One Piece of Advice Series – Nas Raja, Head of Delivery and AI Enablement

Our One Piece of Advice series asks leaders across the business one simple question: what is the single best piece of advice you have ever received? We gave Nas Raja, our Head of Delivery and AI Enablement, four questions to choose from. Nas instead chose to respond to all four.

So we’ve decided to share his advice in full.

On facing risk and big career decisions: plan backwards, not forwards

The best advice Nas received when facing a major professional decision was to stop planning forwards and start planning backwards.

“Look at the pinnacle of your career as you see it. Where do you want to be when you have reached your desired peak? Then work backwards from there.”

His method is refreshingly practical. If you think that peak is ten years away, open a spreadsheet with a tab for each year. Start at year ten and ask: if this is where I want to be in ten years, where must I be in nine? In eight? In seven? Keep going until you arrive back at the present day.

Nas takes it further than most. He has mapped this all the way back from the point he expects to retire, giving him a yearly milestone to work towards at every stage.

“I don’t know if this is conventional career planning, but this is what I do and what I advise others to do.”

On leadership: people don’t care what you know until they know that you care

This one came easily. Nas was inspired early in his leadership journey by mentors who practised servant leadership and the advice that stuck can be summed up in one line: “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

For Nas, everything else follows from that. If you can find a genuine, intrinsic motivation to care about others, you will naturally become an effective leader. People will care what you know, they will care about your feedback, and they will trust where you are taking them.

“Literally, I just like people. Everything else follows from that. It’s a simple recipe.”

On unconventional advice: passion is not enough

The most surprising advice Nas ever received challenges the classic “follow your passion” line. Passion matters, but on its own it is not a career strategy.

Instead, whenever Nas is weighing up a career decision, he runs it through a three-point filter:

1. Commercial value. Will this add economic value to my professional profile? Does the market compensate for this skill?
2. Genuine interest. Is this something I am actually interested in doing, or something I will be bored by?
3. Aptitude. Is it in my wheelhouse? Do I have a real talent for it?

If all three are met, he proceeds. If not, he thinks again.

What makes this unconventional is its objectivity. It includes passion but does not stop there, weighing interest against talent and commercial reality. As Nas puts it, “It works for me.”

On the daily grind: one document, one game, and a frontier model

Nas has tried plenty of productivity frameworks over the years, from Getting Things Done onwards. What actually works for him is far simpler: a single Word document.

Every day gets a new page, and each page contains three things:

• To-dos, sorted by priority as bullet points
• Timesheets, logged as he works through the day
• Meeting minutes, captured live in every meeting

Because the document is always in front of him, he never has to stop and think about what to do next. The list is already sorted by priority, so he moves from one task to the next with zero friction.

He also gamifies it. The daily game is simple: can I get through at least two substantial things and at least ten non-substantial things? At the end of each day, his timesheet tells him how he went.

Then comes the modern twist. Every few days, Nas takes the last 30 days of the document, with all its to-dos, timesheets and meeting notes, and asks a frontier AI model to find patterns and insights. It surfaces things he might have missed: to-dos that never made it into a timesheet, recurring work that could be delegated, and topics that keep coming up in meetings again and again.

“Because it’s all in one simple document, it’s very easy to analyse and generate insights. Over the past year, those insights have become better and better, and more and more useful.”

The beauty of the system is what it frees up. By committing the mechanics to muscle memory, the cognitive load of remembering what comes next disappears, and all of that energy goes into the work itself.

If these insights have made you curious to learn more about the people who make NextGen special, you can:

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