, like you know, ask yourself every night before you go to bed, ask yourself why you want these things that you think you want. Maybe that's what I would ask of myself at that point, or tell myself, because I think it's still something. I can't give them a great insight. I can't give them a great hey, here's the answer. But I think so much of it is asking yourself the right questions, and maybe that would be a question that you know, if I was willing to listen to it, and maybe that would have been one that would have unlocked you know a different way of thinking about the decisions I made, Right?
Max Chopovsky: 1:00:05
On the other hand, it probably, as it stands, had to come to pass that you would go through all of these different iterations and have all these different realizations and it would lead you to that Greek restaurant where you kind of had your mind blown because you held up the help sign.
Sonny Garg: 1:00:23
Exactly.
Max Chopovsky: 1:00:24
Yeah.
Sonny Garg: 1:00:24
And I think that's what it was. You know, and I think it would have been very hard for me to not I get that question from business school students all the time, you know, I think it would have been very hard not to have climbed that hill and then said oh wait, this is the wrong hill, I'm going to go find a different one. But I needed to climb the one that I was pointed to.
Max Chopovsky: 1:00:44
Yes, because you have to get to the top and see that the view is not what you thought it would be. Exactly. Well, that does it. Sunny Garg, thank you for being on the show, man.
Sonny Garg: 1:00:57
Oh, thanks for having me. This is so fun.
Max Chopovsky: 1:00:59
The pleasure was all mine, man. It was awesome For show notes and more. Head over to maspodorg. Find us on Apple Podcasts, spotify, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Moral of the Story. I'm Max Dropowski. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.