[Special Episode] EP008: Potential & Prodigy

Equation of Excellence

Each season on Decoded, we demystify a nebulous concept in commerce. In this season of Decoded, presented by FERMÀT, Phillip sits down with Rabah Rahil, the CMO at FERMÀT, to examine the legacy of these prolific thinkers, inventors, and polymaths, philosophers, and mathematicians whose work inspired Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. One of these inspirations from the past is the mathemetician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Listen now!

The best time to be excellent, and the worst time to be average.

• {00:08:07} - “The first lesson we could learn {from Srinivasa Ramanujan} is becoming your own self-advocate, especially in your career, and understanding that maybe you have a talent and an intuition that can be useful for others.” - Phillip
• {00:10:12} - “Outside of an Ivy or if you want to go study under a professor, I think academia isn't a lot of times the path for you because I think a lot of times when you have these innate geniuses, if you would have taken them through an academic establishment, the creativity would have been beaten out of them. Because when you think of academics, it's very conformist.” - Rabah
• {00:13:50} - “I would rather hire people that have had a bunch of failures and pick themselves back up versus people that have never failed. Because I found those people that have never failed are candidly just quite soft.” - Rabah
• {00:17:05} - “Some truths look like universal laws in one context. But if you zoom out to a bigger context, the law doesn't hold true anymore. The law is broken from a different point of view.” - Phillip
• {00:24:38} - “When you lack conviction, you can be convinced that your intuition is wrong.” - Phillip
• {00:29:55} - “The cheat code of mathematics is it's cold and sterile, and there's usually a right answer. What we deal with is humans. Humans are insanely jagged. They flip from logic to emotion to logic to emotion, and there's going to be way more nuance in like, that's why marketing degree is an arts.” - Rabah