From PhD to Global Leader: Lessons on Resilience and Corporate Politics with Sunny Chahal, CEO

One of the things I found talking to leaders is in their early career, many of them are motivated by fear.

Like, oh my God, how am I going to even keep going? Some are just like really driven.

They've just got this vision.

They know where they want to get to.

What was the motivation for you in your early career? Your son's getting up into his early career.

Both my kids are in a similar age range as yours.

I'm thinking is how do they get to know what they're doing? With hindsight, it can feel easy, but what were your motivations at the beginning?

I would say probably the first one, if I'm being absolutely truly honest, I think the idea of failure.

Again, without over-egging it, there is always that immigrant feeling in you.

Your parents gave up so much for you to have the opportunity.

Don't mess it up.

Again, we'd look back and go, come on, there's times where I messed up my A-levels and sometimes took my foot off the gas when I was I was younger.

Just another little vignette that someone once said to me is that even when you think you're coasting, compared to some others out there, your coasting is still relatively pretty damn good.

So there was always that element of having to do something whereby I didn't want to be a leech hole.

It's funny how all these little things come back in your mind.

My mum and dad actually sent me to a private school and there wasn't that many in Middlesbrough.

Wow.

So there's a perception that, you know, your mum and dad have done this for you, right? My dad was a taxi driver.

And then he bought a business.

I helped out on certain times, you know, Good Friday and all that, you know, all hands on deck.

But I really didn't spend that much time in the shop because my dad always wanted me to focus on my studies, right? There will be some people will say, well, your kids are spoiled.

They don't work at the shop.

So there was that kind of perception that me and my brother were slightly mollycoddled because we've been sent to this private school.

And to be honest, one of the reasons why my dad first sent my brother to that private school is he didn't want him to get bullied because he'd be like the only brown kid.

and so so then he did that for him and then he felt he had to do it for me um it was it's a great school i loved it uh but it's very small class sizes so there was always that my parents had done that for me again partly that's why i was always thinking about oh my god yeah i can't stay in science because how am i going to support myself