The Career Advice Harvard Never Taught: Burnout, Fear & Flow | Pooja Venkatraman - E712
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
47 min
1 speaker
7 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What early experiences shaped Pooja’s career path and love for writing?
I think the biggest misconception about burnout is that it comes from the number of hours you're working, but the causal factor to burnout is what are you thinking and feeling during those hours. I'm afraid my ambition has just permanently gone offline. When I ask myself what do I want, the answer is lay on a beach for three months, but like that's not a career plan. So,
why not just quit? That's what I did. I was at jobs I didn't like, I buried out and I quit.
One part of you is saying, fuck this, I wanna quit. But then another part of you is saying, Hey. Grow up. Life is hard. Jobs are hard. Okay. Stop setting your expectations too high. Put your big girl pants on and like be an adult.
Hey Pooja, good to see ya.
So good to see you. I'm so glad we're doing this.
I thought it was uh gonna be so fun just catching up and also getting catch up over podcast as well. You're a thoughtful executive coach talking about burnout. And I think that's such a topic that's on everybody's mind. Uh and also, you know, you've got, you know, a whole goal plated career, right? Uh as well journey to where you are today from Harvard and, you know, BCG to being a coach today. So I think it's an interesting career journey as well. I think it'd be helpful for many people who are uh thoughtful about their professional careers as well. So Puja, could you introduce yourself?
Yeah, absolutely. It's so fun to be catching up. Jeremy and I were classmates at Harvard Business School, and we actually did a project together in our senior year. We worked together, the two of us, on a whole like report analyzing um the daycare industry, analyzing Bright Horizons. So it's like we we worked together, we were students together. It's so fun to get to catch up now. Like Jeremy said, I'm an executive coach. I work with Ivy League grads and other high achievers. I help them level up their performance. Where they are, as well as navigate career transitions and really ultimately help them build careers that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside. I think some of my clients are experts at building careers that look amazing on the outside.
And it's part of just making sure, hey, let's make sure it feels good and sustainable and aligned to your purpose and you know, powered by flow rather than powered by stress and anxiety while you're actually building that career as well. So that's my passion. That's what I love to do. Before I was a coach, I spent some time working at BCG. I did a research fellowship with Clay Christensen, the kind of famous inventor and theorist of disruption theory. I did some chief of staff and corporate strategy roles, but I've always been an advisor. When we were at HBS, you know, and we were looking at our careers, people talked about advisor, operator, and investor as three different, you know, pathways that people could go down.
And it took me Time to like own it, you know, for myself. And I can talk about that as I talk about my career journey. But I am an advisor, you know, that's really my lane. That's the kind of work I love. And so looking back, I'm like, oh, I was always trying to figure out where to put down my advisory roots. And I tried, you know, seven different places before I found the place that I'm in now. But that's really always been like, um, I love to be an expert in something, I love to go deep, um, I love to learn a lot, and then you. Who's writing, communication, teaching, coaching to share that expertise with people and really try to help them. So that's what I do.
Amazing Pooja. So let's go all the way back to the beginning, which is you studied at Harvard for undergrad and Harvard for your MBA, right? But I'm just gonna flashback all the way back to you as an undergrad. When you first started as undergrad, what was your vision for your career? Like, you know, was it to be, I don't know, super duper green or be X or Y?
Yeah, it's funny because people see Harvard College, Harvard MBA, and so they assume my path has been pretty linear, right? Because you're like, oh, you know, you went to Harvard, you just went to Harvard again, and you're always kind of doing the same thing.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What early experiences shaped Pooja’s career path and love for writing?
0:00–4:02
2
How did Pooja transition from screenwriting dreams to a business role at Capital One?
4:02–15:36
3
What did the Clay Christensen fellowship reveal about Pooja’s advisory instincts?
15:36–28:48
4
Why does Pooja describe her career as a “circular” journey rather than a straight line?
28:48–41:26
5
What is the real cause of burnout according to Pooja’s research?
41:26–45:54
6
Why is ‘just quit’ not always the best solution for burnout?
45:54–47:11
7
What key takeaways does Pooja share for founders and high‑achievers to stay brave?
47:11–47:13
Speakers
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