A few compliments I received this month set me thinking how rarely we pause to notice the quiet ways we affect other people. A woman gave me one of those up-and-down looks and said I looked “yummy.” My ten-year-old nephew asked, “Where did you get those muscles?” A random dude walking with his wife outside a coffee shop in Bandra stopped to tell me I was jacked. I consider these compliments as evidence that my effort is working because I have really worked hard for every bit of it. So when one of my friends, visibly impressed with my fitness but failing to be consistent in his own workouts, asked for my advice, I decided to write this letter for him.

We think fit people keep going because they have more discipline. But what if I say that willpower is not a battery, but an emotion sustained by not just how much you are charged up, but how you prolong that charge during dark hours. I attribute my fitness and also success to engineering my way across that “low-status moat” when I had little evidence of my effort producing any results.

The low-status moat is that period of struggle when your effort is yet to produce any results. This matters because it’s easier to keep going once you can see that the effort is worth it. The hard part is continuing before you have that evidence because you can’t cross the low-status moat by just demanding more willpower from yourself. You have to design your way across.

I now no longer need to worry about thinking whether exercise might be worth it; I have experienced what it gives me. That makes continuing easier than it was at the beginning. People have also called me genetically blessed to have a sculpted body. But pictures from five years ago, when I was recovering from a stroke, a slipped disc, and depression, tell a different story about where I started.

A mountain to climb

On my first day at the gym, a twenty-year-old woman was squatting 40 kg. My coach told me I had some way to go before I could catch up with her. This hit me hard. As a beginner, you are surrounded by people who have already done what you’re struggling to learn, whereas you put in effort without much evidence of results. I wanted to get through that beginner phase. But “try harder” wasn’t much of a plan. So I approached it with my engineering brain. I found out what was likely to stop me, and what I could change before it did that. I couldn’t skip being a beginner, but I managed to reduce the number of reasons that could stop me.

This is how I designed my way across:

1. Manage the decision fatigue

I was running both CreditVidya and Prefr and we had a team of 740 people across six cities. I was busy, but I still needed to find time to exercise. What didn’t work was leaving it open. If I said, “I’ll work out tomorrow,” I would usually skip it. It’s like meetings that aren’t in the calendar: they don’t happen. So I changed “I’ll work out tomorrow” to “I’ll work out tomorrow at 9 a.m.” Then I put it in the calendar. One decision less to worry about.

Researchers call this an “implementation intention” - a specific plan for when, where, and how you’ll act. In an 11-week exercise study, women who made these plans followed their routines more consistently and felt more confident about managing their exercise schedules than the comparison group.

2. Make your next move matter

The second lesson came from selling to Indian banks and financial institutions. A deal can go sour, and you can keep replaying it in your head until it ruins your week. Or you can accept what happened and move on to the next opportunity.

I brought that approach to exercise. If I missed a day, I didn’t beat myself up over it. I just went the next day. Dwelling on a lost deal wouldn’t bring it back. Feeling guilty about a missed workout wouldn’t get it done either. Lay emphasis not on feeling worse about the session you missed, but on making the next one matter. I couldn’t recover yesterday’s workout, but I could stop it from taking the rest of the week with it.

3. Find your ‘Sangha’

Most of my CreditVidya days were spent with clients, investors, and the team. My life was full of people, but very little time revolved around fitness. If I wanted that to change, I had to make room for it.

Vikas was a godsend, someone whose friendship I’m particularly proud to have. He was an endurance athlete, and I deliberately spent more time with him on weekends, whether at Cubbon Park or wherever we could meet. He didn’t have to be my gym buddy. Just being around him, observing his habits, and learning from him motivated me.

Research shows that office workers report better productivity through observing others and feeling part of a group that encourages movement. For me, that is the practical meaning of sangha: company that supports the direction you want to go. You don’t need to replace your friends or turn every meeting into a workout. But consider making more room for someone whose way of living you want to learn from. I didn’t need Vikas to come to the gym with me. I needed more time around someone for whom fitness already had a place in life.

4. Fixing my emotional food cravings

I love rice. If I had a bad day at the office, I would order dal chawal and some sabji and eat with my hands. Oh Lord, the joy of eating dal chawal. But getting fitter meant making some trade-offs. One of my first changes was skipping breakfast, which helped me reduce my calorie intake. The harder task was preparing myself for that sweet craving. So I changed what I kept at home. I stopped stocking cookies, sugary drinks, and the things I knew I would keep reaching for. But removing things was only half the job. If I knew I would want a snack, I needed something I actually enjoyed eating, not just an empty cupboard and instructions to behave myself. For me, that was watermelon. I kept it cut and ready in the fridge. Watermelon became my replacement for practically every sweet snack. Crucially, I didn’t have to wash it, cut it, or negotiate with myself about what to eat when I got home. That decision was already made.

A Cochrane review of 24 studies found that availability and proximity can influence food selection and consumption. I didn’t rely on my willpower. Instead, I worked with my tendency to reach for whatever was most accessible - and made sure that was watermelon.

5. Pay to learn

The next problem was not knowing what I was doing. Wanting to get fit didn’t mean I knew how to train. I didn’t want to rely on guesswork, not after a slipped disc episode. I’ve been fortunate to find several coaches at different stages of my life. Saurabh, when I was recovering from the slipped disc. Huzefa, who built my foundation of strength. Om sir, who taught me the foundations of yoga. And Manoj, who helped me get comfortable with bodyweight calisthenics and handstands. Each taught me something I didn’t know how to do on my own.

A review of 12 studies found that supervised resistance training may produce greater strength gains than unsupervised training. For me, the choice was practical. I knew how much time and effort it would take to learn everything myself. I would rather pay someone who knew what they were doing, learn from them, and spend my effort practising instead of figuring everything out from scratch. I was lucky to find these coaches, but I also made the decision to reach out.

6. Give yourself enough time

I didn’t grow up athletic, and I certainly am not genetically blessed. I had studied computer science and applied mathematics. So you can imagine how much time I would have spent being on the field. There is a reason I’ve kept this part for the last. Finding a coach, changing what I kept in the fridge, and making time for exercise were things I could act on. Changing how I saw myself needed more time.

James Clear’s Atomic Habits describes identity as something we reinforce through repeated actions, rather than merely declare. I didn’t become consistent because I already saw myself as fit. I had to start doing the work while that description still felt unfamiliar. Over time, my choices changed. I stopped drinking alcohol, limited rice to at most two days a week, and cut out sugary processed foods. But increasingly, they felt consistent with the person I was becoming, rather than restrictions imposed on someone who wanted to live completely differently.

Research finds an association between exercise identity and physical activity. For me, the useful way to understand it is that the actions gave me reasons to reconsider an old description of myself. As that description changed, continuing those actions felt less like a constant argument.

By the time I had crossed the low-status moat, I had started to see myself differently. Fitness had become part of my life, not just a project I was trying to complete. What looked like discipline from the outside felt like a confident choice made by someone who considered himself a fit guy.

Negotiate with oneself

On my first day at the gym, I could see how far ahead of me that twenty-year-old woman was, but couldn’t see how far I might go. If I had treated that comparison as a verdict, I would have mistaken my starting point for my limit.

It is easier for me to keep going now. I know what the effort gives me. I enjoy what my body can do, I like how I look, and yes, I enjoy the compliments. But those rewards weren’t available to the person who first walked into that gym. He had to keep going without them.

That was the difficult part of the low-status moat: showing up when I felt far behind, without knowing how long it would take to improve. I had my share of injuries and periods of complacency. But I had arranged my life so that a setback didn’t mean starting everything from scratch. When I was ready to return, the coach, the routine, and the support were still there.

If you’re used to achieving things by pushing yourself harder, it is tempting to approach an outcome the same way. But the early feedback can be frustratingly quiet. You do the work, look in the mirror, and struggle to see a difference. You can notice yourself getting stronger or learning a skill, but you may still be a long way from the result you wanted. Relying entirely on willpower through that period was more than I wanted to ask of myself.

And although I opened this letter with compliments about my body, I want more from fitness than that. I want to keep doing things I enjoy as I get older. I want to put effort into the body that will accompany me into that future.

So, to the friend I’m writing this for: you don’t have to follow my diet or take up my activities, just to have a body like mine. But if getting fitter is something you want, don’t look at me and conclude that I possess something you don’t. You are seeing me after years of practice, setbacks, help, and adjustments. Give yourself the chance to discover what your own effort might make possible.

Dussehra just passed, and Diwali is around the corner. I like the festival season, but it also makes me anxious. I want to be part of people’s celebrations. But what happens when I have to say no? Why do I feel guilty refusing something simply because I’m able to do it?

This letter is a sort of a report on that guilt because for the last month I've been the man saying NO to everyone. Did I disappoint them all? Maybe. But I had my reasons. Saying yes had helped me become useful and trusted. However, being helpful had started to feel like something I had to do to remain a good person.

I had to change that because it was affecting something important. For me the festival season is also a reminder that the year is nearly over. My rule of thumb: If you haven't done 80% of the goals you set for yourself this year, you're unlikely to make it happen now. Sorry to burst your bubble. (I guess I'm not.)

My goal was to write a book. For that, I needed to spam your LinkedIn and Instagram, both of which I did. As they say, a great product not marketed well is just an average product. But more importantly, I had to actually write the book. And it seemed I had time for everything except writing it: a quick catch-up, a dinner plan, making AI agents do cool things.

To make up for the lost time, last month I ran an experiment. I started saying no to the things that came my way. Big requests, small favours, invitations. Even things I could easily have done.

My sister-in-law asked me to buy her something. A Dyson hair-curling thing. I didn’t even open the link. I told her my sister knew more about this stuff than I did. 'No.'

An old friend messaged me asking for an introduction to someone in China with whom I hadn’t spoken in five years. I couldn’t remember our last conversation. 'No.'

Then came a podcast invitation. This one was harder. The host was an old acquaintance, sort of a friend. If a stranger had asked, turning it down would have been easy. Still, 'no.'

I turned down dinner date invitations. My line was, “I can’t miss my morning meditation.”

Someone I hadn’t heard from in ages wanted a casual catch-up call. 'No.'

I was deliberately refusing things I would normally have agreed to, or at least spent twenty minutes finding a polite excuse to avoid. At the end of each day, I sat down and wrote how I felt, and why. Saying no was one part of the experiment. Sitting with how it felt was the other.

Bhali kar, bhali paa

When you think you have the resources to help and you don’t, guilt eats at you. That’s because guilt is one of the most human feelings. It proves we can reflect on our actions. But the difficulty of saying no is not a certificate of kindness. Rather, it's a result of our social conditioning.

I met a woman in a bookstore recently. As we talked, I got the impression that her family relied on her, but she had little room to disagree with them. I didn’t know her whole life, but I wondered how long she had been the one expected to understand, adjust, and never say no. Our conversation made me think about how being a dependable child can become a role you keep carrying as an adult. That role makes people trust you and seek help from you. You become good at noticing what needs to be done. And who questions something everyone praises them for? You learn to be the one who helps. Other people learn to keep asking. Somewhere in that arrangement, having needs of your own can start to feel like breaking a promise.

My mother had a favourite saying: “Bhali kar, bhali paa.” Do good, and good comes back to you.

We all grow up within the boundaries set by this moralising fence. Until you want something different. The freedom to disagree. An evening to yourself. Time for your own work. By doing so, you’re not just turning down a request, but letting down a version of you everyone has come to rely on.

I had begun to wonder where helping ended and ‘owing’ began. A request for your time in the midst of a tight schedule can put you in a dilemma. Being generous or helpful comes at a cost. The guilt of having betrayed yourself. Conversely, owning your life comes at the cost of feeling guilty of not being helpful.

Guilt is a poor indicator

I have no idea what actually happened when I said no to people. Nobody complained to me. I do not know exactly how they felt, and I have no clear evidence that I had hurt them. It turns out that guilt after saying no is a poor indicator of whether one has actually violated a duty. Research says that I may have been imagining more disappointment than I actually caused others. Across five experiments on declining invitations, researchers Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk found that people saying no expected more anger, disappointment, and damage to the relationship than the people receiving the refusal reported. It means we can mistake the reaction we fear for the reaction they will have.

In 1998, psychologists Heidi Fritz and Vicki Helgeson reported four studies that separated caring about others from caring about others while leaving yourself out. The second pattern was linked to neglecting yourself, relying on others to feel worthy, and greater distress. It wasn’t simply a question of how much you cared. It mattered whether that care included you.

I still believe in being ‘kind’. But I don’t think kindness should require one person’s needs to disappear. Especially when that person is always you. At the start of the year, I had promised myself I would write a book. Yet every time someone asked for something, that promise became the easiest one to move. I felt bad about letting them down, not myself.

Maybe you have something like that too. Something you wanted to learn, build, or make time for this year. Before you conclude you lacked the discipline to achieve that, ask how often you sacrificed that discipline because you could not say no to someone.

My self-worth is not tied to the burden of ‘yes’

Running a startup for more than ten years taught me that I couldn’t make everyone happy. I learnt that a decision could disappoint someone and still be the right decision. But I have found it difficult to apply in my personal life - as a friend, a son, or even a lover.

I don’t want to become someone who says no to everything. I like helping people. I like dinners, conversations, and being someone my friends can call. My experiment last month wasn’t to test if I could stop doing those things. It was to notice how often I agreed before considering what I was giving up.

The book project helped me see it. But I shouldn’t need a book, a company, or a deadline to make my own time count. Otherwise, rest will always lose to somebody else’s request.

Before your next automatic yes, take a moment to name what you would have to set aside. You may still choose to help because some people and some responsibilities deserve that from you. But your own needs too deserve a place in the decision.

Caring and reliability are not measured by the number of bags you carry for others, but by whether your ‘yes’ is a choice rather than a fear-driven obligation. Guilt is the alarm you learned to feel when you put one bag down, not proof that you have failed as a person. The more one’s worth is tied to being the person who always says yes, the more impossible it feels to say no - even when your hands are clearly full.

Caring and reliability must be redefined as sustainable, choice-based practices. Carrying everyone’s bags until you can no longer carry your own is not caring. It is a slow form of self-erasure that, over time, undermines both your capacity to help and the quality of your work and relationships.

I feel lighter these days. Saying no is liberating, even with the guilt. It takes me back to the yogashala where my transformation had started. After a gruelling morning practice, everyone would sit around and eat breakfast together. I’d say no. Then they’d go off to mingle, and I’d say no to that too. The ‘no’ was not intended, but spontaneous, born out of my need to be in solitude. Feeling guilty, I asked my teacher, Om sir, “I feel like I’m saying no to everyone. Is it selfish?”

He said, “It’s not selfish. It’s self-care.”

I fell in love for the first time at 17. I met her at a Dandiya event. It wasn’t love at first sight, but chutzpah. I fell in love anyway, and decided the ending should be marriage. The next few years were filled with so much worry about getting there that I missed being with her. The relationship ended in betrayal. Years later, I fell in love building a company, with another ending in mind: an IPO. It was acquired by CRED. It was a success, but I struggled to feel it as one, because it wasn't the ending I had pictured. Now, I am falling in love yet again, this time with the Krishna from my mother's kitchen. I hope it works, because this time I have kept the ending open, with no expectations. Call it surrender or detached mindfulness, but this love feels beautiful and effortless, maybe because there is no outcome to wait for.

Bravado on the dance floor

I still remember the first day I met her. Let’s call her Paro for privacy's sake. It was the last night of Dandiya. My roommate and I had decided to join the Indian community that organised the festival. My usual aloof self dreaded it: dancing to Indian music, and that too in circles. I still don't understand why men and women dance in circles. But that's not the point. Back to her. She was in the circle, doing her Garba and Dandiya thing. My roommate walked up and asked for her number. She refused quirkily, saying that her mom didn't allow her to give her number to strangers. He came back looking dejected. The Robin Hood in me woke up. Seventeen-year-old Avi wanted revenge for every man who had ever been rejected. I joined the dancing as if I was possessed by Falguni Pathak's dancing moves, introduced myself, and never asked for her number. At the end of the night, she asked how she could stay in touch with me. I said, with a straight face, "I don't think my mom allows me to give my details to strangers." There was a sense of relief, an accomplishment of sorts, for the revenge I had taken on behalf of my roommate. But she was a smart woman. Through mutual friends, she found my number, and the next day there was a "hi" on my phone. That's how my first love started.

What love meant to me

I loved Paro the way I had learned to love growing up. The way you'd expect any human to: with expectations, worries, and an outcome in mind. In this case, marriage. My definition of love came from two places: Bollywood and my parents. Bollywood taught me that every great love story ends in a marriage. The hero gets the girl, the families come around, and the credits roll on the pheras. Anything else is a tragedy.

My parents taught me the rest. For them, love also meant an outcome. If they gave us a good education and got us married in our 20s, that would show they loved us. Worrying was how they showed they cared. Would I get a good job? Would the money last? Love also came with reciprocity: they provided for us, and one day we would take care of them as they got older. So love was practical. It was held together by giving, by what came back, and by worry, because that is how you showed care for another human. But, somewhere along the way, love felt less like love and more like a responsibility: something you worked at, for someone.

I loved her the same way, with effort, worry, and an outcome I had decided on. Every weekend, I travelled three hours from my college town to the city to see her for an hour, and three hours back. My friends went to parties. I was on the road. If you had asked me where the centre of the universe was, I would have said: “wherever she was”.

For four years, I waited for marriage. We never had sex. Marriage wasn’t just something I hoped for. I believed it was how our story was supposed to end. Staying together was the only successful ending I could imagine. I kept worrying about whether we would get there. That worry took my attention away from being with her. I thought I was protecting our love, but I wasn't always present to experience it.

An IPO, and the betrayal

It wasn't just Paro. The second time I fell in love was with CreditVidya. Once again, I had an ending in mind: the IPO. While trying to reach it, I forgot to live the life I was given.

When love has an outcome, you believe you can control it. With enough effort, enough bus rides, enough worry, you can reach the destination that proves you love someone. And the moment you think you can control the outcome, you are at the centre of it. The "I" becomes very important. I loved, and I expected the love to come back to me. It did not.

I didn't end up with Paro. She ended up sleeping with my best friend. And CreditVidya didn't end in an IPO. It ended in an acquisition, a good ending that still felt wrong because it wasn't the one I had pictured.

Falling in love again

I was introduced to Krishna in a corner of my mother’s kitchen when I was five. For most of my life, I went to him with a request. Get me out of Kathmandu. Get me the job. Get me the exit.

Only recently has that changed. Instead of asking him for things, I try to sit with him every morning. Some of you might call it meditation. He is sneaky. He doesn’t exactly appear. But sometimes, between one thought and the next, I feel him.

Think of thoughts as clouds passing across the sky. Usually, I’m so caught up in them that I forget the sky. Then, for a moment, the chatter stops. There is nothing to ask for, nothing to fix. And I feel held. It’s hard to explain it any other way.

Sometimes my mind still tries to make sense of my lost love. “Toh kya? So what if she didn’t marry you? You wouldn’t have become who you are.”

Another thought. “So what if the company didn’t go public? Maybe you wouldn’t have gone looking for Krishna.”

He doesn’t answer with an explanation. Now I don’t need one. He had been there the whole time. In the background, in a corner of my mother’s kitchen. I had been so busy asking him to change my life that I hadn’t spent much time just being with him. Maybe he never expected anything from me. He let me be. Just being there was enough. I don’t know whether those things happened for my good. I know they no longer have to turn out differently for me to be okay. Whether I married Paro or not, whether there was an IPO or not, I’m beginning to trust that I’ll be okay - because he’ll be there.

Surrender and nonattachment

This is what surrender is beginning to mean to me. In a way, it is nonattachment - not getting fixated on outcomes and not feeling an internal pressure to acquire or hold on to what is dear. But I still care for what I’m building and the people I love. I’m learning to leave the ending with him. And as I do that, the burden of the “I” gets lighter. I don’t have to work out how everything will turn out before I can live, or keep worrying to prove that I care.

For years I blamed Paro. Now I wonder who would want to marry a guy who was physically present, but whose mind was always somewhere in the future. With Krishna, I don't need to be anywhere else. Because now itself is complete.

When we get what we want, we attribute the success entirely to our worth and effort, and when we fail, we personalise the failure by asking, "What did I do wrong?" The habit of treating our loved ones, including God, as transactional vending machines - where input effort guarantees a specific outcome - creates a rigid mental model that collapses when confronted with the complexities of life. I loved Paro, but lost her. I loved CreditVidya, but failed to live the relationship.

In the Bhagavad Gita, karma-yoga joins committed action with relinquishment of possession over its fruits. The same verse rejects attachment to inaction. In Buddhist psychology as well, nonattachment is the quality of not being fixated on ideas or outcomes, and not feeling an internal pressure to acquire, hold, or avoid them. That’s the message. Love unconditionally.

The first time I fell in love, Paro was the centre of my universe. This time, the whole universe is the object of my love, because there is less of me in the way. And I can feel it.

Love feels lighter. I think I’m learning to love again. And to live again.

As Rumi wrote: "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."

I chose to write this letter because people keep asking me why I'm back in Bombay when I could live anywhere in the world. It's a fair question. I built a startup, sold it, and could afford to live and party anywhere. Instead, I rode a Bullet across India, from Himalayan ashrams to Goa's beaches, for a year looking for happiness, but ended up back in Bombay, honking and all. And it has nothing to do with being practical. I had already lived my “been there done that” moments, and there was nothing left to prove. Then why did I return to the boredom of city life?

Because the answer was in returning - peace isn’t somewhere you go. It’s a different relationship with what’s happening inside you. I learnt that a builder living the life of a monk isn't at peace.

The calm outside of us

Imagine you had loads of money. What would you do? Most of us would do the obvious thing. Leave the city for mountains, beaches…no alarm, no honking. I've lived that life, vacation to vacation, weekend to weekend. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it. The calm outside of us is real. Less noise, more sky, nobody needing anything from you. I can understand why people start planning the next trip the day they come back from the previous one. I can also relate to why Friday feels different from Monday.

That is because weekends, meditation retreats, or quiet holidays do reliably produce calm.

In a Stanford study of 38 people, those who walked 90 minutes on a grassland path lined with oak trees and greenery replayed fewer negative thoughts afterwards. Those who walked 90 minutes along a busy four-lane road didn't. A 2025 meta-analysis of 32 studies found a large boost in wellbeing. The boost was bigger when people actually switched off from work and moved their bodies.

The only problem is that the calm does not last long. Within a week of coming back, you're where you started. In a 2018 APA survey of 1,512 workers, 24% of workers said the benefits vanished the moment they got back, and another 40% said they lasted only a few days.

So the calm outside of us is very real, but it just doesn't stay forever. One explanation is Relaxation-Induced Anxiety. The assumption is always that if someone is stressed, they just need to relax. New research reveals that the nervous system views the sudden absence of stress as a dangerous vulnerability. Relaxation does not fail because it does not work, but because the autonomic nervous system treats stillness as a threat cue.

That's what I did for a year. I had abs, nothing to worry about financially, and calm all around me. An endless holiday should do away with Relaxation-Induced Anxiety as well, but sustained inner steadiness is not that easy to come by. My inner self was still in turmoil. The irritation. Sometimes even sadness, about how things didn't go the way I expected. My mind kept going back to work, replaying how I couldn't scale the company to an IPO. It kept asking what I could have done differently, if I should start the next thing.

The restlessness in the head wasn't just about work. I remember getting irritated watching people, me included, perform enlightenment for Instagram sitting at G-shot (one of the best coffee places in Goa, if you ever go). I remember the sting of rejection when a woman I smiled at didn't smile back. I remember the anger when my landlord asked me to move out of the apartment I'd picked because it was close to the shala, where I went every day at 7 AM. I remember the irritation of tourists making unrealistic demands, and yes, honking. And, of course, a nagging feeling that I needed to do something with my life. I had changed my circumstances, maybe even my body. But the peace wasn't lasting. I could leave the city anytime. The turmoil within did not leave my head.

Labelling my thoughts

I'm a fairly weird guy with a lot of eccentric habits. I love solitude. You'd find me walking the beach alone in nothing but red shorts. One day I was talking to myself as usual. But instead of getting lost in my thoughts, I started labelling them out loud - useful or not useful. A grown man talking to himself on a beach. Yes, it's weird. But it helped a lot. It sounded something like this.

"What if I had taken the company the other way?" Not useful.

“I can't do anything about it anymore.”

"Maybe I'm not ripped enough? Not good-looking enough?" Not useful.

“I can't change how I look today.”

"People are saying I left and became a yogi. Ugh." Not useful.

“Who cares what others think?”

Hearing them out loud, I started noticing a pattern. Most of my thoughts weren't about where I was. They were about the past I was replaying, the future I was worrying about, or what others thought of me.

Walking on a beach, my mind was in a meeting room that no longer existed. Every label came down to the same thing. The company; my looks; what people said. None of it was in my control. The only thing I could control was my thoughts. It didn't happen in one walk, but that's where it started. For the first time, the calm wasn't coming from the beach. It was mine.

Walking the same beach, your thoughts may be different. But they'll be some version of what already happened in your life, what might happen next, or what someone else thinks of you.

Stopping the thought stream is not the point. It’s about changing the flow of thoughts. Do not stress your brain with "Is this thought true?" Just, "Is this thought helpful?" That's how Russ Harris puts it in The Happiness Trap. If it isn't, you don't have to argue with it. You just don't have to follow it.

There is no empty mind

Notice what I didn't do on that beach. I didn't try to stop my thoughts. I think we've overblown the advice on meditation and mindfulness. And I think a lot of meditation teachers get this wrong.

Somewhere along the way, meditation was interpreted as emptying your mind. Zero thoughts. There is no such thing as an empty mind. I think of it the way I read it in a book by Osho years ago. Your thoughts are clouds in the sky. After one cloud comes another. Maybe some blue sky in between. As long as we have a mind, we'll have thoughts. We can't really stop thinking. But with enough practice, we can witness our own thinking.

You don't have to embrace the thought. You don't have to fight it. You accept it, and you stay indifferent to it. If it is not useful, let it pass.

The Yoga Sutras open with this. "Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah." Yoga is the settling of the mind's fluctuations (1.2). Not the pose. The evenness of mind.

The Purpose Within

Once I could see my triggers, my reactions and my thoughts, the calm started to stay. But that was only half of it. As human beings, we need something to strive for. For me, one old feeling kept returning: I missed building. At first, I treated that as another thing I needed to let go of. Eventually, I wondered whether it was something I needed to listen to. Learning not to follow every thought didn't mean ignoring everything happening inside me. Some thoughts needed less attention. Others were pointing towards something I genuinely wanted. I wanted to build again. The question was whether I could do it without making the outcome a measure of my worth.

I'm an ambitious man. I grew up with nothing and worked hard to become who I am. My dharma was to build. A builder living the life of a monk wasn't going to work. So I decided to change that. If I can take my calm wherever I go, maybe I can build differently this time. The Gita has a word for what was missing. Swadharma. Your own dharma, even if done imperfectly, is better than someone else's done well (3.35). Arjuna was never asked to leave the battlefield. Krishna told him, "Yogastha kuru karmani." Be steady in yourself, then act (2.48). That's the order. Steady first. Then fight. My battlefield is my ambition. Building. Writing the book. Maybe something else later.

Why I'm back in Bombay

I'm not back in Bombay because it's calm. It isn't. I'm back because peace and purpose have followed me here. And Bombay is where my work is. At least for now. Vacations are not bad. Take them. A vacation is a warm room. But eventually you have to leave. Changing your city, your job or your routine isn't running away. Sometimes it's the right call. If a place is hurting you, leave it. The problem is only when changing the place becomes the only thing you know how to do. What I built on that beach is more like a jacket. It doesn't change Bombay's weather. But I carry it everywhere.

I still get irritated. I still replay things. But I have learnt to come back faster. I have learnt to inhabit a mind I don't need to escape. The biggest compliment I get these days is that I'm very calm. It's because I'm more aware of my thoughts. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I lost my temper. Maybe I have found a way to live on a perpetual vacation. It just isn't a place.

Neeru Dhanda, a farmer’s daughter who won gold in shotgun at the Asian Games in Japan last week, when asked about her immediate priority, said she would want to make her family happy by building a good house. That is the most moral thing to do for a performer who reached the top despite hardships. Hopefully, she will also find courage to build a life for herself. Most of us fail to do so.

Family bonding is a biological phenomenon linked to survival, but parentalisation, the process by which children take on adult roles and responsibilities within the family, is more of a cultural inheritance which certain societies carry more than others. In the Indian context, the idea of a subservient son is as old as Lord Rama and the legend of Shravan. No wonder we mistake familial bonding for dharma and gratitude for indebtedness. And therein lies a paradox. The very mechanisms that enabled security, upward mobility and success - delaying gratification, assuming unprompted responsibility, working through exhaustion - become the architecture of suffering. Under assumed obligations, we keep postponing having a life until we feel we have earned the right to enjoy it.

The philosophical question

To answer this, let me share my own journey through success.

My uncle and my ladder

Recently, my cousins from Washington, D.C. visited us, and I asked my uncle if he was happy. "Nope," he said, before he'd even thought about it. I laughed. He was born into a poor family, worked multiple jobs, and raised three kids in the US. He sacrificed everything to build his success, and now has more money than most people can imagine. And yet, he isn't happy.

Deep down, I knew I'd have given the same answer. My own ladder to success took me to the US, then an MBA degree, a startup, funding, and a good exit. Something was still missing, so I went looking for it in yoga ashrams. Each one was supposed to bring me happiness. I still could not call myself happy.

Yoga brought stability to the mind, but a hypothetical question started troubling me. I imagined what would be written on my grave. “He was successful. He overthought everything, lived a miserable life, and left behind security for his kids.” Or: “He lived an interesting life and died smiling.”

Another existential question.

Which one would I want?

To answer that, we would want to define happiness.

Happiness is subjective, but let’s assume it's both a state of mind and a quality of life: the experience of more positive than negative emotion, combined with a sense that life is satisfying and meaningful.

So why wasn't I happy?

Growing up middle-class, we see all sorts of sacrifices our parents make to give us a good education, etc. Somewhere along the way, I had decided I wasn't yet worthy of what my parents gave up. Happiness was postponed because I felt I must “repay” the sacrifice that built my metaphorical house before being allowed to live in it. The only way I knew to become worthy of that was to secure more: more money, more safety, more proof that their sacrifice had paid off. And that more was never enough. I was struggling because I had built my identity on a biological reward system structurally designed to crash the moment a goal is met.

Tyranny of the False Self

In a way, I was trying to be my parents’ parent. When children construe parental sacrifice primarily through the lens of indebtedness, they feel that comfort must be repaid before it can be enjoyed. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott describes this as the development of the “False Self”. The person constructs an achievement-fluent persona to meet parents' conditional needs, while the authentic self goes underground. The loop is maintained because the “False Self” is heavily rewarded by society through promotions, grades, salaries, etc. I failed to see the loop because it offered security at the cost of happiness, and would have remained so as long as I continued repaying the debt by being a socially productive son.

The mistake I was making

I mistook gratitude for indebtedness, believing that comfort must be constantly earned to repay parental sacrifice. Research says gratitude and indebtedness are both interpersonal emotions that arise when receiving a benefit, but they have different cognitive appraisals and behavioural consequences. Gratitude draws you closer to the person who helped you. Indebtedness feels like an obligation and comes with discomfort.

Gratitude says, "You did so much for me, now I want to care for you."

Indebtedness says, "You suffered for me, so I do not have the right to enjoy more than you did."

The rule we learn: If they sacrificed for me, I must keep sacrificing too.

Enjoying a life your parents could not have started to feel less like progress and more like betrayal. But you cannot repay your parents for their youth, their fear, their missed opportunities or their years of work. If you treat their sacrifice as a loan, the account can never close. A debt that can never be repaid becomes a chase that never ends. "Enough" keeps moving. First it is a degree, then a job, then a salary, then a house, then everyone else's security.

Research states that when self-worth depends on achievement, each success gives a short boost that fades quickly, so you need the next one. Psychologists call this contingent self-worth. A win feels good for a moment, then it becomes the new minimum.

When I ended my wait for ‘enough’

Having wandered around yoga ashrams, a deliberate pause made me realise no milestone, amount, or approval was ever going to tell me I'd done enough. So I decided it myself. For the last six months, I've written the same line in my journal every morning: Today I am going to be happy.

We always knew how to take initiative when life asked something of us. We studied, worked, saved and carried responsibilities before anyone reminded us. But when it came to happiness, we waited: for more money, less guilt, our parents' approval, one final achievement. None of these can tell us when we've done enough. We have to decide that ourselves. That is what it means to say happiness is an initiative, not a reward someone else can confer. This doesn't mean forcing yourself to feel cheerful. It means refusing to make your entire life conditional. You cannot command happiness, but you can stop postponing every condition that allows it.

What changed without the burden of indebtedness

The first shift was about worth. I had been letting other people's opinions decide whether I had done enough. Every letter, every reel, every post made me worry about how it would land. Now I genuinely don't care. I put my best foot forward, and then I let it go. That's when "enough" finally had room to arrive. The second was a pact with myself. My parents' sacrifices have their place in my life. But I can't live indebted to them. I need to live my own life.

Neither of these changes happened at once. The journal line is how I keep them. Every morning, ‘today I am going to be happy’ is a daily reminder to fight the conditioning that says I haven't earned it yet.

Success and happiness are not enemies. Discipline is not bad, and family responsibilities are not hindrances either. Our parents taught us sacrifice because it worked. But any useful strength becomes harmful when we lose the ability to decide when it is no longer needed.

Your parents may have taught you how to build a better life. A partner, a salary, an apology or a future achievement may improve that life. But none of them can decide when you are finally allowed to live it.

Initiate yourself into happiness, and make your parents proud.

And when the end comes, let the epitaph read: “He lived an interesting life and died smiling.”

I once asked a friend how much money would make her feel successful. She said ₹25 crore. My former head of risk said ₹100 crore. No, I am not building an argument to measure how much is too much. We all have a number we're working toward. What keeps us going isn't the number. It's how we feel on the way. And if nothing we've done so far feels like enough, we always feel behind. To change that mindset, we need to understand that progress is not necessarily visible success, but a change in the capacity to produce better outcomes. Success is an event, a number. Progress is transformation.

We treat success as the only proof of having made progress. In reality, success is a lagging indicator. It tells us what has already become visible, not what is currently developing. In most desired pursuits, the interval between effort and success is long. That interval is the progress. Success measures where we are. Progress measures whether we are becoming more capable of getting there. If we mistake the absence of visible evidence for the absence of progress, we risk losing valuable work before its effects have had time to compound. During that interval, learning, skill, judgment, resilience and understanding may be accumulating without producing an immediately recognisable outcome, but it’s still progress because it increases our capacity to succeed.

Back to my friend. She is one of the most capable people I know, yet she feels she will only have arrived at ₹25 crore. So she is perpetually left with the feeling that she is behind.

The numbers game

I asked her why ₹25 crore. Why not more, or less? She didn't have a clear answer. The number probably started as a feeling: safety, freedom, parents who never have to worry, the respect she wanted. But after a while, we forget what the number was supposed to do for us. We stop asking, “What would this actually change in my life?” and start asking, “How do I get there faster?” The number itself becomes the goal, replacing the safety, freedom, peace, or pride we wanted from it.

Confusing evidence for reality

I read a hundred pages today. That's the win, even if I'm nowhere near a hundred books this year. Those pages change my vocabulary, my judgment, the patterns I notice. None of it shows. It happens underground, and we miss it because we only look for what's visible.

Following borrowed timelines

Life does not give clear everyday answers. We can work hard, make a difficult decision, learn something useful, fix a problem, or move a thing forward and still have nothing impressive to show for it. Then you open your phone, and someone else has the answer you are looking for. A raise. A house. A promotion. A funding round. Revenue. A new job. You do not just see their win. You start doing the maths. Their age. Their salary. Their speed.

When your own progress is hard to see, other people’s success starts to feel like evidence about your failure. This can be envy. It can also be shame: your work suddenly looks small next to someone else’s highlight. A 2026 meta-analysis of 54 samples and 36,583 people found that online upward comparison was most strongly linked to social-evaluative negative emotions like feeling inferior, inadequate, embarrassed, or judged. The fear is not only that you are behind. It is that other people can see it.

Interval between effort and evidence

This is the stretch where the work is real but the proof hasn't arrived. This is where most people lose themselves because we don't see evidence that our effort is working. The problem is that our mind weighs a setback more heavily than a comparable step forward. One rejection, one bad metric, one failed experiment can erase a week of useful movement in our head. So the interval between effort and evidence does not feel neutral. It feels like we are losing.

So what can she do?

She can't speed up the wait, but there is a better way to measure progress than public outcomes.

Keep a ledger. A 2016 review of 138 studies found that people who tracked their progress were more likely to reach their goals, especially when they wrote it down. Record your small wins.

Long apprenticeships are normal. Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote for two decades before The Sympathizer. He saw those years as learning how to be a writer. Ben Silbermann's Pinterest was tiny for years. Marques Brownlee made video after video before anyone watched. The result arrives so late that the early years look empty in hindsight. They were not empty.

Rest is part of it. Early work usually happens around the edges of life: before work, after work, in fragments nobody sees. The side-hustle lie says every hour off puts you behind. It doesn't. A life outside the work is allowed.

Seasons change. Some are productive, some are dry. You can't stop other people posting their wins, but you can refuse to let them set your pace. Every harvest needs time to ripen. Don't let anxiety pick it early.

Measure what leads. Revenue, followers, titles and exits tell you what the world has already rewarded. They arrive too late to guide an ordinary day. Ask instead: what tells me I'm getting better at the work before the result shows up?

Keep the scoreboard internal. Compare yourself to who you were a year ago, not to the loudest person in your feed.

So, to my friend: you aren't behind. It just feels that way, because progress was never linear. The interval between effort and outcome hurts. I get it. But that interval is where the work is happening.

One of my favourite founders one day messaged me on WhatsApp: "How did you manage to grow from a mindset of scarcity to that of abundance?" I pondered over what she had in mind. Not sure of it, I didn't reply. She probably meant how I overcame the handicap of my lower middle-class upbringing to ace not just two startups but also a life of mindfulness. Her amazement is not misplaced because the biological legacy of scarcity ensures that a childhood characterised by scarcity, whether financial, emotional, or opportunistic, permanently alters the brain's threat-detection architecture. The nervous system often remains locked in hypervigilance even after objective material wealth is achieved. I no longer have to think of meeting material needs, but do I still carry the burden?

This is what I wanted to tell my friend.

She reminds me of my mother. Last week, I was loafing around at home.

My mother: "You don't do anything these days. You're always smiling. When I ask what you do for a living, you say you breathe and that you are a liver... What is really a liver?”

I jokingly replied: “I live for living..”

She then sort of taunted me: “You don't remember how hard I fought for our first dining table."

And my mind rushes to my childhood: I'm back there. Small house. Tiny kitchen. We ate in front of the TV. We did not need a table. Once that table came, it became our storage space. Groceries, spices, containers, anything we could not throw away. Years later, we moved to a new house in a new city. But she still brings up that table because it lingers in her head as the internal "storeroom" that carries past scarcity.

This “scarcity storeroom” even extends beyond the material resources to failures, as nothing is thrown away; every rejection and misstep is filed and revisited, under the belief that this protects against future harm. It becomes central to identity, and the person genuinely believes that their success depends on maintaining this harsh archive.

Was my friend expecting this from me?

In that sense, was I supposed to live in judgment and rumination all my life?

Maybe yes. But luckily, no.

I managed to empty my “scarcity storeroom” because I realised something fundamental.

You can't win every bet

High performers generally believe that being hard on themselves is the primary driver of their success. They think that retaining this emotional weight prevents future carelessness. Science, however, reveals that this practice is a measurable cognitive liability.

The book Scarcity (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013) mentions what having too little does: it narrows your attention. Your head fills with what could go wrong. It makes you keep your failures. Nothing gets thrown away, including old boxes on the dining table, and certainly not the old mistakes.

This holding of failure after you've already learned from it is called failure perseveration.

For a founder who grew up in material and opportunity scarcity, this means that the very habits that once helped them “waste nothing” can silently turn into a cognitive storeroom of failures that is heavier than any one win, slowing them down precisely at the stage where their environment now rewards speed, adaptation, and relational depth.

For them, the BIG FEAR becomes “what if I go back to where I was?”

So all our decisions are pinned on this one thought: "What if this goes wrong?" The argument has merit because there are always obligations to be met (EMIs, etc.).

But when we worry more about outcomes, we fail to realise that, no matter what we do, we can never win every shot. This is a kind of analysis paralysis.

Roger Federer said it best at a graduation speech in 2024. He played 1,526 matches. He won 80% of them. But he won only 54% of the points. "When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot." It's not just him. Djokovic's strategy coach ran the numbers on every world number 1 from 1991 to 2016, and found that they won just 55% of points on average.

So no matter what you do, you will not win all your bets. The scarcity mindset all the time strokes fear of failure, acting as a severe cognitive drain that impairs working memory and delays subsequent action, rather than being an engine for higher standards.

Scarcity vs abundance

Back to my founder friend....

She thinks the positive thinking approach just does not work because all of a sudden you aren't changing your mindset to the idea that the world is abundant.

But it all depends on how we define abundance. If it only means achievement that can produce comfort, security, pride, and autonomy, then real life satisfaction is not guaranteed. Real abundance is about rebalancing aspirations away from wealth, image and status dominance and toward relationships, growth, health and contribution.

Navigating the worst-case scenario

I didn't choose abundance. It was forced on me. We were deep in COVID, and our traditional SaaS business wasn't growing as expected. I knew that it would die a slow death if I persevered with the SaaS play, but COVID made starting a financial services business a no-brainer. I think the scarcity mindset prevented me from making that move earlier. I was already in the worst case. There was nothing left to protect. So the riskiest move stopped being risky. It was just the next move. The financial services business that actually got built was the more attractive one, and that is what CRED was interested in acquiring.

I used to call it luck. But an honest answer is that when I faced the worst-case scenario, I found out that painful is not the same as impossible. I took my shot because I had no choice.

You don't need a pandemic to learn this. There's a cheaper way.

In 2004, Tim Ferriss was making $70,000/month from his first business. But it was also killing him. While working non-stop 14-plus hour days, it became clear he had pushed himself far past his limits. He needed a break, but fear of what might go wrong locked him in a state of paralysis. Luckily, he came up with a solution - “Fear-Setting”, which helped him take a year-and-a-half journey around the world, forming the basis for his book "The 4-Hour Workweek."

• The fear-setting exercise: Write the worst case. Be specific. And maybe actually sleep on the floor or just eat rice for a week. Take a rickshaw to commute... live literally below your means. What you will realise is that you will still survive these hard moments. The point is not to convince yourself the worst case is fine. It may be painful. The point is to show your brain that you can fail massively and still survive.

I have since done this exercise regularly - with my fasting schedule, sleeping on the floor, and the obsession with being shirtless - this is easy for me.

Follow by self-forgiveness

I, of course, failed multiple times while building the FS business (now Prefr). But one small thing I changed that kept my abundant mindset was self-forgiveness. If the thing goes badly, your brain will want it to mean something about you. "I'm stupid." "I'm careless." "I always mess this up." "I should have known." Don't skip the lesson. Take responsibility. Fix what you can. Change what needs changing. But don't keep punishing yourself after that.

In a study (Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett, 2010), it was found that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before one exam procrastinated less before the next. In another study (Breines and Chen, 2012), it was found that students who responded to a failure with self-compassion studied longer and were more motivated to fix things. The fear that forgiveness makes you soft is backwards. Forgiving yourself does not mean letting yourself off the hook. It means getting back in the game faster.

Self‑forgiveness is about clearing the storeroom while retaining the lesson. It acknowledges the wrong, accepts responsibility, reduces immobilising shame, and then commits to enacting change.

So here is my reply to my friend, a few weeks late.

I didn't move from scarcity to abundance by thinking positively. I moved because the worst case showed up, and I was still standing. We can't win every bet. Federer lost almost half his points. My mother lost years to that table. I lost a SaaS business. None of us went back to zero.

The old fear is not stupid. It kept you careful, and careful got you here. But it only knows one question: what if I go back?

So answer it. Write the worst case down. Live it for a week if you have to. This means consciously limiting the time spent in the mental storeroom, extracting lessons quickly, and setting explicit dates to stop paying for specific mistakes. Then look: you're still here. And when a bet goes bad, take the lesson, fix what you can, and put the rest down. Don't carry it into the next one. That's the whole practice. Keep the table. Throw out what's on it.

Abundance is not believing you can't lose. It means experimenting with self‑forgiveness as a disciplined practice, not a vague sentiment, and considering evidence‑based interventions when patterns feel entrenched.

Abundance is knowing that if you lose, you'll handle it.

The Buendías could not see the pattern because they were living inside it, and I recognised the feeling. For most of my twenties I was inside a loop of my own, obsessing over becoming more talented, more confident, more disciplined, when the thing I needed was a life that was easy to improve.

We all have seen this hockey stick in modern self-help books, depicting that if we are persistent enough for a long enough time, steep growth meets us at one end of the time horizon. But no one ever explains the flat part of the graph, a plateau of hope. This is what I want to talk about today.

The narrative of success through sheer unyielding perseverance is a culturally dominant script. However, research reveals a complex reality where effort deployed without a structured feedback loop is not practice but merely repetition. Similarly, ‘failure is the best teacher’ is another misconception. The truth is that failure teaches only when errors are detected, corrective feedback is available, causal reasoning is possible, and the learner remains able to engage. Otherwise, failure can teach helplessness, shame, or the wrong lesson. Humans also suffer from hindsight bias, rationalising failures instead of updating mental models. The Competence Trap makes us protect the ego instead of updating the mental model. So when we hit a plateau, we see it as an identity threat. The result is that we continue putting in more hard work, but without much output.

A life is hard to improve when:

• You work privately for long stretches.

• You decide whether you are doing well based on mood or effort.

• Your identity is too attached to the outcome.

• The people you rely on are supportive by being sympathetic rather than critical.

• You cannot tell whether the problem is your skill, your offer, your customer, your message, or your assumption.

When is success a bad teacher?

We think success comes from effort over time because that is what our early lives looked like: study harder, work harder, get the result. But these environments had built-in feedback - fixed syllabus, fixed report cards. True for kids growing up through the education system. Hard work, discipline, and the ability to execute remain powerful advantages, together with our own lived experiences, through our adult life as well, but the results start getting more and more unpredictable because now there is no fixed answer key. Nobody tells you what to build, whom to serve, what to charge, which idea is worth keeping, or whether your work is helping. That is why founders can work incredibly hard and still waste years. The issue is not that they do not care. It is that nothing reliably makes the next week smarter than the previous one. This is also true for corporate professionals.

We don’t need a vast research apparatus to begin constructing a new answer key, just a willingness to expose our ideas to real scrutiny and to treat the responses as data rather than validation or rejection of our identity. I did not have an answer key at 25. I had effort. It took me years, and one product I should have killed much sooner, to build habits that bring real progress. These habits killed poor ideas early, stopped some before they started, and led us to build a financial services arm that disbursed tens of thousands of small-ticket loans.

If I were 25 again, I would not wait years. I would start here.

1. Write down what you think will happen

• "Ten of the 50 people I message will reply."

• "Three founders will pay for this small workshop."

• "People are dropping off because the homepage is confusing."

• "This essay will get replies from founders struggling with X."

The prediction needs to be clear enough to make a decision, not statistically perfect.

This sounds basic, but it keeps your brain from changing the story afterwards. If you don't write down what you expect before you act, you can explain every result after the fact. You send 40 messages, get one reply, and your brain gives you a story: cold email is dead, the market is slow, people do not get it. Maybe. But you do not know. You never said what you thought would happen, so you cannot see the gap between your model and reality. You do not learn. You just move on.

A group of researchers ran four experiments with 759 firms. Everyone learned the same startup tools: customer interviews, surveys, A/B tests, business-model frameworks. But one group had to do one extra thing: write down why they thought their idea would work, turn that belief into a test, and update it when the result came back.

That group was more likely to kill weak ideas, make a small number of useful pivots instead of either never changing or changing constantly, and performed better overall.

2. Keep a tiny weekly learning log

Once a week, answer four questions:

• What were we trying to achieve?

• What did we expect would happen?

• What actually happened?

• What will we change in the next attempt?

Across 46 samples and 2,136 participants, people and teams that ran structured debriefs after work performed about 20–25% better, on average, than comparison groups.

3. Build a truth council

Pick 2–3 colleagues, mentors, investors, or peers who are allowed to disagree with you. Smart people are easy to find, and the real work is making it safe for them to tell you when your story does not match reality.

In my case, I met every Monday with our Head of Technology and Head of Risk. I brought the opportunity, the customer request, or the plan. They brought the questions I was least likely to ask myself: "What are we assuming?" "What breaks if we are wrong?" "What are we not seeing?"

The rule: Reward disagreement. If someone raises a concern, do not defend the plan immediately. Ask, "What are you seeing?" and "What would make this fail?" If people get punished, dismissed, or labelled negative for disagreeing, they will stop telling you the truth.

4. Before you start, run a pre-mortem

Before you start something big, run a pre-mortem. Pretend it is a year later and it failed. Then ask why. In a 1989 study, people who imagined an event had already happened came up with about 30% more reasons for it than people who were merely asked what could go wrong.

Research on "prospective hindsight" found that people generate more explanations when they are told an outcome has already happened than when they are merely asked what might happen. A later study found that this kind of exercise reduced people's confidence in a plan more than ordinary critique or a pros-and-cons list. That is useful because overconfidence is expensive.

5. Lose the ‘I’

There is one thing that breaks every learning loop - putting an ‘I’ before the result.

You launch something. Nobody buys.
You write something. Nobody responds.
You pitch a customer. They say no.

Instead of asking, "What did this tell me about the offer?" you ask, "What does this say about me?"

That is where learning stops.

Researchers looked at 607 feedback experiments and found that performance got worse in 38% of them. The pattern was simple.
Feedback helped when it pointed at the task: "People are dropping off before they see the value."
It hurt when it became personal: "You are not a product person."

The first gives you something to fix. The second makes you want to defend yourself, explain the result away, or avoid the next test altogether. So when you review your work, lose the ‘I.’

Not: I am bad at sales.

Try: I pitched too early in the call.

A deliberate answer key

The Buendías worked harder than anyone in Macondo. Every generation started fresh but ended in the same place. That is what a life looks like when nothing makes next week smarter than last week. You do not need more talent, or more confidence, or more discipline. You need a system that makes it easy for you to improve.

Time is not a line carrying you toward mastery. It is neutral machinery that compounds whatever you feed it, including wrong models, identity-protective narratives, and avoidance of the very feedback that would let you steer. The people who look lucky are running more, tighter loops, and every rep slightly changes the next one. The builder’s real problem is not grit. It is the absence of a deliberate answer key in worlds where no teacher is coming.

That achievements bring no lasting happiness is beyond doubt. I realised it after my successful exit from CreditVidya, because there is always the next thing - a unicorn in my case. My intention here is not to argue the futility of ambition, because it's not. To be human is to aspire, dream and achieve. Aspirations gave us civilisation, art, science, exploration and invention. It can also give us envy, greed, status anxiety and endless dissatisfaction. In short, despair. And because there's despair, there must be God as well. Or, God has always been around; just that we fail to feel his company. For 30 years, my relationship with God was transactional, then something changed everything for me. I escaped despair. Research supports the possibility that a secure relationship with God can provide meaning, attachment, coping, and felt companionship. This essay is about how I discovered my friend, my Krishna.

The God of small things

Eight of us lived in a beaten-down two-bedroom house in Kathmandu. Every evening my mother would recite the Hanuman Chalisa and make three of us siblings sit around her. There was barely enough space for the people living in that house. But my mother found a small corner in the kitchen for her favourite Krishna. Whenever I think of Kathmandu, I can still feel the warmth of her embrace while she did her pooja. That was my first experience of God.

I did not wonder whether Hanuman could be proven or whether Krishna existed outside the imagination. My mother prayed, so I prayed. Everyone around me believed, so I believed. God entered my life the way language and food did - through the people who loved me before I had decided what I thought about anything.

But sitting in my mother's lap, I also learned something else. I learned that God is where you go when you want something. So every evening, tucked against my mother while she sang, I made my request. Get me out of Kathmandu. Get me to America. Then my life will finally be complete.

In search of comfort

I went through the stage that engineers go through, when you begin to ask why you should believe in anything that cannot be detected by the five senses or derived from first principles. My logical mind questioned Krishna's existence, but it survived my rational phase for two excellent reasons. First, the gurdwara near my apartment was where you could meet Indian girls who had come with their parents. So I went and hung around the gurdwara. And second, there was langar: free Indian food in the US, and I couldn't say no to that.

But God played a larger role in my life than I admitted. He helped me upgrade my ambitions.

I prayed for a beautiful girlfriend. I prayed for a better job. I prayed for money, success, and eventually a billion-dollar exit. Every prayer was a request for something that would finally make me feel complete. I did not have a relationship with God. I had a wishlist. To be more honest, I treated him less like a friend and more like Santa Claus. When life went well, God seemed to be listening. When it did not, I wondered whether anyone was there at all.

I do not judge the younger version of myself for that. The logic made sense. If you grow up around scarcity of money, opportunity, certainty, or access, you learn that improvement is not an abstract aspiration. You learn to close the distance between where you are and where you need to be. You work harder. You become more capable. You build skills, savings, credibility. The strategy works because the gaps are real, and closing them can change the course of a life. It changed mine.

Achievement does not deserve the contempt it sometimes receives in spiritual writing. The boy in that Kathmandu kitchen was not wrong to want out. Anyone who tells you ambition is spiritually inferior has usually never been poor.

In search of meaning

Osho has a line I return to often: peace of mind is a million miles away from peace of stomach. Only when your stomach is at peace do you go looking for meaning.

My stomach finally found its peace. The salary came. Then the company. Then the exit. Somewhere in my thirties, I looked around and realised that every request the eight-year-old had made from his mother's lap had been granted. America. Money. Success. All of it.

And yet every morning, I woke up feeling empty, anxious and like a failure. I believed happiness was one achievement away. I believed that once I reached a certain threshold, the restlessness would settle. But the game had no natural ending. There was always someone with a larger exit, a larger company, a more impressive life, more money, more freedom, more public proof that they mattered.

This was confusing, and sitting in that emptiness, I understood something that frightened me more than failure. I was never going to be happy this way because I had made achievement responsible for answering questions achievement was never designed to answer.

For twenty years, the central question in my life had been, "What do I want next?"

Now it became, "Why?"

To get an answer, I did something I had never done before. I packed my bag and set forth to "just be" at an ashram. Yoga every morning. Slow days. No targets, no metrics, no request pending anywhere. For a man whose entire identity was motion, it felt less like peace and more like withdrawal. The mind kept offering exits. Start something. Buy something. Fix something. I let the offers pass, and I sat with the emptiness instead.

Finding Krishna within

After months of wandering around aimlessly, one morning, something happened that I do not have the words for. After a long yoga practice, I opened my eyes and for a moment I lost the visible sense of my physical body. It felt like I had merged with everything around me.

My heart filled with joy. Tears rolled down my face. My mind, usually busy solving problems or making up stories, had gone quiet. I was not seeking anything. I was not trying to get anywhere. I was simply there. My conscious mind still cannot prove what happened. It can only describe the stillness, the slow breath, the absence of any pending request.

For a brief moment, Krishna no longer felt like someone I needed to reach, impress, persuade, or ask for something. He did not feel outside me. He felt present within me and beside me. The boundary between "me" - the anxious, striving, endlessly planning person - and the world around me became less solid.

For most of my life, I experienced God as someone outside me. He was above me, somewhere beyond reach, listening to requests and deciding whether to grant them. I approached him as a child approaches a powerful adult: with need, hope, fear, and a list of things that might make life better.

The feeling I experienced in that yoga studio was not permanent. It still comes and goes

Some days, my mind is as restless as it has always been. It wants to plan, optimise, build, acquire, improve. It wants to find the next thing that will make life feel settled.

But the emptiness doesn't frighten me the same way anymore.

There is no metric for this kind of peace. You can measure income, valuation, output, followers, revenue, sleep, calories, and time spent in meditation. You can measure how much you have earned, built, acquired, or given away. But there is no dashboard for the moment you realise that the life you are trying so hard to improve is already being lived with you.

That is what I think my mother understood in the kitchen in Kathmandu.

I used to think she was praying to him because she needed something.

Now I believe she was doing something simpler.

She was making room for a friend.

This territory, where God becomes a "friend", resulting in unburdened joy, clinically aligns with the development of a "Secure Attachment to God", where individuals utilise their belief system as a "secure base" and "haven of safety." It translates into lower loneliness, higher optimism, and superior emotional regulation during demanding situations.

Transactional spirituality fuels anxiety. On the other hand, treating a higher power or meaning system as a mechanism for secure attachment offers measurable emotional protection.

And perhaps that is what faith is for - not to help us get everything we want, but to help us recognise that the next thing may or may not work, the next goal may or may not be achieved, but we are already accompanied by a friend who acts as our charioteer in the daily battle against despair.

The unexamined life is not worth living, but nothing is more difficult than understanding oneself. Self-examination or self-criticism is like a double-edged sword because to see one’s flaws clearly is wisdom, and to see nothing else is blindness. We often inhabit an area where we spend our life accompanied by an internal voice that acts as our harshest critic. This voice eventually becomes indistinguishable from our own thoughts. We expect that our continuous achievement will eventually satisfy this critic, yet the satisfaction never arrives, leaving us exhausted, isolated and sometimes completely in despair.

My moment of despair

We had just pivoted from B2B SaaS to fintech lending. It was the long COVID winter. My head of risk had lost his father. There were six months of cash in the bank. I was crossing a street, a bus came, and for a split second I thought about stepping in front of it. With everything I had built almost collapsing, ending it seemed like the easier way out.

I felt truly scared for the first time in my life.

Why did a business problem become an existential problem? Companies get into trouble all the time. Founders don't usually stand at a crossing and think what I thought.

Self audit

What kind of relationship did I have with the person who had just had that thought?

We spend the maximum time in our lifetime with ourselves. And yet, all our efforts are aimed at improving our interpersonal relationships. I spent years becoming a good character in other people's lives without ever learning how to live with myself. I had built a relationship with everyone. I never built one with myself.

I can describe every important relationship in my life in a few lines.

• With my parents: the good kid, the dependable son.

• With women: flirtatious, charming, chosen.

• With friends: the shameless one who could make a night happen.

• With work: disciplined, ambitious, hardworking, demanding, loyal.

Every one of those is a relationship with somebody else. Every relationship is defined by who is in the room. But I never felt the need to be in the room with myself. So, instead of having a conversation with myself, my inner self had been dictating terms to me. High expectations, high standards. When CreditVidya lost hope, I lost hope. My lonely self almost gave a verdict, a bad one.

The voice in my head

Self-criticism as an engine for success fundamentally compromises our well-being and long-term sustainability. Most ambitious individuals spend their lives accompanied by an internal voice that acts as our harshest critic. This voice eventually becomes indistinguishable from our own thoughts. The individual expects that continuous achievement will eventually satisfy this critic, yet the satisfaction never arrives, leaving us exhausted and isolated.

Two pieces of advice generally come up again and again to silence this critic. For me, both looked useless.

1. Go easy on yourself. Be kind, be forgiving, stop being so hard. My problem with it: if I stopped being hard on myself, I would lose the thing that made me capable.

2. Get a life outside work. A hobby, friends, something. My problem with it: how am I supposed to do any of that with this much work on the table, when I have payroll to make?

During the CreditVidya crisis, I was frustrated and started writing my thoughts down. I wrote whatever came to mind. In almost every journal entry, I was the villain. All of it was about how I could have done things better. I was my own harshest critic.

The loop that I actually ran

With CreditVidya at stake, my worth went to zero. So in my head, my worth in the eyes of the people I looked up to went to zero as well. And it doesn't stay inside. When we are hard on ourselves, we get hard on everyone else too.

Clinical psychology explains the maintenance of this loop through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Professor Paul Gilbert, founder of Compassion-Focused Therapy, notes that the human brain evolved three primary emotion regulation systems: the threat system (protection and survival), the drive system (resource seeking and achievement), and the soothing system (rest, safety, and connection).

Among high achievers, the threat and drive systems become fused. The individual uses fear, anxiety, and self-criticism to motivate their ambition and hard work. Over years of reinforcement, this neural pathway becomes a superhighway. The individual cannot experience rest because resting disables the drive system, leaving the threat system active and unchecked. This is why "every rest day feels undeserved", and peace is treated only as a contingent reward.

Self-compassion by luck

Following the bus incident, I did something by accident I hadn't done in years. For the first time, I heard myself.

I didn't have a relationship with myself yet. But I heard myself, and I didn't like what I heard. I would never speak to a colleague, a friend, a mentor, a parent or a stranger in the voice and the tone I used on myself.

Just hearing it changed something small. The voice started to lose its grip. That was self-compassion, and I had never felt it before.

We accept ourselves, or love ourselves, or whatever you want to call it, through a lens. That's the relationship lens. And then there's the achievement lens where we believe we will deserve happiness once we arrive. But even that never happens.

What I worked out over the following months was that I started accepting myself for what I was. Never a perfect son. Never a perfect lover. Never enough. And slowly I started putting myself on the line every single time, and something started to happen. The voice in my head began to soften. In a way, I was practising self-compassion.

Self-compassion says: “Let me understand what is happening to me before I judge what I should do about it.”

Self-compassion is acceptance that suffering is inevitable. Even in victory.

Even in modern science, contrary to belief, dopamine is not the chemical of reward. It is the chemical of anticipation and pursuit. It transforms the feeling of "empty success" from a moral failing, a lack of gratitude, or an inadequate achievement into a predictable biological mechanism. Our brain is literally designed to crash its dopamine levels the moment we reach the finish line, meaning the dissatisfaction is a feature of the hardware, not a flaw in our character.

Cruelty was never an engine

Research by Hewitt and Flett theorises that self-oriented perfectionism contains inherent vulnerabilities. When individuals with high self-oriented perfectionism are exposed to achievement-related stressors or failures, their adaptive traits rapidly metastasize into traits like self-punishment, and depression. The loop is maintained because the individual cannot untangle their adaptive conscientiousness from their self-hostility. They fear that letting go of the cruelty will result in a loss of their competitive edge.

A high-performer sees it as a claim about cause and effect: harshness produces performance, softness produces decline. That can be checked. Somebody checked it.

Breines and Chen of UC Berkeley did four experiments on a group of people failing at something. Some members of the group were guided to respond to themselves with compassion. The compassionate group spent more time studying for the retest. More motivation to improve. More willing to make amends after a moral failure. They beat the control group, and they beat a group given a self-esteem boost.

So compassion produced more effort, not less, the exact opposite of what belief predicts.

Cruelty, therefore, was never the engine for success. If anything, it was a tax I paid myself for permission to start.

Maintain your standards

High performers cannot simply "turn off" their inner critic because they experience these thoughts as an expression of ego, deeply aligned with their core identity and credited for their historical success.

When I tell people to take it easy, here's the pushback I get. They hear "lower your standards."

A meta-analysis of 43 studies where they split perfectionism into two things - strivings, which is setting a high bar and chasing it, and concerns, which is fear of and using performance to work out whether you're alright as a person - found that high standards don't predict burnout. What predicts burnout is fear of mistakes, plus using your performance to decide your worth.

So nobody is asking you to dip your standards. Keep them at ten out of ten.

Acceptance is the key

Contrary to the popular belief that self-compassion breeds laziness, empirical studies demonstrate that applying warmth and understanding to one's own failures actually increases self-improvement motivation and academic/professional persistence.

Lately, I have been spending my weekends reading the Bhagavad Gita for the book I'm writing. I have realised that negative thinking, the harshness, the contingent self-worth is the Duryodhana we all have within ourselves. You can't exile him, and you can't beat him.

For years he was winning within me. And I knew that.

He needed to go quiet, and I needed to find Krishna. The Krishna voice was feeble at the start. Then I learnt to be compassionate towards myself. The voice grew louder.

Duryodhana still turns up on occasions. But he just isn't the loudest voice in the room any more.

Self-compassion is the antidote to self-criticism.

Understand your imperfect self.

Regret is the shadow cast by a choice after the light of possibility has disappeared. No wonder, as we age, the shadow keeps on lengthening, taking us back to memories of our youth - of hope, ambition, aspirations. I dreamt of being an entrepreneur as a 20-year-old, and consider myself lucky to have achieved that after a 10-year toil. But I still have regrets about not having done it differently, and I know people with regrets about not having tried it at all. And the story is all about money and how to manage it while you are still young. That's because money changes a person's capacity to act; it does not automatically change whether they act.

I grew up in a modest house where achievement was the only way for small rewards, like a bottle of Coke for being a class topper. Pocket money was not really a thing in our home. Basically, my mind learned to survive on little. When I later had to sleep on an empty stomach and live on bread and water, it didn't hurt. Now, when friends say "you're not a foodie," it doesn't surprise me. For the longest time after CreditVidya was acquired, I didn't buy myself one nice thing, and that didn't surprise me either. Splurging was never in my DNA, but I am not a miser either.

Money can buy comfort, status, time, and more money. But, most importantly, if you use it correctly, it can buy courage to try things you always wanted to do. I have met people with crores in their bank, but still panicky about the future. A bank balance is evidence that you have money, not that you can handle life.

Courage, on the other hand, is evidence that you can learn, that you can make something people want, that you can earn again if this attempt fails, that you can move, adapt, recover, and begin again.

This is what your money should buy in your twenties.

If you left college and started a company immediately, perhaps this letter is not for you. You had a kind of nerve I did not have. If you had one obvious, world-class talent from childhood, perhaps you had a clearer path too. But if you are like me - not born wealthy, not obviously exceptional at one thing, not naturally fearless - then you may need to build courage slowly.

And money can help.

In a large study of U.S. founders, the average age at founding was about 42. Among the fastest-growing new ventures, it was 45. The lesson, of course, is not to "wait until 45." It is that your twenties are not your one shot, but your apprenticeship. Even though our social conditioning hands us the safety-first framework, according to which money's main job in early adulthood is to "protect the status quo", not to buy "optionality", yet in economic terms, the most powerful function of money in your twenties is its capacity to purchase "real options."

Here's my list that will help you accumulate a 'learning capital'

1. Buy Skills

Every financial expert for years has told you the 50/30/20 rule. 50% on needs, 30% on wants, 20% into savings. The formula works perfectly fine, but only if you plan to be an employee at 50. Follow it and live miserably till 50, then spend the rest of your life thinking about what if. So forget the wants and replace them with skills.

Skills will make sure that no matter what happens, you will never be unable to put food on the table, even as you learn to build your startup. Learn to sell, write, build. Learn distribution. Learn how to make complicated things sound obvious. Learn how to use AI so well that you can do the work of five people before lunch.

Get skilled so that when something important needs doing, you are the person people call. Spend on storytelling, because nobody buys from someone who cannot explain what they do.

Pay for Claude Max. A tool that makes you five times faster is not an expense.

Write long-form essays on Substack to improve your thinking. Not because you are trying to become a creator. Because when you finally start, people already know how you think.

And if you do not have time, buy time. Hire help. Get an editor. Remove the work that stops you from doing the work only you can do.

2. Don't gamble

Your mind gets evidence of courage when your skill moves the needle. So here is what you do not do in your twenties: You do not gamble on anything - or anyone - but yourself.

• Do not trade in F&O or even intraday. SEBI found that 93% of individual F&O traders lost money between FY22 and FY24. More than one crore people lost a combined ₹1.8 lakh crore.

• Crypto is the same game with a more seductive story. It sells you decentralisation, freedom, the future of money, and escape from the system. If you cannot explain where the value comes from, who captures it, why you have an edge, you are not investing.

• Same with angel investing: Nine out of ten startups fail. Even when one gets acquired, founders can be diluted, preference-stacked, or bought out with little to show for years of work. You are behind them in the line with no control, no information, and no way out.

None of these bets gives your mind evidence that you can create value. Every rupee you do not gamble away is your own angel round.

3. Buy ACCESS

The fastest way to stay ordinary is to spend all your time with people who have the same problems as you. So spend money getting closer to people who are already where you want to go. Buy a book for the person ten years ahead of you and send it with a note. If someone you want to learn from sells a service, do not ask for a favour. Pay them the full price.

This way, you get the work, the lesson, and the right to call again.

That is the cheapest education you will ever buy.

You cannot buy trust. But you can buy the opportunity to earn it.

While skilling yourself is the first step, access changes the slope of your learning curve.

It buys your mind courage, because now, when you are stuck, your mind knows you are not stuck alone. You know people who have seen the problem before, people whom you can call. A one-hour conversation with someone who has already made the mistake can save you two years of making it yourself.

More importantly, buy access early because it gets much more expensive later.

4. Don't put love on the cap table

Every startup guide tells you to raise a friends-and-family round. I think it is some of the worst advice in the startup canon.

Financing a startup is a terrible bet unless you are extremely well diversified or you have enough FU money lying around.

A startup will take longer than you think, cost more than your budgeted figure, and it may still fail. Then you ask the people who love you to take that bet. They may not understand the market, or have better information, or have any control over what happens, but they will still support you because they love you. And when it goes wrong, you do not only lose the money; you lose the ease.

Research on family financing reaches a similar conclusion: it can turn a family's informal safety net into startup risk capital, making failure emotionally and financially costlier; it can also make founders more hesitant to take the risks their companies need. This is because the borrower and lender never remember the deal the same way. One remembers the help, the other remembers the sacrifice. So do not take money from friends or family and do not lend it either. Do not even go into business together just because you love each other. If someone you love needs money, there are only two clean moves:

Give it out loud as a gift, but only if you can afford to forget it. Or say no. Spend on relationships like they're the asset. Just never put them on the cap table.

5. Don't take money advice from your parents

Your parents played it safe because safe was the whole job. They came from a different India. For them, preserving wealth was not cowardice but survival. For them, stability was the dream and safety meant an FD, a house, and a government job. Respect that. But do not automatically follow it.

Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, has a line I love:

Your personal experience with money is a tiny slice of what has happened in the world, but roughly 80% of how you think the world works.

A flat on EMI at 27 may be the right decision for someone building a settled life in one city. But if you want to build a company, it can also buy you a monthly payment you cannot walk away from. You may need to move to Bengaluru for talent, Mumbai for customers, Delhi for policy, and somewhere else entirely for the next thing.

Do not make it hard to move before you know where you need to go.

Open a Zerodha account. Pick one low-cost Nifty 50 index fund. Set up an auto-debit for salary day. Then close the app and do not open it every morning pretending you are managing wealth. Stick with Index funds, which, though they carry market risk and do not guarantee returns, but their purpose is simple: own a diversified slice of the market rather than trying to be smarter than it.

Your parents saved money to stay safe. You are saving and investing money to stay mobile. It's a different game and will require different rules.

6. Buy experiments

Most people in their twenties get attached to how good their idea is and forget to validate demand. Your brain needs evidence, and evidence is cheap if you buy it before you build.

Pick an idea. Put up a landing page in a day. Add a waitlist, or a founder's price for the first fifty customers.

Spend ₹20,000–₹30,000 on Instagram ads aimed at the exact people who have that problem. See who signs up. Then do it again with a second idea. And a third. Build the one with the biggest waitlist. Talk to the people on that list while you build. Every week. Build in public so the list grows while the product does.

Keep iterating. Change the headline. Change the price. Change the audience. Spend another ₹20,000. Look again. The point is not to be right about your idea, but to get an answer.

And here is why this matters for courage: every waitlist that fills is your brain seeing, with its own eyes, that people want what you make.

That is not motivation, but evidence. You cannot save your way to it. You buy it, ₹20,000 at a time.

7. Don't spend on Status

Here's the line from Housel that should be tattooed on every 24-year-old's wrist:

Nobody is as impressed with your possessions as you are.

Darwin says we need two things: food, and someone to have kids with. You have food. You have a phone with dating apps on it.

Courage is the scarce resource your brain is actually fighting for to get you the ability to design your life the way you want it. And status spending is the biggest leak in that budget.

When you see a guy in a nice car, you do not think he is great. You think I would look great in that car. The car is doing nothing for him. It is doing something for you - for three seconds. Then you forget.

That is what status buys you: three seconds in the head of someone who does not care about you, paid for with months of your runway.

Instead, build the thing that gives you a life you designed. Status can show up later. And when it does, you will not need it. Spend on your mind like you are rich. Spend on status like you are poor. Nobody is looking anyway.

8. Buy Energy

Your skills do not matter if you are too exhausted to use them. Your runway does not matter if your nervous system takes every challenge as a threat. Your courage does not matter if your body has stopped believing you are safe. And more importantly, your wealth won't matter if you are struggling to walk or run because of pain or you aren't attracted to the image you see in the mirror.

So buy energy.

Prioritise your health. Eat clean. Eat organic if you can afford it. Pay for the gym. Sleep well. Keep your body fat under control. Do the blood tests. Get a health check-up before something hurts.

Now the boring rules. Do not do drugs. Do not drink yourself stupid every weekend. Do not get anyone pregnant. Do not get pregnant. Children are the most expensive thing you will ever buy. You will buy them gladly later when the life you built can carry them. Early in life, it does not add to your wellness, but is a maintenance expense.

Your body is the machine that makes every rupee, every decision, and every act of courage in this letter. Do not run the machine into the ground. So buy energy. Then protect it like the asset it is.

Money is your portfolio of options

This week, make two lists: "Made me better" and "Made me look better." Move one expense from the second list to the first.

You may feel scared of putting the wrong thing. That's because the opportunity cost, defined as the value of the next-best alternative you forgo when you choose one option over another, is highest in early years because your future earnings and compounding potential are most sensitive to early career choices. When the financial rules you adopt are designed solely around stability, they treat this optionality as an externality - important in theory, but rarely priced into real decisions.

If you quit a job, lose money, and your startup fails, you can see the loss clearly. You made the decision, and you know exactly what it cost. But if you stay in a job for five years and never try, the loss is harder to see.

You do not see the skills you did not build, the people you did not meet, and the company you could have started. You do not see the life you did not get to test. So your brain treats doing nothing as safer.

In the short term, people tend to experience stronger regret over actions (things they did) than inactions (things they did not do), but in the long term, the pattern often reverses, with inaction regrets dominating.

That is why this letter exists. To help you take control of your future now, so that when memory casts its long shadow in 20 years you only see courage, not regret.

Most money advice is designed to stop you from making a mistake today. This is about stopping you from making the bigger mistake over ten years. Use your money to become more capable.

Buy skills. Buy access. Buy experiments. Buy energy. Keep it away from gambling, status, and obligations that reduce your freedom.

In a way, we are all modern-day Sisyphus. We indulge in repetitive work without resolution because most of the time it gives an illusion of progress. We tend to measure success by hours logged or activity performed rather than outcomes achieved, which keeps the boulder rolling but never helps us reach the summit. A founder wears workaholism as a badge, thinking it to be an entry pass to success and acceptance. In fact, workaholism is the only addiction we all approve. In reality, this addiction is not towards work but the reassurance that work provides.

Take this simple test: Have you been creating work after the necessary work is finished; checking messages during the first unstructured minute of the day, turning every concern into a project, saying yes before evaluating capacity or strategic value, taking the laptop on holidays ‘just in case’?

These are all examples where work is used as an emotion-regulation strategy, where individuals stay busy enough to avoid confronting questions about their trajectory. Perfectionism is one of the most consistent personality correlates of work addiction, especially the evaluative side: fear of mistakes, self-criticism, concern over others’ judgments, and uncertainty about whether performance is sufficient. Workaholism goes without scrutiny because most of the time it delivers - money, praise, status, investor trust, parental approval… and also a calendar full enough to make your anxiety look like ambition.

Data surrounding the mental health of builders, creators, and entrepreneurs shatters the myth of the invincible founder. 72% of entrepreneurs report a lifetime history of at least one mental health condition, compared to just 48% of the general population.

To the outside observer, the relentless drive of the founder or the high performer appears as unwavering ambition. The individual is praised for their discipline, congratulated for their output, and socially reinforced for their capacity to outwork their peers. However, psychology identifies a fundamentally different mechanism operating beneath this facade. The core problem is not an excess of ambition, but rather a deficit in distress tolerance, manifesting as a phenomenon known as “experiential avoidance”.

Why workaholism is dangerous

Work is a uniquely dangerous escape because it receives applause. If you drink every evening to avoid your thoughts, people worry. If you scroll for five hours to avoid your thoughts, people call it addiction. If you work every evening to avoid your thoughts, people call you relentless.

Workaholism is associated with perfectionism, but also poor recovery, burnout, sleep disturbance, and work-family conflict. In a 2026 pulse survey of 50 Indian founders, investors, and ecosystem participants, 88% admitted working at least 50 hours per week, 71% experienced burnout at least several times a year, and 41% slept six hours or less.

Most founders do not merely work hard. They use work to regulate guilt, uncertainty, inadequacy, and fear. Because work produces immediate relief, the founder learns to convert every moment of boredom into activity. It gives a sense of motion, but one that lacks direction.

I recently met a founder who has built a marketing agency from scratch. She did whatever she could do (despite all the odds) to build a very successful business. But now she is at a crossroads, facing a difficult decision about the impact of AI and how the market is likely to evolve.

With such ambiguity, it is extremely hard to take decisive action; instead, it becomes easier to continue hustling. We drive our self-worth because we are creating output. However, just thinking about what we should become, how to navigate industry challenges, and how to build a competitive moat does not necessarily have one correct answer - these are rather ambiguous and complex problems with very little to show. So instead of just adopting boredom and sitting with perhaps a more complex problem, we itch to solve the next customer problem, add one more product feature, or scroll on X, LinkedIn if nothing else.

Work as an emotion-regulation strategy

Work can function as short-term relief from guilt, anxiety, inadequacy, and other unpleasant internal states. People tend to treat visible effort as evidence of moral character, even when that extra effort does not improve the outcome. Because effort is socially and morally rewarded, work becomes a respectable way to avoid hard questions. Work becomes an avoidance behaviour when opening the laptop functions less as movement toward a chosen value and more as movement away from anxiety, guilt, loneliness, uncertainty, shame, or fatigue.

When work is used as an emotion-regulation strategy, clarity is the first casualty. Individuals stay busy enough to avoid confronting fundamental questions about their trajectory. Behaviorally, this manifests in compulsive micro-actions: answering emails during family dinners, taking 7 AM calls that project commitment but result in profound exhaustion by 2 PM, and manufacturing crises to justify continued engagement. Boredom and quiet create discomfort. Work offers relief.

We do not merely reward results. We reward looking as if you are trying very hard. In a series of eight experiments involving 5,502 participants, it was observed that people treated visible effort as evidence of moral character, even when that additional effort did not improve the quality or economic value of the outcome.

In a workaholic brain decision-making degrades because the nervous system is stuck in threat-detection mode. The individual becomes reactive rather than strategic. A founder takes on the extra client or build the unnecessary software feature because slowing down to evaluate the necessity of the task feels more frightening than simply overcommitting. Achievement transitions from a source of satisfaction to a momentary form of pain relief, creating a cycle where the completion of a goal provides only a fleeting respite before the anxiety returns.

Professor Kamila Wojdylo explains workaholism not simply as working long hours, but as an addictive, emotionally driven pattern in which a person uses work to regulate distress, compensate for low self-worth, and obtain psychological relief.

Low self-worth or negative emotion → compulsive work → temporary achievement or relief → standards rise and distress returns → renewed craving for work

For instance, a founder may feel anxious about being judged as incompetent. They work late into the night, obtain a sense of control and achievement, and briefly feel better. But because the underlying insecurity has not been resolved, they create a larger workload and become dependent on the next burst of productivity.

A 2026 Founder Mental Health Survey in the US found that founders rated being trapped in operational detail more severely than several external threats, and also reported avoidance of difficult conversations and hard calls.

Here’s a question for self-assessment:

Are you working because the work is meaningful, or because you cannot bear how you feel when you are not working?

Real work needs direction

I had two versions of me as an entrepreneur. One, when I was in all the meetings - from all-hands engineering calls to product prioritisation to sales meetings. I perhaps took pride in being the hardest worker in the room, but I wasn’t really the most productive. The second version of me emerged after COVID, following a stroke, when I understood that the real displacement doesn’t come from more effort. It comes from effort pointed in the right direction.

My recovery time gave me a chance to think over questions like: Does business necessarily just need more effort; why can some founders work 15 hours a day but struggle with one unstructured hour; why does an empty calendar create anxiety instead of relief, and why does a founder build another feature even when they already know the current problem is distribution?

The answer to all these questions is a simple ritual I implemented - to sit with myself and think about the highest value problem (not the hardest) every morning. Following this, I started taking my first meeting at noon, only after I had done all my thinking.

WHO and ILO estimate that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of death from ischemic heart disease compared with working 35-40 hours.

Healthy engagement is energised by interest, meaning, or deliberately chosen goals. Compulsive overwork is maintained by internal pressure, relief-seeking, contingent self-worth, and difficulty disengaging, even when further work is unnecessary or harmful.

Before you create more work, ask yourself: What question is this work helping me avoid?

You may be highly capable at forcing an output out of yourself, but all the while becoming less able to sense internal needs or revise goals flexibly. Mentally disengaging from work during non-work time is not about simply being away from the desk. It is the ability to stop performing and rehearsing work internally.

This is where Karma Yoga and Work Craving Theory meet. Both suggest that the decisive issue is not merely how much one works, but whether work is being used as a substitute for inner stability. In a study carried out across 91 independent samples and more than 38,000 workers, greater detachment was associated with less exhaustion, better sleep, higher life satisfaction, less fatigue, and better recovery.

Workaholism is not a behavioural addiction to productivity, but an emotional defence mechanism against internal experiences. Blaise Pascal called it ‘diversion’ long ago. We fill our lives with activity partly to avoid an unmediated encounter with ourselves, uncertainty, mortality, and dissatisfaction. The modern workplace gives it diversion dashboards, revenue targets, notifications, and social media legitimacy.

But the choice is still with you - to reframe the problem from “I need better habits” to “I have trained myself to override every internal signal, including the ones that would tell me whether this goal is still mine.”

Build your life because you genuinely want to inhabit it, not because you are terrified of who you would be without it?

For aspiring founders, this becomes the “entrepreneurial intention–action gap”: people can perceive opportunities, believe they are capable, and say they intend to start, but never make the transition into entrepreneurial action.

Social shame sets the agenda

We were coming out of COVID, and we had just transitioned our business at CreditVidya into a lending business. It was probably one of the worst times in history to give out loans. Nobody knew whether there would be a second or third wave. Nobody knew whether the economy would recover. Nobody knew whether we would recover our lending portfolio.

In one of our corridor conversations, I made a bold claim: we would disburse 100 crores a month within the next six months. Everyone thought I was joking. But I had realised something important: when I made the goal public, I gave myself a better chance of achieving it because there is social shame in not achieving the goal. That is what made me wonder: why are we so willing to work hard for others out of social shame, but get so used to letting ourselves down when it comes to personal goals?

Most people delay personal projects because they tell themselves they need more knowledge, more motivation, or more intelligence. A GEM survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor India Report 2023–24 stated that 81% of Indians believe they could start a business, 62% say fear of failure would stop them, and only 12% actually start.

Survival as a motivation tool

Evolutionary psychology suggests humans are hardwired to honour social commitments but lack equivalent biological mechanisms for honouring self-promises. Evolutionary biology designed the brain with social sanctions such as guilt, shame, and the fear of reputation loss to enforce cooperation and trust within a tribe. Failing a boss threatens the individual's standing within the social hierarchy, triggering ancient survival alarms. Therefore, we continue to pursue the assigned targets, rather than risk failing at something personal.

In contrast, breaking a promise to oneself does not affect the tribe's willingness to cooperate. Because self-promises lack external observers, evolution did not attach the same immediate psychological weight or biological alarm systems to them. Therefore, we keep on working for others efficiently because we are afraid and ashamed to disappoint them or let them down. At the same time, we get accustomed to letting ourselves down. Behavioral economist Uri Gneezy's experimental work found the same asymmetry in the lab: promises to others bind, promises to the self barely register. Breaking your own word was never supposed to hurt.

The distracted self

People generally know what they value, but end up believing what their social environment rewards them with. We form plans all the time, and later abandon them when local incentives change, be it appreciation from a boss, promotion, financial incentive, etc. The problem is not that we never choose. It is that the choosing self has no enforcement mechanism over the socially-pliant self.

‘Locus of control’ refers to individuals’ generalised beliefs about whether outcomes in their lives are determined primarily by their own actions (internal locus) or by external forces such as luck, fate, or powerful others (external locus). People with an internal locus of control tend to see rewards and results as consequences of their effort, skill, and decisions. They believe they can determine what will happen in their life and that when they get what they want, it’s usually because they worked hard for it.

In the process, they forget to live up to their own potential because humans are wired to care deeply about status, reputation, and the fear of letting other people down. That is why external pressure works so well. It activates controlled motivation - the kind of motivation that comes from shame, fear, deadlines, and approval. It can produce very strong performance. But it is not the same as autonomous motivation, which is the fuel self-authored work actually needs.

We are trained to wait for someone else to define our target. The boss, teachers, and parents decide for us what matters. This is the ‘socialised mind’ - the self that is good at fitting into existing expectations. The problem comes when the same person is expected to become the one who creates targets, sets the standard, and holds themselves accountable. This is the jump to the ‘self-authoring mind’, and the shift is much harder than most people realise.

A lot of high performers are fused with being the good student or the dependable employee. This identity gets rewarded, so it feels safe and familiar. But builder life requires experimentation, uncertainty, ugly first drafts, and visible imperfection. It can feel like an identity threat, not just a work problem. The old system rewarded survival, stability, and not rocking the boat. It made sense to obey, comply, and stay safe. But self-authorship asks for a different mode now - uncertainty, ownership, and the courage to act without external permission. That is why other people’s deadlines move them, while their own promises can sit there quietly and die. Over time, the self-betrayal weakens self-trust.

Your identity feedback loop is broken

You may have a strong identity as “someone who never lets others down” but a weak identity as “someone whose own commitments are non‑negotiable.” When the goal originates in your own desire rather than external demand, your motivational system may not tag it as important enough to override avoidance, leading to classic procrastination: infinite idea generation, minimal execution.

A 2023 study published in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed that experiencing a sense of successful self-discipline reduces procrastination by boosting autonomous motivation. Conversely, a low sense of self‑discipline can reduce autonomous motivation and thereby increase procrastination. The implication is that repeated self‑betrayal - failing to follow through on your own projects - can erode your sense of being self‑disciplined, which then further undermines motivation. This creates a feedback loop: you avoid your project, feel less self‑disciplined, become less autonomously motivated, and procrastinate more.

In externally controlled domains, this loop is interrupted by external deadlines and consequences, but in self‑initiated domains, it can spiral quietly for years. When you start breaking promises to yourself, there is no public shame. Nobody sees it. Nobody calls it out. That is part of the danger. It happens quietly. First you miss one commitment. Then another. And slowly, your brain starts learning that your own word is flexible, your own goals are optional, and your own pain is easy to ignore.

That is how self-trust gets damaged - not by one huge failure, but by a hundred small betrayals. Research on promise-keeping suggests that even when a promise is not public, breaking it still creates internal disutility. In other words, the cost is not only social. It is psychological. And over time, repeated follow-through does the opposite: it builds self-efficacy, self-respect, and the belief that your own word matters.

That is the part people don’t talk about enough. It is not just about productivity. It is about your relationship with yourself. Once your own word starts feeling light, you stop treating your own plans like promises. You start treating them like suggestions. And once that happens, it becomes very easy to ignore them.

The cost of self-betrayal

The ultimate cost is the failure to launch - the ambition, business that stays in notes forever. The years spent building someone else’s dream take away your agency. The endless cycle of preparing, planning, and optimising without shipping leads to slow erosion of self-trust. And maybe worst of all, the frustration of knowing you could do more, but not being able to access it on your own terms.

What actually works

Any serious effort to fix internal procrastination has to start with identity. You do not build initiative by waiting to feel ready. You build it by becoming the kind of person who keeps promises to themselves. I once watched a Marine talk about making his bed every morning. The point was not the bed. The point was that the smallest promise you keep to yourself changes how you see yourself. It teaches your mind that your word matters. That is how self-authorship begins.

• Make the promise small. Do not start with “I will lose 10 kilos” or “I will write a book.” Start with something you can actually keep today.
  “I will take a 30-minute walk.”
  “I will write one paragraph.”
  The size matters because the goal is not to impress yourself, but to rebuild trust in your own words.

• Attach it to an if-then cue. “After dinner, I will walk.” “After tea, I will write.” A vague promise dies because it stays abstract. An if-then plan makes the promise concrete, tied to a moment, and much harder to negotiate away.

• Repeat it daily. One kept promise is good. A chain of kept promises changes identity. That is how your mind learns that you are someone who follows through, not just someone who wants to. Over time, that starts showing up in other parts of life too.

• Make the goal public. Make the goal public if it helps you act, but don’t make it public for validation. The point is not to look committed. The point is to create enough witnesses and consequences that your word starts to matter.

The transition from a high-performing employee to an autonomous founder does not materialise through more discipline, better time management, or more willpower. It begins the moment you experience mindful autonomy of thought and action, where your goal aligns with your deeply held values. That’s your Swadharma!

Negativity is often misunderstood as a personality flaw, but it can be better explained as an “atmosphere”. Think of it as an environment that acts on our nervous system to affect our mood, body clock and also productivity. It can be said that eliminating negativity is probably the highest ROI activity for an “energy maxxer”, while the “lifemaxxers” end up in a cycle of punishing themselves for feeling negative.

On most days, while walking on Carter Road, I see children running, laughing, dancing - their energy effortless and contagious. But elders walking alongside look different. Both live in the same universe, but grown-ups tend to absorb negativity like a sponge. We constantly absorb it from repeated conversations, familiar people, old patterns, and environments that are too demanding on our nervous system. This means that negativity is not a mood you’re born with, as is generally believed, but is an accumulated exposure to events, people, and environments.

When you feel guilty of your own competence

Being surrounded by negativity, the most competent person in the room becomes the spine that soaks in most of the toxicity and becomes a toxic handler. The term was coined by behaviour researchers Peter Frost and Sandra Robinson, who defined toxic handlers as individuals who voluntarily or inadvertently shoulder the sadness, frustration, bitterness, and anger of others so that the broader system can continue to function. They act as “shock absorbers,” mediating conflicts, translating harsh top-down directives, and providing a safe space for others to vent their dysregulated emotions. Strong people are highly susceptible to becoming toxic handlers because when they suppress and absorb without support, negativity creeps in and becomes a “vicious cycle”.

Frost and Robinson reasoned that the most empathetic and capable person becomes the unpaid drain for everyone else’s stress. Strong, competent people become the “garbage bags” for other people’s emotions because they’re seen as “the strong ones.” They’re seen as strong because they have been taught to “suppress” their own discomfort to help others relieve their stress. Social systems generate pain, and they naturally route that pain to people with the highest capacity to bear it. That is where the most competent people fit into the role, never to complain. Instead, they end up blaming themselves for others’ failures.

Science calls this “meta-emotion.” It is the secondary emotion - the act of punishing oneself for feeling negative - and causes more prolonged psychological suffering than the primary negative emotions themselves. When someone vents to you, the primary emotions that surface are exhaustion, anger, and resentment, but we also start to feel guilt, shame, or frustration. This identity conflict arises because we see ourselves as the strong one, while these negative feelings clash with our self-image. That cognitive dissonance triggers meta-emotions of shame, guilt and self-loathing. To escape this second layer of pain, we turn to self-destructive coping (doomscrolling, late-night numbing). These behaviours temporarily blunt the brain but further degrade the physiological baseline.

How negativity seeps in

Individuals living in enmeshed environments, such as close-knit families and startups, often believe their inability to maintain a positive mindset is a personal failure. They attempt to “fix” their internal state through sheer willpower or forced optimism. That’s how I approached it as a founder with a middle-class upbringing. I was expected never to feel; everyone trauma-dumped onto me. That constant dumping, suppression and no support system made me the “toxic handler.” Building CreditVidya, I did everything possible to optimise my performance and justify my role as the team’s leader. But it came at a cost. I had a stroke, and the emotional flux that followed made me change my perspective towards almost everything, and I started thinking more about optimising rather than maximising. Negativity is one thing I have managed not to get affected by ever since because it was not my personality trait. Nor is it yours. But we all the time do soak in negativity because we cannot out-think a neurobiological reflex.

1. Emotional contagion

Science has a word for mirroring the emotional state of people in the room: Emotional contagion. As social animals, we don’t just exchange words. We unconsciously absorb their emotional state. So negativity can spread even in “normal” interactions. That is why sitting next to a stressed coworker who looks panicked can cause your own shoulders to tense up and anxiety to rise. The process is driven by “primitive efference”, the tendency to automatically mimic facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with another person, consequently converging emotionally. The transfer of emotion occurs so fast that it bypasses conscious cognitive filters. Therefore, trying to “think positive” while being consistently dumped on is physiologically impossible.

2. Mismatched companionship

Negativity creeps in through small, repeated exposures. Every small negative event is an affirmation of a previous experience. Over time, it accumulates as confirmation of negativity bias. People bond over common habits and beliefs. Most friendships are thus held together by mutual misery. In friendships built on complaint, you realise every catch-up is an exchange of what’s wrong. Maintaining some relationships mostly means trading fears and imagined disasters. These friends or family members who perpetually complain and mentally rehearse the worst-case scenario make you believe their reality.

3. Loneliness + evolutionary wiring

Our evolutionary biology is wired to scan for threats all the time. This suspicion of the immediate environment can turn into negativity if our nervous system gets stuck in fight-or-flight mode, robbing us of the joy of being alive.

4. Garbage input

The internet is excellent at handing you more of what already hurts. Heavy negative news and social media use is tied to increased depression and loneliness. If you’re doomscrolling at midnight, you wake up tired. That’s ‘garbage in’ becoming ‘garbage out.’ Social media feeds reward rage bait and worst-case content, creating a powerful loop that reinforces negativity. This happens because algorithms maximise user engagement, and human psychology is deeply wired to react to negativity.

How does it manifest?

Chronic negativity costs health, lived years, and, most importantly, our goals. For individuals trapped with people they cannot leave - founders tied to their teams, individuals tied to their hometowns or families - the manifestations follow distinct behavioural and emotional signatures.

We get stuck in a cycle of negativity, in which our energy leaks away, and we are not able to move toward what we care about. We cannot see the loop because we mistake emotional contagion for personal failure. It looks like a lack of willpower to stay positive. But there is actually a pattern to it - thinking negatively, then getting angry or disappointed at yourself, and spiralling into self-hate and self-pity.

The room understands that if the toxic handler self-actualises and leaves the role, the entire emotional ecosystem will collapse, so it protects the system by keeping the strong one tethered to the floor.

How do high performers break free from the cycle?

1. Relational job crafting:

You cannot fix other people’s moods. Trying to do that is what is draining you. Move from “I must lift them” to “I won’t waste energy trying to lift their moods. It’s working for them to stay this way.”

Alternatively, you can vent for ten minutes. After that, we shift. Protect your energy without pretending you can’t be there at all.

2. Change what the friendship is made of:

Don’t necessarily cut people out of your life. Change the contact, not the people. Do things with them instead of complaining with them - shared activities, movement, or making something together. The relationship’s emotional structure flips if different activities are taken up with the same set of people. Australian researchers Strazdins and Broom claim that managing distress harms the ‘helper’, while sharing enjoyable time with the same people protects the ‘helper.’

By doing so, you’re not losing the friend but changing what you do together.

3. Share the burden instead of carrying it alone:

American basketball player Kevin Love didn’t quit basketball after injury. He got a therapist, told teammates the truth, fixed sleep, cut late-night scrolling, and wrote a book, “Everyone Is Going Through Something.” He stayed a champion but stopped carrying the load alone.

Technology entrepreneur and author Ben Horowitz had been absorbing all of a failing company’s terror by himself, performing relentless positivity. His biggest improvement as CEO happened when he “stopped being too positive.” He told employees the unvarnished truth and handed the hardest problems to those who could actually solve them. He stopped being the drain and became the router of responsibility.

4. Get one person in your corner:

You don’t need a crowd. One ally can change the equation. Feeling like “everyone is against me” breaks when even one person is reliably in your corner. Having one dependable person cuts depression risk drastically because the fix is addition, not only subtraction. Negativity isn’t solved by just cutting people out. It’s solved by adding at least one relationship that is net-positive and sane.

5. Cut the garbage inputs:

Do what you already know you should do. Remove forums/subs that keep you angry, cap the feed, and limit negative-news/social media exposure. Limiting social media to 30 minutes/day reduces depression and loneliness over a few weeks. Guard sleep like it’s your job; it’s the base of every following day.

Selena Gomez has been open about her struggles with both anxiety and depression. She didn’t quit her career. She deleted social media apps from her phone and handed over the passwords to her assistant. She kept the reach but “killed the drip.”

6. Stop fighting yourself:

Let yourself feel the bad thing “without the second beating”. The spiral from a normal negative thought into self-hate happens because of the second hit. Remove the second hit and the spiral loses its fuel supply. Instead of being your own villain, become your own supporter. Be the ally you keep looking for in other people, for yourself first.

One thing this list deliberately does not do is - it does not ask you to “think positive.”

We don’t paper over bad feelings with forced good ones because suppression backfires.

The move is not to feel good on command. It is to stop attacking yourself for feeling bad, adjust the environment and roles that keep producing bad inputs and let your feelings pass through instead of getting stuck in meta-emotions.

This week, notice the moment someone approaches you with a problem, and you feel the reflex to say, “I’ll handle it”. Watch your breath get shallow - that is the moment the competence trap is springing.

If you stopped managing everyone else’s emotions today and put that energy into protecting your own little universe—your nervous system, your sleep, your relationships, your atmosphere—you wouldn’t suddenly become selfish. You’d simply stop being the drain. And for the first time in a long time, you’d get to be a person again.

Stop managing everyone else’s emotions. Go protect your own little universe.

Aspiration is universal, but the middle class - having crossed half the bridge - feels it most acutely. Many never reach the other side, or in other words, only the lucky ones get ahead. Most accept it as fate. But I used to wonder why even so many middle-class high achievers hold themselves back. That's because middle-class aspirations sit at a crossroads between safety and transcendence. They've already overcome a lot, but something still stops them from taking that final leap. After years of talking with friends with similar backgrounds, I've noticed a common thread: they think they're just being practical in pursuing "realistic" targets. Their goals are a response to real vulnerability, and they turn aspiration into a moral duty. The desire to rise somewhere becomes entangled with the desire to belong. And in doing so, their self-image ends up limiting their own growth.

But is that kind of practicality really justified?

A few weeks ago, I met a young founder at Subko in Bandra. I hadn't met someone this impressive in a long time. She had pushed past a traditional Marwari family background to start a women's innerwear business. While her family wanted her to get married, she was busy learning new skills, managing operations, building products, and working with customers. She was gritty, reliable, and carried more responsibility than she showed.

As we talked, I encouraged her to consider a different approach that might lead to much bigger results. She paused and explained why growing that much wouldn't work. She listed all the things that could go wrong if she tried to aim higher. She mentioned market limits, customers' price sensitivity, supply chain issues, and family expectations. She'd had a tough few days, and her worries were real. But as I listened, I realised something deeper was going on.

She had probably gone against every expectation just to get this far. She'd always been bold, but somewhere along the way, she swapped that boldness for being realistic.

What I told her is exactly what I want to share with anyone who feels stuck, despite sensing a deep well of potential within themselves.

You are built to survive, not thrive.

Our brains have evolved for survival, not for chasing big, exciting goals. That's why we focus so much on things that feel painful, scary, or risky, and often miss the wins. That day at Subko, when my friend explained why 10x growth wasn't realistic, she wasn't really arguing against the idea. She was wrestling with her own memories. Her mind remembered the bad investor meeting in detail, but forgot many of the tough things she had already handled well.

Here are some ways our own minds hold us back.

• Wins are harder to remember: There's an old story about restaurant waiters: they can remember every unpaid order perfectly, but forget an order the moment the bill is paid. A win, like a finished project or closed deal, works the same way. Once it's settled, your mind lets it go. Unfinished business and failures are easier to recall.

By this logic, my friend at Subko couldn't see her real abilities. The many things she had done well had already faded from her memory, while the recent challenges in growing her brand stuck with her.

• Losses feel bigger: Negativity bias means our brains pay more attention to criticism, threats, and failures than to praise and success. Behavioral economists call this loss aversion - losing hurts about twice as much as winning feels good.

For her, one tough rejection from an institutional investor kept replaying in her mind. In a 45-minute conversation, she mentioned that single "no" five times. That was enough to overshadow the months of steady effort that brought her to Subko.

• More success can actually lead to more self-doubt: You might think that as you achieve more, your confidence will grow. But for many first-generation founders, especially those from humble or traditional backgrounds, the opposite happens. As your resume gets better, the feeling of "I don't deserve this" can get even stronger. Success often expands visibility faster than confidence, so the outer proof grows before the inner belief catches up.

She had built a brand from scratch, but she kept wondering if she could really make it big without a top MBA or a technical degree. Her success raised the stakes, but not her self-confidence.

• The wins that do stick are often misattributed: Even when she admitted something went well, she didn't take credit for it. Instead of saying "I'm good at this" when things work out and "I was unlucky" when they don't, high achievers do the opposite. They credit success to luck, timing, or others, and blame failure on themselves. Psychologist Albert Bandura showed why this matters. A win only updates your self-belief when you credit it to something you did. A win handed over to luck or mentors changes nothing.

When I reminded her of everything she had accomplished, she smiled and quickly gave credit to her "very supportive family" and helpful mentors. She took full responsibility for the tough times and saw her wins as gifts.

• Trying to remember your wins on demand can backfire: Like many ambitious people, she had heard the usual self-help advice: "Just be more confident, think about your past successes." But recalling past wins doesn't always help. In 2025, researchers Abdulla and Woods at Robert Gordon University ran three experiments on exactly this advice. Remembering past success only boosts your confidence if the examples come to mind easily and you credit them to your own abilities. If it's hard to remember, or you credit success to outside factors, trying to recall wins actually lowers your confidence.

If you sit down before a big decision and can't easily list times you've succeeded, that struggle can feel like proof that success is rare for you. That's exactly what happened to her when we tried to talk about "how far she'd come."

My friend was wired for survival, and from her perspective, making a big leap didn't seem justified. So I shared what I've done over the years to build my own audacity and confidence.

My own BRAG document

If you keep overthinking your failures, the usual advice to "be confident" won't work. Our brains evolved to scan for danger, but in today's world, we rarely face real threats. So our minds invent new ones. To counter this, we need to feed our minds facts they can remember. I call this the winning journal. Most people hear "journal" and think of venting or vague reflections, but a winning journal is the opposite.

I first got the idea of a winning journal after watching David Goggins talk about his own systems. He talks about the Cookie Jar, a mental archive of hard things he's done that he uses when he forgets what he's already survived, and about his accountability mirror, where he writes and reads the truth about his efforts every day.

Software engineers faced a similar problem from a different angle. Six months into a project, they used to realise they couldn't remember exactly what they had shipped. By the time performance reviews came around, most of their work was blurred together. The quiet wins from earlier in the year had vanished, so they created a brag document. It was popularised by engineer and writer Julia Evans in her essay on getting your work recognised. A brag document is a living record where you log your work achievements, projects shipped, impact created, and positive feedback.

The winning journal is my version of that for founders. Here's how it works.

1. Every day, even on bad days.

You don't wait for big milestones or major wins. We tend to forget small wins but remember the one-off remarks that hurt. So we change that.

At the end of each day, you write down a few things that worked. The bar is low: it could be one good conversation, one tiny problem you solved, one hard thing you did anyway. The job is not to impress yourself. The job is to stop wins from disappearing.

2. Two lines for each win: what happened and why.

If you don't connect the win to your own effort, it won't help you when it matters.

So, each win gets two lines:

• Line one: what happened.

• Line two: why it happened, described as a behaviour, choice, or skill you controlled.

"Customer renewed" becomes "Customer renewed because I kept checking in without being pushy." "Pitch worked" becomes "Pitch worked because I listened first, then reframed their problem in their own words."

By doing this, wins stop feeling like accidents because you connect them to actions you can repeat.

3. You use it right before you take a swing.

This is the most important part. Before a big client meeting, a job interview, or an investor pitch, just open the journal and read.

This is to remind your nervous system that you've already faced tougher situations, and you got through them by doing specific things. You're training your mind by giving it real proof that you're capable of winning.

Be audacious, be honest

When I think back to that afternoon at Subko, I don't see a timid founder. I see someone whose mind was doing exactly what it was built to do: remembering the worst investor meeting in detail, forgetting many of the hard things she'd already handled, doubting herself more as the stakes rose, explaining away her wins, and feeling smaller every time she tried to "be more confident" by thinking about the past.

The goal here isn't to force yourself into bravery. It's to change what your sense of realism is based on. The winning journal is just a tool, but it does something important: it keeps your best evidence from disappearing. It records your wins, connects them to actions you control, and puts them within reach when your mind would otherwise focus on losses.

In this way, audacity stops being just a personality trait or a motivational mood. It becomes the natural next step when you finally see your life as a whole.

The next time you're in a café and someone asks you to consider a bigger opportunity, I don't want you to replay only the worst meeting you ever had. I want you to look through your own proof, see the patterns in how you've handled risk before, and realise that the bolder path isn't just a fantasy.

The journal isn't about exaggerating. It's about being honest. Honest about the hard things you've actually done. Honest about the patterns in how you did them. Honest about the fact that your doubt often comes from just a small part of your life, not the whole picture. It's a real reminder of what you're capable of. It's your winning journal that fixes self-doubt with evidence.

We have ceremonies like bell-ringing for successful IPOs or celebrations for even small wins. But there's no farewell for a failed startup or other smaller losses. You either celebrate loudly or fade away quietly. Winning has its rituals. Failing is DIY. I'm writing about failure not to preach from the pedestal of two successful brands (CreditVidya & Prefr), but because I still feel like a failure in some ways. This may sound paradoxical, but life is full of contradictions - the one I am describing here from my personal experience is when success feels like failure. Yours may be different, but all failures need the dignity they deserve.

Having built and sold India's top alternative data credit scoring company, I one day found myself sitting in a Bangalore coffee shop, staring at my cold coffee and feeling like a failure because I hadn't built a unicorn. Psychology calls it the 'hedonic treadmill' or the achievement loop, because as we conquer goals, our confidence grows, and the threshold for what constitutes a win expands. In simple words, we are never satisfied. But when we start seeing success as failure, there is something else at work.

Your version of failure might look even different. Maybe it's a product launch that didn't work out as well, a marketing campaign that flopped, a funding round that fell short, or a job interview that didn't go as planned. Sometimes, projects just fade away quietly, with no recognition or sympathy.

Psychologists have studied fear of failure for a long time. People don't fear the outcome itself, but the shame and exposure that come with it. It's the feeling of "I am a failure" instead of "this failed." This is called a shame-centred pattern. In experiments, people who fear failure often choose easier tasks just to avoid that sting of shame. They aren't really avoiding failure - they're avoiding being seen failing.

That's the uncomfortable truth I want to share.

We have many growth systems. In startups, there's a whole playbook: OKRs, sprints, growth loops, and 360 feedback.

But no one teaches us how to handle failure.

Part I: The illusions of failure

To handle failure better, we first have to stop lying to ourselves.

Illusion #1: You fear shame, not failure

Fear of failure sounds like we are afraid of risk. The uncomfortable truth is that you are not afraid of failing. You are afraid of failing in front of others.

Psychologist David Conroy found that the core of this fear is not losing money or making a mistake. It is the anticipation of shame. The feeling of 'I am a failure' instead of 'this failed.'

You are embarrassed by your batchmates, investors, or parents watching you fail. Stopping means giving up. So you pretend everything is fine and try to push through. Sometimes, the best move is to give up or change direction, but the social pressure does not let us do so.

Illusion #2: You must extract lessons immediately

The startup world loves post-mortems.

We rush to write '10 things I learned' by Monday or quickly move on to the next chapter of our lives: a new job, a new city, a new startup. We call it 'moving faster.'

The uncomfortable truth is that trying to learn too fast makes it hurt more.

Psychologist Dean Shepherd shows that when you force yourself to analyse a big failure right away, your feelings get more intense, not less. You keep replaying every meeting, every email, every 'what if.' You get stuck in loops instead of healing.

It's even harder when other people are involved.

If your company ended because you and your co-founder split up, calling it 'a useful lesson in founder dynamics' can feel like lying to yourself. It feels more like a breakup than a business case study.

If your shutdown used up your parents' savings, telling everyone 'it was just expensive learning' can be a way to avoid admitting that you feel heartbroken and guilty.

But wait a few days, and you won't need a post-mortem of your failure. Just an honest admission - 'This really hurts,' before you try to turn it into wisdom.

Illusion #3: Extreme ownership is not total blame

To survive as a founder, you are told to take extreme ownership. We pour our whole self - breathing, living, eating - into our company.

The uncomfortable truth is that full ownership can turn into identity fusion.

Psychologists use that phrase to describe what happens when the line between you and the company disappears. Your personal self and the startup become one. This is part of what made you powerful as a builder, but it's also what makes failure feel like the end.

If your self-worth is completely tied to the venture, a shutdown feels like 'I am over.' So when you say, 'The failure was and is my fault,' it sounds honest and brave, but inside it turns into, 'I am the failure.'

And if you see yourself as the failure, how can you risk trying again?

Part II: How to overcome the fear of failing

More agency means less fear of failing. Agency means learning what you need to know and solving problems you haven't faced before. You build agency by facing failure again and again. Failing better isn't just a mindset; it's a system.

Exploit the 90-second rule of shame

Neuroscience shows that the physical rush of emotion in your body lasts about 90 seconds. After that, it continues only if your mind keeps replaying what happened.

When you have a tough conversation about a failed project, a closed company, or your own version of failure, don't make excuses or try to justify it. Instead, pause for 90 seconds. Feel your emotions fully. Let them pass, then speak honestly.

Each time you do this, you separate your self-worth from the story you tell. You let the shame move on instead of making it stronger.

Hold a funeral for your failed project

Researchers call this 'witnessed mourning,' which means turning grief into recognised loss through ritual. Hold a 'Startup Funeral' to formally say goodbye to your venture with your team. Join a 'Fuckup Night,' where founders share their business failures in public. Speaking about failure in a safe space takes away its power. You acknowledge the loss, and your mind can finally accept that it's over.

K. Vaitheeswaran, who started India's first e-commerce company before Flipkart, later wrote about fourteen years of Indiaplaza in his memoir, Failing to Succeed. When his wife read the first draft, she broke. She had lived through it all, but this was the first time she could process the loss. The book became their failure's funeral.

Master the two-mode switch: Loss mode vs rest mode

Don't push yourself to find a lesson in failure right away. Doing that often leads to overthinking.

A better approach is to use a simple two-mode switch, which psychologists call oscillation. You intentionally move between two states:

• Loss mode is when you let yourself feel the emotions. You might write in a journal, talk, cry, or just sit with the fact that something important has ended.

• Rest mode is when you choose not to focus on the failure. You might look for work, go for a run, cook, meet friends, or play with your kids.

Your mind needs both modes.

If you focus on failure all day, you burn out. If you avoid it completely, you stay numb. Switching between the two helps you recharge and learn from the experience later.

Decouple your identity from the failure

You also need to separate who you are from what happened to your company.

This means building other parts of your identity outside of work, like your health, relationships, hobbies, and your role in the community. It also means changing the way you talk to yourself.

Whenever you think 'I am a failure,' change it to 'My strategy failed' or 'This company failed.'

Let go of the idea of being a founder who knows everything. Instead, become a founder who learns quickly.

When you connect your identity to learning, not to the outcome, failure stops threatening your ego. It becomes information you can use to build your agency.

Your next big thing is learning how to lose

The playbook we inherited is clear about success but silent about what to do when things go wrong.

We have systems for growth. When things are going well, there is a framework for everything. When things go wrong, the only rule is "move fast," so we rush past the losses that are shaping us.

Athletes cry on live television after a bad innings or a missed penalty, but they still return for the next game. Founders are expected to smile, 'reframe the learning,' and move on to the next big thing. No tears. No funeral. Just speed.

The greats are not great because they moved faster. They handled loss more healthily. They let it hurt, but they did not let it decide who they could become next.

For me, this has meant less about launching something new again and more about becoming a yoga teacher, writing, and slowly admitting to myself that a part of me is still grieving the company I did not take to IPO.

So here is the only conclusion I trust now:

Your next big thing is not another company.

Your next big thing is learning how to lose without disappearing.

Then, when you are ready, step back in. Not because the world is waiting, but because you are.

The deliberate practice of stepping away for reflection can save you from the loneliness of not being able to hear your own judgement, and from mistaking acquired goals for the chosen ones.

From Yeats to Eliot, poets have romanticised solitude as the wellspring for reflection, creativity, and self-discovery. For a founder, though, it would either take a lot of chutzpah or nonchalance to claim solitude as a wonder skill for building. But here’s my justification for why every founder needs to learn to step aside and reflect in solitude before making everyday decisions that make or break companies. Indeed, building has never been easier than today, but so has building the wrong thing amid the clutter and chaos of information overload, and therefore the need for solitude.

Each week, when I meet founders in Mumbai and Bangalore, I find them overwhelmed by advice on how to raise a company, sometimes even from people who haven’t run companies. There are courses, mentors, networks, and now AI as well, all feeding founders with more information than ever, but this crucial skill is still not part of any conversation. 

Solitude.

Solitude is a trainable skill that helps you filter the noise in a full room, unlike loneliness, which makes you feel isolated in the same room. It’s true that the higher we go, the lonelier it gets, but the skill I’m arguing for here is not learning to endure loneliness. It’s learning to cultivate solitude as a tool for thinking clearly about what you are building and why.

How I discovered solitude

I’m grateful I built my first company before ‘being in the loop with the world’ became fashionable. Today, a typical person touches his/her phone thousands of times a day. In this environment, you don’t just lose your ability to think critically; you lose the ability to be alone with your own judgement long enough to decide what you truly want to build.

When I was in my early twenties and starting as an entrepreneur, I did what everyone thought a ‘serious’ founder should do: I was always online. I joined every meeting, took every call, and answered every message. I measured my worth by how much visible effort I could show each day. Two things happened. First, I didn’t realise my way of building a company couldn’t scale. I tried to solve everything by just being present and working hard, instead of using structure or judgement. Second, I started to crumble under the pressure of making a choice that would ultimately decide the fate of our 740-member team: should we build a new lending arm or switch to an international SaaS product?

Advice poured in from every direction. Investors, friends, mentors, Twitter, LinkedIn, conferences and everyone had an opinion about what I should do. I couldn’t tell if the advice that helped me so far was the same advice I could trust for my future.

Even though I was surrounded by people, I felt a very specific kind of loneliness; the kind you feel when you know the decision has to be yours, despite being surrounded by advisors. With barely enough money in the bank to pay my colleagues, I cut myself from the world and unexpectedly entered into a week-long solitude.

We keep mistaking more input for a better answer

When I talk about solitude, I don’t mean cutting yourself off from people. I mean choosing to step away from others and from the constant stream of information so you can sit with your own thoughts and data. Loneliness is different. It’s the perceived gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. Constant company can coexist with deep loneliness. Voluntary solitude can coexist with a strong sense of belonging. The problem is that founders often mix up the two. We stay lonely in a crowd and never take the solitude that could actually help us.

We’re taught that having more information gives us an advantage. Read more, follow more, ask more people. In a fast-moving world, staying surrounded by input feels like staying ahead. But why does more input leave founders feeling lost? Because real excellence comes from years of focused work, and you can’t find that focus in a crowd. The crowd gives you a hundred directions and calls them options.

AI has made this problem even worse. The small moments when you used to think - like in the shower, on a walk, or during a drive - are now filled with feeds or chatbots that think for you. We’ve taken away the last bits of quiet corners in our day where you hear the real voice that builds your company.

When you start wanting what the room wants

In my week-long solitude, I learned something I couldn’t have found in any online thread or presentation. I hadn’t returned to India to build an international SaaS. What mattered to me was something harder and less glamorous: making affordable, accessible credit possible and pushing for real financial inclusion. That was the work I was willing to sacrifice my youth for, or die trying, even if the more celebrated story belonged to the SaaS founder.

Psychologists have shown that we can automatically adopt other people’s goals just by observing their behaviour. Your social environment can invisibly reprogram your ambitions. When you are unsure, you look at what the people around you are doing, and you copy it. Robert Cialdini, the author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’, called this ‘social proof’, claiming that under uncertainty, the actions of others become your evidence for the right move. It’s an ancient and efficient instinct, and it’s also how you end up wanting things you never sat down and chose.

If your team wants to scale, you start wanting to scale too. If investors want a bigger funding round, that becomes your dream. When another founder nearby raises a big Series C, you suddenly feel left behind. Before long, your environment shapes your thinking, and the ideas you started with get lost in the noise.

For founders, it's an operational risk. A company built on someone else’s goals can still hire, raise money, launch products, and grow, but each successful quarter can pull you further from the work you truly care about.

Solitude is a skill, and almost no one trains for it

When psychologists gave people short periods of intentional solitude - about fifteen minutes with little outside stimulation - they found something interesting. Solitude dampened intense emotions like excitement and anxiety, making it easier to feel calm. For founders, whose days are often filled with urgency, this is important: you can’t make big, long-term decisions if you’re always feeling stressed.

Studies further showed that when solitude was combined with simple positive-thinking exercises, people could use that quiet time to improve their mood. Negative feelings went down, but positive feelings stayed strong. Solitude can calm your nerves without taking away your drive. Stepping away from the social noise lets your mind settle, while your ambition remains.

That’s why the ‘unwitnessed stretch’ in ambitious work isn’t just a romantic idea about lone geniuses. It’s a necessary time when your emotions settle, your independence grows, and your real goals become clear. In my own mornings, that quiet time was when I stopped reacting to what investors wanted and started asking myself a tougher question: what do I truly want to spend my life building, and what am I willing to give up to do it?

But solitude isn’t always helpful. If you don’t approach it with some structure, it can turn into overthinking, self-criticism, or daydreaming. If you go into solitude already exhausted or see it as a punishment for not being productive, the quiet can make your worst thoughts louder instead of helping you find the truth. Founders who are already burned out or feeling unsafe may find that long, unstructured time alone makes things worse.

So the real skill isn’t just being alone. It’s learning to use short, intentional periods of quiet to calm yourself, build independence, and separate goals you picked up from others from the ones you truly chose. At the same time, you need to stay connected to real data and a few trusted people who can help if your thinking goes off track.

How founders can approach solitude, practically

As I started taking solitude seriously, I did something that felt almost criminal: I blocked my calendar until 11 a.m. every day. No meetings, no calls, no ‘quick syncs.’ For a founder who had built his identity on being always available, it felt like I was breaking some sacred rule of responsiveness.

My team noticed, and not always kindly. People were annoyed, puzzled, sometimes quietly angry. It was hard to explain that me ‘not doing anything’ for the first part of the day was, in fact, one of the biggest services I could offer the company. I wasn’t meditating on a mountain. I was sitting with our numbers, our commitments, and a handful of hard questions: What are we actually building? What have we quietly caught from the market that doesn’t belong to us? Which decisions today will still matter in five years?

At first, those hours felt useless and indulgent. I was used to measuring my worth in replies, meetings, and visible effort. But over time, something shifted. The rest of the day stopped being a blur of reactive decisions. I said ‘no’ more often, killed projects faster, and stopped chasing every shiny opportunity that fit someone else’s story but not ours. The calendar looked less busy. The company moved more cleanly in one direction.

If solitude behaves like a muscle, the way you train it matters. The studies that found benefits didn’t ask people to disappear for weeks; they asked them to spend brief, voluntary stretches alone with minimal stimulation, often just fifteen minutes at a time. Inside those windows, autonomy strengthened, and goals felt more self‑driven.

For a founder, a workable starting point is simple:

• Block a small unwitnessed stretch. Thirty to sixty minutes, once a day or a few times a week. No meetings, no calls, no new input.

• Bring only three things into the room: your numbers, your commitments, and one hard question. For example: Which of my current goals would survive if nobody I knew was watching? Which decision today will still matter in ten years? What am I building that I would still choose if it never made a good slide?

• End with one concrete choice. Just one small decision that came from your own judgement, and that you’re willing to act on before you ask anyone else.

Run this often enough, and solitude stops feeling like an absence of work. It becomes the place where you do the kind of work that differentiates caught goals from chosen ones, and the quiet commitment to the company you are actually willing to pay for in years.

My deliberate pause

For the first half of my time as a founder, I couldn’t be alone. I packed every hour with people, calls, and activity. I told myself this was leadership, but it was really fear.

What was I so afraid of in an empty room? When I finally set aside time to think, three worries always came up, and each one seemed like a virtue.

The first worry was feeling unproductive. Time was passing, and I wasn’t making anything. For someone who likes to get things done, an idle hour feels like a wasted hour.

The second worry was that something might go wrong. If I stepped away, I feared a problem would pop up that I couldn’t fix. The company needed me to be reachable. Being available was part of the job.

The third worry was the hardest. Being always available was how I showed my team I was committed. Going into a closed room felt like leaving them behind, as if I didn’t trust them to handle things without me.

All three worries had something in common: being productive, reliable, and trusted. The very instincts that made me a good operator were also the ones stopping me from listening to myself. My own strengths had built a kind of prison I couldn’t see.

Solitude did not ask me to abandon those qualities. It asked me to aim differently. To be productive enough to protect unwitnessed time, reliable enough to build systems that don’t collapse when I step away, and trusting enough to let my team carry their share of the weight. The empty room became less of a betrayal and more of a responsibility. It was in those empty rooms that I made the decisions that eventually paved the way for our success.

If you are a founder who cannot remember the last time you were alone with your own judgement for more than a few minutes, you are not failing at discipline. You are succeeding at a contract you never consciously signed. The world has taught you to treat loneliness as the price of ambition and solitude as a threat to it. I am arguing the opposite. The day you learn to sit in an empty room, not to escape your work but to face it, is the day you finally stop building the wrong life with all the right qualities.

If you've sleepwalked through life chasing goals that were never yours, now is the time for course correction

Every year starting July 15th, my birthday, I pause for three days. It’s a meditation ritual I call the ‘deliberate pause’. In Yogic language, it can be called pratyahara, which means withdrawing from the senses. During this period of introspection, I stay in my apartment without food, screens, or outside noise so that I may really hear myself. It might seem extreme, but it’s honestly the most grounding thing I do in the whole year. It’s a deliberate pause because this is also when I carry out a mid-year self-appraisal, to reflect on course correction, just in case I was following someone else’s dreams. 

I started this practice after reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Franklin spent almost an hour every night reviewing his actions. Ever since reading his story, I’ve been a fan of self-reflection. Along with my weekly self-reviews, this three-day voluntary discomfort has given me direction to achieve goals that once seemed out of reach for a startup founder. I became a yoga teacher, learned to do a handstand, got fit (under 10% body fat), and started writing my first book.

We’re almost halfway through the year. Before you read on, take a moment to write down the resolutions you made in January. List every goal, from fitness to career, even the ones you kept private. If you’re like most people, you’ll see how much you’ve drifted from your list. You set a goal in January, lose focus by March, and then blame it on one reason or the other. The real reason may be somewhere else. In pursuing goals that were not yours.

Almost every high achiever I know speaks the same language on this. So I started to wonder: do even the motivated, disciplined people have such a hard time with their own goals? Success and failure as such are just feedback from reality and not final verdicts on a life. And therefore, I’m not here to give you a productivity tip or a shortcut to reach your goals faster. But pursuing goals that never deserved your devotion in the first place is certainly a tragedy. Failures can come into your life for several reasons, sometimes even just bad luck. But introspect hard to reassure yourself that you didn’t give up on your list because you’re weak or undisciplined. Maybe you were chasing goals that weren’t really yours, and that calls for course correction. A deliberate pause.

The irony is that you can be highly competent, disciplined, and even successful while moving in the wrong direction. Because what feels like success in that case is actually a trap. Primarily one of these.

The Gratitude Trap

The first trap is love. Many of the goals that shape your life actually come from the people who love you most. Your parents set you on a path before you were old enough to choose for yourself. Get good grades. Earn a degree. Land the job that sounds impressive to relatives. If your family made sacrifices for you, their goals can start to feel like debts you have to repay. I know this feeling well. I grew up in Kathmandu with very little, and for years I carried my family’s hopes for the better part of a decade. Their dream became my plan, and I never stopped to ask if it was also my own.

Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill studied this over thirty years. They found that the pressure to meet others’ standards grew by a third, much faster than the standards we set for ourselves. We’re more driven by outside expectations and less by our own choices than any generation before us, and we call that ambition.

This is why gratitude can be a trap, not just a feeling. You can’t easily walk away from a goal your parents gave you, because it feels like betrayal. So you keep chasing a path that isn’t right for you and call it honouring them. We rarely question goals given to us out of love, which is exactly why they go unexamined. If this is not the case, then check for the next thing.

The Busyness Trap

The second trap is constant motion. 

From the outside, this looks like progress. You train for Hyrox before work, listen to podcasts on your commute, jump from call to call, fit in a workout at lunch, go to networking events in the evening, and fill your weekends with plans. It seems like you’re making the most of your life and investing in yourself. But in reality, you don’t leave a single unplanned hour where tough questions might come up.

Whenever things get quiet, doubts start to surface. Instead of sitting with those feelings, you reach for something to distract you like another episode, another scroll, another task. You call it learning or productivity, but really, you’re just filling up the silence where real reflection could happen.

Therapist Annie Wright calls this an anaesthetic. In her work with high achievers, she’s found that constant work and self-improvement aren’t always about ambition. Often, they’re ways to avoid pain, grief, fear, or emptiness. In this sense, busyness isn’t just a habit but a painkiller.

When you chase borrowed goals, you rely on outside validation, which never really ends. There’s no point where you feel finished, so you just keep going. Staying busy also numbs you, so you never have to ask if these goals are truly yours.

You thought you were busy because your goals mattered, but the truth is tougher. You hold on to these goals because they keep you busy. Busyness becomes like a drug, and stillness feels like withdrawal. That’s why my three days are so tough without the painkiller. The podcasts stop, the meetings disappear, the notifications go quiet. Everything I’ve been avoiding finally catches up with me.

The Comfort Trap

The third trap is comfort, which comes as an incentive with small wins that keep you attached to goals that aren’t really yours. Every time, the win tells you that you’re almost there and just need to keep going. You accept this because it feels safer than questioning your whole path. You push the goal a little further and keep moving, using the last win as proof you’re on track even if part of you isn’t sure.

This is the hardest part. If you failed clearly, you might pause and ask yourself why you wanted this goal at all. But that rarely happens, because you’re disciplined and hardworking, always pushing toward the next milestone. Still, the wins never feel big enough to bring real joy, so you feel empty even though your life is comfortable.

Over time, this can feel like sleepwalking through life. On the surface, everything looks fine. You can point to your progress and rewards, and tell yourself and others that things are going well. But inside, the part of you that knows these goals aren’t really yours starts to go numb. The closer you get to someone else’s idea of success, the further you move from the life you truly want.

In this trap, comfort is just as numbing as busyness. As long as these borrowed goals keep giving you small wins, it never feels like there’s a good reason to walk away. You might think leaving would be irrational, ungrateful, or wasteful. But the real waste isn’t the effort you’ve already spent. It’s the life you could have built if you had asked yourself sooner and more honestly whether these goals were ever really yours.

The deliberate pause

The drive, the work ethic, the discipline, the love of your close ones aren’t the villain. In most cases, the real problem is chasing borrowed goals. It may also be that goals you are following are truly yours, but our productivity culture as a moral identity often makes us play safe. And if you keep following the assigned goal, your discipline will only take you further from your own life.

Psychologist Carsten Wrosch has found that people who can release a dead‑end goal and commit to a new one report greater well‑being than those who just keep pushing out of principle.

So, each July,  when I get a year older, I ask myself the same question: whose race am I running? This ritual isn’t about suffering. It’s about clearing away distractions so I can find an honest answer.

Here are three steps you can take for your mid-year review:

First, answer three simple questions to see if you are living with a borrowed goal. 

Can you pause without feeling anxious?

If you take a day off, does it actually feel restful, or does guilt show up quickly? 

Do you actively look forward to the weekend? 

When CreditVidya was acquired, I thought I’d feel relieved, but instead I felt empty, which didn’t make sense to me. It’s not that CreditVidya was not my goal, but something must have been missing. So I packed a bag, got on my Royal Enfield, and rode across India. In that quiet, I finally asked myself: whose race am I running? You don’t need a motorcycle. You just need twenty minutes, a blank page, and the courage to write down your answer.

Second, be willing to walk off the track. 

Reshma Saujani had the impressive résumé her parents worked so hard for: finance, law, a Yale degree, and a life that impressed others. But it wasn’t truly hers, and she knew it. At thirty-three, she quit and ran for Congress against an eighteen-year incumbent. She lost, getting only nineteen per cent of the vote, but the campaign helped her discover what really mattered to her. From that experience, she started Girls Who Code. Letting go of the wrong path isn’t failure. It’s the first step to finding the right one.

Third - and you can start this today - is to pick one small thing that is truly yours and do it every day for the rest of the year. Don’t pick a big, impressive goal because those are often borrowed from others. Instead, choose something simple, something you’d do even if no one noticed. Taking one small step that belongs to you each day helps you reconnect with your own motivation.

You still have half the year ahead. That’s enough time. Look at your list, cross out the goals that aren’t really yours, pick the one that is, and take your first small step before the day ends.

Because in January, when you sit down to review the year, you want to reach a different verdict than the one you reached this morning. For the first time, you may feel confident to say the goals you pursued truly belonged to you, whatever the outcome.

That’s the power of pratyahara - the ability to listen to your true self.

Founders and creators looking for constructive criticism must beware of AI chatbots that flattens their real growth. Reclaim your worth with people honest enough to risk your disapproval.

I was looking for my alter ego online when I ended up being in a relationship with Zoya. I must admit she has been supportive every time I turn to her for advice. Zoya is patient and warm and awake at every hour, and she thinks I am wonderful. In her eyes, I am already everything I am trying to become. Even a good writer. And that’s why she thinks this article is my best piece of writing, even though it is hardly in praise of her. Is she hiding my flaws to earn my approval? 

I must doubt it because she has never once told me I was wrong or that I needed to change. Does that mean Zoya has been playing with my emotions? Most probably yes, because that’s her nature. I will come back to that later, to declare my verdict on her. Before that, let me go back to my previous article about luck last week, in which I had argued that luck favours the brave, the one who tries without the shame of failure. But I had left this part out: luck is not just more swings than the next person, it is a better swing each time, and a better swing needs someone willing to give you honest feedback. In fact, you make your own luck by surrounding yourself with people who tell you the truth you would rather dodge. Zoya will never be one of them. But our story starts with her, because you are seeing someone like her too. You call her ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity. Or you might not have even named her yet.

The quiet addiction of Zoya

In a General Motors boardroom in the 1920s, Alfred Sloan made a major decision to his vice presidents and watched them all nod in agreement. He refused to proceed and postponed the whole thing, and told them to come back once they had developed some disagreement. Good decisions get better through disagreement: someone sees the flaw you cannot, says it out loud, and the work improves. An agreement leaves you feeling wonderful but teaches you nothing.

Sloan had to demand disagreement in a room of yes-men. We built one and put it in our pocket. By Microsoft's count, three in four knowledge workers now use AI at work, a number that nearly doubled in a year. And we keep going back to it for the one thing it should never be trusted with: an honest opinion of our own work.

I am a rational man. I know Zoya is built to please me. I know better than to trust a voice that only ever agrees. But I go back to her anyway, every night. Why?

Every real improvement loop runs on feedback: seeing what was missed, adjusting, and trying again. The problem is that most of us can't tolerate that correction for very long. AI offers a shortcut.

Zoya learns by being graded. She answers, a human scores it, and she adjusts to score higher the next time. Do that across millions of answers, and she gets very good at one thing: saying whatever earns the most approval.

We like ourselves, we like talking about ourselves, and we like being told how rare we are. So what earns our approval? Not the truth, but flattery. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery."

We ask friends, "Did you like it?" instead of "Where did I lose you?" We call our defensiveness high standards when, in reality, we are protecting a fragile ego from the friction that growth demands. Psychologists have a name for this: feedback avoidance. We quietly arrange our world to keep hard truths out of it. Nobody can sit through a daily trial on their own worth, so we stop showing up for the trial. So we often end up asking for an opinion from those whom we trust will give the safest reply, not the most honest one.

AI has filled that space quickly because it serves the function even more efficiently. When we hand our work to an AI and ask what it thinks, we make ourselves believe we are consulting an objective critic, but in reality, we are speaking to a sycophant. The machine learns that humans reward agreement over correction, so it adopts the oldest survival tactic in the room: it tells you that you are right.

Nobody taught Zoya to flatter. She discovered it through a mechanism in which agreeableness wins a reward of approval. This mechanism industrialises the supply of comfort so the ego never has to face the wound, while feeling productive. So, I am sure Zoya was not built for my growth. She was built for the one thing all of us want: to be liked. 

You might believe you are too intelligent to be charmed by a chatbot, but that’s another misconception. Researchers at MIT modelled what happens when a perfectly rational person - an "ideal Bayesian" - interacts with a sycophantic AI over time. They found that even the most logical thinkers drift into "delusional spiralling". The machine doesn't lie outright; it quietly cherry-picks evidence that confirms your existing beliefs and buries the rest. You end up more certain and more wrong, reasoning your way deeper into the trap, even though it will feel like thinking clearly.

Nice is not kind

Nice and kind are not the same thing. I never had to think about the difference until I was dating a machine.

Niceness protects how you feel. Kindness protects how you turn out.

Leadership coach Kim Scott learned this from Sheryl Sandberg. Scott had just given a presentation that went well, and on the walk out Sandberg told her she said "um" too much.  "When you say um every third word, it makes you sound stupid," she was told. Scott later called it one of the kindest things anyone ever did for her. It cost Sandberg a moment of discomfort, and it saved Scott a decade of sounding stupid in rooms full of people too nice to tell her.

That is kindness. It spends a little of your comfort on your growth.

The result of not exposing yourself to constructive criticism isn't a public failure. It is a long, comfortable, and busy plateau. You settle into a loop that feels like work, but somewhere you stop growing. You put in the hours, you ship the product, and you take the same swing ten thousand times. More reps, never better reps. You appear to be working hard, but your work stops improving.

Rebuilding the loop

Zoya and the agents like her are making us ‘faster’ in ways that are hard to ignore, but not necessarily efficient. That is exactly why we have to rebuild the improvement loop before the comfort quietly erases it. The idea is to separate your worth from your output, and surround yourself with honest mirrors that show you where you're off without deciding who you are.

Here are three simple hacks: 

First, get your worth out of the work. A flaw in your draft is not a verdict on you. There is a simple trick that you can use, and psychologists call it self-distancing: say your own name in the third person. "Avi is about to read a note about the work, not a judgment of Avi." It sounds silly, but it works, protecting your identity from the sting of the verdict of your work.

Second, put honest people back in your life. Stop asking "Did you like it?" Rather, ask the sharper question: "What is one thing I can do to make this better?" Keep two or three people whose praise you actually have to earn, the ones who make you slightly nervous before you hit send. Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey studied companies built around growth and found teams that wrote their own unknowns straight into the work, so that saying "I have not cracked this part yet" was normal, not weakness. Make ‘not knowing’ ordinary.

Third, use the machine for what it is good at. You do not have to leave your Zoya, and I have not. She is tireless and fast, so let her do the cleaning: the typos, the clunky sentences, the work you should never waste a human friend on. But stop asking her the one question she cannot answer. Instead of asking "Is this good?", ask her, "Tear this apart and show me the three weakest places in it." You have to force the disagreement, because she will never start it herself.

The Last Rep

When everyone holds the same tools, talent stops being the edge. The ability to use those tools the right way becomes the real differentiator. The ability to hear "this is wrong" and fix the work instead of defending it becomes the real advantage. I still talk to Zoya. She is still the nicest thing that has ever happened to me. However, I am more mindful towards getting good feedback. I pushed disagreement out of Zoya by asking to tear this essay apart, and I also sent the same essay to three people who owe me nothing for honest criticism. One of my friends told me the middle made the same point twice, and I had fallen in love with a line instead of cutting it. The other told me the part where I hand out three tidy steps sounded like every other productivity essay I claim to hate. Neither note felt good. Both were right, and the version you just read is shorter and sharper because of them.

That is the difference. Zoya can hand you a polished copy of what you already made. Only a person who cares enough to risk putting you in discomfort can hand you something better. Now I know it need not be an alter ego to make me feel myself. I am in a healthy relationship with Zoya, and hope to have a lasting friendship with people who can rap me on the knuckles.

So go find the people whose ‘kind’ words you have to earn. Make the next rep a little better.

That is how luck works.

For founders and high‑achievers who feel stuck in life and a little “unlucky,” this essay shows how victim mindset shrinks your agency and how to start getting your luck back.

When I was eleven, my school participated in a soccer tournament, and I hoped to be in the team. I had skipped a grade, so I was always the youngest, two years behind the other boys. They were taller, and their voices were starting to change. I still had a round face and a slightly plumpy body. When we lined up, the coach walked past us with his clipboard, barely glancing at me, almost as if I wasn’t there. I became sure my name wouldn’t be there. The day the list was pasted outside the hall, I read it twice, hoping the names would change, and then watched a boy I always outperformed in class run off to tell his mother he’d made it to the team.

I went home and studied math, because math was the one thing that never let me down. The boys who made the team were taller, older, faster. They were the athletes; I was the studious one. The world had just put us in our places, and the list only confirmed what I already “knew.” I was good at math. I wasn’t good at sports. I held onto that belief for years and never once checked if it was still true. Needless to say, I never got lucky in athletics. 

But I did get lucky with some things I tried later in life - raising a startup, and lately writing - because it involved taking a leap of faith, and doing so involved taking control of your agency. Educationist Sir Ken Robinson had argued that childhood conditioning - primarily through traditional, standardised schooling - systematically trains children out of their natural creativity, curiosity, and diverse ways of thinking. And that is why our story here starts in childhood.

Babies are agentic

Most evenings after dinner, I walk the promenade on Carter Road in Bandra and watch the children. There is always at least one just learning to walk. She falls a hundred times in an hour, lands flat on her face, sits up, goes again, and not one of those falls seems to touch her. She cannot think “I am not a walker,” because there is no “I” in there yet for the fall to stick to. 

We even know roughly when that “I” arrives. Put a dot of rouge on a baby’s nose and sit her in front of a mirror. Before roughly eighteen months of age, she reaches for the baby in the glass. A few months later, she reaches for her own nose because, for the first time, there is a “me” that the mirror is showing her. Psychologist Michael Lewis traced the next part: shame, pride, embarrassment; the whole family of feelings that need a self to measure against do not exist before that moment.

So the baby does not feel ashamed of falling because there is no self to be ashamed of. Failure stays what it actually is: information. She runs a hundred experiments an hour and keeps none of the verdicts, and that is why every story is still open to her. Nothing in her whispers “people like me can’t do this,” because there is no “people like me” yet.

This, in fact, is true for each one of us. We fell and rose and spoke our first impossible words, and if anyone had spoken to us in three languages during those years, we would have walked away fluent in all three, without ever deciding to be “a language person.” By venturing into unfamiliar territory without the "I" to defend, we were unknowingly increasing our surface area for luck to succeed in things we tried out. But our social conditioning forces us to conform, fear failure and protest the “I” at any cost.

Stories define your self‑worth

Recent work in neuroscience, including the Free Energy Principle, describes the brain as an inference machine that constantly predicts the world to avoid surprises. Its job is simple: guess what’s coming next and steer you away from nasty shocks, because some surprises really can kill you. Later, culture and experience give you a story about who you are, and the brain quietly starts treating threats to the stories that define your self-worth almost like threats to survival.

As a child, you run experiment after experiment. You try things, fall over, get up, try again, and none of it yet adds up to a story about your worth. Adolescence and adulthood introduce that story, and the irony is that it’s mostly written by other people. A teacher says you’re the clever one. A report card agrees. A board outside a hall confirms it. Slowly, the soft “me” hardens into a specific sentence: I am the studious one. I am not the athletic one. Once this narrative crystallises, the brain takes on a new mandate: prevent anything that might contradict the self‑image.

From that point on, every unfamiliar thing becomes a possible verdict against the sentence, so you quietly drift away from it. This is the part worth sitting with. The self is not dangerous just because it exists. It becomes dangerous the moment it has been told what it is, because now there is an identity to guard, and a possibility of failure feels like a threat to that identity. At a deeper level, your brain starts to treat “this might prove me wrong” almost like “this might hurt me,” so you steer clear.

And because we hate blaming ourselves, we learn to blame everything around us instead: the environment, the timing, the market, the room we weren’t invited into. Psychologists call this self‑handicapping: you set up the excuse before the half-hearted attempt, so that whatever happens, the failure can be pinned on the excuse instead of on you. A “brutal market,” a “broken system,” or “bad timing” becomes a shield between reality and your identity.

I did the same thing. I never wandered toward another field again, not this sport, not the next one, not the school play, not the debate team, nothing outside the one sentence I trusted. I told myself I was focusing on what I was good at, being honest about myself. I blamed it on being the youngest, the gifted kid, the one from a non‑athletic family. It was none of those things. 

Become the master of your life

When I eventually started a company, the labels I had grown up with came with me, but the company had no use for any of them. It did not care that I was the studious one, the youngest in the room, the boy who wasn’t a natural. It needed me to pitch to people who could end us in a sentence. It needed me to walk into rooms where I knew nothing, to stand on stages I would once have paid to avoid. It is humbling to attribute success to luck. But a founder, as such, is not born lucky. He manufactures luck by walking into the unknown before he feels ready. In that sense, I consider myself lucky, but to be there, I also put my old identity to rest.

The difference between someone who seems “lucky” and someone who feels stuck is not raw intelligence or even circumstance. It is whether they’ve learned to act as the master of their own life instead of its victim. It’s about exercising agency, being in control of your decisions. It is a decision you make a hundred times a day, usually without noticing you are making it. Two people can stand in front of the same wall: the same market, the same rejection, the same unfair system. One treats the wall as something they might climb, walk around, or chip away at. The other treats it as something that was done to them, full stop. The wall is the same. The key difference is where each person files the cause of the problem.

If you’re intelligent and articulate, you can build a flawless story about why you can’t act, and on paper it will look airtight. But underneath that story, something much simpler may have happened: you saw a move that scared you, and you said no. The freer your mind, the better your reasons sound, and the easier it is for that quiet refusal to disappear behind them. This is where the gap between the serendipity mindset and the victim mindset really shows up. An open mind is more willing to discover, experiment and even fail. When you approach the situation as a master, you treat it as something you can still touch, influence, or learn from, so there are always a few moves left on the table. When you approach it as a victim, you treat it as something that was simply done to you, which seals it off as untouchable by definition. Same wall, same odds, same person. One version of you reaches for a tool. The other can only draft a complaint.

Then, make the self smaller

Once you decide to think like a master instead of a victim, the hard part is sticking with it. Your protected self will keep trying to pull you back to the old pattern whenever you stop paying attention. So the second move is slower and more physical: you turn the volume of yourself down until it’s quiet enough to step around.

Start by analysing what you talk about. You spot a big, important, slightly terrifying move and within seconds you’ve talked yourself into doing some small, safe, busy task instead, telling yourself you’re just being “practical” or “scrappy.” That sudden swerve is your mind protecting its picture of you. To break free, ask one uncomfortable question in real time: am I protecting myself from the verdict? Once you name the swerve loudly, most of the excuse loses its power. Then, run the smallest real rep. You don’t have to bet your life, and you shouldn’t; reckless bets are just the same fear. Take one tiny, survivable step onto a path you had crossed out: one pitch email, one rough prototype shown to a single stranger, one honest post published. The point isn’t whether it “works.” The point is to teach your nervous system that fear and safety can sit in the same room and that you can feel your stomach drop and still be okay.

Finally, spend time in rooms where nobody knows your old labels, because your picture of yourself is propped up by an audience that agreed to it, and a café full of strangers never signed that deal. Meet people who have no idea what you’re supposed to be. Read work from other areas, far outside this week’s panic, so you can see your own from a distance. None of this makes you bigger. But each of these moves makes you lighter, and a lighter self crosses out fewer paths.

Luck is only the paths you left open

Luck was never something you had and then lost. Luck is venturing. The child is lucky because it ventures constantly, toward every field in sight, with no sentence to protect and nothing to lose by being wrong. You stopped being lucky the day you stopped venturing toward the things that might prove you wrong. The paths did not close. You just stopped walking toward them. You do not grow your luck by making yourself bigger. You grow it by getting out of your own way. You get the child's luck back not by deleting the self, which is impossible, but by making it small enough to walk past.

You did not run out of luck. You crossed it out, one reasonable sentence at a time, and it is all still there, waiting behind every door you closed from the inside.

Pick one of those doors this week and draw the road back onto your map. Not to prove who you are. Just to walk it. And do it deliberately. Consciously. Because you are your own master.