It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for that generous introduction.

You are turning the tables and asking me my own question. This is very meta.

Well, my family story is not unlike many other immigrants. Let me start with that. I moved to Canada when I was young, when I was 6 years old, and my parents grew up in India, actually in Sindh, before partition. At partition, they had to move. My father's family moved to India, and my mother's family moved to Malaysia.

That is right. This is a very emotional thing because I have never had a chance to visit Pakistan. I have always wanted to, and I am making a trip there soon. This is a momentous occasion for me to rediscover my roots. Of course, I have never lived there myself. I only spent 6 years in India. I grew up in Canada, and I ended up marrying an American and moving to the States at a young age. My educational upbringing was in Canada, then I moved to the US and spent some time studying in England. But largely, I lived in Boston for most of my life.

I think one of the stories that is in the book that is probably relevant for this conversation is when we were leaving India to come to Toronto, Canada, we flew through Amsterdam, and I got lost in the Rijksmuseum on our stopover in Amsterdam. We spent a short time there, and I was lost for several hours. I was six years old. That apparently ended up being a sufficiently traumatic event that when we landed in Canada and when I got accustomed to the new place we were living in, I developed a severe stutter, a speech impediment that made it really hard for me to even say sentences.

There are many types of stutters. One involves quick repetitions, and another is when you open your mouth and nothing comes out because you cannot get the first sound out. I had the latter, which made people think I either could not talk, was reticent to talk, or they just could not understand why I was not able to answer their questions. When you are a kid, particularly in a new country and, in my case, with a bit of a funny name, Asheesh Advani, it was hard to think of myself as a leader or as someone who could accomplish much.

It was mainly because of my stutter. I can tell you more about the lessons I learned and what helped me overcome it, but you asked specifically about a childhood memory. Being lost in the Rijksmuseum for several hours is probably one of the ones I picked for this.

No, I remember. It was my first time out of the country, so the memories are vivid - taking the airplane, being in the museum, and meeting these tall, blonde men in security uniforms in each room. I was not paying attention to the art and only paying attention to what these kind blonde men were telling me to do to find my parents. No one knows if my stutter was due to that, but moving to a new country could also have contributed. Many children stutter at 6 or 7 years old, but fewer persist into adolescence.

I feel for so many people when I hear them stumble on words, especially those with a persistent stutter, because of my personal experience. Joe Biden has been open about his stutter, and I immediately connect with people who share that struggle.

Sure. Everyone has their story with a speech impediment or something they have had to overcome in childhood. My story includes a speech in school, reciting the poem "In Flanders Fields" in front of parents, teachers, and students. I struggled to get the words out of my mouth and I stumbled my way through what should be a minute or so on stage to what felt like to me an hour but it was probably about 10 minutes on stage and felt like I let everyone down.

On the positive side, my parents put me in speech therapy. On Wednesdays after school, I went to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto for therapy. My speech therapist had me practice extemporaneous speaking, starting each sentence with an "easy onset" technique. She would give me topics like buttons, artificial intelligence, or air travel to speak about extemporaneously for 2 minutes while starting each sentence slowly. I learned to change words in my head very rapidly.

Stutterers usually know they will stumble on a word before saying it, so I became adept at quickly changing words in my head. If I knew I would stutter on "podcast," I would say, "this radio conversation" instead.

I learned to be good at extemporaneous speaking and now see it as a blessing. I practiced public speaking for over ten years every Wednesday at the hospital, training that most young people never receive.

Yeah, probably between seven. It probably took a year to start, and ran right through high school.

I think a lot of people who stutter become adept at switching vocabulary and minimizing the public embarrassment of not being able to speak at times. Hearing your story about overcoming your own affliction reminds me that difficult moments build resilience. But in addition to resilience, does it change your perspective on what you want to do and the impact you want to make? It did for me, but I'm curious---how did it impact you?

Yeah, in my case, in addition to the resilience piece, which I do think is important, glossing over it isn't necessarily the right thing to do, but focusing on the fact that has become a much more important part of my life, and I know that going through what I did with both the stutter and basically all the extracurricular things I got involved with and how it helped me build leadership skills has really made me think that the impact of that you can have on somebody's life is substantial. And I would never have known that, frankly, if I hadn't reflected deeply on this part of my journey.

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So let me start by saying that our organization is very global. We have operations on the ground in over 100 countries, now up to 118. We have staff on the ground, great local leaders, and in some countries like the U.S., Canada, and Sweden, we not only have national leaders but leaders in every state or community across the provinces and states.

Our organization helps young people develop self-belief by teaching business, entrepreneurship, and financial skills. Additionally, we help young people see themselves and build prosperity for themselves and their communities. Connecting the dots between entrepreneurship, economic empowerment, and prosperity is crucial. This connection between economic empowerment, prosperity, and peace is what I'm most proud of, and it's why this nomination brings attention to this often-overlooked connection.

The Peace Prize is traditionally awarded to organizations associated with conflict and war, but some like UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders have won it. This preventive approach to peace can work even in conflict zones like Africa and the Middle East, where youth lacking economic prospects are drawn into terrorism. Our programs in places like Nigeria have been running for over 20 years, allowing young men to envision themselves as entrepreneurs and businesspeople, thereby changing their trajectory and keeping them away from terrorism if they can earn a living for themselves and their families.

Let's start with failures. It's always more fun to hear than the successes. My first failure was a business I started right out of college called "The Business Minor." I attended Wharton, the only undergraduate business school in the Ivy League. I met a lot of students who were studying engineering, physics, English and history, who really wanted to get a job in the business world. They wanted to signal to employers that they were different from all the other young people studying history, English and engineering, and they actually wanted to learn some very concrete skills so they'd succeed when they started their jobs. I was the editor of my school magazine in college called "The Wharton Account", and we expanded the magazine to all the Ivy League campuses. We recruited executive editors at each of the Ivy campuses, and we were able to build a little mini following for students who wanted to study business and wanted to get jobs. In those days, the hot jobs were investment banking and management consulting.

Based on that early experience, I thought, hey, let's create a business called The Business Minor to allow people who are studying something else during the summer to get a "minor degree" with our branding, with professors from the top universities.

I still think it is a great idea even though it was a dismal failure, probably because of my awful leadership at the time and no market research, but I still think it can be done.

We built this business. It was with a friend. We learned very quickly that students who are paying thousands of dollars for their university education do not want to spend 'more thousands of dollars' on their summers to get 'more education.' We just didn't do the research. We just didn't do the market research. We thought we'd launch. We were in love with things like branding. Let's develop a beautiful brochure to communicate this great idea. That was my first failure.

I guess the big lesson there is you have got to do market research. Fast forward a little bit to the business I started, which was acquired and is called Circle Lending. I started in my late 20s. I was 27, and it was one of the first person-to-person lending companies on the internet. It allowed people to lend money to each other for things like buying a home, starting a business, paying for education, or getting out of high interest credit card debt by borrowing money from their friends and family, their social network. This was pre-Facebook, so the idea of social networks didn't exist. Largely people were borrowing home loans from their parents or business loans from their friends and family or education loans from their extended family. We would document the loan, do all the loan servicing, do their credit reporting, and you could build a credit history with the loans. For mortgages, we would do the tax reporting so you could claim it as a tax deduction. It was an amazing journey. It really was a business that found a niche and nobody else was serving the niche. It was the early days of what we called social finance. I was interviewed in the New York Times and claimed the term social finance, or at least I believe I can claim that. I'm sure others came along and also started around the same time. That journey was a much more successful one for a number of reasons. It made me believe more that entrepreneurs can do good for the world by virtue of the journey that we've been on.

Oh, absolutely. I do not think entrepreneurship should be limited to definitions around what the press has done so well, particularly in the US, in elevating tech businesses and making entrepreneurship almost defined as high-tech acquired businesses. When I travel around the world and meet young entrepreneurs, they are finding ways to transform scarcity into abundance by building something of value for others. You can do this as a self-employed person, hire others to build livelihoods for them, or do technology. There are so many different applications of how you can be an entrepreneur. At Babson College, where I used to be involved in the Boston area, they think of entrepreneurship in a different direction. They see entrepreneurship as a state of mind and operating with resource constraints. In any field, you can have an entrepreneurial state of mind if you are operating with resource constraints. I tend to view it more narrowly as turning scarcity into abundance.

It has already happened, regardless of how I feel about it. Social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship are synonymous now. Let me give you a statistic which will blow your mind. We have a program for young people, typically in high school, sometimes middle school, to create a business while in school. It is called the JA Company Program. It has been around for 100 years and is our flagship program. It now reaches between 400,000 and 500,000 young people per year. I meet many entrepreneurs, and many of our prize award ceremonies include the winners of this program.

At least 70% of young people in this program are building businesses related to climate change and sustainability. I am not sure if they would call them social businesses, but they just see a problem that needs to be solved and find a way to work on it. For instance, using recycled products, a team in Indonesia took rubber from discarded tires and made purses and other attractive high-end products that looked beautiful. It does not look like leather, but it has that trendy feel of being new and different, made from recycled rubber. They would not define themselves as social entrepreneurs differently than entrepreneurs. They believe that what we may have called social entrepreneurship 20 years ago is now just entrepreneurship.

They are making money. Honestly, they found a way to make money and appeal to a customer set that cares deeply about helping the world, which, let's be frank, today is almost everyone. It's an opportunity. It's a market opportunity.

Let me start with why it is called "Modern Achievement" and I will tell you the Marshall story. Most achievement books are written with a traditional definition of achievement, which is all about achieving a goal and setting a long-term goal that you write down and visualize. Through abundance and effort, you can achieve that long-term goal. However, the world has really changed. The predictability of being able to set a long-term goal and know that with certainty you will be able to maximize this environment around you to achieve it is just no longer true. I just pick one trend. With AI, the world is changing as fast as it is, where young people are going to have at least 20 jobs and at least 7 careers, and over 40% of the skills they have today are going to be displaced or changed in the next 5 years. Those are largely fact-based statements from some of the reports we are hearing from experts. If you believe those things to be true, then you have to look at achievement very differently. You have to set multiple goals, be able to pivot, and find happiness in the journey to goal attainment, not just in the attainment of goals.

As I look back upon my life and when Marshall, who I will tell you about in a second, looks back upon his life, we realize that much of our happiness came not from the attainment of goals but from the journey and process of achieving them. With our own personal experiences and certainly from the experiences of young people who I met through Junior Achievement and some of the leaders I have met through Marshall, we came up with a set of lessons for young people designed around this new concept of achievement.

Absolutely. It's already happening. Rankings are becoming much less important. Let's talk about college because it's easy and you're at Columbia. Columbia is at the forefront of debunking some of this, with a professor examining flaws in the rankings, even from your university. It's already happening. The relevance of your first job is much less important than it used to be 20 years ago, when it was path-dependent. If you didn't get that job at Ford or IBM of the day, you couldn't have a successful career. Now, you could get a job at a startup that does not yet exist, related to AI, even if you start your career doing something completely different. The idea of rankings driving the way you perceive your purpose in life will change regardless of what is in my book or what thought leaders like you and I are advocating for. It will happen.

Let me give you another insight I learned when writing this book. There is a lot of pressure on young people to have their purpose, probably because people like you and I tell the world that you must have a purpose. So, parents think that their 18-year-old child needs a clear career direction to guide their myriad choices. The reality is, for much of your early career, you have what's called "ready-made" purpose given to you by your school, parents, employer, boss, colleagues, or lover. At some point, you start to build "self-made purpose", which comes at a different time for different people. For Greta Thunberg, who was very young, it came early, but for many, it comes after midlife. This is one of the insights in my book that I am most proud of. I have given a few speeches, including one at Columbia, where a dad came up to me afterward and said hearing that released some pressure on him because he was putting so much pressure on his daughter to have a sense of purpose. He realized it doesn't always work that way at 18 or 19.

One thing I like about your framework of "Leadership in Flow," is that it is about values and purpose. Focusing solely on purpose makes some people feel insecure because they haven't discovered that "one thing." When you focus on values, everyone has values. There is a section in my book called "The Hero's Exercise." I don't know if you are familiar with it. Ayse Birsel, the illustrator of the book, wrote a book called "Design the Life You Love" and another called "Design the Long Life You Love." In her second book, she has an amazing exercise called "The Hero's Exercise." We did it at JA. I have done it in my YPO forum and other places. We included it in my book because it helps you discover your values in a clever way. I won't give it away---you have to read the paragraph. Everyone over 12 years old can find values that they identify with, but not everyone has a purpose, at least not a self-made one. It can be challenging to be told to guide decisions solely by that.

Sure. The framework I introduced in the book, which we've been using at JA for many years, is called a "fixed, flexible, freestyle" framework. I learned it from Jonas Prising, who leads an organization with a different governance structure and set of decision rights. This framework works for various types of organizations, including traditional hierarchical ones. "Fixed, flexible, freestyle" means that some things are fixed---one could say global for a global organization. Other things are flexible, varying based on time and place. For instance, a lesson for a teenager is different than one for someone in their mid-30s, or a lesson for a person in Africa is different than one in Europe or Asia.

From a leadership standpoint, we brought this to JA. It has helped me and my colleagues, especially those with roles spanning geographies. It makes it quick and easy to explain what should be fixed and why, what needs to be flexible and why, and what's truly bottom-up. It's truly based on empowerment. Local education, for example, should be different in Kenya versus California. Local leaders of JA should have full autonomy over decisions that are relevant to the youth in their regions.

This framework really works well for us. I want to credit my predecessor, who did a fantastic job creating a framework and agreement for all JA entities worldwide. They all signed it, and it's helped me to follow in his footsteps by providing this easy language around fixed, flexible, freestyle. We've included this versatile three-dimensional framework in the book.

Well, he got his wish.

I get asked this question often, and it's a bit frustrating because it's like me asking you "Tell me about the adults of the world. What do they think?" The reality is, perspectives differ among young people depending on where they live and their personal stories.

To answer more respectfully and articulately, we've developed a way to collect real voices of young people. I am not speaking for them, they are speaking for themselves and we use AI to draw out common themes for what they actually are saying and what they actually believe. We have a website called www.youthvoices.org. It is a beautiful website. I encourage you to go because we have a section of the website called Conversations. We do this in partnership with MIT Center for Constructive Communication and a non-profit called Cortico. I highly recommend both of these organizations, which are doing great work.

You go to the website, click on Conversations, and literally click on any theme. It will find the segment of the conversation we had with a young person in Zimbabwe, a young person in California, and a young person in England, and it will allow you to listen to them in their own voice the common theme. It ensures that people like me are not generalizing in a one-minute answer, equating these three people's views, which are often similar but still different on some level. I know that might be a highly unsatisfying answer to your last question, but I will end with something that should give you a little bit of hope.

Of course, there is a massive mental health crisis. I used to think that the mental health crisis was confined to the US and Western Europe, but I have since learned that it exists even in developing countries. In places where I thought that just because the data showed young people were more optimistic about their future, they were not susceptible to mental health issues. So, I believe there is something deeper here. However, the hope and optimism that young people have is an order of magnitude higher than adults have. In almost every country in the world, except, I think, three. So that should give you a sense that it is not all dire. And I based that data on the UNICEF project, where they looked at data across all these countries.

I hope that leaves you with a sense that 70% of young entrepreneurs are building businesses that address climate change, and young people are more hopeful and optimistic than people our age. I hope that leaves you with a bit of positivity at the end of this.

Sure. [[www.youthvoices.org]{.underline}](http://www.youthvoices.org) and JA's website is [[www.jaworldwide.org]{.underline}](http://www.jaworldwide.org). And while we're promoting the book website is [[www.modernachievement.com]{.underline}](http://www.modernachievement.com). So I've given you three websites to check out. I'm really passionate about all three of them.

Marshall did something amazing. When he turned about 70, he decided that he wanted to teach everything he knew to 15 people. He created a little video, put it on LinkedIn, and said, "Here is what I want to do in this phase of life. I want to teach everything I know for free to 15 people. If you are interested, please apply." He had a little form to apply and received 17,000 applications when he expected about 100. So, he expanded the group to 100 people initially, but he could not say no because he is a wonderfully generous man. Now, the group has expanded to several more than 100, and the community is called 100 Coaches.

I became part of this group, and he is sharing all of his wisdom for free with all of us. All he asks is that we pay it forward at some point in our lives when we are ready as a pay-it-forward project. This book is a manifestation of that idea. He is sharing all his wisdom for free, and we are giving all the proceeds from the book sales to Junior Achievement. He is a very generous person. I think his idea is so good that I encourage you to do this too. I know you are already doing it in many ways with Mentora, but it is a wonderful way to give back. That is my interaction with Marshall and why we did this together.

I will say that one of the things I am most proud of at JA is that we have built a culture in our organization where we all share intellectual property. If something is developed in one part of the world that could benefit somebody else in another part of the world, as part of the Junior Achievement global network of 340 organizations, we share IP. This has led to all sorts of amazing results, where people are not only proud of what they have created but also proud of what they have adapted from someone else's work. That is core to what makes us unique.

Oh my God, I was not prepared for this question. I will have to give you a somewhat ambiguous answer because I do not have clarity in my own mind. I want to enjoy what I am doing and make a maximum impact with the skills I have. That is the unfortunately unsatisfying answer to your very good question.

There is a really good book that might be helpful to your listeners, "The Difficulty of Being Good" by Gurcharan Das. Are you familiar with the author?

He talks about the Sanyasi phase of life. At that phase of life, which for Hindus is the last phase, you start to focus on reflection. I stumbled upon the book and found it enlightening. While I do not think I am quite there yet in terms of my life phase, what Marshall has done with this pay-it-forward project has got me thinking about making sure that what I do next is something that allows me to maximize my impact.

So the next 10 years, who knows. I hope they are as fun as the last 10.

I am going to have you talk to my wife and tell her that. That will be great for our relationship. So thank you.

She is in the book. Her name is Helen, and she is a very successful social entrepreneur in her own right. She runs a nonprofit that teaches science skills. The science fair organization has been around for 75 years and sends students to the International Science Fair. She runs it here in Massachusetts, so we get to see the top business kids and the top science kids.

I like to joke with her and this is going to offend half of your listeners but I'll make the joke anyway that all the great science kids coming out of her program will end up working for Junior Achievement one day. This drives her nuts, and she is not here to defend herself. One of the many nice things I can say about her is that she has helped me realize that you can put others before yourself and find personal happiness in doing so.

When I was younger, I thought there was a trade-off between helping others and helping yourself. Helen is the kind of person who tells me to wipe the toilet seat even if it is not dirty because that is what you would want someone to do for you. I never thought I had to do that when I was younger, but that is the kind of person she is.

Thank you for this great conversation.