Episode 129: The Costanza Experiment: Do The Opposite Of Your Instincts With Anuradha Muralidharan
The belief systems passed down from generation to generation can become a critical factor in your success. Today, Anuradha Muralidharan, Chief Operating Officer of Expensify, shares that belief system about women and how she works around it to drive them to succeed. Her instincts weren’t going where she wanted to be, so Anu introduced the Constanza Experiment, where she assesses her choices and experiments in making uncomfortable changes which led her to success. No matter how drawn you are to your instincts, if it does not lead you to success, learn to turn around and take the opposite path. Learn more from Anuradha’s success formula today!
We are honored that Expensify sponsored this episode. Expensify is a payment super-app that helps individuals and businesses simplify the way they manage money. More than 12 million people use Expensify’s free features, which include corporate cards, expense tracking, next-day reimbursement, invoicing, bill pay, global reimbursement, and travel booking, all in one app.
To learn more about how Expensify can help save you time to focus on what really matters, check out use.expensify.com/spend-management.
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The Costanza Experiment: Do The Opposite Of Your Instincts With Anuradha Muralidharan
In this episode, I interview Anu, who is the Chief Operating Officer for Expensify. She joined Expensify in 2015 and is the Principal Strategist for fraud prevention, audits, bank relations, and all other operational efforts for Expensify. Prior to becoming COO, she was the driving force behind the creation of the Expensify Card, where she combined her vast knowledge of the world's financial networks with her deep technical background to guide development. Prior to leading Expensify operations, Anu held Vice President positions at Citibank and Marqeta, various engineering roles at Oracle, and received her MBA from Cornell. She is an avid traveler and devoted to her kettlebells. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog, Vito.
This episode is sponsored by Expensify. Expensify is a payment super app that helps individuals and businesses around the world simplify the way they manage money. More than twelve million people use Expensify's free features, which include corporate cards, expense tracking, next-day reimbursement, invoicing, bill pay, global reimbursement, and travel booking, all in one app. I can tell you personally that we use Expensify and it helps with expense management in your business. To learn more about how Expensify can help save your time to focus on what matters, check out Use.Expensify.com/spendmanagement.
For those of you that are people that have gone on a journey yourself of change, pivots, and maybe not even understanding what makes you happy, this is the episode for you. My interview with Anu talks about her upbringing in India and the relationship that she had with her mom. Also, the belief systems that were passed down generationally about women and working that set a course for Anu in driving herself to succeed.
You will walk away from this episode with a better understanding of how to assess your choices and how to experiment in making changes that may make you uncomfortable but ultimately lead to success. I'm so excited for you to listen to this episode. I think there are so many great takeaways that you're going to be able to use in your daily life.
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In this episode, I'm very excited to be interviewing Anu, who is the Chief Operating Officer at Expensify. Anu, do you want to introduce yourself?
Thank you for having me. It's an honor. I am the Chief Operating Officer of Expensify, and what that means is a fluid concept. At any given point in time, I consider my role to be taking on the most critical challenges that the company faces. I've spanned across the organization. I've worked on products. I've worked in sales. I've worked on core operations from a payment processes standpoint, and now, I'm helping out and doing a lot with our marketing strategy. That's true of a lot of roles at Expensify. We wear a lot of hats, but mine is particularly fluid because I wasn't hired into a specific role. I've always moved around and tried to work on the most critical thing for the company.
That probably keeps it interesting as well.
Yes. There's never a dull day.
It’s so great to have you. I would love to go back into your background of what led you to be doing what you do now. Maybe you can talk about where you grew up and what your parents did when you were growing up and so forth.
I come from a very humble middle-class Indian family. I'm the only daughter. To give you an example of what I mean by very humble and very middle-class, when I was about eight years old, we got our first refrigerator. Until then, we didn't even have a refrigerator. I wouldn't say we were very poor by Indian standards, but lower middle class. My family, especially my mom, was very much about, “If you want good things in your life, if you want to be wealthy and have the finer things, then you need to work hard for it.” It’s because I didn't quite have the same financial opportunities as all of my other peers.
This idea was always drilled into me. Even now, I find it difficult to disassociate from it that, in large part, money buys you access, opportunities, and, in a sense, happiness. Not all the way, but in a lot of ways. For most of my life, the growing up years, I was a very studious and hardworking kid. I spent every waking moment studying and planning where I was going to go to school and how I was going to turn my opportunities into cash.
I went to school for engineering. I did Electronics Engineering. There was not much more method to that decision than as an engineer, you get higher paying jobs and that was what I was after. However, I was also very analytically inclined in things like math, analytical reasoning, and science like physics and chemistry. Those things came naturally to me and that helped. I went to school for engineering. I didn't have any passion for it. At the time, the best jobs in India were all IT companies and software engineering jobs.
Did you grow up in India?
Correct.
What part of India?
It’s in Chennai. It's in South India. It’s not as well-known as some other cities, but it's a metropolitan city. Sometimes I've wished that I'd grown up in a smaller city because my husband did. He has such amazing stories of neighbors that are super friendly and warm that I don't. A big city in India is like New York. It's impersonal.
What did your parents do? What were their jobs?
My dad was an accountant and my mom is like an executive admin. That wasn't quite what they called it back in India. She didn't do just admin work. She did a lot of clerical work. My mom was very ambitious. She put herself through school and clawed her way into better jobs. I'm a lot like my mom.
I can imagine in India that was hard, especially in her generation. What do you think drove her to do that?
The things that my mom instilled in me, she was after. She wanted a better life. Her family, my grandparents were even poorer, and she was 1 of 4 daughters. It still is to a large extent, but in her generation, it was true that parents worry about how they were going to get their daughters married off. It was a big deal because they'd have to spend all this money doing it. All the planning in a household is based on, “First, we have to save money for our daughter's marriage and then we can put money towards their education,” and she hated that. It's not a dowry or anything. You only need to pay for the wedding. That's the norm.
Also, it's so elaborate the Indian weddings. You put a lot of money aside. I'm sure there's competition for how great your life is. Did they do that for her?
They did it. She had sisters so they did it four times. It was an overwhelming thing for them.
All their money went toward future weddings versus things they needed. Were they planning the same thing for you?
It’s not so much. When I was very young, my mom would say it sometimes, but in an argument like, “You want a pair of jeans for no reason. We have to save.” She probably hated the idea of passing it on to me, but it's social conditioning and it probably came out a few times. I never worried about all that. For the longest time, I didn't even care about dating, getting married, or any of it because my eye was on the price. I needed to get a job that would elevate my status and I wanted to leave India and go to the United States. I wanted a different life for myself, and I was a very focused kid. I didn't have time for anything else in my mind.
With your mom, she was so against it. Did she ever talk about the process for her of how that happened and how she felt about it?
She resented the idea that a bride's family needed to pay for everything, especially because the culture was set in stone from back in the day when women didn't work. You're going from your father's house to your husband's house and you're being supported, and this was the thing they did because you were going to be dependent on this person. I'm not saying that was right. My mom worked and she made more money than my dad. She resented that she needed to also do all these other things to get married because she was an independent woman.
There was a certain generation of women because my mom was similar. I had it in my head never to depend on a man or whatever. I had a plaque over my bed that says, “Don't tell your daughter to marry a doctor or lawyer. Tell her to be one.” It seems like a similar thing. When you were saying that your mom talked about hard work, one of the things that I found with that in my own life is it was never enough. How did she and you define hard work? It’s because it's these belief systems that jump with us and then we don't even know why we're working hard, what hard means, and if it's ever enough.
That's a very astute observation because one of my biggest issues in life is nothing is ever enough. When I'm talking to my therapist, it's always this ideal state of affairs, which you can never achieve like perfectionism that is making you miserable sometimes. That's my biggest demon. With my mom, nothing was ever enough either. She passed away when I was 25. It was because she thought there was always something more that I was capable of and she was trying to bring it out.
At one point, I became very obsessive. I already have an obsessive personality and this fed that obsession or that OCD-ness in my nature. At one point, she was concerned about it. When I was in university and if I didn't get perfect grades, I would get so upset. I didn't live at home. I went to university in North India. I was very far away from home. I think that distance scared her like, “I'm not there. She's crazy about these grades.” Also, there is this news in the media at the time about how kids who couldn't get into IT would kill themselves. They are putting too much pressure on themselves.
I'm sure that's still true, but that was an emerging awareness in society. She did freak out and would then constantly tell me. I'd stress out about a grade and she would say, “What do you think you're going to get? You're going to get a C. That's okay. You should be okay with that.” It freaked me out. I was like, “You've never ever said that to me.” I don’t know how to take it seriously.
Did you ask her about it?
No. I would then joke like, “What did you do with my mom? This is a funny thing you're saying to me.”
Is she the one who chose Electrical Engineering for you?
No. There's this element of, “These are the things that successful kids do. They become doctors or engineers.” Within engineering, there were certain disciplines as they called it, like Computer Science and Electrical, and it went down like that. If you got good grades, you got Computer Science or Electrical. If you didn't get good grades at all, you wouldn't get into an engineering school. It wasn't very well thought out like, “What am I interested in,” other than, “This is the thing to do.”
You ended up finishing in Electrical Engineering. Did you finish that degree?
I did that. As part of your third and fourth year, you can select whatever subjects you want to study on top of your actual core major. I did a lot of coding-related classes. I got a job at Oracle in India to be a software engineer. I did that for three and a half years. The first couple of years were fun. It was like solving puzzles, but it got a little dull because Oracle is this huge machine. They have all these different applications, and then all those different applications are divided up into modules and you work on a module.
You don't even know how this entire thing comes together. You don't know who's buying it or how they're using it. You're so far removed from anything real that my job didn't feel real. At this point, it was like, “What is the next thing I can do that's going to set me up for success?” This is because I didn't have any idea of what I wanted. What I want to do was never a factor. I didn't think like that.
At the time, people graduated from their university and went to do a Master's in Science or they worked for a bit and then went to business school. I found myself in the latter bucket. I applied to business school. As I've said, I’ve always wanted to live in the United States and moved from India. This helped me do that. That's what I did, and I went to Cornell for two years.
Did you go to Cornell in you in the US?
Correct.
How did you afford that?
It's a very cool story. It was right before the credit crisis. I was lucky and unlucky. I got my loans before the credit crisis because, after, it became really difficult, but then I needed to get a job and get internships and it was the midst of the crash, so that was not good. However, the school co-signed a loan for tuition, which was cool, but then I had to pay for a living, which was probably another 50% on top of the tuition.
That was tough because I don't live here so I couldn't get a federal loan for that. A lot of people did. I had to get a private loan. This guy that my mom worked with, I don't think she was close with him or anything, but he knew her. He lived here. I don't know how she thought to reach out to him and I don't know why he decided to take such a big gamble, but he co-signed a loan for me for my living expenses. It was incredible. I had a total loan of $140,000. It was an unimaginable amount of money coming from strangers. I don’t know how they took this huge gamble. I don't know if I would do it again. I should because it paid off, but it sounds so scary.
Sometimes you can't think about how scary something is when you're doing it. This guy, did you stay in touch with him?
I stayed in touch with him through the time I was in business school. When I started working, you could prioritize your loan payments. I paid off the living expenses loan first, and I remember sending him an email when it was paid off. I don't think he was wealthy. He worked at an IT company. He was okay, but he wasn't so rich that he didn't care about the money, but he never once asked me, “Did you get a job? Are you paying this loan?” He completely trusted me, which was insane.
Did you have any idea how your mom knew him?
She knew him through work. He used to work at a company called Ashok Leyland, which was a big trucking vehicle company. I think he was an engineer, and she knew him through her work. I've never met him. I lived in the Bay Area. He was in the Bay Area. We never met. He came out of nowhere like a guardian angel.
It is these people that show up in your life that's so random and the fact that they were planted in your life for that moment and you haven't seen him.
It’s the synchronicity. The universe is helping you.
Was that your first entrance into the US?
Yes.
How old were you?
I was 24.
You said your mom passed away when you were 25.
I turned 25 in 2009, but I also graduated that year and my mom passed that year in October.
What did she pass off?
My mom had renal failure, and she had it for a long time. She was diagnosed when I was in high school. When I was in university, she had a kidney transplant from an external donor, and she was fine for a long time for about six years or so. She had a relapse and that relapse happened a year into my being at business school. It was her passing and the following years were probably the roughest years of my life. When I was in business school, they didn't tell me that she was sick, but I could tell.
I’m sure you would've been so torn to be here versus there.
They hid it from me, but you have this instinct. You know your mom. It's like, “Something is off.” She was like, “I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to chill because there's a voluntary retirement scheme,” that they call it in India. They would pay you a bunch of money and give you health insurance for life so that they could cycle the workforce. She took that, and that's when I knew because my mom would always say she would drop dead working. It was like, “That's not normal.”
Did you talk to her about it?
When I confronted her, they told me the truth. The whole thing was I had to get an internship. I had to follow through because, if not, I had this huge loan. What am I going to do? I followed through and then went home after my internship for a bit. I came back. Through my second year, she was okay. She wasn't great, but she was a little sick. I got a job and then I went home for a little bit again. I came back, I joined, and she passed.
I was working at Citibank at the time. I don't even know how I got that job because everyone was losing their job at Citibank. It all felt like it just happened. For six months, I went home. Mom was around, but she worked. My grandmom pretty much raised me. She is my mom's mom. When my mom passed, she was so broken about it. I couldn't leave her and come back immediately. I stayed there for six months and I asked Citi if I could work out of their India office and they were cool about it.
That's a different time era for that to happen.
It was in 2009/2010. I stayed for six months. It was a rotation program. Every six months, you went to a new team for three cycles. My first cycle, I spent in India and then I came back. I then continued. I didn't love my job at Citi, but I was always so grateful that they gave me those six months to stay with my family.
With your mom getting sick, did you notice any of her beliefs shift at all? Did she say anything different to you or any advice she gave you?
She was still very much like, “You need to get your internship. You need to get a good job. Please don't come back here. I'm fine.” She was still very concerned about that, but the one thing that did change was, suddenly, she was all like, “You need to get married.” Until that point in time, she would constantly say that men were a distraction and I should focus. I'm not even dating anyone. I skipped five steps. That's the only thing that changed. Suddenly, she became very worried. I don't know what the worry was that I will not get married or I didn't have the support.
She know that if she wasn't there that you should have somebody. That's interesting.
My grandmom had this history where her mom passed early on in life and then she got married. She had a pretty unhappy marriage. My mom must have associated it like, “If you don't have your mother, you're going to make a decision or people are going to make decisions for you,” but it was three generations later, so it was not the same thing.
Disconnect to Connect: Tap into the Power within You to Create the Life You Desire
I put out a book called Disconnect to Connect, and it's very much about these generational belief systems and patterns. You're making a decision based on the way your mom felt because that's what's pushing your head and she's making a decision for three generations. It's interesting how that passes unless you're intentional to say, “Is that my existence right now? Is this truly what I'm living or am I living somebody else's story?”
It takes a bit of maturity and you have to have experience under your belt before you're able to have that level of objectivity and distance because, for the longest time, I never questioned any of it. I never questioned that this was not the path I wanted. What do I even want? What do you want? What is the truth? It’s buried under all your conditioning that it's hard to get to.
How did you go on that journey?
I worked at Citibank for four years. I moved to the Bay Area. I met my now husband. At the time, I was dating him. We moved. I worked at a company called Marqeta. The common thread for me throughout my life, and not even only in the United States or these jobs, was the sense of, “I want to do this. When I do this, I'm going to be set up for success and I'm going to be so happy.”
You get there, and it's like, “Now, I need to do that.” At this point, you scaled this mountain and then you'll be happy, but then, “There's another one.” Each one's getting steeper and it's like this hamster wheel that's going faster and faster. I reached this point, and I know precisely when the last straw that broke the camel's back was at some point in 2015 when I felt like I need to do something different because this isn't working.
I've done this for so many years and it's not any different no matter what goals I reach. I did this insane thing, which if you watch Seinfeld, you'll know immediately what I mean is the Costanza experiment. It’s because Costanza in the show is always getting into stupid skirmishes. In one episode, he says, “Every instinct of mine is just wrong.”
He is going to do the opposite.
I was like, “I'll do that.” For real, that was my thinking. I was like, “Every instinct of mine to follow something is not getting me where I need to go, so I need to do something totally against my instincts.” My instincts were all, “Every job should pay you a little bit more than the previous job. Every job should have a better title. You should be treated a certain way by everybody around you.” These were the things that were important to me. The work itself was irrelevant.
I decided to shift that. As I said, there was no role at Expensify that was set up. I approached David who I was working with on a project, but I was on the Marqeta side and he was trying to get a card program. That's how I knew him. If I think about it for real, I don't even think there was any specific reason why him. Something in me, an instinct, was like, “Let's pursue this.” It was going with the flow. I approached him and said, “You could hire me. I can run this project for you and I can do whatever else is critical at the company. I can figure it out.” That was the pitch.
I don't know what need the company had at that point and what he was thinking and he went for it. They ran an interview, but he hired me. It took a $30,000 to $40,000 pay cut and I had no title. All of that is why I did it. I was like, “This is about the work I'm going to do and nothing else is going to fit the bill, so I'm going to try something new.” I gave myself two years. I said, “For two years, I'm going to focus on doing good work that I can finish and feel proud of and nothing else.” I can't pretend that during that time, I forgot about all the things that mattered to me. It's constant.
It's embedded in your neural channels. That's how you think and you have to keep being aware of when you're thinking it.
It would come to me all the time. I would get very sad. It would be like, “My career is going in the reverse direction.” I'd have to be like, “No. It's a two-year experiment. You can't think of this. Let's focus.” It didn't even take two years. It maybe took a year or a year and a half, and I realized that was the best job I ever had. I felt good. Mondays I would wake up and I was raring to go. I'd never ever felt that way.
It's, in large part, the way the organization worked as well. There were no walls. Anybody could pick up anything. No one was building little fiefdoms and cutting you out. All that was critical to success, but at the same time, it was me because I had chosen to tune into what mattered, which I didn't even know mattered as opposed to keeping on listening to the same channel, which was telling me to do X, Y, Z, and after doing X, Y, Z, I wasn't finding happiness.
How much did you hear your mom's voice in that?
It feels wrong to say this, but I didn't hear her voice in that at all. Until you asked that question, I've never thought of it. I'm only reacting at the moment because I don't think she would've approved of it. She would've said, “I don’t know what you're doing. You're supposed to move forward, not backward.” In all fairness, that's the world she knew.
Taking a little gamble wasn’t a luxury she had, and it turned out to be life-changing for me. I have often lost my ways since then, but now I know the formula. When you lose weight and then you gain it back, you're like, “No, but I know how to lose it because I did it before,” and you repeat it. It's like that. Over and over again when I've gone back to my old ways and start obsessing about things, I'm able to course-correct myself to be like, “What this is about is how you feel at the end of the day, not about how you think you feel four months from now because that is not promised. Also, you don't even know. You don't have a crystal ball.”
The Costanza Experiment: Taking a little gamble may not be a luxury for others, but it can be life-changing for you.
I keep trying to remind myself. The work is what matters. If you're not enjoying what you're doing every day and if you're not impactful in doing that, then nothing is going to make you feel happy, no amount of titles or money. Also, it's paid off for me. I feel it is the formula for success for me. Anybody that will listen, I'll tell them the same thing.
When you do that, it brings out the best in you. You do your best work. You show up with such authenticity that people are drawn to you. They want you to give your two cents on what they're doing and you become a magnet. That's how you build influence. It's how you grow. It's how you make more money. All of it just comes.
Your purpose will protect you, but you have to serve. It's interesting because I've questioned this about myself too. We had a similar path, and I talk about that in my book, a strong mother's voice in my head all the time and always feeling like I was good enough now, and then I had to start over the next day to keep accomplishing. I went down the same path. Even what I do now is much about purpose, passion, and what makes me happy in serving, but I've often wondered if I haven’t achieved those titles prior to this.
I agree with your statement, “I'm much happier everyday living for my purpose,” but when you're that type of person driven for titles and the next level, it’s the same thing. It's like, “I keep getting those levels,” and I'm like, “Why am I not happy? This is what I want. I'm still not happy. What's the next thing?”
It is that whole recalibration. I do have gratitude that I got those titles because I don't know that I could have let go of it. I don't know if I could have done it at 25. If you hadn't gone through that path, could you do it? It's hard to know looking back because of the way that you got there. For me, when I talk about passion and purpose, I don't want to make someone feel like I never tried for it or whatever. I’m trying to decipher that as far as advice to others because you want to make sure your passion is aligned. When you're young, you do have this thing in your head about titles and what that means. I don't know what you think about it.
That's a very good point. If we had the luxury of being able to take a step back, would we be able to take a step back and do the things that we do now if we didn't build up the base? That's a very pertinent question. My thinking on that is if I had to go back in time knowing what I know now, I don't think I would make any different decision. I would still follow this path because I still care a lot about money. I have a lot more now than before. I still want more. I say that proudly. I'm material and I'm okay with that.
It’s good to say it if those things drive you.
When you walk onto a plane and you turn left and they'll never ever take your bag and try to check it in because you're in first class, that feels good. I'm not going to lie. I like it. I would've made the same decision. I would've still chosen a line of work that paid well. I wouldn't have decided to become a war journalist or something. I respect it. It's not for me.
You're right. No matter how you approach this, working hard is your only way because there are no shortcuts. At some point, you hit a block and you can only scam your way through life so much, even for the slickest person. I'm not slick at all, so I couldn't scam my way at all. The important thing is to stay tuned into what you're hoping to feel and whether or not this thing is going to help you or what's going to help you.
When I worked at Citibank, what I wanted to experience was building and improving things materially. That was not going to happen there. It's an unrealistic expectation. The only thing I would do differently is I took a huge chance on myself going to business school and I would do that again. However, I didn't take that much of a chance on myself when I was working at Citibank.
Everything has its purpose. I had to maintain my visa status, so I couldn't go work for a small company that could turn around and say, “We are downsizing. We are going to lay you off.” I would lose my status and I have to go back home or go back to India. I was weighing all those risks and making a decision based on that. If I wanted to do something that materially moved the needle, I can't work at a big bank.
Start tuning into what outcomes you want every day. It is probably the only thing I would do differently. I couldn't have put all those words together. I didn't do what that meant. It's an elevated amount. Maybe it feels that way to me. Who knows? It feels like it's an elevated social consciousness around all of this now that didn't exist before, which is amazing. I'm so jealous of the newer generation. That’s the only advice I would give somebody. Tune into what you want and make a plan for getting that because otherwise, you're going to end up achieving things for the sake of it, but never feeling a sense of satisfaction.
Sometimes you have to do the Citibank job as long as you have a long-term plan. That's the important part of knowing, “How is it that I want to feel?” I remember not being able to answer that question. I was having my annual reviews. I was getting promoted. There would be 95% awesome on my evaluation, and I'd focus on the 5% that they were saying I needed to improve.
I remember sitting with a friend of mine who was my manager. We had a close relationship. It was a stellar review and I still wasn't happy. She paused and said, “What would make you happy?” I was probably 25 or 26. I remember looking at her and being like, “I can't answer that question.” I thought I could because I was very driven like you on titles, getting to the next level, and accomplishing, and it wasn't making me happy. When she asked me that question, I stopped in my tracks like, “I don't understand why I am not happy.”
It’s because if you got a 100% stellar review, it would be like, “The raise was so small. There was no promotion in the title.” It's always something.
It’s this lifelong question to always be asking yourself because it shifts as well through your life to where you're younger and thinks you know what it is, and as you get older, it shifts based on your family circumstances or whatever it is.
It becomes more and more about self-actualization, which is difficult because now you're improving on perfection, hopefully.
Also, that awareness of what has been driving you that you thought would make you happy doesn't make you happy. One of the things that I try to get across in these journeys is that you can't run away either. Everything you're talking about, you did very strategic pivots. I love how you had guardrails around the two years. You're like, “I'll give myself two years. If I don't like this, I'm going back to the way.” When you know you've got the exit, it's easier to take the risk.
It makes everything easier. I work with a life coach or career coach. She always says it's not a life sentence. “It’s not a life sentence, so try to look at it with amusement and curiosity.” I try to do that. Even if you're agitated about something at work, it calms you down to then be like, “This is not a life sentence. This is real amusing, curious, or weird.” When you start observing it like that, it de-stresses you a little bit.
It’s where you can separate from yourself and assess it. Now, it's evolved into a title that you do at Expensify. When did that happen?
It was in 2021. Like everything else in my life that was a step up for me, it came out of nowhere. Everything that you worked for and came as expected never brought me all that much joy. COVID was a confusing time for everybody. I lost my direction a little bit. That was the time I started working with my coach, Amy.
I remember one session she asked me, “When was the last time you felt very happy and satisfied with what you were doing?” I remembered that it was the Costanza experiment time. I went back to that. This is why I said that every time I go back to it, I feel the same sense of space, freedom, and satisfaction. Out of the blue, the company as a whole made a decision to make me the COO because we were going public. We were setting up our executive team, and that was amazing. You don't want to chase titles, but it feels great.
Especially for it to come that way where it was a recognition.
I didn't suck it out. It was great, but it's validating. Even that gets old. I love it, but it's normalized now. The market's been rough and we've been working very hard as a company because we are a word-of-mouth-led product-led growth company in the small business space. We have a lot of our work cut out for us to weather the storm.
I wake up, go to sleep, and dream about how I'm going to do that. I'm very fired up about it. I’m very passionate about it. I love it. I find myself on the regular clocking of 11 to 12 hours, but it's because I don't want to log off because I have so much left to do that I find incredibly driving. It still comes down to the same thing, “What is it you're doing? What do you think it's going to accomplish and is it fun for you to do it? Are you learning something new?”
I'm a big believer in bite-sized milestones. I've never had a five-year plan. I’m like, “In the next six months if I do this, that will be great and that's what I'm going to work towards.” That's the longest I plan. It's a tough time, but it's also super exciting because we are building a new app in order to go after the market in a much bigger way. We do a lot in the way that we grow, which we've never had to do in the past. I'm learning a lot and doing a lot. It's incredible.
Listening to you, there was an awareness that came up for me throughout my career because I would get a role like that that was exciting solving the puzzle, and then once you solve it, it's maintenance. I realized I'm not good at maintenance. That's what gets me excited. It seems so frustrating at the time and you're working with it, but when you solve it, six months in, you're like, “This isn't the fun stuff for me.” However, other people love the maintenance. It is important to figure out where your passions are and where your strengths are because you will find that sometimes when you think you're unhappy, it's not about where you're working. You've got to do a pivot or a shift in what you're doing.
The Costanza Experiment: Figure out where your passions are and where your strengths are. Because when you think you're unhappy, it's not about where you're working. You have to pivot or shift.
It’s the alignment of what you enjoy and the work. At Expensify, I haven't had a single year where there's not been a new challenge.
You are working for a very visionary CEO. ExpensiCon itself, everyone keeps asking and I can't even explain it. It was such an experience. Someone that could have envisioned that great kind of community and experience for people, it's a very different company. Thank you so much. I have a couple of rapid-fire questions that I like to end with. You pick a category. The category is either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Spiritual.
Everyone always likes family and friends, so that's cool. Things or actions I don't have that I want.
A calm or a sense of balance because, in everything I do, I'm either very obsessive or I'm bored.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep.
I'm very instinct-driven. If something doesn't feel good, I know instantly and I won't do it. I believe that the universe has a plan for me and is working with me. That is a belief I have grounded in no logic. I like it. I want to keep it.
It's trusting your intuition. Things or actions I don't have that I don't want to have.
I don't have a scarcity mindset, and I like that. This world is huge and there's so much for everybody. If I have something, I want to share it. I don't think by sharing it, I'm diminishing my role. I'm only elevating it.
The last one. Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.
It’s orthogonal to not having the scarcity mindset. I'm very competitive. The reason I don't like it is because it goes against my belief that the world is open and everyone can have what they want. I was raised to be super competitive so I have to struggle against it. I look forward to the day when my immediate response won't be one of, “I need to do better,” but rather, “That's great for you.”
It’s not about you. That's such a common human nature thing to happen, but with the awareness of it, that's the most important thing. Most people are not aware of it. Is there anything as we close up that you want to make sure people walk away with from your story or that we didn't cover now?
The biggest reason I do speaking engagements and that I show up in public and talk my story is because I've always wished that, many years ago, I knew what I know now, that you can tune into what you love, and you can be about the hard work and the impact that you have and that will show you the way to success.
The Costanza Experiment: You can tune into what you love. It can be about hard work, and the impact you have will show you the way to success.
When I was in school, there was a lot of fear-based coaching like, “You have one shot and you better show up, do this interview, and nail it because, if not, there are so many people that are Indian and engineers.” That fear-based talk restricts a lot of us and we have a lot of negative self-talk. My message to everyone out there, especially women, is to tune into that and do it less and less.
It's not possible to do it zero because we are made this way or something. You can do great things, and that's true for everybody if you tune into your capabilities and tune out of the negative self-talk. If Sheryl Sandberg's done it to her level and I've done it to my level, anyone can do it. That's the message I hope everybody will take away.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. There are so many nuggets that will be helpful to others.
Thank you for having me.
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Now, for my Mindful Moments with this interview that I had with Anu. There were so many great points that Anu had in her story. You probably heard a lot of them that I was pausing on and going deeper in, starting out with her background growing up in India and having that understanding of where women's places were and how the culture believed that women would get married off with husbands would be given the responsibility for them.
This was something that her mom had a belief system and wanted to break. It’s because of that, she was very strong in her beliefs and training Anu that if you want good things, you have to work hard. We talked about, “What does working hard mean?” A lot of times, we don't define what working hard means and we put this expectation on ourselves that nobody else is putting on us.
Also, we might be looking out to see if there's disappointment or we're not doing enough, instead of realizing that we are enough. Also, defining what it is that working hard means. What is it that we want to accomplish, and what are the things that we need to do each day to achieve that rather than feeling like we've got to accomplish everything at once?
This led to a discussion about how she chose her career and that it was somewhat chosen for her. This wasn't something she had a passion for. It was that in India, she was so intelligent that she was accepted into the Electronic Engineering program and went in that order, not asking herself what she was passionate about or what she would want to do. This was something to please everyone else and also please herself. She wanted to make sure that she made money and had the titles that she wanted in the future.
Anu and I talked about how I had a very similar situation where I was trying to get out of my situation. You believe that money's the thing that's going to make you happy. What she started realizing was that no matter what title she got or how much money she made, it was one of those things where you got there and then there was another mountain to climb. It’s that you can never truly get to happiness. Defining happiness is an important thing and understanding who we are.
If you haven't read the episode with Dr. Keith Bernardo, you might want to go back to that episode because we talked about who are you with a capital S, which means Self. One of the things that reminded me of that interview was our discussion about what she liked and what she didn't like when she went through engineering. One of the things that she liked was solving puzzles, but the work would get dull once it was broken up or she couldn't see the bigger picture or how it was all coming together.
When she went to business school, it was a whole story of its own of the risk-taking that she took during that time. Going through the next stages in their career, she was after the money and after the title but never questioned what she wanted and whether this was solving her capital S, of Self, solving puzzles, and being curious. That's what made her happy. A lot of times, we don't allow ourselves to even assess if we're happy.
When we take that question of what makes us happy or how we even define success, it's important that we understand that because we can never reach happiness if we haven't defined what that looks like, and maybe that's a long-term play. We need to think about how and what small things we need to get there.
I loved her way of getting there and finally saying, “I've made it through all of these rings. I've gotten all these titles. I'm still not happy.” It is like watching a Seinfeld show with the Costanza experiment of like, “Every instinct I have is wrong so I'm going to do the opposite.” Go against your grain. What I also liked is she put guardrails around it and she said, “For the next two years, I'm not going to worry about money. I'm not going to worry about the title. I just want projects that make me happy.”
When those thoughts would come up of, “I'm not making enough money. I don't have the title I want,” she would be aware enough that it was coming up to push those aside and remind herself, “I'm only doing this for two years. What I'm doing is making me happy.” It's important that we think about that as we're testing new things. Also, she said that in less than two years, she already was happier and she no longer was losing herself, and she found ways to be excited about work again.
It's not that she doesn't care about money, but she was making sure that she was doing the things that were going to help her find fulfillment in her workday, and that was solving puzzles again. It’s solving puzzles, which was a string from engineering, meant that it was all these different projects she was doing at Expensify, getting into different types of work, expanding her mind, and pushing herself. That was what was fulfilling her.
It's not that she lost that she wanted to make money, but as she said, a few years later, they end up giving her the title she wants. They end up giving her the money without her asking for it, and that was a nice thing to get. When we're living our purpose, we have to trust that our purpose will support us. We've always got to have guardrails. Are there points where we have to tap out of it because we aren't getting what we want out of it, we do need to make more money, or whatever that is?
Make sure we put those benchmarks in place so that we can go through that testing process and see what it feels like, see who we are with a capital S, and tune into what you love. As she said, when you do that, it will show you success. When you've got that fear-based talk happening in your head, be aware of it. Find out what you can do less of and how you can stop that from happening. Instead, tune into what is great about yourself and make sure that you are finding happiness there.
I hope you enjoyed this. Many of these concepts were reflected in my book, Disconnect to Connect: Tap into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire. If you want to learn about generational patterns and how you break these habits, pick up that book that's going to help you on that journey. Again, I want to thank Expensify for sponsoring this episode. They are a payment super app that helps individuals and businesses around the world simplify the way they manage money.
More than twelve million people use Expensify’s free features, which include corporate cards, expense tracking, next-day reimbursement, invoicing, bill pay, global reimbursement, and travel booking. If you want to learn more, check out Use.expensify.com/spendmanagement. Thank you very much. I hope that you were able to take some actual things away from this episode and share them with your friends and colleagues that you think would help them as well.
Important Links
Disconnect to Connect: Tap into the Power within You to Create the Life You Desire
Dr. Keith Bernardo – Past Episode
About Anuradha Muralidharan
Anu joined Expensify in 2015 and is the principal strategist for fraud prevention, audits, bank relations, and all other operational efforts at Expensify. Prior to becoming COO, she was the driving force behind the creation of the Expensify Card, where she combined her vast knowledge of the world’s financial networks with her deep technical background to guide development. Prior to leading Expensify’s operations, Anu held Vice President positions at Citibank and Marqeta, various engineering roles at Oracle, and received her MBA from Cornell. Anu is an avid traveler and devoted to her kettlebells. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog, Vito.