Rupal Patel, MA'05 (CIR), joins our hosts to discuss her career path from CIR to the CIA, and onwards to multiple-time CEO, author, and international speaker.
Rupal Patel is a 2x CEO, corporate adviser, international speaker, and author of 'From CIA to CEO: Unconventional Life Lessons for Thinking Bigger, Leading Better, and Being Bolder.' Prior to her private-sector career, Patel worked as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a position she entered after completing her degree in the Committee on International Relations (CIR) program.
Patel earned her BA from Columbia University, her MA in International Relations from CIR in 2005, and her MBA from the London Business School.
Kelly Pollock:
Hello and welcome to Dialogo, a podcast of the division of the social sciences at the University of Chicago. In each episode, we interview an alum of a graduate program in the division of the social sciences here at UChicago, exploring their career path and reflecting on their time on campus. I am Kelly Pollock, Dean of Students for the division of the social sciences.
Paul Poast:
I'm Paul Paost, Deputy Dean in the social science division at the University of Chicago.
Kelly Pollock:
Today's guest is Rupal Patel, a 2005 graduate of our master of arts program in international relations. Rupal was an intelligence analyst with the CIA from 2005 to 2011 and has since moved into the corporate world becoming a two-time CEO and bestselling author. Welcome, Rupal.
Rupal Patel:
Thank you so much for having me, Kelly and Paul, I'm really excited to have this conversation.
Kelly Pollock:
Why don't you start by telling us just a little bit about what brought you to our CIR MA program in the first place?
Rupal Patel:
I think it was really just the reputation that Chicago has for both its poli sci department and then, of course, the international affairs department. I really liked, I think, the ethos of just the university writ large, this whole idea of the life of the mind and debating ideas and something about just the intellectual rigor and that willingness to engage in dialogue with fellow students and professors which just really, really appeals to me. It was pretty much a no-brainer when I got in to join.
Paul Poast:
Now, as a faculty member in the political science department who also advises a number of CIR students, I have to ask, what was your thesis on, and what was your experience of writing that thesis?
Rupal Patel:
Gosh, do you want the honest answer or the university approved answer?
Paul Poast:
We would love the honest answer.
Rupal Patel:
Okay, good. The honest answer is, a one-year MA is so quick, and I was scrambling. I am a last minute type of person, and so I was scrambling at the very last minute to write my thesis. What it was on was ethnic conflict in South Asia, and it was something that was just done with a lot of time pressure on me, let's say. I wish I could say something a little bit more erudite and intellectual about the why and the what, but yes, ethnic conflict in South Asia. I'm pleased to say that even though I put that time pressure on myself, I did do pretty well on my final grades, but yeah, that was my thesis.
Paul Poast:
Totally understandable. I've advised many a thesis, where it's like, it's good enough, trust me, it's a one-year program. It's about getting a done thesis is the best thesis.
Rupal Patel:
Yeah. Where were you when I was there, Paul? That's what I wonder.
Kelly Pollock:
I have to expect that that actually puts you in pretty good, prepares you pretty well for something like the CIA, right? Having to do something under extreme pressure where you're analyzing a whole bunch of information and figuring out how to get it into this synthesis for an MA thesis is probably pretty close to what you had to do in your job as an analyst.
Rupal Patel:
Yeah, and also, really accepting the limitations of so many people have this notion of a perfect dataset and that in no world intelligence thesis or otherwise does it actually exist, but we have this notion that, oh, well, I just need a bit more research or another book or another article, and that's just not, there is diminishing returns, of course, but also that is just not how it works. Yes, I think I hadn't really reflected on it in that way, but you're right. I mean, again, the time pressures of the way I had sort of experienced doing my thesis did really stand me in good stead for all of the work we had to do at the agency. Because sometimes you get a question from, for example, the president at, I don't know, six o'clock in the evening on a Thursday, he needs an answer by tomorrow morning.
There's only so much more insight that you can glean or get or gather in that intervening 12 hours that you have. You have to do the best with what you have available. Also, one of the most brilliant takeaways from my time at the CIA that I carry into my work now, even as a consultant and in the corporate world, is acknowledging the boundaries of your dataset, saying, this is what we know, and this is the methodology, this is the dataset that we have, this is the intelligence that's informed it. PS, these are all of the things that we still don't know either because it's incomplete information or we're still gathering information, but never to pretend that you know more than you do because especially at a place like the agency, the stakes are really, really high. We had it drilled into us that if you were asked a question that you did not have the answer to, you say, "I don't know, I'll find out and come back to you, but at this moment, or these are the parameters, or these are all of the caveats," but never to make it seem like it was more than what it was.
Paul Poast:
I really, really love hearing that because that is, I think, hopefully something that a lot of our Master's students either currently in the program or future Master's students could really appreciate hearing because I see that a lot of times where students will have an idea for their thesis, they'll start collecting data for it, and then it's like, well, it's not quite showing what I thought it was going to show. It's like, well, that's okay. We're not going to try to make it fit. Instead we're going to work with the data we have. We're going to talk about why is it not perhaps showing what it's supposed to be showing. I see that a lot that struggle with students who are in the Master's program. It's fantastic to hear that that kind of skill is also very much translatable into what you were doing for the CIA.
Rupal Patel:
Yeah, and I think also in decision-making in any context, we're all making decisions personally, professionally with a limited data set. Yet we always, like you were suggesting there, Paul, there's this pressure to presuppose the answer or to then cherry pick the data that only fits this preconceived idea that you have. What I loved about both the CIA approach and also, the approach that we're just talking about right now is that it sort of mirrors the scientific method. You have a thesis, you have an idea that you are trying to test, and then you don't, as it were, torture the evidence until it confesses what you want. You go where the data takes you or you, again, then caveat and limit and explain and qualify. The reality is that, yeah, I mean, life isn't going to serve our thesis in the way that we want. There's no reason that reality should, and so we have to be willing to go where the information is actually taking us, or at least then ask new questions and different questions.
Kelly Pollock:
When you were in CIR in this one year quick MA program, you're in classes, you're writing a thesis, were you also having fun? Were you finding moments where you were able to enjoy Chicago?
Rupal Patel:
Very little, to be honest, and it's such a shame because, and also Hyde Park is so different now than it was when I was there almost, actually, yeah, 20 years ago now. I was there just last year, and I was stunned. I was like, man, you all have it made now, right? I mean, all of the restaurants and the things to do that just were not there. To be honest, no. I think I was so singularly focused on just the coursework on getting a thesis done, but also the application process for the CIA was incredibly time consuming and grueling. There wasn't a lot of downtime to have some of the more have just a bit more fun in Chicago. I've made up for it after the fact, right, but sadly, while I was in the program, I didn't venture into downtown as much as I would've liked.
Paul Poast:
Just to pick up on what you were just saying there, so you were going through the application process to the CIA while you're in the CIR program. When did you actually make the decision that you wanted to go to the CIA? Was it something that you had been thinking about and then you thought CIR could be a springboard to that, or was it something that came to you as you were in the CIR program and then you started that process?
Rupal Patel:
The CIA came to me physically when I was in the CIR program. Before then, to be honest, Paul, I had no idea again that one year I was like, "Oh, this will give me a break. I'll figure it out in this year," and then you realize, well, actually, yikes, there's a lot else going on. The two things that were on my radar was one, either further study, either in a PhD program in the Poli Sci department, potentially law school, because that is seemingly what people in my generation did when they didn't know what they wanted to do or to join the state department. Because I had, when I was in, I had done an internship at state at our embassy in Muscat, Oman, and I loved, again, all of the action and the marrying the theory of foreign policy and foreign affairs with actual practice.
That was what I was thinking about. Then as I much later found out, the agency does have a long history of recruiting from Chicago, and so I was part of that, I guess, intake from that year. I know not from the CIR program, but once I started at the CIA, there were so many of my colleagues and fellow analysts who were Chicago grads, but they came to me. It was not on my radar. It was not something that I had ever dreamed or wished or even imagined was possible because I had no idea that there was a whole analytical cadre within the organization. It was just not something I was thinking about. Yeah, once they made that offer and invited me to apply, I was like, "Well, how do you say no to this, right?"
Kelly Pollock:
Obviously, recognizing there's still limitations on what you can talk about in your time in the CIA, what does that job look like as an analyst? What does that actually mean day-to-day? What does your job mean?
Rupal Patel:
It is, in many ways, the dream because you are effectively paid really well to be a continuing grad student. The paper role of an analyst is to, again, analyze all of the intelligence, all of the information, what we would sort of jokingly refer to as the fire hose of information that we get on a specific area, specific topic, a specific country, and then make sense of it for policymakers. More often than not, we were tasked by the president or someone in the cabinet or an ambassador that said, "Hey, what's happening in X country, or what's the dynamic between these tribal groups," or whatever it is, something that had direct bearing on US foreign policy, and then we had to do the best that we could with the intelligence and information available to us to write briefing papers or brief them in person about certain things.
For the bulk of my time that I was at the agency, I was on our Afghanistan account. Of course, that was fast moving, very timely, very pressing, big high profile issues, and there was just so much to constantly brief the president that both he wanted to know, but also we thought would be worth bringing to his attention about developments on the ground and how our efforts there were faring. That's what you do as an analyst. You make sense of complex data for decision makers so that they can hopefully use that information to make better decisions. Some of that is through writing analytical papers. Some of it is actually giving briefings. A lot of my time I actively sought to spend in the field or outside of headquarters to collect on the ground intelligence or to work with our partners and allies. I could have been a totally desk-based job, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't at a place like the CIA and only in Langley for the time that I was there. Yeah, I shaped it in ways that allowed me to do a lot more field work than otherwise.
Paul Poast:
Well, I could ask all sorts of questions about your role in analyzing Afghanistan and so forth as a international relations scholar. There's a lot of things I'm curious about, but I'll refrain from that from having the whole podcast beyond that. I would like to hear about in maybe a particular episode that really stood out during your time there of maybe where you did have to, whether it was an episode of immense time pressure and maybe what that dealt with, again, within the bounds of what you're actually able to share, and maybe in a way that you perhaps on reflecting back and relating to what we were just talking about that you could see where the analytical process that you went through, again, kind of going back to that time pressure idea of working on your thesis might've actually been a useful skill in that episode.
Rupal Patel:
Oh gosh. I mean, I think there were quite a few, to be honest, and I can't think of any big discrete moment, but I think one of the recurring opportunities for that skillset to shine was when I volunteered to go and serve in Kabul. My role there was to brief the commanding general in charge of US and international forces. He was sort of my main customer in my role out there. Again, he has, the interesting complexity of that context was he has his whole own intelligence apparatus, right? The military, the DIA, his own sort of command, all of his own intelligence officers who are bringing him intel. Then there's me as the civilian briefer who is bringing the agency's insights and analyses to the table. Because you're in a battlefield context, there is a lot more of a requirement for much more up-to-date sort of real-time information.
Sometimes I would find myself in these strange conversations where what we had at headquarters was more updated and sort of real-time than some of what his own people were getting in the field, and that's sort of vagaries of intelligence collection and reporting, et cetera. I think, for me, it was always having to practice that, well, how can I not bruise any egos or step on any toes and acknowledge the gap between what he's hearing from his own people and what we are able to share from our side and do it in a way that was politically sensitive/astute? It was less about the time pressure of data necessarily, but more about being able to respond in real time in a way that made sure that your message and your credibility was intact, but to being sensitive to the fact that in this moment you might have the slight upper hand and you don't want to ... You have to be very careful how you're going to play some of those cards.
It was more of a communications sort of agility that was always present. To be honest, extending that more broadly is in all of the briefings that we did, either me individually or as part of my team, you just never know what curve ball questions you're going to get. Again, that ability to think on your feet and to respond intelligently, both to maybe slightly politically charged questions where they're trying to lead you down a certain path or trying to get you to cherry pick information and how to push back on that in a way that gets the message across, but also to adapt the way that you communicate to the audience in front of you.
When I'm briefing a four-star general versus when I'm briefing seven, eight guys in a special forces base, in the middle base in the middle of nowhere, the granularity, the level of detail, even some of the language and the methodology that you used to communicate has to shift and adapt accordingly. I think it was that agility, it spanned everything. It was the intellectual agility, but also the communications and sort of the, I guess, political agility that you have to display.
Paul Poast:
Absolutely. No, what comes to mind with that story is it's not just enough to simply allow the data, if you will, to speak for themselves. It's really about how you communicate it, which is, of course, you had very particular ways, as you said, politically sensitive ways you had to communicate it. That's something that, again, tying it back to the training we give students say in the Master's programs, it is, it's like even if they do collect, going back to what we were talking about earlier, even if they do collect the optimal data wow,, this really hits the thesis. Well, you still have to communicate clearly that that does. I really like how that story illustrates the need for, yes, you have to have the data, but you also have to be able to communicate it and communicate it properly for the audience. It's a great illustration,
Rupal Patel:
I think the challenge for all of the, I love how intellectual the culture is at Chicago and all of those sort of that focus on intellectual integrity and smarts. What I think sometimes, especially in those very, and not necessarily just at Chicago, but what can often happen for individuals who find themselves thriving in those kinds of contexts, we sometimes can rely too much on what the argument is sound, and I'm right, and that's important, of course it is, but it's how you get that across to the other person and how you adapt that to the person in front of you. It's not enough to be right, sadly, right?
That's a huge part of it, but you need to know who you're talking to, what's happening in their heads, how can you make it relevant to them and still be true to the data, true to the evidence, to all of that kind of stuff? That willingness to not just be like, "Well, on the face of it's obvious, so I shouldn't have to convince you." Well, yeah, I mean that's not reality. You have to do that extra bit of work to get into their person's head and find a way to make yourself Resonate and make your message resonate with who they are and what they care about.
Kelly Pollock:
Since the lesson I've been trying to teach my thirteen-year-old lately, it's not enough to just be right. You have to be able to communicate it too.
Rupal Patel:
Indeed, indeed.
Kelly Pollock:
You have this dream job, but it's obviously a very intense job. Can you talk some about the transition you made then from the CIA to the corporate world to what you're now doing?
Rupal Patel:
For sure. I didn't have this vocabulary at the time, but I think I was burnt out and it was six years of really emotionally and intellectually intense work. Again, the stakes were high, the attention on us was really, really high. Also, there's just the human story that's unfolding, especially in Afghanistan. I think after working on it, and also the reality was because the way politics works, it was sometimes we were screaming into the wind in many ways, and this is my personal view, not the view of the agency, but my personal view is the ship had sailed long before I even got involved. Because all of the country's involved, because of just the national politics involved in any war effort and also, just the futility in my view of nation building efforts, full stop. I think I sort of knew where things were going to end up anyway.
It was just frustrating that even though you're doing your best to try to nudge things in a certain direction or inform things in a way that will hopefully mitigate the potential worst case scenario of things, there was no way you did your best, but the president doesn't have to listen to you. You're just there to give him information or the policy makers or the people on the ground. They don't have to take anything you say and act on it. For me, that was the biggest frustration was that gap between the knowing and the doing. It's not to say that we were always right, of course not right, but being a part of a process where you're informing policy makers and you just feel like, well, what was the point of that? Right? After a while, it really does start to wear you down.
I think I was burned out and I initially thought that I would take a break and maybe come back, see what else the world had to offer because it's such also an insular and a very specific universe that you inhabit when you're in the intelligence community, but particularly at the CIA. I had no idea what else was out there in the world. Going to business school seems like a nice way to, again, take a bit of a break to go back to my happy place, which is school and learning and academic and environment, and just recalibrate and see what would happen next, and then maybe go back if I wanted to. That wasn't really what I had in mind. It was sort of a nice mental safety net, but it wasn't one that I thought I would ever really rely on.
Then I spent the two years of getting my MBA really just exploring what else the world had to offer, which is infinite. There's so much opportunity. There's so many things that I could do and had my eyes opened to, but I think I left for that reason. There was no big push, there was no big pull. There was nothing that I was desperate to do on the outside. It was more just, I need a break and let's see what else is out there.
Paul Poast:
Picking up on this narrative, you're now at business school and as you say, there's infinite possibilities, so what led you down the path to basically becoming a CEO?
Rupal Patel:
Initially, I did what I thought everybody, well, again, the culture of MBA programs sort of has suffused throughout. It is you go into consulting or you [inaudible 00:21:35], those are the most impressive credentials that you can put on your resume after you graduate. I toyed around with consulting. It also made sense from, again, a narrative perspective, like the types of skills I was using at the agency analysis, helping decision makers, making sense of complex data, all of that great stuff had the most direct transferability in a consulting and management consulting context, but it just wasn't for me. Over time, I just felt like I was just going through the motions and it wasn't, my heart wasn't in it. I didn't really want to be a consultant, not because there's anything wrong with it, but it just didn't speak to me. There was this constant trial and error or experiment and learn what I didn't want, but not really know any more about what I did want.
Through this multiple year process of experimentation and trying and stuff, and I just thought, you know what? Actually I don't want to work for anybody else ever again if I can help it. How do I do that? Well, I start my own business in what? Then again, going through the process, I'm an ideas person and I'm a multi, I guess, in the parlance of the day, right, multi [inaudible 00:22:44], multi passionate. It was a lot of all of that, just trying different things and seeing what fit. And what I decided on in the end was my first business, which is in real estate investments and construction. There are many reasons for the why that in particular, but one of the most fundamental that is not just about what you are doing, it was I love that it was tangible.
There was something so nice, and having come from a knowledge economy sort of type of role into something that was very physical that I could point to that gap that I just mentioned a few seconds ago of like, well, you do all of this great work at the agency and you deliver this impactful briefing, but then who knows what, right? Whereas, in real estate, there's a before and an after, right? There is something that you can touch and point to in a transformation that you can be proud of, and that is because of you. That really think I, without sounding too sort of whatever about it, I think my soul sort of needed that something very concrete. In all honesty, even while I was growing and scaling that business, I was like, this isn't it for me. I love real estate. I'm still interested in it. Again, there are many big and small things that I appreciate about it, but even as I was growing that I was like, but this isn't it, right?
This can be part of a multi whatever portfolio career, whatever we're calling it these days. I was always not keeping my eyes open for something to suddenly shift to because I knew I had to focus on this and build it and scale it before I could pivot to anything else. Just, again, in small ways, just doing things to just test the waters in other ways. All along that growth journey, I was always being asked for advice. I was always being asked by other founders, by eventually other leaders about very specific questions. I loved that. It was some of what I loved most about the work at the CIA was developing an expertise in something and then using that expertise to help other people. The real estate business got me into then the private sector of advising and mentoring and coaching, et cetera.
Then when that business was big enough and self-sufficient enough for me to then formalize some of the coaching and the mentoring and the consulting, and then I pivoted to that, but it was never this big sort of planned out trajectory. It was something very organic that came from trial and error, experimentation, knowing what I like, knowing what I don't like, and trying to do more of this stuff that I was uniquely qualified to do, I really enjoyed doing and I was really good at and that other people valued. That, I think, was sort of the multi-stage process that led me to where I am now.
Paul Poast:
I like how you related that back to the part of your time at the CIA that you were dissatisfied with. You literally said concrete. You wanted something concrete, both figuratively and literally to be able to point to, in contrast to, as you very well said, there was times you put in all this work, you put it forward when you're at the CIA and it's like it's just out of your hands about whether it actually matters. That makes so much sense, as you say, that in many ways then guided you towards going on a path where not just that you wanted to be your own boss, but as you say, you wanted to make sure that the things you were working on had an impact, actually something physically you could point to, or as you say that you're helping people, you know that people are actually hearing your advice and maybe making use of it as opposed to saying, "Thank you for that report. I'm now going to do what I want do anyhow."
Rupal Patel:
Exactly, and then you've hit the nail on the head and look, and to be honest, I think that is probably one of the biggest strengths of the CIA, right? Is that we are not policy prescriptive. That is not our job. I knew that going in, and I remember very vividly actually, the first interview I had with the person who recruited me on campus, he said, he's like, "Look, what about this interests you?" I said, "Oh, well, we can inform policy and we can do ..." And he's like, "Kook, I just want to be very clear with you. You can do the best analysis in the world, but that is not our job. It is not to tell policymakers what to do to inform them so that they can choose with eyes wide open, but we have zero ability and it's not our role to tell them what to do."
He's like, "So is that going to be a problem for you?" I did the good interview thing where I was like, "Ph, no, of course not. If that's the job, that's the job." I sort of believed it for a little while, but I am much more of a sort of, getting really geeky about this. I'm much more Newtonian. I really like the cause and effect in that context. I did it for a while and I did my job. I did it very, very well, and I got a lot from that career. Yeah, I think for me, I just needed a bit more certainty about the impact that I was having. Because fundamentally for me, that's what all of my work is about, is how can I have a positive impact and how can I know what my impact is going to be? You can never know the full impact of everything any of us do, but for me that causality was really, really important.
Kelly Pollock:
I think that takes this neatly to the book that you've written. I would love to hear about the process of deciding to write a book and then writing the book. This is, of course, a very different style of writing than a Master's thesis, for instance, or a policy brief for the CIA. We can certainly see, I've read your book, I think Paul read your book as well, I think we can certainly see your analyst brain in this kind of writing as well. Can you talk to us some about the writing of this book?
Rupal Patel:
Oh my gosh. I think one of the most gratifying things about the book was that I was just able to be, or felt like gave myself permission to be fully myself. I can't think of many concepts in which that is or had been sort of true. What I mean by fully myself is, yeah, I'm such a dork. I'm such a geek. I have this analytical bent of mind, but I'm also philosophical. I also make really corny jokes. I'm also, I do some cool things and I have a bit of a badass edge. It was just nice to be able to be all of those things in one place because all of us are very complex and have different elements to who we are, but we dial them up or dial them down depending on the context. That's just life, right? I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I think, and this is the first time I've actually said this out loud, but I think one of the things that was so rewarding about it was like, this is me.
It's also very much my voice. Every other thing that I've ever written professionally has a very specific style, and it's much more buttoned up. At the CIA, it's sort of a journalistic style. This was just me having a conversation with readers. I, in many ways, speak the way I write anyway. It was a real pleasure. I mean, it genuinely was a labor of love, and it had been a long time in the making. I had always, ever since I was a child, I've always loved to write. I have this great anecdote I love to share because I think it tells you a lot about what a dork and what a writer I am is, back in the day of VCRs, when Superman II came out, I was a child and I remember vividly sitting on in my parents' bedroom transcribing the entire movie just because I loved the physical act of writing.
I wasn't creating anything. I was just hitting play, writing some words down, hitting pause. It was so tedious, but that also reflects a different side of my personality, which is slightly, when I get into something, I just obsess over it. I've always been a writer in some form, and writing in words have played a huge role in my life and ideas. The book was in many ways, sort of 35, 40 years in the making. In the iteration in which it came out into the world, it was probably closer to five or six years in the sense of the conversations I was having with other people, with people I was advising, or that I was consulting with conversations I was having with myself as I'm going through some of the ups and downs of all of the things that I do, being a parent, being a business owner, being a CEO, building various businesses, all of again, the multi facets.
Finally, the pain of not having written it down in words for in a coherent way was so much greater than the idea of how painful it would be to actually write it. After much sort of navel gazing and hand wringing, I was like, "I can't not do this." The more boring technical part of it was I just really needed help with some of the structure I'm good at. As many of us we're good at helping others with things that we struggle with ourselves sometimes. I had this universe of ideas and insights and stories that I wanted to share that I thought would help other people, but it was so large I couldn't make sense of it all, and I felt a bit paralyzed. I hired a book coach to help me through some of that early, just very shell of getting to a shell of a structure. Once we hit the point where I had worked with her to get to a table of contents, the rest of it was just, I mean, it was a breeze. I had had these ideas, I had the phrases, had the conversations in my head for so long, I was able to fill in those gaps. Getting to that point of what gaps am I filling in, that was really, really difficult for me.
Paul Poast:
What I love about what you just said is about how writing this book in many ways was very different than the other types of writing you've done. Relating back to what we were talking about earlier, we were discussing about how a lot of the other writing has, you have to think of who you're talking to and you have to calibrate it to who you're talking to, whereas you said, writing this book, it was truly that was not what you had to do. Instead it was, this is what I want to say, this is how I want to say it. Once you knew what to say, you just said it.
Rupal Patel:
Yes, in many ways, yes, but also some of the trick that a lot of folks have said to me, other writers have said is, "But also when you are writing, who are you talking to? Do you have a person that you're envisioning?" For me, for so much of what I write now is I'm kind of writing to myself at a different stage in my life. A lot of the book, in some ways, it's kind of self-indulgent, right? It's like I say the things that I needed to hear at whatever stage in the past, because I know that so many of these things are universal and that others will at some point need or wants to hear it or have something that they will get from hearing it. A lot of the times when I'm writing in a weird way, I'm kind of writing to myself that is the audience or a different version of myself, which is kind of weird when you think about it.
Yeah, there was always still an audience. I think fundamentally for this book in particular, the audience is just, it's kind of Chicago people. Thinkers, people who like ideas and mulling over ideas who are a bit reflective, but instead of reflecting on the outside and on the external stuff and all of the ideas in the world, it's like reflecting on yourself. That's a huge part of a big portion of that book is about turning that analytical gaze inward, which we so rarely do or have the time or the luxury to do. I know how much I benefited from taking that time to reflect inward. That self-analysis piece is a lot of it.
Kelly Pollock:
We should probably give listeners an idea of how to get the book. Can you please tell them that?
Rupal Patel:
Anywhere you get books, so hopefully an indie bookshop near you, but it's on Amazon if that's your sort of bookseller of choice. Yeah, it's at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, all of the places you would normally get your books from.
Kelly Pollock:
Paul, do you want to ask our signature last question?
Paul Poast:
Yes, I can ask the signature last question, which is there anything we should have asked you about?
Rupal Patel:
Not that I can think of, but there was, somebody asked me this question once and I thought it was such a brilliant question. I had been interviewed on this podcast, and the nature of the podcast is how you define success. The question she asked that I loved so much was, what is the thing that you are proudest of that either nobody knows or won't show up on your resume? I thought that was such a cool question. Again, it sort of reflects back on this bigger idea and bigger conception of success and how we define it for ourselves and all these other things. The answer I gave her, and which is still true to this day, is the thing I'm proudest of is that in pretty much every interaction I have with people they leave either inspired or feeling like they have an insight that they didn't have before we had that conversation.
There's no way to put that on a resume and why would I, but it is something that I am genuinely proud of because I think the world just needs a lot more inspiration and a lot more conversations that leave you feeling not like a victim, not depressed, not overwhelmed by the scale and the enormity of what's happening around you, but just like a person who has agency and can do something and then go and do it. That is not a question that often comes up, but it is something that I am deeply proud of.
Paul Poast:
Saying I'm helpful is not often something we put on our CV, even though that probably is ultimately one of the most important things we can do.
Rupal Patel:
Exactly.
Kelly Pollock:
Rupal, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been just an absolute pleasure.
Rupal Patel:
Oh, I love it. I love everything about Chicago, and this is a delight to have a chat with both of you, so thank you for having me.
Paul Poast:
Thank you for joining us.