35. Chronicles of a Serial Dropout

Intro

[00:00:00] Pradeep: But what I fell in love with was the weights. I have two friends, one my best friend from university and the second is the weights. I can see a gradual... progression in my physique and also in the weights I lifted and that gave me confidence. I think that confidence, allows you to do anything.

[00:00:17] Pradeep:  Once, I remember a couple of the gang members coming up to me and saying, "Hey, we're going into a fight. You gonna come?" I said, "No, it's leg day, I have to do squats". They ended up beating someone up and most of them are now behind bars for murder.

[00:00:32] Steve: Pradeep Kumar Sachitharan. We hear lots of stories of successful careers starting from humble origins, but what caught my attention with Pradeep was the sheer speed at which it happened. Did you ever see that video where Kyle from Canada started with a paperclip and traded it up repeatedly until he eventually ended up with a house? Well, Pradeep followed a similar path with his education and career. But let's rewind first and check out where it all started. Sri Lanka.

Heritage

[00:01:53] Pradeep: My grandfather, my dad's dad, had a good upbringing. He was a scientist in Sri Lanka, he done very well with little resources.  He discovered some drugs for diseases of dogs. My mum's side granddad was fascinating. He was orphaned from a young age, so he grew up in British monastery, by British monks.

[00:02:14] Pradeep: So that's where I got my Christianity from but he was very British; The way he spoke, the way he wrote letters, immaculate English, handwriting was amazing. So we had that kind of English culture and nurture from a very young age.  But my dad's generation lost a lot of that because of the Civil War in Sri Lanka. So we're ethnic Tamils, the majority are Sinhalese.

[00:02:37] Steve: It's the mid-eighties. Sri Lanka is in the midst of a civil war. The majority Sinhalese, largely Buddhist, are at war with the minority Tamils, largely Hindus, but with a significant Christian presence. In 1948, Ceylon, as it was then, gained independence from the British, and a law was immediately passed to effectively make it impossible for Tamils to obtain official citizenship.

[00:03:05] Pradeep:  My parents... lost a lot of their education and their wealth or assets from a young age. So my dad was a rebel. He go into a lot of fights and so forth, thinking about fighting, and then my mum's like, "Nope, you're not doing this. You're going away trying to get a living for us".

[00:03:23] Pradeep:  So my dad packed his bags when he was 17, very young, and went to Kuwait to work as a labourer. And he found himself very successful. He opened one of the first Asian restaurants in Kuwait, so when there's an influx of Asian labourers and so forth, he had a restaurant there. He done very well there.

Kuwait

[00:03:48] Steve: Pradeep's mum joined his dad in Kuwait for a short period, where, in fact, he was born. But needing more family support meant that soon she was back in Sri Lanka.

[00:03:59] Pradeep: I got raised up by my mum's side. They're more English orientated because of my granddad. So my granddad, very man's man... those six years were brilliant with him. Actually. I very fond of him. I But, even early on in... growing up, I can remember him saying, "Hey, you're gonna go to England one day. You've gotta speak English this way. You've gotta sit at a table this way. You've gotta talk this way. He didn't allow me to go to Tamil schools or Sinhalese schools.

Grandpa predicts great things

[00:04:27] Steve: So Pradeep's grandad clearly had a significant impact on him. And whether through desire or some inner sense, he got pretty close to [00:04:40] predicting where Pradeep would end up.

[00:04:41] Pradeep:  A little mantra he kept telling me is that, "One day you'll get to Oxford, one day you'll get to Oxford". And my aunties and my mom were like, "Don't be silly, he's, what, two and three, he doesn't know where Oxford is, there's no chance" and, "Why would we go to England" and so forth. But what happened was my dad was doing well, but then Saddam invaded and Kuwait was in the 1990s, was kind of in turmoil.

[00:05:08] Steve: That turmoil was in fact the start of what became the Gulf War, and as a result, Pradeep's dad left his business in Kuwait, and ultimately ended up in England, while Pradeep and his mum stayed in Sri Lanka.

[00:05:21] Pradeep:  We used to to travel up to our dad's homeland near Jaffna and you can hear the bomb blast, the soundings, gunfire at night. And we used to travel from village to village with literally the old school wooden torch kind of method. And practically my village outside was wiped out as well. So, it was scary. But my granddad, my mum's dad protected me a lot and tried to get me as much into the south as possible near Colombo.

[00:05:53] Steve: Eventually, it was time for Pradeep and his mum to leave Sri Lanka and try to make their way to the UK.

Fleeing to London

[00:06:01] Pradeep: My mum and I had to get to London. And that's where the struggle was because our passports was not with us... they were confiscated. So we had to have fake passports and overnight from a village outside Colombo, we had to... get smuggled in a truck.And I remember my mum saying one day, "Hey, your name is Raj now." And I'm like, "What? what is going on? " I said goodbye to my granddad,  then got on a plane with my mum and the first stopover was Doha.  And then we got found and they said, "Hey, this is... these are not the right passports. You gotta go back".

[00:06:39] Steve: Well, they did go back, but within six months, another chance presented itself and this time, they made it through. Pradeep and his mum were on a plane to England and there was no going back.

We're in the UK!

[00:06:56] Steve: You were still pretty young, but can you remember your first impressions of the UK?

[00:07:01] Pradeep: I was six years old and I can tell you, I can vividly remember the first day as well, coming to the UK; big lights, big city. My granddad talked a lot about it, so I was really happy. When we first came in, we could only afford a room for the three of us. It was a part of a house, so that's how we stayed in a room probably for six months... until we got our own place.

[00:07:23] Steve: That place was on the Chalkhill Estate, which was built towards the end of the 1970s within a mile of Wembley Stadium, in the North West London area. At one stage, it was considered a fine British housing project, but by the time Pradeep had arrived, it had deteriorated into a centre for crime and drugs.

The Chalkhill Estate

[00:07:45] Pradeep: Engineers or delivery men or anyone would be scared to come into Chalkhill... during the daytime. The police sometimes were scared to come into Chalkhill. It was a drug manufacturing hub. I don't know who actually built this structure, but it was perfect for these kind of enterprises because you had flats that were connected by tunnels, right? And then you had a underground car park in the middle of it. So the drug runners and these manufacturers will run from building to building. No one could catch them. Then they'll ship things out... from the car park. And  That was my first to the FBM model, which means 'fulfillment by merchant'. Because that's how they did it. They manufactured and fulfilled themselves.

[00:08:36] Steve: And what were your early memories of school?

Early school

[00:08:40] Pradeep: Early school actually I was bright enough. Probably year six to year nine, I was actually doing well. Then I think the hormones kicked in, I became a teenager. I wanted to be cool. Bad influence... bad people around me. In the area I associated with... Sri Lankan gangs. In those days they were prominent in London. It was a no man's line from probably year nine to year 12. I bunked school a lot. I didn't understand studying. I didn't know what a career was. I didn't know what university was. No one in our area of school went to these things. No one in my circles went to these things. Everyone wanted, you know, party, get girls, have fun, eat and drink, and just be a lad.

[00:09:28] Steve: Pradeep's life trajectory was far from clear, as he was increasingly exposed to some undesirable influences. But then his uncle visited from Sri Lanka.

[00:09:40] Pradeep:  He was trying to sell roses because Kandy in the mountains have beautiful roses and teas and so forth, and he was trying to do a business deal and he stayed with us and he said, "Hey... I'm worried about you kid. You're either gonna die or go to jail".  And he said to me,  "I can't give you much, but you need to either go to martial arts or do some weights". Me and martial arts didn't click Steve. For some reason I used to fight on the streets, but fighting itself didn't appeal to me.   I went to boxing. I went to Ninjutsu. I went to Judo. All these things I've experimented on my own.  

Discovering weight training

[00:10:13] Pradeep: But what I fell in love with was the weights. They were like plastic, but inside was sand. There were the York dumbbells and barbells. and I fell in love with the weights. I used to lift in my house and got me disciplined, got me outta trouble.

[00:10:27] Steve: What did you like about the weightlifting?

[00:10:30] Pradeep: It just felt right for me. It was just me and the weights. I don't have to depend on anyone else... It was down to my skill level, my effort level and my discipline. I always say this, I have two friends, one my best friend from university and the second is the weights. It gives you humongous confidence once you lift it. Once, I remember a couple of the gang members coming up to me and saying, "Hey, we're going into a fight. You gonna come?" I I said, "No, it's leg day. I have to do squats." It sounds silly now, but thank God because that day these guys, you know, I don't know what they were high on or something, they ended up beating someone up and most of them are now behind bars for murder. So that day, the weights saved me and the gym session saved me so...

[00:11:18] Steve: And another pivotal moment in your life came, I think, when you were on a shift in Tesco's, and you spoke to the manager?

[00:11:25] Pradeep: I'm practically running the shop on my own. I'm like, "Why you manage?" He's like, "Well, I got a degree, I'm on a graduate program. So I was like, "Oh, okay. A degree is important then".   I thought, you know, no one's gonna take me seriously if I don't have a degree.

The Education begins

[00:11:37] Steve: So, after a number of false starts and a life of reacting, Pradeep took control and set off with his one GCSE on what I can only describe as an educational sprint.

[00:11:51] Pradeep:  I was 21, so I was classified as a mature student and the University of Westminster and other polytechnic universities and even some colleges now have access courses and foundation courses. This access course allows you to have kind of a condensed GCCE and A level experience all in one. So you'll do the four sciences; biology, chemistry, physics, and a bit of maths altogether. So it's called the Access or Foundation course. And it normally it's for one year.

[00:12:26] Steve: Pradeep's self confidence grew. He went on to collect a medical degree, a master's and a PhD from Oxford, and we'll take a look at how he did that in a moment. But for now, let's just follow through with this meteoric rise. So...

Finishing PhD

[00:12:42] Pradeep: So you finish a PhD, and you do something called 'postdoc'. Before, you used to do one postdoc, you can be a professor. Now you might have to do two postdoc positions, four years each, to discover something pivotal, publish a paper, and then you might get the fellowship in a position. I said, "To the hell with this, I have three drug ideas. I'm not waiting until 40!" So I wrote for my own fellowships;  so I got one called the Fulbright at Harvard,  the Ember Fellowship at Sorbonne,  then the Daniel Turnberg Fellowship at... The Hebrew University in Israel.  So I spent three to nine months at every one of these universities, learning with the best professors in the field of one technique. So now it might take individuals three... postdocs, maybe 12 years, to learn these three techniques. I've done it in, what, 18 months.

Back to Oxford

[00:13:36] Steve: Well, Pradeep went back to his Oxford professor with his new postdocs and put his case for funding to start his research. But the response was disappointing. So he took control again, and here's where the Law of Large Numbers comes in. You know the game Heads or Tails? Sometimes it's heads, sometimes it's tails. Sometimes you might get a run, perhaps four or five heads in a row, perhaps more. But it is inevitable that if you throw enough coins, Eventually, heads and tails will each be thrown exactly the same number of times. That's the Law of Large Numbers. Pradeep had a similar philosophy with applications. If you keep applying, eventually you'll get accepted. Next stop, China.

272 calls to China

[00:14:36] Pradeep: So I made 272 phone calls and I finally landed a job as associate professor, skipped all these years and went to Suzhou, to university at first to start my own independent academic lab where I discovered all these drugs that my professors in the west said it will take 30 years. I did it in 18 months, because I had the budget and I had the talent and the team behind me.

[00:15:07] Steve: Pradeep kept pushing doors, and they kept opening.

[00:15:12] Pradeep: Then I got approached by pharmaceutical company biotech to say, "Hey, can you become vice president of business development?" So that's how my business side of things kicked off for me.  I merged and acquired companies. The company IPO'd at 1.5 billion, 1.6 billion valuation. Obviously, none of my money, that money, but I was part of the success. I grew... the company 80% in certain places.

[00:15:39] Steve: Now at the time, the pandemic was in full swing. A life full of pivots was about to pivot again. Pradeep was practically the only foreigner left in Suzhou, and because all the restaurants were shut, he had to eat in a local hotel. After a few visits, he started to wonder.

Trading & hustling

[00:15:59] Pradeep: Who are all these men with cigars and laptops? So I started approaching them and saying, "Hey, I do corporate business, I'm curious, what do you guys do?" "Oh, we own factories". Some of them were selling paper clips and wooden clips at 200% ROI's, manufacturer straight through to the consumer through Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. I said, "Hang on here. I'm in the wrong game".  So I had no idea what e-commerce was. I opened up an account, I got my brother to help me open up a company in the UK. And then we started selling toys and it was a profit from the first month onwards.  Then we were going to pet supplies, I was doing all this side hustle. I still didn't wanna get let go of the science. And I moved back to the UK and during the eight months when I was trying to get a biotech job, that's when I thought, you know I... can switch to e-commerce full time and still survive and, you know, have food on the table.

[00:16:52] Steve: Let's stop there. Pradeep had gone from teenage gangster, high school dropout, to award winning scientist at Harvard within seven years. He went on to discover new drugs and became vice president of a biotech with a revenue of 1. 6 billion dollars. After a chance meeting in a hotel in China, he'd quit his career and founded his own company. Spoiler alert! Today, he runs his own eight figure company. He's successful, wealthy, and contented. But the essence of the story is not what he is today, but how he got there. The journey, not the destination.

[00:17:34] Pradeep: So it comes down to the process and the journey. That's what makes you really successful in anything you do. Once you do something very good in one thing,  you know yourself good enough to do good in other fields as well. 

1. Visualisation

[00:17:47] Steve: There are so many textbook moments to pick out from Pradeep's journey, but here's three, each of which I wanted to check off with Pradeep. Number one, his practice of visualisation.

[00:18:02] Pradeep: I had a lovely mentor and he said to me, "Hey, you know what? You got talent, but how are you gonna get to Oxford with your credentials and from Westminster?" I said, "Hey, I'm gonna take the train from Paddington." That's what I did. I took the train from Paddington to Oxford.  And Steve, I'm being very serious, I put a suit on, was very smart and I said, "Let's walk around". I visualized being in Oxford and I immersed myself in that environment. So that's what I did and I realized, "Oh, I can handle this. These are humans like me and... I'm gonna go away."

[00:18:42] Steve: And there's plenty of psychological research that says this actually works. And it's free.

[00:18:49] Pradeep:  I think that's my greatest skill actually; this ability to think big and to have big goals and have a clear plan to get there. It's always been with me; to visualize, have a vision and go for it. You don't know what talent you have unless you take the first step, and then you realize there's people with more talent than you. You gotta appreciate their talent, but work towards your strengths and not look too much on your weaknesses.

[00:19:15] Steve: So, visualization is about looking at the big picture, [00:19:20] but sometimes you have to think about the little picture, don't you?

[00:19:23] Pradeep:  Yeah, when I'm on 40 kilometers and I... have two more kilometers to finish a marathon, I'm not thinking about my loved ones I'm thinking about the next 2.2 kilometers and how many footsteps I have and how much time I left. Now when I was at Oxford and it was a late night and I was sleepy and I was tired, I was experimenting, I wasn't thinking about, "Hey, if I finish this degree, I'll get something nice for my mom". I'm like, "When can I finish the experiment so I can sleep?"  So, in those moments, the motivation and interest and drive has to come from yourself. You have to be focused to accomplish the task at hand. When you really do think about the hardest moments, the driving factor was to finish the task at hand, not the bigger goal and how to help the world.

[00:20:10] Steve: Okay, number two. Back to that numbers game again, and how Pradeep uses it to deal with rejection.

2. Rejection and the numbers game

[00:20:18] Pradeep:  At first it's a numbers game. So I realize this now from Westminster's three calls to Imperial's 13, to Oxford's 47, then 272 phone calls to the job, and I think 1,190 for the first investor for my own business to grow. The harder the challenge, the bigger the calls and numbers and volumes. And what you're doing is you're gathering data and saying, "Hey, I can't go down this avenue. I can go down here. I need to improvise this. I need to talk to this kind of person". Large numbers gives you data to reflect on. You don't need... imported export records. You don't need Google Analytics or you don't need any of sort of Excel sheet. You just need experience and rejection to guide you.

[00:21:05] Steve: And with rejection, it's not a negative as we can easily position it. You see it as a positive.

[00:21:11] Pradeep:  So someone or something has seen you and perceived you wrong. It's up to you to go and fix it and then show again and try again. Every rejection I fixed myself and made the application better.

[00:21:24] Steve: So rejection's not a motivating tool, but a learning one. So when you're applying for your various posts and you're going through your 271 rejections, what you're saying is, "With each rejection, I learn a little bit more. Therefore, my next application must be a little bit better." Therefore, if you keep going, the logic says, at some point, "You'll give all the right answers and get the job". How does that sound?

[00:21:51] Pradeep: I got to Oxford, I remember the graduate director saying, this is one of the best interviews I've had in my 25 year career, and he's like, How do you know so much about British UK research and how do you know so much about what you wanna do in the future?"   I went through so many applications and so many network events.  I knew every professor and every lab and what kind of research they're doing. Every molecule, every kind of drug and all the rejection built up a huge amount of knowledge.  I've been rejected and failed in so many different areas, and that's why I know so much. There's no ability for me, there's no special gene or talent where I... retain so much and learn so much.

[00:22:28] Steve: And I get the sense that your weightlifting experience may have helped you get to this point.

[00:22:33] Pradeep:  Yeah, Every failed set is just me learning the technique and the muscle is stressed enough to understand the weight and the pressure that it's under. And then I know the muscle's now trained for another set. Everything can be utilized somewhere, someday.

3. Education

[00:22:51] Steve: And finally, number three. Education. Pradeep went through that educational whirlwind process, and yet ultimately made his nest in life by going down a completely different route. How did he reflect on that?

[00:23:05] Pradeep: Education gives you a lot; opportunity, discipline, adhering to deadlines. It teaches a lot, but you don't need it. It's just one facet. It helps you in certain professions and it helps you in life.  I'm an uneducated educated person.  When there's been important decisions in life, particularly with risk, the street hustler Pradeep has made the best choices compared to Oxford or Harvard Pradeep. And that's very important to say, because education only can give you so much. But when you reflect on wisdom and how to reflect on a journey of when you succeed in something, that's true education for me.

[00:23:45] Steve: Well, there are so many ways to reflect on Pradeep's story. Surviving wars as a child, taking opportunities as they presented themselves, never taking no for an answer, serendipity, luck, the intervention of loved ones at key moments in his life, if at first you don't succeed...

Final thought

[00:24:07] Pradeep: The way I describe my life is I'm a serial dropout. I dropped outta high school, I dropped out of academia. Then I went into the business development side, corporate business. I dropped out of that the third time.  My fourth version now, I'm an entrepreneur. I'll probably drop out of that as well.