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.

For founders who chose to carry everything alone and now can’t feel their own wins, because loneliness has quietly turned those wins into invisible failures.

“I don’t celebrate occasions. I celebrate victories,” I used to say to my family and colleagues whenever they wanted to mark a birthday or an anniversary. Why tie joy to a calendar when results were the only honest metric, I used to believe. I was twelve years old when I first imagined what a real result could look like after seeing my heroes on the covers of Forbes and GQ, and I concluded that I would get to celebrate when I landed there among them.

Twenty years later, I raised a startup, then funding came and then the acquisition. The milestones I had worked toward since childhood arrived one by one, almost exactly as I had planned. I got my victories. But I could not celebrate a single one. Not because I didn't want to. Because I had no one to celebrate with. The people who would have cheered didn't understand what it had cost. The few who knew the cost weren't there. So the moment I had rehearsed for two decades showed up and left without landing. I felt nothing and ended up doing the only thing I knew. I reached for the next problem. The culprit was loneliness.

We talk about founder loneliness as the heavy feeling you push through, the price of building alone. I want to say something harder. Loneliness for a founder is not the feeling of being emotionally, socially, or meaningfully disconnected from others. Loneliness is a bad decision. It’s a decision because the option is always yours. And if you choose to be lonely, it quietly starts making decisions for you, the wrong ones. Judging your victories to be failures is among those decisions. Loneliness makes you overthink, overanalyse, and blame yourself.

A Win Needs a Witness

A win may be an achievement, improvement, or positive outcome that has meaning for you personally, regardless of whether others notice it or consider it significant. But the win won’t land if there is no one on the other side to receive it. Professor Shelly Gable studied this, the act she calls capitalising: share a good thing with someone who understands what it costs, and the good thing grows. Keep it to yourself, and the same event barely registers. I spent twenty years building the result, but I failed to build the other person to share it with.

There is a moment in the early Buddhist texts that I came upon recently. Ananda, the Buddha's closest student, offers what he thinks is a humble observation. Good companions on the path, he says, must be about half of the spiritual life. The Buddha corrects him. “Do not say that, Ananda. Admirable friendship is not half of the holy life. It is the whole of it.” This conclusion comes from the tradition of people who gave up everything to sit alone with their own minds in caves and forests. The most self-reliant path human beings ever designed looked hard at the question and concluded that the friend who sees you is part of the work itself. You do not wake up alone no matter how disciplined you are, because a mind cannot finally be trusted to judge itself from inside itself.

The Unmonitored Mind

If loneliness is so destructive, why do capable people stay in it for years? Partly because of what loneliness does to the mind itself. John Cacioppo, founder of the field of social neuroscience, spent his career studying isolation, and what he found was not just sadness. It was something mechanical: an isolated brain tilts toward threat, reads ambiguity as danger, and treats the absence of reassurance as evidence of failure. It thinks “something is wrong” even when nothing bad has happened. A tiny comment can feel huge and hurtful, just because there’s nobody else there to say, “Hey, that’s not a big deal.”

When no other voices come in, the founder’s brain has to make up the story by itself. And when it does that alone, it usually decides, “I failed.” That’s the real danger of building alone: not just being by yourself, but letting a lonely brain tell the worst possible story and then believing it.

Almost everyone tries to fix the problem the same wrong way because it looks like a socialising problem. So you say yes to the founder dinners, join networking groups, and community-run clubs. But none of that really helps. The truth is, it was never about not having enough people around. One founder said, “I have lots of people around me, but no one I can really talk to.” He had a full team and a whole office of people who depended on him. But those events and dinners are places where you act strong and smart, tell safe stories, and hide the messy parts. You can meet nine new people and still not tell anyone what’s really going on. You go home, and the harsh voice in your head is the same - maybe even louder - because now you’ve proved you can be surrounded and still feel alone.

So if more people aren’t the answer, what is? Just one right person - the one who is always there to complete the feedback loop and validates your decisions honestly. Before his book Carrie made him famous, Stephen King thought it was terrible and threw the pages in the trash. He had judged his own work and decided it was worthless. Those pages only survived because his wife pulled them out, read them, and said, “You’re wrong. This is good.” He couldn’t have done that by himself, not because he wasn’t talented, but because no one can judge their own story clearly from the inside. It took one other person to see what his lonely mind had gotten completely wrong.

Founder Myth That Keeps You There

If loneliness is so destructive, why do capable people stay in it for years? Because there’s a story in their head that tells them they’re supposed to. The story says a “real” founder carries everything alone, including their own thoughts and worries. So when loneliness shows up, they don’t see it as a problem. They see it as the price to be paid to be serious and successful. The pain starts to feel like proof that they’re doing it right, instead of a warning that something is broken.

I lived inside that story for a long time. Self-reliance was not a virtue I chose. For a middle-class kid in India, it was the only way out of the trap. When it felt like nobody was coming to help, I decided to become the kind of person who didn’t need anyone to come. That decision worked in some ways - I got things done, I hit goals. But in the end, it left me alone at the finish line with no one to share the moment with.

The data is sobering. 76% of founders report profound loneliness - 50% higher than corporate CEOs. 87.7% struggle with mental health issues. Founders are 4x to 10x more likely to face depression, ADHD, or bipolar disorder. The strongest predictor of founder loneliness is not network size but perceived connection with the immediate team. If you cannot delegate psychological weight, isolation skyrockets.

So now I’m doing something different. I’m going to start writing down my wins, big and small, in a private log for the days when I’m still building the rest of the support around me. And I’m going to build that support on purpose - not a big group, not another event, but one person or maybe two who know the full picture and with whom the truth can move both ways.

That’s what I’m asking you to do as well. Not another “vulnerable” social media post. Not a new kind of networking. Just one person. Someone who understands what your work really costs, or is willing to learn. Build the kind of relationship where honesty is normal, not a rare, brave act.

Nobody Outgrows It

The danger of solo building isn't isolation - it's that an unmonitored mind, deprived of input, fabricates the harshest possible reading and calls it information. A founder who constantly judges himself, tracks every flaw, and keeps trying to improve is still standing in the same mental courtroom. He’s acting as his own judge and jury at the same time. He never actually gets to step outside and just be a person who is seen and understood by someone else.

People sometimes say a half joke and half comfort: “You could be running the whole world and still need your mom.” It sounds funny, but it’s mostly just true. Wanting someone to see you and say, “I see what you did, and it matters,” was never a childish phase you were meant to grow out of. The role you stepped into quietly took that need away and then made you believe you chose to give it up. That’s the danger of solo building - an unmonitored mind, deprived of input, fabricating the harshest possible reading and calling it information. 

That twelve-year-old Avi on the street staring at Ambani on a magazine cover didn't have a word for what he felt. He just wanted to get somewhere, and then spent the next three decades getting there. He didn't know that getting somewhere alone amounts to not getting there at all.

All he needed to do was to admit that a strong founder handling everything on his own, including his own head, was a myth. This myth brings in loneliness, but the choice is always yours. Admit that loneliness is a bad decision, and start feeling your wins.

For entrepreneurs and perfectionist founders who hide behind their product, selling is the bravest and final part of building.

There is a romantic myth that good work should speak for itself - that a true creator shouldn't have to stand behind their work and 'ask'. The myth is seductive because it lets fear of exposure wear the costume of integrity. But the truth is that selling isn't the grubby opposite of creation. Rather, it's its final act of creation - and the work only becomes real the moment you stop hiding behind it. It becomes real when you can sell it.

I learned it as a 20-year-old, sitting behind the counter of a liquor store in Washington DC, selling to a Spanish-speaking customer, neither of us being good at English. I learnt it from my cousin Pravesh, who has been the best salesperson I have ever known since then, and he has never once looked like he was selling. Not pushy, as salespersons are generally considered to be, he just listens. He always has the one right thing to say to his customers, and when someone says no, there is always the next person. I watched him that whole summer before I understood that the turning was the secret. My mind kept inventing reasons why I didn't belong behind the counter: my English wasn't good enough, I would never know what to say, I would freeze. So I copied him. His words, his pauses, the way he leaned in, the small nod that told a stranger he was heard. For weeks, I just imitated him. Then, one day, it came naturally.

A woman came speaking Spanish, and I barely spoke English, let alone Spanish. We stood across the counter with no language between us, but the sale happened anyway. Nothing about it should have worked, but it did. That counter was the most important apprenticeship of my life. What I learned there never left me, and it came with me into every room that mattered thereafter. For an introvert who once believed he could never do it, it was the closest thing to a superpower I have owned.

So here is the question that has bothered me for years. We pour ourselves into building our products, then feel embarrassed at the thought of selling them. Why? Is it our nature? Is it that we don't believe we have earned the right? Or that we think the product should speak for itself?

We tell the story of 'making' in two acts: first, you build the thing, then you go sell it. This workflow is the whole mistake. The question is not what comes after the 'making'. Because, at both ends of creation, there's work. The work starts with making and ends with selling. The question you are terrified to ask once the product is finished is the exact question you were supposed to ask before you built anything at all. The question is: will you pay for this? Asked early, with nothing made yet, we call it discovery. Asked late, with the thing in hand, we call it sales. It is one question, posed twice, and the founders who hide from it at the end are usually the same ones who skipped it at the start.

Pravesh, without ever framing it this way, did both at once. Standing at that counter, every sale for him was also a lesson in what the next customer would want. He was selling and discovering in the same breath, learning the market by asking it to buy. That is what the ask actually is: not a transaction bolted onto the end of creation, but the instrument that tells you what to build and whether it was worth building. Refuse to ask, and you have switched off the only sensor that was ever going to tell you the truth.

Market research firm CB Insights read through hundreds of startup postmortems to find the single most common reason companies die. It is not startups running out of money or getting crushed by a bigger competitor. The largest killer, by a wide margin, is building something nobody wanted. Almost 42 per cent of startups die not because the execution failed, but because the thing never needed to exist, and no one found out until the money was gone.

Some founders do ask, hear warm encouragement, build the thing, and still find no real demand. That's because they were listening for applause instead of truth, and people are kind enough to give applause for free. That is a different startup death, and a rarer one. The common death is quieter and sadder: a finished, careful, genuinely good product that starves in a folder, because the person who made it could not step out from behind it long enough to find the single customer it was built for.

That is the real cost of the hiding, laid end to end. To avoid one verdict on your worth, you protect yourself from the exact thing you most need to hear. A no, asked early, is the cheapest truth you will ever buy. A "NO" you spend three years avoiding becomes a single line in someone's research: no market need.

Why are we so afraid to ask?

Here is what I have come to learn after meeting hundreds of builders: building is the most respectable hiding place. As long as you are still building, the work is not finished, and if it is not finished, no one can judge it yet. You get to stay in the warm, private room where the thing is always almost ready and never quite exposed. You add a feature. You refactor the code because it isn't ready yet. You redesign the landing page one more time. From the outside, it looks like perfectionism. From the inside, it feels like progress. It is neither.

It works because making and asking are two completely different acts, and they cost completely different things. Making is private, and endless, and it returns no verdict: you can polish a thing for a decade and never once be told it fell short. Asking is the opposite on every count. It is public. It is a clean yes or no. And the answer never feels like a judgment of the work. It feels like a judgment of you. But being judged is only the surface of it. Go one layer down, and you find something that looks like a virtue and works like a trap.

The people who hide in continuous 'building' are almost always perfectionists, and they wear it as an identity. Ask them why the product still isn't in front of customers, and they will say it isn't ready. But "it isn't ready" is the polite version of a sentence they never say out loud: I haven't earned the right to ask.

So they keep working to earn it. One more proof point, one more month, one more feature that finally makes the thing undeniable, and then they will be allowed to ask. But the line keeps stepping back as they approach it. It always will, because it was never a line in the product. It is a permission, and they are waiting for someone who isn't in the room to grant it. 

I know exactly where that waiting comes from, because I come from it. I am first-generation. I was carrying a family's hopes long before I carried a company's. When you arrive somewhere that way, you learn that you are allowed to stay only as long as you out-deliver everyone around you, so you over-deliver by reflex, and the feeling that you have finally earned the right to ask never quite comes.

Psychologist Annie Wright describes this kind of perfectionism as a shield rather than a standard. If the work is flawless, it cannot be criticised, and neither can the person who made it. Sociologist Jo Phelan names what sits underneath it: environments built around an upper-class polish that make first-generation professionals feel like frauds, quietly discouraging them from asserting themselves or claiming their space in the market, no matter how good the work is.

Almost everything you believe about selling is wrong

I have sold to a risk committee at the State Bank of India. I have sold to executives at Vodafone. I have spent twenty years asking strangers for money, attention, and trust, and I have watched what actually works from the only seat that teaches you anything, the one across the counter. Three things I believed about selling turned out to be wrong, and unlearning them is most of the job.

The first: The salesman you are afraid of becoming is not even good at the job. The best sellers I have ever met, starting with Pravesh, barely talk. They ask a quiet question and wait. Adam Grant later put numbers to what that counter taught me: the loud, classic extroverts don't win. The people who outsell everyone are ambiverts, the ask-and-wait kind, who outperform the strongest extroverts by 32 per cent.

The second: That most people will turn me down, so asking is mostly collecting rejection. It is the opposite. Vanessa Bohns has run studies across more than fourteen thousand requests, and people underestimating how often a stranger will say yes by close to half. Saying no is awkward and costly for the other person too. Yes is the easier path for most of us, most of the time. We never account for it because we are stuck on our own side of the counter, never imagining the person across from us is wired to want to help.

The third: that they are judging me the way I judge myself. You finish the pitch, replay every stumble, and assume the other person catalogued the same flaws with the same contempt. Erica Boothby named the opposite the liking gap. After a conversation, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. You hear your own harsh commentary and assume the stranger hears it too. They can't. What they heard was someone offering them something useful, and most walked away thinking better of you than you thought of yourself.

A boy who could not finish a sentence in English sold a case of wine to a woman who could not understand a word he said. I had the proof in my hands at twenty. The research only told me, decades later, why it had worked.

You do not have to change your nature to sell. You never did. Pravesh didn't, the twenty-year-old copying him didn't, and neither do you. The shy, careful, perfectionist builder is not disqualified from asking. He is built for the listening kind of asking that actually works. The only thing standing between you and the ask is a permission you have been waiting for someone else to grant. No one ever will, because no one was ever holding it.

The product never says no

Pravesh never knew he was teaching me anything. He just turned to the next customer, and the next, and the next. I have spent twenty years trying to earn what he had for free: the simple willingness to ask, and to not be destroyed by the answer.

Somewhere right now there is a product that would have changed a life, sitting in a folder, perfect and unseen, because the person who built it could not bear to hear one stranger say no. That is the real tragedy of all this. Not the companies that tried and failed. The ones that were good enough to matter and never got asked about, because their makers mistook the building for bravery. Do not be that maker.

You learned to do the hard part already the day you learned to do anything well. The ask is smaller than the build. It only feels bigger because it is the first time the work and you are finally in the room together.

So make the thing. Then do the harder, truer part of completing it: step out from behind it, find the one person it was built for, and ask. Because asking isn't a betrayal of the work - it's the completion of it, the final brushstroke that completes your masterpiece.

The product never says no. Nor will the product speak for itself. Your product. Your say. Say it!

For high-achievers who chased the feeling of freedom that comes with the founder tag but discovered entrepreneurship is the ultimate subordination.

Every afternoon, walking home from the school bus in Kathmandu, I'd pass a small book stall on the corner. My friends would stop to flip through Baywatch magazines while I'd step aside to stare at the business ones. Ambani looked out from one of them in an immaculate suit, with the word billionaire written beneath his name. I was twelve years old. I didn't want to be a film star or a cricketer. I wanted to be him -  the man who had figured out something that other men hadn't.

Looking back, I see it as a desperate wish of a young boy for a way out of a life that felt too small, too hard, and too set in stone. Entrepreneurship was the door I couldn't open yet, but I couldn't stop looking at it either. For the next ten years, I kept a notebook to write down business ideas. The list kept growing, from competing with Flipkart to opening an organic store. Some nights, I fell asleep dreaming about the version of myself who had already made it out. The ideas kept coming, but I wasn't actually building anything.

There is a word for what I was during those two decades: wantrepreneur.

It might sound like an insult, but it isn't. It describes more people building startups today. So what is a wantrepreneur? It's someone who connects to entrepreneurship on an emotional level but fails to act on it. 

Wantrepreneurs find that picturing themselves as entrepreneurs feels rewarding in a way that real entrepreneurship rarely does. People are drawn to entrepreneurship as a fantasy of freedom, status, and self-rescue. The fantasy gives them the feeling without requiring the actual transformation. The reason wantrepreneur culture persists is that dreaming about entrepreneurship can "fill the emotional void" long before a person has built the maturity required to run a real business.

I want to tell you about two people who understood entrepreneurship better than most founders I've met. Pochadri was my head of technology, and Arun headed risk. Both of them were, in every way that matters, entrepreneurs.

For more than five years, the three of us met every Monday at 11 am. I can't remember missing a single week. We talked about everything: strategy, team issues, regulatory problems, and whatever kept us up at night. But what stands out isn't the conversations. It's the decisions. When the business faced 'collections' work none of us had done before, I started running 'collection' calls at 7:30 am with my team on camera. Arun learned to handle banking and partner relationships he'd never managed. Pochadri took charge of managing people and our entire Hyderabad office. Not because anyone told them to. Not because it was glamorous. Because the business needed it, and they quietly decided to take responsibility.  That is entrepreneurship. The decision to be responsible for something beyond yourself.

Now compare this to many founders I know who carry the tag. They're focused on the wrong things: the idea, the vision, the future version of themselves who already has it all figured out. And since that future self is always available in the imagination, the real work - the 'collection' call, the banking relationship, the office nobody else wants to run - keeps getting deferred. We collect ideas the way some people collect watches: with real passion and taste, but with no plan to use them. Wantrepreneurs aren't lazy. They're focused on the wrong thing, missing accountability completely. Accountable towards a task at hand, even if it doesn't match the founder image you've been building in your head. Pochadri and Arun didn't have the titles, but in every way that counts, they were more of a founder than most I've met. When something needed to be done and no one else would do it, they stepped up. That's the real secret. It's so unglamorous that most people overlook it entirely.

But what is the founder tag really? Who gave it out? And why do so many people who clearly have it - the registered company, the pitch deck, the LinkedIn headline - still act like wantrepreneurs, while people like Pochadri and Arun, who never claimed it, live it every day?

The real odds of startup success

Mark Zuckerberg is the poster child for wantrepreneurs: the hoodie, the dorm room, a billion users. The story goes like this: real entrepreneurship means a technology breakthrough, a venture round, a valuation with many zeroes. If you haven't disrupted something at scale, the implicit logic goes, you haven't really done it. You don't have the tag.

But here is what that mythology never says: if money is genuinely what you're after, the odds strongly favour a different path. A lawyer, a doctor, a finance professional, someone who gets very good at their craft and then replicates it, gets a higher expected return than the unicorn chase at a fraction of the personal cost.

And the unicorn chase costs more than most people calculate. The probability of becoming a unicorn founder is roughly 0.007%: one in fourteen thousand. Yet research shows that 81% of entrepreneurs believe their personal odds of success are at least 70%. A third believe their odds are absolute. Now run the actual expected value calculation that nobody puts in the pitch deck:

Unicorn path: 2% average founder ownership at exit × $1 billion valuation = $20 million. Probability: less than 1%.

Smaller path: 100% ownership of a $20 million business. Probability: meaningfully higher.

The payouts are identical. The risk profiles are worlds apart. And the unicorn path costs something the math doesn't capture: years of your life spent chasing a feeling that, as Philip Brickman's research on lottery winners showed, fades within 12 to 18 months of arrival anyway.

Unicorns are rare, and the startup culture has built myths around founders, but the fact remains that even genius-level originality or a Facebook-scale idea is not enough to "fill that emotional void" for founders without building the maturity required to run a real business.

The bill nobody shows you

Every founder I've met started with the same dream: freedom, ownership, building something on their own terms. Nobody hands you the other document. The one that lists what you are actually agreeing to. It states that you will become priority number two for yourself. The moment you hire your first employee, their livelihood outranks your comfort. Once you have a team of any size, you are responsible for a hundred families' rent, a hundred mortgage payments, a hundred school fees arriving on the first of every month, regardless of what your month looked like. The dream was to escape the hierarchy. The reality is that you've chosen to sit at the bottom of one you built yourself.

The excitement fades faster than you think. The early days feel electric: the first customer, the first hire, the first time someone uses what you built. Then the business becomes real, and real means repetitive. Incremental improvements. The same problems in different clothing. One founder described it plainly: the first six to eighteen months of bringing an idea to life are actually the smallest part of the business. The rest is empowering others, fixing what breaks, and doing it again. Nobody posts about that part.

Your ego is the first thing to go, and it happens day by day. You will do work you once thought was beneath you because the business needs it. You will be wrong in front of people who report to you. You will ask for help from people who used to ask you. I was one of the lowest-paid people at CreditVidya for longer than I'd like to admit. The founder tag carries a certain image,  but the founder's reality has very little interest in that image. The reality is that you may have to pay for it through the compound interest of skipped sleep and deferred doctors' appointments and the exhaustion that comes from carrying decisions no one else can make. Your body keeps the score even when the spreadsheet doesn't.

There is a particular loneliness in this that nobody warns you about. You can have a significant valuation and still feel like a fraud. The imposter syndrome strikes because when you really work hard, you also start valuing the hard work of others and see your own effort as not deserving enough. Wealthy on paper, feeling hollow inside. The people around you see the numbers. You see the gap between what the number suggests and what you actually feel on a Tuesday morning when three things are on fire, and your co-founder isn't speaking to you.

This is the bill. Presented incrementally as responsibility, over years, in currencies you didn't know you were spending. The bill has to be paid first, before you can think of your own priorities, because you have decided that what you're building is worth the cost. Most founders believe the cost does not exist. Or that they are exempt from it. Because they became founders to buy their own freedom, not to pay for others' well-being. That's a different mistake, and a more expensive one.

The only decision that matters

Entrepreneurship isn't about having the perfect idea or waiting for the right moment. It's about deciding, once, that you are responsible for something beyond yourself and then letting that decision make all the smaller decisions for you. The boring business, the daily execution, the Monday meetings - none of these is strategy. They're what responsibility looks like when you stop overthinking decisions and start living them.

This is what Pochadri and Arun understood that most founders with the tag do not. They didn't wait for the conditions to feel right or the work to feel worthy of them. They decided they were responsible - and that decision did the rest. The 7:30 am 'collection' calls weren't a sacrifice. They were just what responsibility looked like on a Tuesday morning.

Most wannabe entrepreneurs begin on the other side of that decision. A twelve-year-old in Kathmandu staring at magazine covers, hoping for an escape that felt like ambition. Imagining yourself on the cover costs nothing and carries no risk of visible failure. The emptiness that drove you to the fantasy in the first place doesn't go away when you actually get the tag. Does it disappear when you reach a certain valuation? No. Does it go away when your name appears somewhere? No. The founders I've watched struggle most after their exits are the ones who believed the cover would finally silence the dreamer within. But the emptiness stays. The question is whether you build something real with 'responsibility' or are still staring at someone else's face on a magazine, waiting for a beginning that never comes. Because if you are looking for the status of a founder without stewardship, a model of success that worships valuations, genius, and glamour, while hiding the real task of becoming trustworthy enough to hold responsibility for other people's livelihoods, that is not going to happen even in your next venture.

Bluntly put, entrepreneurship isn't an escape from subordination - it's the ultimate subordination. You already know which choice you made, now own it.

A notebook full of ideas isn't the problem. The problem is believing that the notebook is the work. It isn't. The work begins when you put the notebook down and do what needs doing: the unglamorous task, the thing beneath you, the thing that doesn't fit the founder you pictured. Because you've decided, quietly, that you are responsible for it. That's the whole thing. It took twenty years for a twelve-year-old boy on the streets of Kathmandu to understand it. You can understand it sooner. 

High achievers build a system for everything, then fall into 'analysis paralysis', ending up doing all kinds of socially rewarding things except the one that would have actually helped realise their true potential.

Most of us have two lives. The one we live, and the one we are capable of living.

I grew up in a middle-class family where I got to follow a clearly laid career path even before I could understand in what direction I was headed. Over two decades, a near-perfect Avi was assembled: the topper, the disciplined one, the person whose standards were so high that he never had to find out what happened when they weren't met. The standards became my identity. And if you are a high achiever reading this, you probably know exactly what that feels like, because it is your identity too. The colour-coded calendar. The suite of productivity apps. The morning routine that would make a monk jealous. The courses finished, the workshops attended, the framework built for the work not yet started.

Then I ran a startup, and the identity of the one who couldn't afford to fail became a problem. For years, I was always busy, always optimising. But I never quite got around to the thing that actually mattered. What eventually cracked it was not a breakthrough. It was accumulated failure: pivots that didn't work, wrong hires, strategies that looked embarrassing a year later. The clearest example: when we pivoted CreditVidya from B2B SaaS to lending, no amount of research told us what we needed to know. The market only revealed itself after we launched. Every critical lesson arrived after the move, not before it. Each failure took a small piece of the perfect Avi with it. Somewhere in the wreckage, I discovered something I hadn't expected. Overcoming self‑doubt, I could laugh at myself. I found the absurdity of my own seriousness genuinely funny.

When I look around now, I keep seeing the same pattern. Highly qualified people, waiting for the right moment. The writer who wants to publish but needs one more draft. The founder who wants to build but needs one more month of research. They are not lazy. They are not lacking ambition. They are almost ready, and almost ready, it turns out, is the most comfortable place in the world to live. Because if the work stays unfinished, the possibility stays perfect.

The system did its job perfectly, keeping them feeling serious and in motion, but, in the process,  kept them away from the one move that would have made a difference in their lives. This essay is about the distance between the two lives, and why the most disciplined people in the room are often the ones living furthest from their own potential.

I am not a particularly social person. Most days, you will find me walking around Bandra with my laptop, talking to my AI agents. But, over the years, I have made two unlikely good friends. Call them V and G.

V wants to be a published author. She has been working on her first book for years, and the work is never quite ready, never quite right enough to leave her hands. G is a different species - a perfectionist working on launching an athleisure brand built for adventure sports. She took six months to tell me the brand name because naming it out loud made it real, and real things can be judged.

Both of them, by their own account, are almost ready.

What I've come to understand about V and G is that their preparation is not the obstacle. The preparation is the product. An evolutionary explanation for this is that the nervous system gets exactly what it wants: the feeling of serious forward motion without making the real move. Their calendar is full, the intent is genuine, but the person they could become is still waiting because they are stuck in analysis paralysis.

Psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying what happens to children praised for being smart rather than for effort. They become adults who avoid risk because failure now threatens the core of who they are, and that is how the identity of the high-potential one gets reinforced. But from inside, they remain the person who could do something great, without ever finding out what their actual ceiling is. 

V's unfinished book remains the work of a potentially brilliant writer. G's unlaunched brand remains the vision of someone with impeccable taste and iron discipline. This is not a weakness. It is, in a way, the cost of having been genuinely capable for a long time. We call it perfectionism, and we say it like a confession that is also a boast. Your greatest strength is a cage because perfectionism is one of the most socially rewarded forms of self-sabotage.

The shame budget

Every person has a finite amount of social shame they can tolerate before the nervous system pulls the brake. Call it the shame budget, or fear of failure. But the culture that is responsible for this shame in the first place also helps redirect it. The shame that should attach to not-launching gets redirected onto launching badly. The budget gets inverted. The avoider feels virtuous. The launcher feels exposed. We should have been celebrating the failed attempt. Instead, we start celebrating perfectionism. That's because the productivity industry figured out that the fear of not being ready is more monetisable than the fear of failure. Notion didn't sell you a productivity tool. It sold you a more sophisticated version of the feeling of being serious. Each purchase redirects a little more of the shame budget toward preparation, leaving less available for the actual move.

Our nervous system is running a programme, probably since the first time someone important told you that you were gifted. The programme has two rules: preparation means safety, and visible failure means danger. The same neural alarm system that fires when you spot a lion fires when you are about to publish something for the first time. The amygdala does not distinguish between a physical threat and a reputational one. To the nervous system, shipping before you are ready and walking into a lion's den run through the same circuitry, which is why the feeling you get the morning you are supposed to launch, the sudden doubt that it needs one more pass, feels less like a preference and more like a warning. 

This system is spectacularly successful at the job it was designed for, and that job was never about helping you become who you could be. It was about keeping you alive in the environment you grew up in, where being wrong in public had consequences, and where your identity as the capable one was the most valuable thing you owned.

Behaviour scientist Herminia Ibarra spent decades tracking career changers and found that those who spent the longest in careful preparation consistently received the most social validation but produced the worst outcomes. James Marcia's identity research found something harder to sit with: people who stay indefinitely suspended between exploring and committing, never quite ready, never quite launched, report lower well-being than people who committed imperfectly and early. The prolonged moratorium feels responsible, but the data says it is a sabotage of success. Everything around you - the app, the course, the culture's applause -  conspires with complete sincerity to make sure you never become who you could be.

The cover story

What V and G are doing, and what I did for longer than I want to admit, is perfectionism. But the actual mechanism is self-sabotage, and the reason it is so hard to see it is that it looks nothing like the dramatic version: not the founder who drinks before the pitch or the athlete who skips training the week of the race. This is the quiet kind. The kind that looks like conscientiousness from the outside and feels like responsibility from the inside. The kind that gets a medal.

The logic underneath it is this: if the work stays unfinished, the possibility stays perfect. As long as V's book lives in draft, she remains, in her own mind and in the minds of everyone who knows her, a writer of limitless potential. The moment it goes out, that story ends. What replaces it is a real thing, with real limits, that real people can judge. The unfinished work is not a failure. It is a possession: the most valuable thing she owns, the story of what she could be, kept safe by never finding out if it is true.

I held the perfect Avi the same way. The identity of the person who might do something great is more comfortable than the reality of the person trying and sometimes failing in public. The nervous system, doing its job with complete sincerity, keeps the identity intact by ensuring that the work never has to confront reality. Your diligence, your care, your high standards, the things that made you a perfectionist, thus turn against the future they were supposed to build.

The unlived life

Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec spent years studying what people regret most at the end of their lives. Seventy-five per cent of major regrets are about things people did not do, not things they did and failed at. The standard reading of that statistic is about missed opportunities. Read it differently, and it becomes a lifelong mourning of the person you never got to become.

The fear of failure, the fear of judgment, the self-doubt that arrives the morning you are supposed to ship: these are not problems to be solved before you begin. They are the conditions under which beginning happens. Every person who has crossed to the other side did it while fear was still present. They did not wait for the fear to go away, but showed courage to press the send button anyway.

There are two things that can be done. Neither of them is a system.

The first is learning to laugh at yourself, genuinely, not as a performance. The real thing is the ability to ship something that doesn't land, watch it fail in public, and treat it as data rather than a verdict. This is not a personality trait you either have or don't. It is built by repetition. Every time imperfect work leaves your hands and the world does not end, the nervous system updates its estimate of what is survivable. The self-doubt doesn't disappear, but it loses its veto. 

The second is doing one specific thing every week that the colour-coded calendar, the Notion dashboard, and the endless optimisation cannot do for you. Post the first chapter if you want to write a book. Make the sales call if you are trying to build a product. Publish the code on Git if you have been polishing it in private. It may not register as data to the part of the brain running the avoidance programme, but what counts is the moment you press the send button, because that's how you will realise the world does not end there. By pressing that button, you take a giant leap of faith to unlock endless possibilities. 

V's book is still in draft. G's brand is still unnamed to the world. But the non-judgmental creators within them are not alienated either. The day they press the button will be the day they announce their arrival.

Seneca wrote long ago that most of life is not lived. It is postponed. He wasn't talking about laziness. He was talking about capable, conscientious people with high standards who built an immaculate system for never quite arriving.

The unlived life is not a metaphor. It is the actual cost for your perfectionist excuse.

Press send to overcome self-sabotage.

For founders and high-achieving professionals who became people pleasers to survive, and now feel trapped in a borrowed life.

All the world's a stage, but we are no longer 'merely players', as Shakeshear would have us believe. The performative and predetermined life in the modern sense is more of a willing compromise rather than 'as destined', defined 2,500 years ago in ancient Athens, when actors, then known as hypokrites, wore hollow wooden masks called prosopa.  Hypokrites just meant the one who answered from behind the face and not as we know the word today  -  hypocrite. The mask then was not hiding the actor, but was the actor. The performance and the person were the same thing. From prosopa came the Latin persona. From persona came personality, personal brand, and personal best. Every word we use to describe ourselves today traces back to a mask somebody wore in a theatre two-and-a-half thousand years ago. But the irony is that today the personality itself has become the mask as we go about 'performing'. I have been performing for as long as I can remember.

From the streets of Kathmandu to sleeping on airport floors, I had learned early that the world rewarded certain versions of me and punished others. Every time I levelled up, the room demanded something more polished, more dependable, more strategic, and the cost of entry was always the same: the mask. I paid it without thinking, because the alternative was 'being left outside'. What I did not see was what I was leaving behind each time. The rugged zero-to-one builder who rolled up his sleeves and figured things out in small rooms with smart people. The one who got lost in problems and forgot to eat when the work was good. That version of me was useful at certain stages and inconvenient at others. The further up I went, the more inconvenient it became. By the time I reached the room I had spent fifteen years trying to enter, I was not sure the person who had wanted it so badly was still there.

I was dying in the thing I was incredibly good at.

Psychotherapist Pete Walker spent decades studying how people survive environments where their authentic self is not safe, and what he found was that the least discussed of the four threat responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) is the one that gets you promoted. The fawn response is the nervous system's strategy of choice when you grew up in an environment where pleasing the powerful person was the cheapest path to survival. You learn to scan their face, micro-adjust, and disappear into accommodation. The threat passes. You live another day. Then you grow up, walk into your first office, and the fawn circuit lights up, and the boss says, " We love how you handle people."

It starts earlier than that, though. A father decides what success looks like, and to be loved at home, you perform the version he can recognise. I remember the first time I brought home marks my father did not find impressive. The silence at dinner that night was its own instruction. I learned, without being told, which version of me was welcome in that house. Then a teacher decided what intelligence meant. Then a boss decided what leadership looked like. Then, in seven minutes, an investor decided whether you were the kind of founder worth backing. Each one handed you a script, and you took it. You took it because you were afraid. Afraid of the silence at dinner. Afraid of the follow-up question that never came. Afraid of being left outside the room.

Reshma Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code and ran for US Congress against an incumbent before most people had heard her name, admitted to having built her entire life this way. A career that looked from the outside like pure ambition and grit. But what she said about it later was simpler: she had not been brave. She had been afraid. She was not climbing toward something she wanted, but was running from the terror of disapproval. The mask had been so good at its job for so long that she had stopped knowing the difference between the mask and the face.

Psychologist Robert Kegan found that seventy per cent of adults never write their own story. They borrow one from a father, a mentor, a boss, a friend, and live inside it without knowing it is borrowed. Surrounded by people doing the same thing, it almost becomes impossible to distinguish the borrowed life from a well-lived one. It looks like a great life. But it just is not yours.

The cost nobody names

This pattern does not hit everyone equally. It strikes hardest at the people who started from humble circumstances and clawed their way up through achievement and sheer will. I know this from the inside. I grew up understanding that the version of me that got to stay was the version that performed. My childhood taught me that safety depends on competence, that love is conditional on success, and that your value is measured by what you produce.

So when I walked into the professional world, it rewarded everything I had already learned: work hard, be reliable, do not make waves, always have your act together. It felt like confirmation. The workplace became an echo chamber for the survival patterns I had built as a child. And the fear keeping me in the chameleon suit was never irrational. It was based on real observation. I had seen what happened to people who stood out too much, who took risks and lost, who spoke up and were cut down.

What I could not see from inside the suit was that the environment had changed. The risk that was real at fifteen was imaginary at thirty. I was no longer in that room, and yet  I kept dressing for it. Ironically, the fawn response is the only one of the four threat responses that gets you a bonus. Fight back, and you are labeled difficult. Run away, and you are called uncommitted. Freeze, and you get managed out. But fawn: scan the room, adjust, accommodate, make everyone feel heard. They call it emotional intelligence and put it on your performance review. The thing that is quietly hollowing you out is the thing they keep promoting you for.

And the real cost of that success is loss of agency, when someone else decides for you what is good or bad for you. When someone else decides what matters, what is worth your time, what you should feel proud of, and what you should feel afraid of. You have outsourced yourself so completely, for so long, that you no longer notice the transaction happening. That is what sovereignty means. Not independence, not quitting your job. It is the signal that tells you that what matters in your life should come from inside, not from reading someone else's face.

You know your agency is gone when you stop feeling joy,  not suddenly but gradually. Where joy used to arrive, relief shows up instead. Peace feels wrong, stillness feels like something is missing. So you find a problem to solve, a risk to manage, a conversation to have. It is not out of necessity, but because struggle is the only state that feels like you. I ran this pattern for fifteen years and called it drive.

Coming back to Junoon

I have been building again for the last several months. Twenty hours a week. Just me and a laptop. No investors to manage. No board. No performance review. No room to read and no approval to earn. I am happier than I have been in years.

My previous identity is gone. The fame is gone. The proximity to power is gone. What I have is me, my laptop, and 'junoon".  I feel seventeen again. Not nostalgically. Actually. The watcher who has been on my shoulder since fifth grade has gone quiet. The voice that calculates how this will look, who will be pleased, what the room will think, has nothing to scan for. There is no audience. There is only work and me.

That feeling is the signal home. You know the feeling I am describing. You have felt it. Maybe in the early days of building something, before the investors arrived. Maybe in a side project you never told anyone about. Maybe just once, on a Sunday morning, doing something nobody asked you to do, forgetting for an hour that there was a room to read at all. That was not a distraction. That was you. You have been gone a long time.

The Gentle Return

I met a VC recently. Sharp, well-networked, and one of the most respected people in every room he walks into. We were having coffee, and somewhere in the second hour, he said something I have not been able to stop thinking about. He said he did not know who he was outside his work. He has spent twenty years building a career anyone would envy. He is also, in the most precise sense of the word, lost. He traded authenticity for approval so long ago that the trade no longer feels like a trade. It just feels like him. I did not say anything as I recognised the feeling too well to offer advice.

Here I am writing this for him, and for everyone who recognised themselves somewhere in this write-up and felt the particular discomfort of being seen. You do not have to burn it down. You do not have to quit, give back the capital, or disappear to an ashram. You just have to notice. Notice the borrowed parts. The decisions that were not yours. The ambitions inherited from others. Notice them without shame. They served you. The script kept you safe, got you into the room, earned you money, and bought you time. So honour it. And then put it down gently, the way you put down something that has served you well. Then notice the alive parts. The hour when the watcher went quiet. The thing you do for no return. The project you keep coming back to when nobody is looking. Start choosing those parts more often. A little more this month. A little more next month. The borrowed life will not collapse because you started listening to yourself. It will just slowly stop being the only life you know.

Give yourself grace here. A lot of grace. Because putting down the borrowed identity means putting down the approval it bought you, and that loss is real before it is freedom. You will flinch. The flinch is not a weakness. The flinch is thirty years of survival instinct working exactly as designed. Feel it. And then choose anyway.

Your worth was never your output. It was never the room's approval. It was always the thing underneath. The fire that needed no audience. The version of you that knew what it wanted before anyone told it which wants were worth having. That version has been waiting. Stop performing to be living a life.

You have your own permission to be authentic.

I chose to do so. Now it is your turn.

For a majority of us, life is something that happens to us, not something we choose. That's common knowledge, but there's an irony to it. Unlike The Matrix, we humans, not machines, have created a simulated world for ourselves, and are living it too, believing what happens to us is what we chose. 

I was reminded of this, sitting at Bokka Coffee one morning, clouding my life away in gym clothes, when the man next to me leaned over and asked what I was 'building'. He assumed gym clothes meant gym brain. He was wrong, but curious. So we got talking. I told him about my tryst with yoga, the motorcycle year, and the writing. He runs a software services company. By every measure, he is successful. But his face said something different. He wants something more. He wants to build with AI this time, to feel again the thing that made him start a company in the first place. Instead, he has client meetings - to sustain a business that works and a life that doesn't quite. 

I asked him if building again would settle things. He didn't have a clean answer. What he had was a laugh, a little tired around the edges, and this: he envied me for showing the courage to live my life. He said he couldn't imagine walking around Bombay in gym clothes. I told him I couldn't imagine going back to a formal shirt. We were joking. But we weren't.

Here is what I took from that conversation: the more successful you become, the harder it is to leave. Not because there's comfort around, but because we confuse success with life itself.

I know that confusion from the inside. By the time CreditVidya was acquired by CRED, I had stopped being a person who ran a company. I had become it. The exit should have felt like an arrival. Instead, I sat in a coffee shop in Bangalore feeling like a failure, scanning the horizon for the next thing that might tell me who I was. It took me a year on a motorcycle and a lot of silence to understand that the self I was looking for was never going to be found in a milestone. This essay is my explanation to my coffee shop friend.

Sachin Tendulkar picked up a cricket bat at 7, and something in him recognised itself. But for the majority of us, a series of reasonable decisions, each one sensible in isolation, add up over the years to a life we didn't quite choose. Physician and author Gabor Maté puts it plainly: when a child must choose between attachment and authenticity, attachment wins every time. You cannot fire your parents. You cannot quit your origin. So before you know what you want, you learn to fit in. And then it compounds. You grow up and take the job that makes sense. You pile up promotions, recognitions, and responsibilities. That pile, built achievement by achievement, then stops being a record of what you did and becomes the answer to who you are.

I watched this happen to me, and I could not stop it. The slow, invisible merger of the self with the output happens until you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. At that point, you don't feel achievements anymore. You are the achievement. And the moment that happens, quitting stops being a career decision. It becomes self-erasure. Which is why the most successful people are often the most trapped. The suit fits best the founder who has won, and it tightens, almost imperceptibly, with every milestone year after year until you forget there was another version of you as well.

The Cost of the False Self

At some point  - and you probably can't remember exactly when - you stop asking what you want and start asking what is expected. You make one adjustment. Then another. Then the adjustments became the self.

Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott had a name for this. He called it the False Self, which is not a fake self, but a functional one -  built early to manage the world's expectations so that you could fit in. As Maté observed, we choose attachment every single time. So you trade your authenticity for the right to stay in the room, and then you stay so long you forget having made a compromise.

Author Min Jin Lee arrived in the United States from Korea as a seven-year-old. She did what the immigrant arithmetic demanded: Georgetown Law, then a commercial firm in New York, then a work schedule that translated to roughly a hundred hours a week. Two years in, she was sitting in a partner's office when he handed her another massive file. Her body, by then, had been sending invoices for months: a severe liver disease, exacerbated by malnutrition and the sustained physiology of a life performed on schedule. She heard herself say: I quit. I can't do this anymore.

Career satisfaction, according to Clark, Oswald and Warr's research across decades and countries, follows a U-shaped curve: it falls steadily from early career and hits its lowest point in the mid-forties to mid-fifties. Exactly when the suit fits best. Exactly when the income is highest. Exactly when the cost of leaving feels most unacceptable. What most people don't see is that the False Self extracts a physical price. The chronic stress of performing a life you didn't choose doesn't stay in the mind. It moves into the body. For Min Jin Lee it was a severe liver disease. For me, it was a slipped disc. Then a stroke. But the deeper cost is harder to name than a diagnosis. It is the life unlived. My friend at Bokka carried it on his face without knowing it. He had hit every marker anyone had ever given him. What he couldn't articulate yet was his own.

Maybe Luck. Maybe Adversity

Ken Jeong spent seven years as a practicing physician while moonlighting in comedy clubs at night. The career satisfied every external metric of a life well lived. His family had prayed for a doctor. He had become one. He stayed the way most people stay: not by deciding to, but by not deciding not to. What broke the fusion was not ambition. It was his wife's cancer diagnosis. Her mortality made his own invisible goal suddenly visible. The risk he had spent years avoiding -  leaving medicine, looking foolish, becoming a beginner at forty -  looked, in the clean bright light of her illness, like nothing at all.

But you don't always need a crisis. Sometimes the suit just slips in an ordinary moment, and you catch a glimpse of what is underneath.

Ali Abdaal spent years as a Cambridge-trained NHS doctor while building one of the world's most successful YouTube channels on the side. He told himself the channel was a hobby, that the degree was the real thing, that leaving would be irresponsible. Then one day on a hospital ward, a patient ignored the senior consultant and looked directly at Abdaal - recognising him from YouTube. The cover story collapsed in a corridor. What he realised, later, was not just that his impact had moved. It was that his identity had been split in two for years, and the cost of maintaining both halves was being paid somewhere he couldn't see on a spreadsheet.

He contacted the UK General Medical Council and formally requested that his medical license be withdrawn. He didn't just leave medicine. He burned the return ticket as well. He understood what research confirms: the False Self does not release you gradually. You have to name it and act.

You can wait for serendipity. You can wait for adversity to force your hand the way it forced Ken Jeong's. Or you can decide - before the diagnosis, before the crisis, before the body sends the invoice - that the cost of not living your own life is already too high.

So, before the motorcycle, before the yoga, before I found the courage to build a life I actually chose, I did this. You may try as well.

One Experiment. Three Questions

For one day this weekend, wear your oldest, most ordinary clothes. Not the shirt that does the speaking for you. Go to a coffee shop. Walk around your neighbourhood. Notice how people treat you and how you feel about it.

That feeling - somewhere between being exposed and grounded - is information. It is showing you how much of who you are has been borrowed from what you own and what your business card says. It is showing you what remains when you take it away.

Now sit with these three questions.

The first: What is the number? The exact amount - the salary, the valuation, the savings - that would finally make you feel safe enough to try something different. Write it down. Then ask yourself why the number you already have has not made you feel that way. Because it hasn't. That's why you're reading this.

The second: The next time you say yes to something this week  - a meeting, a project - stop for one moment. Notice what arrives in your body. Is it relief? Or is it emptiness? Relief means you chose it. Emptiness means the suit chose it for you.

The third: Who gave you this goal? Not the company goal. This one. The life you are living right now. Name the person, or the moment, or the fear that handed it to you. Because if you can name who gave it to you, you can finally ask whether you ever actually chose it for yourself.

The Person Who Was Always There

The suit kept you alive. I mean it without irony. It was the right tool for a specific moment: the credential that got you in the door, the discipline that built the company, the reliability that earned the trust. Honour it for that. It did its job.

But there is a difference between a tool and an identity. And at some point - only you know when - the tool stops serving you and starts running you.

I think about my friend at Bokka often. The laugh that was a little tired around the edges. The ironed shirt. The life that was happening to him while he sat inside it. He had done everything right. What he hadn't yet done was the hardest thing: decide that the life he was living was a choice he was still making - and that he could make a different one.

Life does not have to happen to you. But the fact remains that the more successful you become, the harder it becomes to take off the suit of 'success'. It isn't. You stitched the suit. Which means you can also, slowly and deliberately, alter it.

The person you were before the first pitch deck, before the EMI, before achievement became the answer to every question about who you are - that person didn't disappear, but is waiting for you to find the courage to ask the question you have been avoiding.

What would you build if you were building it for yourself?

I have been coding day and night, even though I claim never to have been hooked on a technology like this. I was late to Instagram, am still not on Pinterest, and skipped Snapchat entirely. But Claude has taken over my life in a way nothing else has. I have agents running across Claude, Codex, and Perplexity overnight while I sleep, and by morning there is a working prototype waiting for me that would have taken a quarter to build at CreditVidya. As a one-man army, I am shipping more than I did with a product manager and four engineers. The speed is real, and it is something I would not trade. But, it is also the fastest road to the oldest trap I know.

The trap is the shifting goalpost we set ourselves each time we think of a new pivot. And Clauddiction has made us even more susceptible to the trap, with the ease of trying out a new idea acting as a perfect bait. I hadn't realised it until late March this year, when I felt something familiar. The shine of my current product had faded, and the next idea, the one I hadn't started yet, was glowing at the edges of my attention with a warmth the current project no longer had. As my fingers moved to open a new terminal, I recognised the feeling with a clarity that stopped me mid-keystroke. This was not new. I had done this before, and I had done this to people.

When Sanjib, our head of data science, posted his tenth work anniversary on LinkedIn, his former teammates left a note under the photo: "10 years. 1 company. Infinite pivots." I'm sure they meant it as a badge of honour, but it landed in my chest like a confession. 

First at CreditVidya and then at Prefr, we pivoted through everything. Credit education. Financial fitness reports. Score improvement. The ScoreUp app. Fraud verification. Alternative data credit scoring. B2B Pay Later. Lending-as-a-service. Each new direction required the team to abandon what they'd built, reload a new mental model, and commit again with the same intensity, knowing, though nobody said it, that the next shift was already forming in my head.

Last week, I wrote about the rider and the elephant, the rational mind and the instinctual body. The rider promises the elephant a reward for its effort. Ek baar yeh ho jaaye, bus life set. But instead of delivering, the rider changes the goal. The elephant learns that effort never leads to reward, and the broken pact between them leads to emptiness, exhaustion, and a hollowness that no achievement can fill. That essay was about what the broken pact does to one person. The rider, though, never stops at one person.

When you run a team, you become the rider for a much larger animal, the humans who load the priority you set and allocate themselves toward the outcome it promises. They are spending their elephant on you. They believe, when they start a project, that there is a reward at the end: a launch, a result, a number that will move, a resolution that lets them feel for one clean day that they pulled something off. That belief is the engine that keeps your startup running. The pact you have with them is the same pact your rider has with your elephant. Effort, in exchange for the reward that was promised. Not money. Not even praise, exactly. Closure. The knowledge that their work had meaning.

And every time you move the goalpost, you break the pact.

I have seen what that looks like at scale. Seven hundred people in a townhall. I am on stage announcing that we are shifting gears - a new direction, new priorities, new everything. Not everyone speaks up, but if you watch carefully, you can read the room through small gestures: a drop in posture, wandering eyes, the specific look of someone who has decided not to invest the part of themselves that actually matters. They still show up, still hit their metrics, but the ownership, the creative risk, the willingness to build something that might matter - all of that leaves without announcement..

The Goalpost Factory

This is what clauddiction does when it scales. The solo founder's restlessness multiplied across a team becomes an organisational condition. What felt like creative energy in a single builder becomes, at twenty people, a culture of bracing.

In June 2021, sixty-one former employees of BrewDog signed an open letter that detailed what it felt like to work for a man who could not stop changing his mind. They called themselves Punks With Purpose, a small revenge against the brand's branding. Most of the letter was the usual catalogue of a hard culture: the long hours, the broken promises, the missing development. But the most telling line was about the daily emergencies. Staff had learned to brace each morning for a new pivot, a fresh "everything has changed" announcement from co-founder James Watt, sending the team scrambling in a new direction on a whim. The team did not call this leadership. But James Watt thought it was agility.

A friend of mine is living a quieter version of the same story. She builds premium footwear, think the Birkenstock of India. Real product, real traction, a brand people love. But every time we speak, there is a new initiative: an affordable label for a younger segment, a physical store, an Amazon channel, a collaboration targeting a different audience. Each move has a business case, and each one is smart in isolation, but with every new direction, the previous one gets deprioritised, which is a polite word for 'abandoned while still technically alive'.

She is not careless. She is ambitious. And underneath, she is running a goalpost factory. James Watt ran his at a daily speed, and sixty-one people wrote a letter. I ran mine, pushing my team through pivot after pivot for seven years. Today, I know countless entrepreneurs, clauddictors, running the same factory at machine speed, alone in a room with AI, because we have lost the ability to tolerate stillness.

When Pivoting Is Right

I need to defend the pivot because some of them saved my company. The lending pivot during COVID was not my nervous system talking. The B2B SaaS model had a structural ceiling visible in the numbers. The market was sending a real signal, and that pivot led to the CRED acquisition. The founder who cannot change direction dies. I believe that completely.

The problem is that the pivot your market demands and the pivot your nervous system demands look identical from the inside. Both feel urgent. Both come with a business case you can defend. You can wear "strategic agility" the way I used to wear "I'm just very driven." But if your nervous system cannot tolerate stillness, then most of your reprioritisations are signals wearing market clothes. The market would have been fine with the priority you set last week. It's just that you couldn't sit with it.

Most of what we disguise as productivity is movement without depth. Real work happens when you sit with something long enough to find the layers underneath the surface. The entrepreneurs who build things that last are not the fastest ones. They are the ones who stay longest.

The Smallest Honest Move

UC Berkeley researchers found that when goals shift rapidly, the brain only partially adjusts to each new goal state, a phenomenon they call "control adjustment cost." The reduction is 15 to 25 per cent of cognitive capacity per switch, not from fatigue but from the switching itself, as the brain attempts to run two incomplete programmes simultaneously, with neither getting full resources. You build faster but think thinner. Four prototypes sound like output, but each one consumed the cognitive depth that the others needed.

Goodall's Change Volume Framework asks one question: what works well here, and what should we protect? Then it asks the leader to count how many goals have shifted in the last thirty, sixty, ninety days. And finally, to separate change doing something different from making something better. Once the change volume is a number, you can no longer mistake it for strategy. For me, that question becomes personal: how many things have I started in the last thirty days, and for each one, can I name the signal that triggered it, or was I running from the work that staying would require?

Leslie Perlow at Harvard found that banning interruptions during specific hours raised productivity 59 per cent in the morning and 65 per cent in the afternoon. What the intervention did was structural: it removed the leader's ability to inject false urgency into the team's working hours, building a fence around cognitive flow rather than trying to change the leader's instincts. 

My own answer lives in two rituals. Every morning, a distraction-free hour before any screen, writing down what has worked and what hasn't. Every Sunday, two questions: if I tracked every priority change I made this quarter and showed it to my team, would they describe what I'm doing as leadership or as whiplash? For each goal shift in the last thirty days, can I name the external signal that triggered it, or was it my own restlessness?

Entrepreneurship Is in Staying

Sanjib stayed ten years. He saw every pivot. What his note didn't say - what nobody says out loud - is that infinite pivots is the opposite of what great work requires.

The best founders I know think like artists. They plan obsessively before the first line of code, before the first sample, before the first conversation with Claude. They treat the blank canvas as a decision that deserves weight. And once they start, they go deep, through the obvious layer, through the second layer, into the third, where the thing starts to reveal what it actually is. That is where the magic lives - in the staying.

The rider wants to start again. The artist knows that the work starts only after you have sat with it long enough to peel away what it isn't.

The Deliberate Pause, the name of this series, the thing I am still learning, is not a rest between sprints. It is the gap the rider refuses to enter: between the idea and the build, between the build and the judgment, between the judgment and the abandonment. That gap is not a weakness. That gap is where everything real gets made.

I have a Superman cape. The question is whether I am building art or running from stillness.

Wellness advocate Rich Roll spent years walking the halls of his law firm, feeling a constant, low-level confusion. It wasn't about the work - he was good at it. What puzzled him was that while others seemed to genuinely enjoy it, he could not say the same for himself. Still, he kept going. He had once been a world-ranked swimmer at Stanford, but by age 40, he couldn't climb the stairs in his own house. What happened in between is the story I want to tell. But before that, I need to admit that my story is no different.

Six months after CreditVidya was acquired by CRED, I sat in a Bangalore coffee shop across from someone who asked what I would build next. It was a fair question. I had options, capital, and reputation. But suddenly, and oddly, I didn't have an answer. It wasn't that I didn't know what to say, but something inside me had gone quiet in a way I had never felt before.

That quiet is what this essay is about.

For a decade, I kept telling myself the reward for my hard work was just around the corner. Ek baar MBA ho jaaye, bus life set. Ek baar acquisition ho jaaye, bus life set. The MBA happened. The acquisition happened. But the feeling I was promised never came.

The Rider and the Elephant

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses a metaphor in The Happiness Hypothesis: the rider and the elephant. The rational mind is the rider, and the instinctual body is the elephant. They have a pact: the rider can ask the elephant to do extraordinary things, but only if the rider eventually gives the elephant the reward it was promised. The problem is that the rider and the elephant don't want the same things.

The rider wants prestige. Titles, bonuses, board seats, the things you can screenshot and post. The elephant wants meaning. Autonomy, rest, and the felt sense that the work matters. The unlisted, illegible things that have no market price and can't be screenshotted.

During those early years of hard work, the elephant agreed to everything the rider asked. Sleeping on airport floors, living on bread and water, and carrying the weight - the elephant said yes to all of it. It agreed because the rider promised: ek baar yeh ho jaaye, then you get what you actually want.

Your struggle was probably different from mine; maybe you fought against your parents' wishes, maybe you came from privilege and had different battles, but the mechanism is the same.

The elephant believed the promise. It worked double shifts and pushed through the suffering. But then, instead of delivering on its promise, the rider looked up and asked, "So what's next?"

That's when the elephant realised it had been lied to, though not maliciously. The rider (through no fault of its own) believed its own script. The rider had been told by parents, professors and every successful person that true happiness lies in the next milestone. Ek baar shadi ho jaaye. Ek baar Series A ho jaaye. Ek baar unicorn ho jaaye.

The script always has one more step. The script never said *ab bas karo, enough.*

The Only Tool You Had

I want to be careful here because grit is not the villain in this essay. In fact, grit is why I'm writing it. The week I lived on bread and water wasn't a tragedy. Sleeping on airport floors got me my first job in NYC. Carrying impossible expectations got me to the States and into UCLA. Building a company with limited capital led to a successful exit. The tool worked, every single time.

Your relationship to your own suffering is probably set to whatever level of resourcefulness you had the first time you encountered serious pressure. For most high performers I know, that was somewhere between ages 12 and 22. You've been using the same tool ever since. We call it ambition, drive, hunger, and raising the bar. We use these words because they sound like virtues, because they built everything you have. The problem is that no one teaches you when to stop using it.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter spent 30 years documenting something that Deci and Ryan formalised into Self-Determination Theory: misalignment of values predicts the emotional exhaustion of burnout independently of workload. You can work 30 hours a week and still be burned out if those 30 hours feed the wrong appetite. That's what breaks the pact between the rider and the elephant. The elephant can handle the stress, but not the realisation that its years of effort were paid in a currency it never wanted.

The strength that helps you push through suffering also lets you ignore why you're suffering.  Roll didn't realise it when he crossed the line. He kept using the pain tolerance he built as a Stanford swimmer to get through the misery of his desk job. He drank, used substances, and gained weight. By age 40, he was defeated by the staircase in his own house - a man who had swum at the highest level, now unable to climb to his second floor without stopping.

I didn't know either. My body had already sent warnings I ignored for years: a slipped disc, a stroke, all in my twenties. The WHO says working 55 hours a week raises stroke risk by 35% above baseline. I had been working over 80 hours a week for a decade, and the grit that kept me going was also causing me damage because the elephant eventually figured out the script had no ending.

The Wrong Water

It is true that for some people, the rider and the elephant may be in sync, and this whole narrative may feel like an exaggeration.  But for those who didn't feel the exit the way you expected, or if the bonus wasn't satisfying enough, let me show you what the trap really looks like.

Imagine a man on a raft in the Pacific, surrounded by more water than he could drink in a thousand lifetimes, yet dying of thirst. Eventually, his thirst wins. He cups his hands and drinks. But seawater takes more fluid from his cells than it gives back. He gets thirstier, drinks more, and becomes even thirstier. Salt starts killing him from inside, even though it looks like survival from the outside. The wrong liquid and the right liquid are made of the same molecules. Only one of them keeps you alive. This is the trap. The reward looks almost the same as what you truly need. It comes with applause and, for a moment, feels right. But then the feeling fades, and you're even thirstier than before, with only the same tool that made you thirsty in the first place.

The Loop

The misalignment isn't a one-time mistake; it's a loop. The reward arrives, but the elephant remains unsatisfied. Instead of looking into why, which would mean sitting still and feeling something, the rider prescribes more of the same solution, just at a higher dose.

Kahneman and Deaton found that emotional well-being levels off at about $75,000 in household income. Beyond that, daily life doesn't really improve with more money. But the rider's ledger - the way we measure our lives - keeps building up with income. The rider keeps pushing for the next raise, even as the elephant grows quieter. By now, the elephant has mostly stopped sending signals.

This is why someone can get a seven-figure bonus and still feel cheated that it wasn't bigger. They aren't lying when they say the bonus made them happy - they're just talking about the rider's ledger, not the elephant's. I know this loop. I lived it for seven years.

The higher the compensation, the tighter the golden handcuffs become. The cost of leaving keeps growing. The rider needs to believe that this version of the role, this year, or this deal will finally deliver the reward the elephant was promised.

The Third Lever

B.K.S. Iyengar spent sixty years teaching people how to stand in Tadasana, or mountain pose. To most people, it just looks like standing still. But what he was really teaching was alignment: feet rooted, knees over ankles, pelvis neutral, spine long. When you're aligned, you can hold the pose for an hour and feel lighter at the end than when you started. If you're misaligned, five minutes can ruin your lower back.

Iyengar's main lesson, repeated in all his writings, is that effort without alignment leads to injury. The harder you push in a misaligned pose, the more you hurt yourself. Students who came to him in pain were rarely lazy - they were just trying too hard in the wrong way.

I spent two decades convinced there were only two levers: discipline and rest. Push harder, or recover more. If you're exhausted, the problem must be one of those two dials. Turn one up. Turn the other down. Try again.

There's a third lever, but no one taught us its name.

The reason for the exhaustion, the emptiness, the hollowness: it is not that you didn't work hard enough. It is not that you didn't rest enough. It is not that the rider shouldn't have made the promise. The rider was doing its job. The elephant was doing its job. Both were running exactly the programme they were trained to run.

The answer was never to grip harder or to put in less effort. The answer was alignment - to find the adjustment that lets the same effort create depth instead of damage. Aligned effort compounds. Misaligned effort accumulates.

A 2018 BetterUp survey found that nine out of ten workers would trade part of their income for more meaningful work, on average, twenty-three per cent of their future earnings. People already know their rider is spending in the wrong currency. What they don't know is how to stop.

What the Work Is For

The way out does not begin with quitting. It does not begin with a sabbatical. It begins, according to Tasha Eurich's self-awareness research, with something so unglamorous it sounds like a joke: an audit. Twenty minutes, this week, with a piece of paper and a pen. List every decision in your work. Mark each one A (you actually control this), B (you appear to control this, but in practice the system makes the decision for you), or C (someone else controls this and you have been pretending otherwise).

The list will reveal that the autonomy you have been telling the elephant you possess is mostly fictional - the thing the elephant has been complaining about all along. The audit will not ask you to work less. It will not ask you to want less. It will just point out the missing entry in the balance sheet. 

Naming that gap doesn't fix everything by itself. But it is the first honest sip of fresh water - the first thing in a long time that the elephant recognises as the right liquid.

For a time, Andre Agassi was the best tennis player in the world. He also hated tennis - not just in the tired way athletes sometimes mention, but deep down. "I play tennis for a living," he wrote, "even though I hate tennis."  He didn't quit. Instead, he built a school for children in Las Vegas and decided tennis was just the vehicle, not the destination. The sport stopped being the reward and became the way to create a reward that the elephant could accept.

In 1998, John Wood was Microsoft's Director of Business Development for Greater China, leading the company's fastest-growing product. During a trekking holiday in Nepal, he visited a village school with almost no books. Reflecting on his life, he described it in a sentence I'll never forget: I had adopted the commando lifestyle of a corporate warrior. Vacation was for people who were soft. That's the rider's voice, captured perfectly. Wood left Microsoft and started Room to Read, which now operates in ten countries, has opened thousands of libraries, and has put books in the hands of millions of children.

Agassi stayed in the pose and changed what it was for. Wood left the pose entirely and built a new one. Both are vertical moves. Neither is the same as quitting.

My own solution is still a work in progress. I'm trying what I call a portfolio life: some days I write, some days I advise founders, some days I teach, and some days I do nothing at all - which is still the hardest part. The common thread is that I'm trying, imperfectly, to pay my elephant in its own currency, bit by bit, while the rider learns a new language.

It isn't going smoothly. Old habits keep coming back - the urge to scale, to monetise, to turn quiet moments into metrics. Every week, I notice the rider trying to take over the practice. Every week, I start again.

The Pose You're Actually In

To arrive at a balanced pose, the rider has to come down to the elephant's level and listen. The elephant has to trust that the listening is genuine. Together, slowly and imperfectly, they have to build a new chemistry - one that the body can actually sustain.

No book or essay can teach you that. But the audit takes just twenty minutes, and the alignment that follows can last a lifetime. It is not glamorous, but it is the only arrangement I know of that does not leave you thirstier than you started.

Choose your audit words wisely, for if years were letters, the average human lifespan would not be longer than this sentence.

Rajat Agarwal is the kindest investor I have ever worked with. He is also my closest friend, and in our years together, he taught me a lesson that has made me a better founder and a better colleague. But I regret what I did to him. First, let me tell you how I got there.

For years, I lived my life angry. Angry at myself when I fell short of my own unrealistic expectations. Angry at others when they fell short of the unrealistic expectations I'd placed on them. Most of my CreditVidya family would attest to this, though I've improved over time. It was actually not anger, but disappointment. At that time, I couldn't tell the difference. And I can bet, neither can you differentiate yours. Marc Brackett at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence found that 95% of people cannot accurately differentiate between anger and disappointment. Nearly all of us are misreading our own signals, treating disappointment - which is quiet, vulnerable, and aimed inward - as anger, which is loud, protective, and aimed at whoever is standing closest.

Mere paas 'anger' hai

Amitabh Bachchan was the first superstar who gave this anger a hero's costume. Vijay in Deewar, the mill worker's son who turns his wound into a weapon. Vijay in Zanjeer, the cop who fights a system designed to crush him. An entire generation of Indian men and women watched these films and learned that anger served a purpose. If you grew up middle-class in India, anger made sense. You were angry at the system, at the injustice, at the gap between how hard you worked and what the world gave back. Anger wasn't a flaw. It was fuel. I carried that lesson into CreditVidya like a founding principle, proud of my intensity, wearing my impatience as proof that I cared more than anyone else in the room.

Then Sravan Samala joined the leadership team. IIM Ahmedabad, same fire, twice the volume. He'd walk into meetings charged, voice sharp, and for the first time I saw the performance from the outside. It didn't look like strength. He looked like a man who couldn't sit with his own pain, so he made everyone around him carry it instead.

I saw in him a mirror to look at myself.

What I did to Rajat

This story still haunts me because I hurt the one man I genuinely believed had my back.

It was a monthly catch-up during a fundraiser at one of the fancy hotels in Bangalore. Rajat, his partner Vikram, and me. I'd been fighting a battle with SBI, an enterprise deal that would have changed our trajectory. The sticking point was technical: they wanted us on their premises, which meant IBM contractors would have access to our source code. I couldn't agree to that, and SBI wouldn't budge. I was confident I'd resolve it before the investor update, but I couldn't. We were in the middle of the fundraiser, and I'd just lost a big one.

Rajat asked how the meeting went. I don't remember what he said next. My body had already decided this was a fight. The heat climbed through my chest, my voice went sharp, and I said things I didn't mean. I watched his face change: the slight pull back, the careful pause, the moment a kind man decides it's safer to stop being honest with you.

I regret it to this day.

What I couldn't see then was that I wasn't angry at Rajat. I was disappointed with myself. The SBI deal falling apart had cracked the machine I'd built over the years, the one that closed deals and earned respect through output. When Rajat stood in front of me, my brain didn't hear a friend. It heard a witness to my failure, so it turned my disappointment into aggression and aimed it at the person standing closest.

Shame in, blame out

Psychologist Helen Block Lewis gave this a clinical name in 1971: humiliated fury. When a threat lands on your identity - on your sense of who you are - shame fires before you're aware of it. And because shame is unbearable for someone whose worth is fused to their output, the brain runs a conversion: shame in, blame out.

For someone whose worth is contingent on flawless execution, sitting with disappointment is like sitting with a death sentence. You didn't choose this belief. Your parents chose it, or your school chose it, or your first boss chose it. Or growing up in a house where love was conditional, the report cards chose it. The belief was installed before you had the language to question it, and now your brain, to protect its self-image, will decide with absolute certainty that the other person is the problem.

David Chang built Momofuku from a tiny noodle bar into a Michelin-starred empire. One day at Momofuku Seiōbo in Sydney, a hotel maintenance man was whistling near the kitchen. Chang screamed at him and threatened him with a knife, all because of a whistle. His brain turned the sound into evidence of carelessness, carelessness into evidence of declining standards, and declining standards into proof that his empire was built on sand. He later wrote that the slightest error from a cook could turn him into "a convulsing, raging mass," and that the only thing that snapped him out of it was punching a wall.

Nir Eyal, the habit design expert, stayed up until one in the morning calling florists across multiple countries, comparing reviews, checking whether delivery vans were temperature-controlled. The flowers were for his mother. When they arrived half-dead, and she mentioned it, he snapped at her. Five seconds is all it took for his brain to swap out the disappointment, replace it with rage, and aim it at the person he was trying to impress. The person the entire operation was designed to delight became the target of the shame it was designed to prevent.

Jerry Colonna was a venture capitalist, one of the best. He rose from childhood poverty to the top of the tech industry with the same relentless drive, the same conditional worth, and the same conversion: when co-founder dynamics or market uncertainty threatened his sense of control, he would bite the hook of anger to maintain power. He used fury to mask a fear of financial ruin rooted in his youth, and the anger gave him a fleeting high while it drained everything else. Years later he named what he'd been doing: "My biggest regrets tend to be around the things I've done or said that hurt people. And in looking back, they were always rooted in the poor handling of my own fears." The fear was the real emotion. The anger was just the costume it wore.

A chef, a venture capitalist, a behavioural scientist. Three people who built their lives on the belief that their worth was their output and their brain ran the same conversion: disappointment in, blame out.

We convert our disappointment with ourselves into anger against others, often towards the people closest to us. They're the mirrors nearest to our face, and the closer the mirror, the harder it is to see past your own reflection.

The bar was never the problem

Here is the part that high achievers find most difficult to accept: the belief that makes you excellent ("my standards are what got me here") and the belief that makes you destructive ("any failure proves I am insufficient") are not two beliefs. They are the same, experienced from two angles. You cannot selectively keep the strength and discard the shadow because they share a single root.

My drive built everything. First in my family to graduate, carrying the family out of scarcity and into safety, and finally, CreditVidya. All this needed discipline, obsessive preparation, and refusal to accept mediocrity. But I didn't stop there. I didn't stop closing deals after Rajat, Chang didn't stop chasing Michelin stars after the whistling incident, and Colonna didn't stop investing after the boardroom rage. The bar stayed high because the bar was never the problem.

Perfectionism and high standards are not the same thing. Patrick Gaudreau calls alternative excellencism the pursuit of excellence without identity contingency. Kristin Neff's research showed self-compassion made perfectionists calmer, more motivated, and effective because they stopped wasting energy on redirected it toward their work.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor found that the physiological lifespan of an emotional reaction is approximately 90 seconds. Every hour spent replaying the anger, rehearsing the prosecution, constructing the airtight case for why the other person was wrong is an hour gone. Every minute past the first minute-and-a-half is a minute you are voluntarily giving to a story your brain invented to protect you from a feeling you were too afraid to feel.

The only exit is to change your relationship to the belief itself, to treat it as a tool that is useful in context and swappable when it stops serving you, rather than a truth fused with your identity. You don't need a lower bar. You need to survive 90 seconds of discomfort before your brain turns your disappointment into someone else's fault.

The yoga tradition has a word for the fusion that makes this so hard. 'Asmita': the ego's collapse of the self into its roles and outputs. Patanjali lists it as the second 'klesha', the second root cause of suffering. I'd read that sutra dozens of times and didn't understand it until Rajat's face taught me what it looked like from the outside.

Asmita is what makes a collapsed deal feel like a collapsed self, what makes a suggestion sound like an accusation, what makes a whistle feel like a verdict.

The opposite of 'asmita' isn't low standards. It's 'sakshi': the witness, the part of you that can watch the pain arrive without becoming the pain, that can hold still long enough to ask whether this is about them or about you.

The angry young man grows up

Nir Eyal puts it well: "Beliefs are not truths, they're tools. Just like a carpenter wouldn't say, 'Oh, this is the hammer, it is the only true tool."

The angry young man was a tool. He built everything I have: seven years of CreditVidya, the fundraise, the acquisition, my family's hopes carried across a decade. The problem was never the anger. The problem was that it had been welded to my hand, and I'd been swinging it at everyone who got close enough to see me miss.

The carpenter in me hasn't thrown away the hammer. He has learnt when to pick it up and when to put it down. I have learned to feel it in my grip before I swing. The tightness in the chest, the held breath, the microsecond where the rage is still sharpening into a story about what someone else did wrong. That's the window, and in that window I complete one sentence: "I am disappointed in myself because _."

I've been angry maybe five times in the last two years, and each time I caught the mislabel before it left my mouth. I don't claim to be a better person than I was, but I have finally learned the difference between the emotion and the costume.

I think about Rajat's face sometimes - not what he said, but what he didn't say. The expression when I finished wasn't confusion about the SBI deal. It was the look of someone watching a friend fight a ghost he couldn't see.

He's still my closest friend. He taught me, without ever saying it, that the people who stay after you've shown them your worst are the ones worth learning from.

He knew my outrage was never the real emotion. It was disappointment, and that disappointment was never about him.

People often ask me if I have been happy for as long as I can remember. I remember building CreditVidya, I remember its acquisition by CRED, I remember riding a motorcycle across India for a year, I remember self-discovery in ashrams and highways and long silences sitting between strangers. But I don't remember having an answer to feeling happy, and the reason embarrasses me: I genuinely do not know what happiness feels like. I can recognise relief. I can recognise the absence of a crisis. But happiness as a sensation in my body, something warm and specific that I could point to and say this, right here, this is it: I have no memory of it.

For a long time, I assumed something was broken in me. A defect, a flaw.  It took a decade, a breakdown, and a line of research I wish I'd found years ago to understand what made me think so. Nothing was broken. The system was working exactly as designed. I had built a life so efficient at suppressing pain that it suppressed everything else as well, including happiness.

You can't win the happiness game

A close friend, someone who adores me, once called me rigid in passing. One word in one conversation. She's said hundreds of kind things across months of friendship. I cannot recite a single one. But "rigid"? I can tell you where I was sitting. I can tell you the light in the room. That word moved into my head and never left.

You know this machinery. Thirty-seven compliments dissolve, but one criticism stays. The 'perfectionist' in you treats that one word as the truth, and builds an entire identity around making sure it's never true again. So you work harder. You collect wins. But the wins don't feel like winning. Psychology professor Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the arrival fallacy: the belief that the next milestone will finally make you happy. It never does. You close the round, you land the deal, you ship the product, and what arrives isn't joy. It's just relief. Brief and shallow, before the quiet returns to the question you were trying to outrun.

A sharper mind doesn't protect you from the trap. The smarter you are, the harder you become on yourself. It builds a better mask. And the better the mask, the more your self-worth gets welded to it. Every compliment lands on the image. Every success feeds the persona. The real you, the one behind the performance, gets nothing. Your entire sense of worth now lives inside a version of yourself that isn't you. And you can't take it off, because without it, you don't know who's there.

Therein starts the endless struggle of finite evidence trying to satisfy an infinite demand for worthiness. You set the threshold at infinity early, without knowing what you were doing, and then spent decades believing the next accomplishment would finally clear it. Every success is attributed to the external persona, whereas "You're enough" is filtered through "They don't really know me." Patanjali named this loop 'asmita' twenty-five centuries ago: the confusion of the costume for the face. You don't just wear the competent, polished persona, but start believing you are that persona. Your identity fuses with it. Any threat -  critical feedback, a visible mistake, a moment of uncertainty - registers as annihilation. You don't just fear looking incompetent, but fear ceasing to exist if the next accomplishment does not materialise. With that, the very idea of happiness evaporates because happiness is always in the future.

Be deeply seen

For most of my adult life, I didn't understand that self-worth doesn't get built by accomplishments. It gets built by being seen - fully, without the performance -  and discovering that what's underneath the mask is enough. You can collect wins for decades, but the verdict on happiness won't shift a bit. That's because the verdict was never about what you could do. It was about who you are when you're not doing anything for the mask. And that person, the one behind the facade, has never been tested. You've never let anyone meet him.

This is why approval never converts into belonging. You can be admired from a distance and yet be starved up close. The loop does not produce connection, just validation. Connection requires the one thing the loop is designed to prevent: being seen without the act.

Storyteller Brené Brown spent six years trying to find the variable that separates people who feel a deep connection from people who are constantly grasping for it. She expected complexity: a model, a taxonomy, a set of factors. What she found was disarmingly simple. The people who feel loved believe they are worthy of love. The people who don't feel loved, don't. Brown is worth paying attention to because she lived the identity trap. She built her academic career on measurement and control, using data to "knock discomfort upside the head." When her own research told her to stop controlling and start feeling, she didn't nod wisely. She had a breakdown, spent what she calls a "yearlong street fight" with vulnerability while seeing a therapist, and resisted every finding her own data was producing. She lost the fight. She says it probably saved her life.

And here is the finding from her work, confirmed by Gross and John at Stanford, that rearranged everything I thought I knew about high performance.

You cannot selectively numb emotions.

When you suppress vulnerability, you also suppress shame, fear, joy, and gratitude. Push down the pain of being insufficient, and you push down the warmth of the moments when you are enough as well.

What Brown didn't say, and what took me twenty years to learn: you can't selectively unmask either. Spend ten hours a day performing composure and competence in the office, and the performance doesn't clock out when you leave. It follows you home. It sits across from the people who love you. It answers "how was your day?" with the same curated polish you used in the board meeting. The mask isn't something you put on for work and take off at the door. Wear it long enough, and you lose access to whatever was underneath.

Mard ko dard hota hai

If you grew up male in India, you absorbed five words before you could question them: mard ko dard nahi hota. A real man doesn't feel pain. It sounds like a movie dialogue, but it functions as surgery. It doesn't tell a boy, "don't feel pain." It tells him "don't feel." The playground enforces it. Bollywood celebrates it. The father who doesn't cry at funerals models it. By the time you're a man, you experience "not feeling" as an achievement. You have successfully become what the culture asked you to become: someone who doesn't flinch.

And it follows you into every room you enter as an adult.

You grind harder instead of admitting you're tired. You solve problems instead of saying you're overwhelmed. You don't hold hands. You don't say "I missed you." You don't call the friend back because returning the call would mean explaining how you actually are. You don't actually have the language for that, because the language was taken away from you before you were ten.

When my company was near death, I told no one. When I couldn't make payroll, I sat with it alone. When depression arrived, I carried it silently, because that is what the instruction demanded. A real man handles it. A real man doesn't burden others. A real man figures it out on his own, and if he can't, he fakes it until the crisis passes or his body breaks - whichever comes first. The loneliest thing about it is that nobody around me knew, because the mask was doing exactly what it was designed to do: make the suffering invisible.

This sentence is what I need you to sit with. Not the suffering. The invisibility of it.

Mard ko dard hota hai. A real man does feel pain. He feels it because feeling is the price of being alive, and the alternative is the slow, invisible deletion of every sensation that makes life worth the effort. Including joy. Including love. Including the answer to "Are you happy?"

The Courage to Be Vulnerable

A few months ago, a woman in her twenties said something during a yoga teacher training at Om Sir's shala that I haven't been able to unhear. She told the room she couldn't remember the last time she felt happy. She wasn't depressed. Life wasn't falling apart. She couldn't locate happiness anywhere in her body. Then she said the part that cracked the room open: she felt guilty when it showed up. As though feeling good was a betrayal of the person who had worked so hard to hold everything together.

I kept still. My chest was tight, but my face was composed, because that is what my face had been trained to do for twenty years. I recognised what she was describing, and I recognised it instantly, because it was my biography. But something happened in that room that I didn't understand until I started writing this essay. She said the unsayable thing. And the room held her. Nobody flinched, offered advice, or rushed to fix it. People just listened, and in the listening, something shifted. I felt my own chest loosen. The room wasn't asking anyone to perform. For the first time in years, the persona wasn't required.

Patanjali's Sutra 1.3: 'When the fluctuations are still, the seer abides in its own true nature.' I'd been chasing that sutra through philosophy and discipline and years of practice. But it was waiting for me in a room where a stranger said, "I can't feel happiness."

I don't know if she'll ever read this. But if she does, I want her to know something. That morning, she thought she was confessing a failure. She was describing a condition she believed was hers alone. She had no idea that a man sitting next to her with a composed face and a tight chest, heard his own life in her words.

Our stories are intertwined. Her inability to feel joy and my inability to answer "are you happy?" are the same story, written by the same conditioning, running in two different bodies. She named what I couldn't. And in naming it, in a room where naming it was safe, she opened the door for both of us.

I hope she leaves it open. And I hope I learn, too, that it's all right to feel everything that comes with being human - the fear alongside the warmth, the shame alongside the gratitude. I hope to accept imperfection not as a flaw, but as the very condition that makes us feel alive.

Maybe one day I will have the courage to be happy.

What good is a conversation that never happened? I would say, good enough to make or break a company. I ran a successful fintech company in India called CreditVidya, and can testify that it survived and then thrived on honest conversations.

We had just been through a layoff, and a few senior leaders had already left - the kind of period that strips a company down to the people who actually care and the people who are too afraid to leave, and you can never quite tell which is which. With the senior technology leader gone, my architect, Pochadri, stepped in to lead the technology team from Hyderabad. I was in Bangalore. But we developed real disagreements about the company's course, the kind that threatened its very survival - destined to be forgotten as yet another dead startup. I was desperate to find a way out, and I should have had a conversation with him the day I felt it. Instead, I let it rot in my head. I was unsure about our direction, unsure about our investors, but instead of saying any of that out loud, I kept avoiding the one conversation that mattered. I knew exactly what needed to be said, but was afraid that if I said it, he'd leave too.

Then something trivial happened, the kind of thing that wouldn't matter on a normal day. Pochadri stopped picking up my calls. Three days. My heart was in my mouth. Denial was no longer an option, as silence spoke what I could not. It was a test of my patience, as I kept trying. On the fourth day, he picked up. We spoke our hearts out. Everything came out. The disagreements, the frustration, the fear; everything we'd both been carrying until saying it felt safer than holding it.

That conversation made us best friends. The foundation wasn't warmth or chemistry. It was the willingness to say the hard thing and hear it without punishing the person who said it. We built a principle out of that call. CreditVidya First. No matter what happens between us personally, the company comes first. We would openly disagree in front of our team, on purpose, to show that conflict in the service of the company wasn't just tolerated but expected.

The alignment theatre

Co-founder conflict is one of the top reasons startups die, and almost never because the disagreement was fatal. They die because the disagreement was never voiced.

This goes well beyond founders. You avoid asking for a raise because it feels like a fight instead of a conversation. You sit through a colleague crossing your boundaries and say nothing, because saying something feels like unnecessary trouble. You rehearse the hard conversation in the shower, draft the opening line while pretending to listen in a meeting, and then tell yourself the timing isn't right. And when someone asks what you want, you say "I'm flexible," because you can't bear the weight of stating a preference.

I know because I have been through all of this. I spent years not voicing my opinion until I learned, slowly and painfully, to change. The sad part is what happens while you wait. Other people's preferences start running your life, because yours were never expressed. And you don't get what you want because you never asked for it.

The conditioning to be agreeable is instilled in childhood, and we carry it into our adulthood. In many cultures, and especially in the one I grew up in, every dissent sounds like disrespect. The education system rewards compliance: don't argue with the teacher, don't question the textbook, just get the grade. Our first jobs rewarded agreeableness: don't make waves, be a team player, and get promoted. And if you grew up in a household where keeping the peace was the highest virtue, the instruction went deeper: be humble, don't boast, don't ask, don't take up space. The good child doesn't rebel. The good child doesn't even want to rebel.

Researchers Avi Assor, Guy Roth, and Edward Deci at Ben-Gurion and Rochester universities studied what happens when parental love comes with conditions. The child develops what they call introjected regulation: behaviour that looks like self-discipline from the outside but runs on guilt and anxiety from the inside. The child doesn't choose to be easy. The child learns that being difficult is the fastest route to losing love.

I know exactly when this took hold of me. My father came back from a work trip to China when I was ten. He had gifts. Colourful, foreign, wrapped in that particular way that tells you someone thought of you from the other side of the world. He gave them to my siblings, one by one. I stood there. He skipped me. I was the eldest, the obedient one, the child who never asked for anything. And he was right. I never said a word. I absorbed it the way I absorbed everything: completely, without protest.

You know this person, because you might be this person as well. The one everyone calls collaborative. Low-maintenance. A team player. The one who pays the highest price by sacrificing what they actually want.

The cost at scale

This conditioning doesn't stay personal. When it becomes the culture of a company, it stops exhausting individuals and starts killing the organisation instead.

Nokia didn't die because Apple built a better phone. Quy Huy and Timo Vuori at INSEAD and Aalto University spent years reconstructing what actually happened as the iPhone ate Nokia alive. Middle managers knew Symbian was failing. They had the data. But the executives who needed to hear it were temperamental, and the culture punished anyone who brought bad news. So the managers lied. They inflated progress. They told leadership what leadership wanted to hear. And a company that once owned forty per cent of the world's phone market walked off a cliff while everyone inside it watched.

Huy and Vuori's conclusion: "Divergent shared fears led to company-wide inertia." Dale Prentice and Beverley Miller call it pluralistic ignorance: everyone privately disagrees but goes along because they assume everyone else is fine with it. Nokia didn't lose a technology war. It lost a psychological one.

Alan Mulally understood this when he walked into Ford in 2006, seventeen billion dollars in the hole. Every Thursday, executives submitted colour-coded status slides. Every slide came in green. Seventeen billion in losses and not one red slide. Eventually, Mark Fields submitted one. The room held its breath.

Mulally clapped. "Mark, that is great visibility. Who can help Mark with this?"

Truth met with curiosity instead of punishment, and the entire culture turned. Reed Hastings built the same thing into Netflix: "To disagree silently is disloyal." Amy Edmondson at Harvard has spent her career studying why this works. When people believe they won't be punished for speaking up, they speak up. Teams like that don't just make fewer mistakes, but detect them before the mistakes become fatal.

The pattern across Ford, Netflix, and our small CreditVidya First pact is the same. None of them imposed a cost to speak up. They made truth more rewarding than keeping quiet.

The benefits outweigh the costs

We are capable adults. Why can't we just say what we think? Because we start believing the conversation will go badly, and we've already thought that for so long that the fear becomes our identity.

Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson at Harvard have a name for this: impact bias. I rehearsed the conversation with Pochadri over and over. Every version ended with him leaving, the relationship broken. I overestimated how bad it would feel. The actual conversation took forty minutes and ended with a lifelong friendship.

Here is the part that should change your mind about staying quiet. Nicole Abi-Esber and colleagues at Harvard found, across multiple studies, that people consistently underestimate how much others want their honest feedback. You think your truth will damage the relationship. The other person is waiting for it. You overestimate what speaking costs and underestimate how much the other person wants to hear it. The market for your honest opinion is larger than you think.

Every time you avoid a hard conversation and nothing bad happens, it gets harder to have the next one. The avoidance feels like it worked, so you do it again. And again. Over the years, you become someone who doesn't speak up. That is the real cost. A whole identity built around not saying things.

The instruction you can rewrite

Disappointing others is not a moral failure. It is the price of becoming who you actually are.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali calls it asmita: mistaking the mask for the face. The easy, agreeable person I performed for decades was a mask that worked so well I forgot I was wearing it. When you avoid the hard conversation and call it kindness, that is the mask protecting itself. Avoidance isn't compassion. It is comfort dressed as virtue.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the stress you carry while avoiding a conversation - the worry, the rehearsals at two in the morning, the knot in the stomach that won't leave - costs more than the conversation ever would. I go back to Pochadri, and my only regret is that I didn't pick up the phone sooner. It took months of fear and forty minutes of courage, and the courage gave me a lifelong friendship.

If you have been struggling to say what you actually think, try something small. Before the next conversation you've been putting off, write down your prediction: how bad will it be, zero to ten? What are you afraid will happen? Then have the conversation. Afterwards, write down what actually happened. Do this five times. I have done it. You avoid hard conversations because you think they'll be terrible. They rarely are. Once you see that your predictions are always wrong, you stop trusting the fear.

The peace you are keeping costs you clarity, speed, and eventually, if Nokia is any guide, the whole thing. You don't need to become braver. You need to make truth more lucrative than comfort, in your own head and in your organisation.

Speak now. Or else, the waiting cost will drain your resources faster than any future words ever will pay you dividends.

The Deliberate Pause

The pitch that changed how I raised capital during CreditVidya's fundraisers wasn't the one I nailed. It was the one I failed. Yes, enough rehearsals (failures) do make for a good show (success), but there is also a rehearsal tax to be paid, which keeps us tethered. I chose not to be taxed. After a particularly bad investor meeting, the kind where you can feel the room leave before you've finished, I sat down with a notebook and wrote one line. "Lost them at slide four. Next pitch: start with a working demo."

That sentence stayed with me. The following week at the next pitch, I didn't open the PowerPoint at all. Instead, I walked in with a working demo. The product hadn't changed overnight. Neither had the market size. I hadn't become a better speaker. But I'd extracted something concrete from the wreckage of my failure, and I'd moved on. I had made reflection my choice. Brief. Specific. Finite. It ends when the lesson lands.

But that was not what I did most of the time.

Most evenings during that fundraiser, I wasn't reflecting; I was replaying. My brain kept replaying the VC partner staring at his phone and the associate, who knew nothing about lending, questioning my entire business model. I was replaying the feeling, the same emotional signature triggered on schedule, without a single new insight. I was reopening the wound night after night, mistaking it for analysis.

What I didn't understand then was that replay and reflection were not the same, even though they feel identical from the inside. On the contrary, they produce opposite results, and the confusion is costing high performers more than they know.

The Shadow of the Past

Years ago, I was robbed at gunpoint in New York. It was my first day in the city. I had taken a wrong turn outside a subway station and ended up in East Harlem. To this day, if I'm walking down a quiet street and hear footsteps closely behind me, my nervous system treats it as an attack. Heart rate spikes. Muscles lock. I know Bombay streets are safer, but the shadow, anyway, hijacks my biology.

That is unconscious replay - the nervous system runs a prediction from the past into the present. But the pattern didn't start with the robbery. In middle school, I'd skipped a grade. Everyone in the building was bigger than me. I learned early, in my body and not my mind, that the world could turn on you physically, without warning. The vigilance that was installed, the constant scanning for who might be a threat, was useful at twelve. It was survival.

You don't need to be mugged to know this pattern. A harmless remark from a board member, a throwaway comment from a friend, or even a family member can replay two hundred times in your head. You know how draining these moments become when they loop. You tell yourself you're processing, working through it, learning. You realise it's irrational. But that knowledge changes nothing. 

We replay events consciously and unconsciously. We feel the pain as though the events are happening right now. That's replay, not reflection at work.  Reflection sits down, extracts the lesson, writes it in a notebook, and closes the notebook. Replay sits down and never gets up.

The Replays Become Your Identity

You were never taught how to close the loop on emotional pain. Not in school. Not at home. Not in any leadership programme or founder bootcamp. There is no protocol for what to do when a moment hurts, and you can't stop returning to it. Without a release mechanism, the mind defaults to a belief: my history is my identity.

This is how smart people stay stuck. Each replay doesn't just re-experience the pain. It converts the event into identity. Replay that 'failed fundraiser' enough times, and you don't just remember the rejection but become the founder who isn't good enough.

"I am not good enough" was never our first thought as children. It is the thought that replay builds, one loop at a time. And once it's installed as an identity, it shows up wearing different masks. "I'm not ready yet" before a big opportunity. "I should stick to what I know" before crossing into new territory. "I need to prepare more" before shipping anything. "That's not realistic for someone like me" before dreaming bigger. All of these sound like wisdom. All of them are the replay's output. The past failed you once. The replay turned it into a permanent verdict. And now every decision runs through that verdict first.

The past does build resilience, depth, and hard-won wisdom. But without closing the loop, the 'shadow' becomes the rehearsal tax, reducing your capacity to reach your potential because the identity never upgraded. That's because childhood teaches you that your history is you; the achievement culture rewards the backwards-looking narrative; and the startup culture institutionalises replay and calls it a process. The replay finally feels like your live story because the belief underneath it was inherited. And nobody teaches you how to close the loop.

And It Costs You Your Sanity

I broke a bone in my left foot during taekwondo. It was excruciating at the time. I can think about it now and feel nothing. The memory is there. The pain is gone.

The VC partner who stared at his phone through my entire pitch? It was painful then. It still is. The humiliation, the smallness, the heat in my face. It arrives at full intensity, as though it's happening right now.

This is not a metaphor. Your brain processes social pain and physical pain through the same circuitry, but they differ in one cruel way. Physical pain fades in memory. Social pain doesn't. Meghan Meyer, Kipling Williams, and Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA found that physical pain can be relieved with genuine activation of pain circuitry. Social pain cannot. A broken bone heals in memory. A humiliating pitch, a public failure, a rejection by someone whose opinion mattered: these stay electrically live, recruitable at full intensity years after the event.

Social-evaluation threat is the specific trigger for social pain. Being judged. Failing in front of people who control your future. These are the exact conditions founders walk into every week. Intelligence offers no protection against social pain. High performers are more prone because they have more cognitive capacity for the replay to consume.

With repetition, replay transitions from deliberate thought to automatic habit. But the method you employ determines whether you're extracting a lesson or deepening a groove. 

Wendy Treynor, Richard Gonzalez, and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema at the University of Michigan studied over 1,100 people over a year and found that "thinking about what went wrong" splits into two processes with opposite outcomes. Whereas brooding is moody, evaluative self-focus, reflective pondering is active, solution-oriented examination. 

Abstract processing worsens emotional reactivity and impairs problem-solving. "Why does this keep happening to me?" Concrete processing reduces it. "What specifically happened at slide four, and what will I change next Tuesday?"

Reflection asks a question that has an answer. Replay asks a question that doesn't. "What will I do differently" terminates. "Why am I like this" loops. Replay is more damaging than avoidance. More damaging than suppression. It is the single most costly thing you can do with your own mind.

The Deliberate Pause Framework

What I learned came slowly, over months of travelling across India, reflecting on the person I'd become. I was trying to find ways to be happier and kept discovering I was still paying for events that had happened years ago. I still struggle to walk calmly on empty streets. I'm still not entirely myself in a room full of CEOs. But I've started closing loops.

When something goes wrong, before the loop has time to start, I sit down and write. Not the feeling. The lesson. What specifically happened. What I'll do differently. When. One entry. Concrete. Specific. Then I close the notebook.

The next time the event surfaces, and it will, I don't follow the pull. I pause. I go back to the notebook. If the lesson is already there, there is nothing left to extract. The loop isn't serving me. It's taxing me. I return to the present: to the pitch I'm preparing, the problem in front of me, the conversation I'm actually in. Because that is where the next decision lives.

Patanjali identified the root of this trap twenty-five centuries ago. He called it avidya: the fundamental misperception. Mistaking the impermanent for the permanent. Mistaking the changing for the unchanging. Every replay is avidya in action.

Oxford researcher John Teasdale and colleagues arrived at the same insight through clinical research. They found that the mechanism for breaking the loop is decentering: the capacity to experience thoughts as mental events rather than facts about the present. The thought "I'm going to fail" arrives. You see it arrive. You recognise it as a replay, not a forecast. The loop loses its authority, and you stop mistaking it for the truth.

Neuroscientists call it decentering. Patanjali called it Sakshi: the witness. The observation of thought without becoming it. The Bhagavad Gita draws the same line. Krishna doesn't tell Arjuna to stop feeling. He tells him to act from a place where the feeling doesn't govern.

That place is the pause. The notebook is how you find it. The lesson is what you extract. The present is where you return.

Reflect, and Not Replay, to Find Courage

For years, I believed I was the product of my past. The kid who got bullied. The founder who wasn't enough. The person whose worst moments proved something permanent about who he was. Every replay reinforced that belief. Every loop was another coat of paint on an identity I mistook for truth. But the past only shaped me. It doesn't run me. Instead of erasing memories, I have learned to pause long enough to see the difference between a lesson and a loop, between data and destiny, between the story and the one watching it. 

Reflection is a lever. You pull it, extract what moves, and release.

Replay is a tax, levied every time you grip the lever and forget to let go.

You are not the product of your past. You are the awareness that can choose what to carry forward and what to set down.

The pause is where that choice lives.

The Deliberate Pause

Hindsight is the rear-view mirror through which we judge our past, often with certainty, but mine is fogged by doubt. We built India's leading alternative data credit scoring company with minimal capital and got acquired by CRED, but a question keeps on nagging me - what could I have done differently to take CreditVidya to an IPO? Not that I'm bitter about the acquisition - by most measures, it worked. But the thought lingers on: What else could I have done?

A better hire? An earlier pivot? A sharper fundraiser? These are obvious answers, but I don't think they're right. To find the real answer, I had to go back in time further than I expected.

I was in fifth grade and had ranked second in class for the first time - second in the whole class! I ran home buzzing. My mother looked at me and said, "Jyada khush mat ho. Nazar lag jaayegi."

Don't be too happy. You'll attract the evil eye.

She wasn't being cruel, just protective by passing down a survival mechanism. Visible joy is dangerous in the game of survival. The safest thing to do is to be quietly grateful and keep striving. As the eldest son, I absorbed a deeper layer: My job was also to provide, which meant my own happiness came last. Put your head down and suffer now to earn aliveness as a reward later. I carried that into everything. Through school, through business school, through seven years of building CreditVidya. And the belief seemed to work. I never took a vacation. Not once in seven years.

But recently, reflecting on the journey, a terrifying question emerged: What if grinding through misery didn't pay the price of success but placed a ceiling on it? What if the decisions I made in a depleted state of mind were worse than the ones I would have made in a more cheerful state?

We've been taught that excellence produces happiness. What if the opposite is true - that happiness is the prerequisite for excellence?

The project manager who runs your life

That childhood belief - put your head down, your happiness can wait - didn't disappear when I grew up. It became a project manager that ran my entire life.

The project manager optimises your performance every waking hour. It scans every room, every relationship, every conversation and adjusts you accordingly for productivity. Confident here. Humble there. Impressive at this dinner. Relatable at that one. Available. Responsive. Never a burden. The one person it never checks on is the real you. Not because it forgot. Because it was trained - by my mother's warning, by the eldest son's code, by a culture that treats selflessness as the highest virtue  - to believe that your needs come last. That attending to your own happiness is self-indulgence. That responsible people don't ask, "Do I feel alive?" They ask, "Is everyone else okay?"

But there are moments when aliveness breaks through anyway. An afternoon lost in a craft - writing, playing a sport, solving a problem - where time vanished because you were doing, not performing. A conversation so good you forgot your phone existed. A Saturday morning with nowhere to be.

And the project manager doesn't celebrate. It panics. Jyada khush mat ho. You're enjoying this too much. Someone needs something from you. You should be doing something productive.

The aliveness drains away before it has time to settle. Replaced by guilt. Replaced by the next obligation. Replaced by the familiar comfort of being useful to everyone except yourself.

Finding the signal underneath the noise

I didn't find aliveness through a framework. I found it by running out of options.

After CreditVidya, I got on my motorcycle and rode across India. I read the athletes and the spiritual masters and the people I genuinely believed had figured it out. What I learned would have shocked the kid who grew up believing that suffering was the only path to success.

I started doing something that felt painful in the beginning: I sat with myself. Fifteen minutes. No phone. No podcast. Just me. It was excruciating. Every cell in my body wanted to reach for something - a task, an input, a distraction. The project manager was screaming.

But slowly, over weeks, a quieter signal started coming through. Not what I should want, but what I actually wanted.

I started noticing what gave me energy and what drained me. Not what should energise me, but actually left me more alive at the end than at the beginning. I went on a diet - not just food, but people and information. I started saying no to everything. Everything that someone expected out of me. I stopped measuring the things I loved, because the moment I put a KPI on something enjoyable, it started feeling like work, and the aliveness bled out.

The project manager called this selfish. It wasn't. It was self-care. And it was the first honest thing I'd done in years.

What was left was writing. Writing not as a strategy or as brand-building but as the thing that made time disappear. The thing I'd do even if nobody read it.

The project manager hated this. No clear ROI. No revenue model. No path to approval. By every metric it tracks, writing was a waste of time.

But I had not felt more alive in years.

The equation in reverse

The world teaches: effort first, then excellence, then someday aliveness. It's the same promise my parents made - put your head down, life will be sorted one day.

My parents had it wrong. The equation is reversed - aliveness first, then absorption, then excellence - as a byproduct of years spent doing the thing that made you feel most alive.

But here's why that equation stays broken for most people. You're doing more than ever - reading, exercising, networking, meditating - and none of it is landing. Because you're eating without digesting. Your brain doesn't work like a hard drive. Growth is digestive. Past a certain rate, the food passes through without feeding you. The real absorption happens when you stop - when you walk, sleep, stare out the window. When you just be. The gaps are where transformation happens.

But the project manager can't tolerate gaps. It fills every one with another podcast at 2x, another book, another class. It mistakes fullness for progress. And you stay stuck -  not because you're lazy, but because nothing has time to take root.

Excellence isn't about effort. Excellence requires absorption - the state where work is hard but doesn't register as hard. Where hours vanish. Where the doing feeds you rather than depletes you. Absorption only happens when you say no to enough things that space opens up. Every person who achieved genuine mastery - the kind that compounds across decades - said no to almost everything else. They protected their attention. They disappeared into their work while the world waited. They chose their thing over everyone else's expectations.

That's not a character flaw. It's self-care. And it's the prerequisite.

Be too happy

A few months ago, I was sitting at GShot cafe in Goa - open walls, lazy afternoon light. Writing a little. Thinking a little. Mostly just sitting.

A couple walked up to my table. Total strangers. The woman smiled and said, "What are you smoking? You look really happy."

I hadn't spoken a word to them.

Weeks later, at my farewell, my head of AI (Sanjib Panigrahi) pulled me aside. "Something's changed," he said. "You look happy. Like genuinely happy."

The answer was embarrassingly simple. I hadn't checked social media in weeks. I had no idea what was going on in the world. I hadn't called family out of obligation. I hadn't attended a single event I didn't want to attend. I had said no to almost everything - and the project manager called it selfish. And I was the most alive I had ever been. So visibly that strangers could see it from across a cafe.

Here's what I didn't expect: Saying no made me better for everyone around me. The writing sharpened. The ideas deepened. I was more present, more patient, more generous with the people I chose to see - not because I was trying to be, but because I finally had something real to give.

The person who never says no isn't generous. They're performing generosity while slowly disappearing. And everyone around them can feel it.

In my last article, I wrote about how self-love fails because it inflates the very thing that needs to get smaller. Love comes when the self loosens its hold. Aliveness works the same way. The things that matter the most - love, depth, mastery, aliveness - don't come from the self doing more. They come from the self getting out of the way.

That self got me through school. It built my career. It kept my family proud. It also kept me showing up at 7 AM after a stroke, wearing my own destruction as a badge of honour.

But it can't take me where I need to go next.

My mother told me not to be too happy. She was protecting me the way she knew how. I carried her warning for thirty years, and it became the voice that ran my life.

This article changes that advice.

Jyada khush ho. Be too happy. Let them look.

That's not selfish. That's self-care. And it's the only path to being fully, unapologetically, contagiously alive.

And being alive - it turns out - was always the path to excellence.

Growing up in a middle-class Indian family, the deal is simple. Get into the right school, get good grades, work harder than everyone else in the room, and make your parents proud. In return, there is an implied sense of belonging. But there is never a moment when someone explains this unwritten contract. You just absorb it - from the relief on your mother's face when the results come in, and from the way your father's voice softens when you win something. Your identity is intertwined with accomplishments.

Jim Carrey captured it perfectly in his famous speech - the moment he introduced himself as "the two-time Golden Globe winner, Jim Carrey!" The joke landed because everyone in that audience recognised the same silent contract: When I get the thing, I'll finally be enough.

I know this because I have lived the full arc. First one in my family to graduate, move to the US, earn an MBA from a top school, start a startup, secure funding, exit…

Weeks after my successful exit from CV, one of my mentors, Bala Srinivasa, casually asked me over coffee, "So what's next?"

I told him I was emotionally exhausted. I told him I needed to start loving myself, and I said it the way founders say everything - as if it were the next project. Little did I know it would take me across India, through ashrams, unlearning in silence, until I found something in a yogashala with a healer called Om Sir.

But before I get to what happened there, let me start with why this project was doomed from the very beginning.

It was doomed because the premise "fall in love with yourself" is entirely the wrong instruction.

Who exactly are you trying to love?

"Fall in love with yourself." Pause on the last word. Your self. Who is that? Because the self you're trying to love isn't the person you were born as. It's the person you were trained to become.

Freud's most enduring insight is that our relationship with ourselves is learned, not innate. Before you had language, you were still absorbing data on social validation, not from books but from micro-expressions on your mother's face, the tone in your father's voice. The precise conditions under which warmth appeared and disappeared. When acceptance is conditional - on achievement, on compliance, on being the "good kid" - the child internalises an operating code that says, "I'm loved when I perform". By age seven, the nervous system internalises it as a reflex. Any story that contradicts it - "you are worthy just as you are" - gets treated as a threat. The body moves into fight or flight.

Now watch what this conditioning produces.

The child who learned "I'm worthy only when I achieve" grows into the adult who can't walk into a room without silently asking: Do I matter here?

Vadim Zeland - a Russian physicist-turned-philosopher - calls this inner importance. The terrified childhood ego demands that it must be flawless to deserve love. The stakes of being you never let up. Then comes outer importance. The child who learned that love is earned by outcomes grows into the adult who inflates the significance of everything around. That importance given to outer outcomes ties the inner self to worldly approval. And when we assign excessive significance to anything - an event, an outcome, or our own ego - we create what Zeland calls excess potential. It's the pressure that reality pushes back against, because, in nature, everything strives for equilibrium. The pushback shows up as anxiety, as impostor syndrome, as the persistent feeling that something is wrong, no matter how much you achieve. The harder you hold on, the more it hurts.

That's what childhood conditioning does. It makes the ordinary act of being alive feel like a test you can never finish. And "fall in love with yourself" doesn't end the test either. It adds another subject. Another goalpost dressed up as healing.

Success amplifies the self.

This trap is worse for high achievers. The more you accomplish, the deeper it pulls you in - until life hits hard enough to make you look at what you've been doing.

Elon Musk tweeted at midnight: "Money can't buy happiness." Set aside your opinions about the man. Look at the data point. The person with the most external validation on the planet - wealth, fame, influence, followers - is still awake at midnight, still reaching for something the scoreboards can't provide. If external worth could settle the question, it would have settled it for him. It didn't. Because the question was never about the scoreboard. It was about a child who learned to look at one.

Consider this: global happiness has been declining for over a decade - from 77% in 2011 to 71% in 2024. The US has fallen from 11th to 24th on the World Happiness Report. Americans under 30 now rank 62nd in the world for life satisfaction. Meanwhile, the global self-improvement industry hit $50 billion in 2024 and is on track to nearly double by 2034. We have never spent more money trying to love ourselves. But, we have never been less happy.

Tending to the self has become our main hobby. Before Instagram and LinkedIn, you checked your reflection in a handful of mirrors - your parents, your boss, your small circle. Now you're checking it in front of thousands, every waking hour. And the more you achieve, the more mirrors appear. When you scroll past twenty success stories before breakfast, your brain doesn't register "good for them." It registers "not me yet." The self-worth system that was trained in childhood to scan for approval is now scanning at scale, without rest.

This is importance compounding. The same mechanism from childhood - worth must be earned, approval must be visible, the self must be validated - except now it runs on infrastructure that never sleeps. Your brain doesn't know the difference between your father's approval and a stranger's like. It processes both as survival data.

No wonder "fall in love with yourself" fails. You're not being asked to love a person. You're being asked to love a scoreboard.

My first glimpse of peace

After the acquisition, I tried to fix myself. I journaled. I meditated. I tried affirmations. And the more I focused on loving myself, the worse I felt. The "self" I was trying to love was the constructed identity - the founder, the achiever, the man who proved everyone wrong. Every time I tried to embrace it, I was making it more real. More important. And as Zeland would say, more importance creates more suffering.

I wasn't failing at self-love. I was succeeding at self-inflation.

Then I stumbled into a yogashala. Six weeks of training with Om Sir. Practice at 7 AM. Asana, anatomy, philosophy.

He watched me the whole time. He saw everything - the one meal a day, the protein runs, the workouts squeezed between sessions, the work calls taken outside the ashram in the middle of training, the need for black coffee before practice. He saw all of it. And he didn't try to fix a single thing.

No correction. No lecture about surrender. No knowing glance. He understood the kind of person I was without making it a problem to be solved. And in that space appeared something I'd chased for twenty years. I felt accepted. But not because I was finally "enough". I felt accepted because "enough" had left the room. There was no self being graded. Just a person being seen without a scorecard.

That wasn't love of the self. It was self being released. And it was the first real peace I'd known.

Less self, not more love

If self-love inflates the ego, and an inflated ego is the source of suffering, then the strategy isn't to love harder.

Imagine walking across a log on the ground. Easy. Now place the same log between two skyscrapers. Same log. Same you. But now it's paralysing - not because the challenge changed, but because the importance did.

Start by dropping inner importance. Stop treating yourself as a high-stakes project. Give yourself the profound luxury of having shortcomings. You don't need to love your flaws, and you don't need to hide them. You just need to stop evaluating them. True professional and personal resilience does not come from building an impenetrable, perfectly loved ego. It comes from the quiet, unbreakable realisation that the self doesn't need to be important to be complete. Then drop outer importance. Do the work fully, but stop tying your worth to the result. Zeland's instruction is disarmingly simple: Rent yourself out. Give your head and your hands to the work, your projects, your goals. But don't give your heart to the scoreboard. You can perform at the highest level without making the outcome a measure of who you are.

When you lower the importance on both axes, the log returns to the ground.

Zeland arrived at this through physics. The yogis arrived at the same place 2,500 years earlier. Patanjali identified the root of suffering as avidya  - misperception - which gives rise to asmita, the confusion of "who I am" with "what I think and feel and do." The solution isn't to love the ego more. It's to stop mistaking the ego for the self. This is about being the witness - the practice of Sakshi. You step back from being the character on the screen and remember you're the one watching. You don't need to love the character in the movie. You just need to remember it isn't you.

Om Sir didn't teach me to love myself. He showed me what it looks like when someone sees you without keeping a score. And in that absence, I glimpsed what the yogis and the physicists arrived at from opposite ends of the earth - suffering does not arise because we love ourselves too little; it arises because we make too much of ourselves.

The debt of 'potential' you thought you owed the world has already been paid. A false goal forces you to keep proving yourself. A true goal makes your life a celebration.

The cure for the modern crisis of the soul isn't more love for the self. The cure is less self to love.

'Avi is the founder of The Deliberate Pause and the former co-founder of CreditVidya & Prefr (acquired by CRED). He writes about Inner Engineering for Founders—the psychology of sustainable high performance.

By Avi Agarwal

My grandfather (nana) was no philosopher, nor a futurist. And yet he had willed or wished something unimaginable for me. Though I don't remember much about him, as he died when I was still young, there was a single, cryptic directive from him for me that my mother repeated throughout my childhood like a mantra:

"Go live in the biggest city in the world."

At that time, it looked like a heartfelt wish from a loving grandparent, so I did everything possible to honour it. But today, in hindsight, I understand it to be an authoritative directive, delivered with the absolute certainty of a man who understood something about life he didn't quite have the vocabulary to explain.

When I eventually landed in New York City (the biggest city), I was the definition of an outsider. I was the kid from Kathmandu who had grown up with limited resources, working three odd jobs alongside my studies, sleeping on an empty stomach on airport floors, and shovelling snow in freezing temperatures as a 17-year-old just to make ends meet. In short, my self-image at that time was built entirely on scarcity and the desperate need for approval.

My colleagues in NYC, however, were different. It wasn't just their bank accounts or their degrees. It was their terrifying clarity. They knew exactly where they wanted to go. They spoke about the future as if they already owned the title deeds to it. To sum up, their internal thermostat, as I call it today, was set to the deep belief that they were meant to win.

I realised what profound effect our immediate environment can have on us. That is when I realised why I felt so vulnerable. That is when I realised why I could never say "no".

Sigmund Freud had argued that our early environment doesn't just influence us but constructs us. When you grow up with limited opportunities, saying "yes" becomes a fundamental survival mechanism. You say yes to every crumb of opportunity because you don't know when the next one will appear. You become a people-pleaser because you confuse "fitting in"- sacrificing your boundaries for external approval - with true belonging. Research in developmental neuroscience suggests this conditioning is shaped in childhood itself.

So, I carried this trauma-forged "Yes-Man" identity right into my professional life, even to NYC and beyond as well. I said yes to every opportunity, yes to dilutive partnerships, yes to the 11 PM email thread, and yes to every shiny new project. I thought my relentless "yes" was my superpower. I didn't realise it was destroying my potential.

The Invisible Cost of Saying Yes

What keeps you alive in scarcity will kill you in abundance.

When you say "yes" to everything, you fall victim to a psychological trap called opportunity cost neglect. The irony is that you don't realise being a "yes man" because it appears to be hard work. When I said yes to a new, low-value project, I felt highly productive because I felt busy. What I didn't feel was the invisible cost: the deep, strategic thinking time I had just sacrificed, or the core problem I didn't sit with long enough to actually solve. Every lukewarm "yes" silently crowds out the space needed for a life-changing opportunity.

Here is the hard truth of the business world: bouncing from one new idea to another feels like progress, but it is just perpetual exploration. Exploration generates options, but only deep, focused execution generates compounding returns. Founders who pivot every time things get hard just to feel the rush of a new beginning never allow their skills to compound. They remain perpetual beginners, generating perpetual noise.

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett points out, the difference between successful people and really successful people is that the latter have the agonising discipline to say no to almost everything. They wait patiently for the "fat pitch." But you cannot swing at the fat pitch if your energy is exhausted fighting off bad pitches all day long.

The Willpower Fallacy

So, why don't we just try harder to say no?

Because relying on willpower alone is a lost battle. The corporate world worships the myth of "Grit," telling us that if we are distracted, we simply lack discipline. But neuroscience proves that willpower is not a muscle you can endlessly flex; it is a finite battery.

Every time you force yourself to ignore a phone notification or navigate the guilt of declining a favour, you drain the exact mental energy you need for high-level strategy. When you get tired, your brain's executive control goes offline, and you default to your oldest, most impulsive habits.

In Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz explained that your self-image operates exactly like a thermostat. You can try to "white-knuckle" a "no" for a week using raw willpower. But the moment you get tired, your thermostat violently snaps you back to its original setting. If your internal identity is still set to "Scarcity-Driven People Pleaser," saying "no" feels like a literal threat to your survival.

When you fail to say "no", you aren't fighting a bad habit. You are fighting the child who slept on the airport floor.

And that child has been winning for decades.

Designing Your Environment

If willpower is a finite battery, how do we permanently escape our childhood conditioning and protect our focus?

We do it by intentionally changing the room we are standing in.

We do it by exposing ourselves to environments that force the self-image to upgrade. We cannot think our way into a new identity. But when we move to a new city, travel to unfamiliar cultures, or immerse ourselves in profoundly challenging situations, we give ourselves an identity intervention. We insert new data into the thermostat. This is exactly what my nana was teaching me: design an environment that upgrades your self-image.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. Control Your Physical Space.

Your physical space determines your default behaviours. If a child is trying not to eat cookies before dinner, putting the cookies in an opaque jar instead of a clear one drastically reduces the demand on their self-control. Do the same for yourself. Research shows that just having a smartphone on your desk - even face-down - drains your brain's capacity. A single physical decision - leaving your phone in another room, working from a coffee shop, or hanging a "Do Not Disturb" sign - eliminates the need to make thousands of exhausting willpower decisions over a year.

2. Curate Your Social Circle.

We unconsciously mimic the people around us. After my companies were acquired, I moved to Goa to write a book. I had a romantic vision - quiet beach, open laptop, words flowing. Instead, I sat in cafes for three weeks surrounded by digital nomads building apps they'd never ship and writers talking about writing instead of writing. The ambient identity of Goa was set to "Ease." I wrote nothing. So I moved to Mumbai. The city's restless energy demanded output, and I didn't need willpower to work - the environment made hard work the natural default. If you surround yourself with people who wear 100-hour workweeks as a badge of honour, you will stay trapped in the "yes" cycle. But if you build a circle of peers who fiercely protect their deep work, strategic restraint becomes your new normal. You stop feeling guilty for saying no because no one in your room expects a yes.

3. Filter Your Information Diet.

Today, your most powerful environment is the algorithm on your screen. Constant exposure to others' curated wins on social media creates a sense of being permanently "behind". I know this intimately. Six months after CreditVidya's acquisition by CRED, I sat in a Bangalore coffee shop feeling like a failure - not because the outcome was bad, but because my feed was full of people who had built bigger. The information environment had so thoroughly reprogrammed my thermostat that an actual acquisition felt like a consolation prize. That is the power of an undesigned information environment: it can make a win feel like a loss. A leader who feels behind acts out of fear, chasing every new trend and saying yes to distractions. You must curate your digital feed as rigorously as you choose the city you live in. Design your inputs for learning and capability, not comparison.

The Art of the Delivery

When your environment is designed correctly, fewer distractions will reach you. But when something does slip through, you need a system to handle it without draining your energy. First, automate your decision-making using entrepreneur Derek Sivers' rule: "Hell Yeah or No". If an opportunity doesn't immediately make you think "Hell yeah!", the answer is a firm no. This keeps your schedule completely clear for the rare, life-changing projects.

Second, when you must decline a request from a boss, colleague, or friend, use negotiation expert William Ury's "Positive No" framework. The biggest mistake we make is basing our "no" on what we are against. Instead, base it on what you are protecting. Start by stating your deeper commitment: "I am entirely focused on finishing this critical project for the team." Then, deliver a clear, respectful no: "Because of that, I cannot take on this new request." Finally, propose an alternative solution to preserve the relationship: "But I can review it next month, or recommend someone else."

The Mirror You Choose

My nana knew that the beliefs I had internalised in Kathmandu would limit my potential. He knew that as long as I lived in an environment that reinforced a "scarcity" mindset, I would never be free. He knew that by placing me in the biggest city in the world, my internal thermostat would have no choice but to rise. He knew that the only way to outgrow the kid sleeping on the airport floor was to put him in a place where that identity no longer made sense.

I am no longer that street kid. I am a builder and a writer. Not because I worked harder than everyone else - there are people on the streets of Kathmandu working ten times harder than I ever have - but because I have finally learned to design the room I am standing in.

The most transformative advice doesn't come from a management guru. It comes from the quiet realisation that you are the product of your environment, and your self-image is simply what it reflects.

If you are still saying "yes" when you know you should be saying "no," stop looking for a new productivity hack. Look for a new city. Look for a new room. Look for the mirror that reflects the person you are meant to become.

Design your environment. Or it will design you.

Avi is the founder of The Deliberate Pause and the former co-founder of CreditVidya & Prefr (acquired by CRED). He writes about Inner Engineering for Founders—the psychology of sustainable high performance.

At the 2011 memorial service for Steve Jobs, the world's most powerful innovators were handed a small brown box as a farewell gift. It wasn't a new Apple device. It wasn't a design manifesto. It was a book. A paperback copy of 'Autobiography of a Yogi' by Paramhansa Yogananda. This was Jobs's last message. He had read this book once a year for the last forty years of his life. He wasn't the only one.

Virat Kohli says this book transformed how he plays the game. Novak Djokovic describes himself as an "inner athlete" and credits the book for his late-career renaissance. What do a tech visionary, a cricket legend, and a tennis champion all find in the writings of a 20th-century Indian mystic?

Jobs wasn't sending a spiritual message. He was sending a performance message. These leaders discovered something that the rest of the business and startup worlds are still missing.

Sustaining greatness without breaking needs a completely different way to play the game. And it's centred around the story you tell yourself between falling and getting up.

Every master is first someone who fell apart.

The script we've been handed is: Success equals Talent plus Effort. But here's what the script never prepares you for.

The fall.

Because success is never linear, the path to the top is muddled with failure, self-doubt, and moments where everything you've built feels like it's collapsing. Talent doesn't protect you from this. Neither does effort. And at whatever scale you're operating, your ability to pick yourself up from the lowest points defines how far you will ultimately go.

Most of us are running on autopilot. 95% of who you are is a memorised set of behaviours, emotional reactions, and hardwired beliefs. You wake up and feel the same low-grade anxiety you felt yesterday. You react to today's crisis the same way you reacted to last month's. You make the same class of decisions wearing slightly different clothes. So what do you do when life hits you back despite your best efforts?

Jobs was fired from Apple at 30 - pushed out of the company he built from nothing. Kohli went nearly three years without a Test century while a billion people debated whether he was finished.

This is what 'Autobiography of a Yogi' is really about. Yogananda didn't write about people at their peak. He wrote about people in their darkest moments - the student who wants to quit, the disciple who loses faith, the seeker who can't find the door. The difference was never 'talent'. It was never even 'effort'. It was the ability to return to the centre after being knocked off it. Every founder gets knocked down. Every great athlete, every person building something real do hit the floor. The question that separates them is: how long do you stay there?

Your real opponent is never the competitor, the market, or the investor who said no. The real opponent is the story you tell yourself in the gap between falling and getting up.

Mind is the wielder of muscles

Early in the 'Autobiography of a Yogi', Yogananda describes a man known as the Tiger Swami. He fought wild tigers with his bare hands. Not as performance, but as practice. His thesis was simple: physical outcomes are determined by mental conviction, not physical capacity. He called it "mind is the wielder of muscles." The body, he believed, does exactly what the mind instructs it to - and most people are giving their bodies instructions they never consciously chose.

This isn't mysticism. It's neuroscience.

In a study, one group physically practised piano scales two hours a day for five days. A second group only imagined practising - they never touched the keys. At the end, both groups had identical brain scans. Both had grown the same new neural connections.

The brain does not know the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one.

If you change your mind - truly change it - your biology will follow.

Djokovic uses this every day. He calls his pre-match preparation a full neurological rehearsal. "80 to 90 per cent of the match," he says, "is won before I step on the court." He feeds his subconscious the outcome because the subconscious, as he puts it, "doesn't know what's good for you or bad for you. It just knows what you tell it."

I know this because I lived it too.

During the gloomiest days of my life - when the business felt like it was falling apart and effort had stopped working - I found breathwork. Not because I believed in it. Because I had run out of things to try.

Five minutes. That was all I could manage at first. But something that had been locked tight began to release, breath by breath. The negativity I had been carrying - the self-doubt, the reactivity, the story I kept telling myself about what was possible - started to loosen its grip. I wasn't solving problems. I wasn't grinding harder. For the first time, I was learning to return to the centre. With that came clarity. Not the forced clarity of a whiteboard session or a strategy offsite, but the quiet kind. The kind where the right answer arrives because you've finally stopped drowning it out. That's when I understood what the masters had found. Not a technique. Not a hack. But a practice. Something you return to every day, especially on the days when everything in you says it won't work.

At the highest levels, everyone is disciplined. Everyone works hard. The variable that separates winners is the inner state they bring to that effort - the signal they're sending their own nervous system before the work even begins. It means that the performance isn't about adding more. It's about what we are willing to sacrifice to reach our highest potential.

Sacrifice self-doubt, reactivity, and negative thinking

Startup culture has trained you to sacrifice sleep, health, relationships, and peace - all in the name of effort. But you've been sacrificing the wrong things.

Here's what actually needs to go.

Sacrifice self-doubt.

Self-doubt is the voice that tells you your inner work isn't the real work. That sitting quietly before a big meeting is an indulgence. That trusting something you can't put on a spreadsheet is naive. But that voice isn't wisdom. It's your old script protecting itself.

Yogananda wrote about his own moment of crippling self-doubt before leaving India for America. He had never spoken in English to a large audience. He was unknown. Every rational signal said he wasn't ready. His teacher Sri Yukteswar looked at him and said simply, "The heart of the world needs your words." He went. He filled Carnegie Hall.

Self-doubt isn't protection. It's just noise dressed as caution.

Sacrifice reactivity.

Yogananda describes his teacher as a man who was never disturbed - not by crisis, not by loss, not by chaos around him. Not because he was detached from life, but because he had trained himself to respond in stillness rather than react in fear. When a student came to him in panic, Sri Yukteswar would slow down, not speed up. The room would calm because he was calm.

Most founders do the opposite. Every problem pulls them into reaction. They confuse urgency with importance and motion with progress.

Sacrifice negative thinking.

In one of the book's most striking passages, Yogananda describes a student being told by doctors he had an incurable illness. He came to his teacher in despair. Sri Yukteswar refused to accept the diagnosis - not out of denial, but out of a deep conviction that the mind's verdict over the body is final. He told the student: "The only way out is to stop agreeing with the disease." The student recovered.

Negative thinking isn't realism. It's a choice - one most of us make unconsciously, hundreds of times a day, about what we're capable of, what's possible, what the market will bear, what we deserve. Each thought is a vote for the old script or the new one.

When you sacrifice these three things, something shifts. You stop taking the temperature of every room you walk into. You start setting it. You stop being a thermometer. You become a thermostat.

The brain you bring to the work changes what the work produces.

But only if you stay in it long enough.

Steve Jobs read the same book every year for forty years. Not because he forgot it. Because trust in the inner game isn't something you build once.

The secret

Steve Jobs didn't hand out that book because he wanted his friends to become monks.

He handed it out because he wanted them to understand one thing:

The state you bring into every room, the lens through which you see every problem, the inner voice you're listening to - that is what separates the top 1% from the rest.

Djokovic's late-career dominance wasn't built on better technique. It was built on the recognition that he had hit the ceiling of what outer work could achieve. "Our consciousness expands infinitely," he has said. "We are more than we think or feel with our five senses."

Kohli proved it with his career. Jobs proved it with everything he built after coming back to Apple.

The final frontier of performance isn't physical. It isn't even strategic.

It's internal.

You got into this to build something that matters. The market will test you. The investors will test you. Your own mind will test you hardest of all. The founders who last aren't the ones who never fall. They're the ones who know how to get back up.

Stop sacrificing your inner world to feed the outer one. Start protecting the signal. Start maintaining the state. That's the secret inside the brown box.

And it was the most valuable thing Steve Jobs ever learned.

The question isn't whether you can afford to play the Inner Game.

The question is whether you can afford to keep ignoring it.

Start with five minutes. Just breathe.