A conversation with Vimal Bisundial on creativity, ego, and the patience required to improve—exploring how lessons from martial arts translate into better coaching, stronger teams, and more thoughtful leadership.
Host: Devon Walker (Head of Recruiting at LinkTech), Adam Kleckner (Head of Strategy at LinkTech)
Summary:
Vimal Bisundial’s career spans animation, storytelling, and product design, including work at the NBA. Outside work, he spent roughly 14 years earning his jiu-jitsu black belt. Those worlds share a common thread: observing people, solving problems, and experimenting long enough to improve. Vimal explains why expertise doesn’t automatically make someone a good teacher, how an obsession with outcomes can block learning, and why protecting a team matters as much as pushing it forward.
Main Topics:
- Keeping childhood creativity alive into adulthood
- Moving from animation to product design as a change in medium
- The community, persistence, and humility behind a black belt
- Why losing does not mean you aren’t learning
- Separating personal identity from performance outcomes
- Learning to coach instead of repeating how you were taught
- Managing up, prioritizing work, and protecting teams from burnout
- Pattern recognition across art, design, and martial arts
- When ego supports confidence—and when it prevents growth
Intriguing Quotes:
“I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was. But I also wasn’t nearly as bad as I felt.”
“There’s a time to be competitive and there’s a time to sit back and learn.”
“Outcomes matter, of course, but they’re just incomplete signals.”
“You need to protect your team and allow them the space to do what they need to do.”
“It can give you confidence, but it could also stop you from learning.”
Key Moments:
[01:26] Creativity as something to preserve: Vimal credits an environment that kept encouraging the imagination he had as a child.
[03:07] From animation to product design: the medium changed, but the work still centered on shaping someone’s experience.
[04:14] The long road to a black belt: consistent training, self-doubt, and a community that kept him coming back.
[09:23] A humbling realization at purple belt: there are always more levels, more skilled people, and more to learn.
[12:09] When results become identity, experimentation stops. Vimal explains why allowing mistakes creates room for growth.
[13:53] Being skilled wasn’t enough to teach well. Watching students struggle to retain techniques pushed him to study how people learn.
[20:18] Directing a team’s attention: question deadlines, understand business impact, and have honest conversations about priorities.
[23:38] A successful delivery can hide an exhausted team. Outcomes alone don’t tell you whether the process is sustainable.
[27:53] The connection between creative work and martial arts: patterns, constraints, adaptation, and personal expression.
[31:00] How weekly pandemic Zoom conversations about art and music grew into animation projects and client work.
[36:12] Ego isn’t automatically good or bad. The skill is recognizing when confidence helps and when humility is needed.
[37:40] What never appears on his resume: reading people under pressure and distinguishing confidence from competence.
- Concepts: Motor learning; iterative coaching; managing up; process versus outcome; creative problem-solving
Connect with Vimal Bisundial:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vbisundial/
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