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The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Listener Favorites: Alex Budak | Becoming a Changemaker: Leading Positive Change at Any Level

The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Srinivas Rao

Society & Culture

4.81K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this enlightening conversation, we're joined by Alex Budak, a professor at Haas Business School and the author of 'Becoming a Change Maker'. Alex shares his unique insights on micro leadership, the dynamics of champions, cynics, and fence sitters in our ability to make change, and the importance of taking a long-term perspective.


Alex Budak is not just a faculty member at Berkeley, but also a global director, entrepreneur, and changemaker who has helped countless students lead positive change in their communities. His book, 'Becoming a Change Maker', is a research-backed guide that helps individuals harness their potential to make a positive impact.


In this episode, Alex discusses his experiences of leading change, the concept of micro leadership, and the importance of building trust in ourselves. He emphasizes that change isn't just for your career, it's also for your personal life. He shares his belief that while leaders might be scarce, leadership is abundant. He encourages us to see leadership not as a title, but as an act, and to seize the leadership moments that appear around us every day.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

As you probably notice, this month, we're bringing you our Life of Purpose series and revisiting

0:04.6

some of our most transformative episodes. Tune in to explore expert insights and practical

0:09.4

strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve

0:14.4

personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get

0:18.5

recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free Life of Purpose ebook.

0:24.7

What you have to do is go to UnmistakableCreative.com slash Life Purpose. Again, that's

0:28.9

unmistakablecreative.com slash life purpose. I put up two words on a slide, which simply says,

0:34.8

go, fail. And students kind of start looking around, like, what's going on?

0:39.2

And I go to the next slide, and it says, okay, you have to go leave the classroom,

0:43.9

and you have to go ask for something, and get a note.

0:46.7

You have to get rejected before you can come back.

0:49.7

So again, imagine these really high-achieving students used to succeeding in most of what

0:52.8

they do, and they start acting, they started responding sematically. So like they start beating,

0:58.7

heart to beating fast. We start sweating a little bit. And I go, okay, I'll be at the front of the

1:02.0

room. You need any coaching, any mentorship. I'll be here. But yeah, go leave the classroom. Go ask

1:05.7

for something and get rejected. And so students shuffle nervously out of the room. But when they come back, the energy

1:11.8

is just off the charts, so much so that I once had a next door professor come over and asked

1:16.9

to keep the noise down because students were just so pumped up from this experience. When we look

1:21.5

at the people who are most successful, we tend to think, wow, they have a ton of successes,

1:25.9

probably not that many failures.

1:30.1

But actually what we see is that many of the people who succeed a lot also have a ton of failures.

1:34.1

And so the question isn't,

...

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