Twenty-two years. A rented shed in Ludhiana that became a proper building, then a second floor, then a small yard for loading. Three workers became thirty. The family had never been rich, but they had never been afraid.

When Suresh inherited it at thirty-four, he wanted to honor what his father had built. And he wanted more.

The expansion would double capacity. The bank would lend what he needed. His accountant sat across from him and went quiet.

“What if something goes wrong?”

“I’ve planned for everything,” Suresh said.

“You cannot plan for everything,” his accountant said. “That is exactly the point.”

Suresh signed anyway.

Eight months later, his largest buyer lost a European contract and needed ninety days before they could pay. They were apologetic. It wasn’t personal.

It didn’t matter. Suresh had ninety-one days of oxygen left.

He sold a machine to make payroll. Then another. Production slowed. Buyers left. On the day he handed the keys back to the bank, he walked through the factory floor one last time. He could still see where his father had laid the first bricks.

Suresh’s father had always kept three months of cash in reserve. Never touched it. Never explained it. He called it sleeping money. Suresh had kept the same amount. But the business was twice the size now. It covered sixty days, not ninety.

Warren Buffett, who has never borrowed beyond what he could easily repay, not once in sixty years, describes it this way:

Never drive a 9,800 pound truck over a bridge with a 10,000 pound capacity. Go find the bridge with a 15,000 pound capacity.

Suresh understood now what both men had known all along.

Every Sunday, one story. The kind that changes how you decide.

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The cold call that started everything

In 2010, James Lawrence had completed exactly one full-distance triathlon. Not ten. Not five. One. That year, he cold-called Guinness World Records and asked about the record for most half-triathlons completed in a year. “No record has been set,” they said. He signed up for twenty-two.

He wasn’t ready. He had no obvious reason to believe he could do it. But he signed up, secured sponsorships, and completed twenty-two half-triathlons in 2010, becoming a certified Guinness World Record holder.

Two years later, stronger and hungrier, he went back. Thirty full-distance triathlons in one year. Another world record. Along the way, his kids told him they couldn’t spot him in race crowds. As a joke, he started wearing a cowboy hat so they could find him. The hat stuck. The nickname followed: the Iron Cowboy.

Then came 2015. Fifty full-distance triathlons in fifty days, across fifty states. He called it the 50.50.50. Physically brutal. Logistically nearly impossible. He finished.

What happened next was unexpected. Fortune 500 companies started calling. Audi. Nike. Red Bull. Microsoft. Toyota. In the year after the 50.50.50, Lawrence spoke at eighty events. For five years after that, he averaged sixty annually, in more than fifty countries. A man who had completed one triathlon a decade earlier was now advising the world’s most sophisticated organizations on what human beings are capable of.

He hadn’t planned this. He had planned the next record, the next race, the next goal that scared him enough to pursue. Each success created the conditions for the next one. The world record opened the door to coaching. The coaching built credibility. The credibility created a platform. The platform became a speaking career. The speaking career became a brand.

None of it was visible from the starting line. It never is.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend, Jayant. He is an internet celebrity, well on his way to a million followers. When he quit his job and started reading and writing, he had no idea how he would make money. He just knew he would figure it out. A year in, he still wasn’t earning from it. He kept writing anyway. Today he has more opportunities than he could have ever imagined. He calls it the luck surface area. The bigger and more consistent your output, the more luck finds you.

He then looked at everything I have written over the last few years and told me it amounts to seven books worth of content. “Keep going”, he said. Your luck surface area will expand in ways you cannot yet see.

I cannot see it from the starting line. James Lawrence couldn’t either when he made that first cold call to Guinness. That is the thing about compounding. You only understand it looking backwards.

Lessons

1. Start before you feel ready. Lawrence had completed one triathlon when he cold-called Guinness. Jayant quit his job before he knew how he would earn. The starting line never looks like the right time. It never is.

2. Consistency is the strategy. Lawrence planned the next race, not the speaking career. Jayant wrote the next piece, not the million followers. The destination is invisible from where you stand. The only lever you control is showing up.

3. You cannot see from the starting line what you are building. Compounding works in silence for a long time before it becomes visible. You only understand it looking backwards.

On Monday, do this

Pick one thing you will put out consistently for the next 90 days. Not perfectly. Just consistently. Start this week.

Reading obsessively. Building businesses. Sharing lessons learnt. Link to this newsletter, WhatsApp community, LinkedIn.

The few who move the many

Durant starts with an observation that would be impolite in a modern HR memo: practical ability is not evenly distributed. In almost every society, most of the competence, energy, and foresight ends up concentrated in a relatively small group.

That minority, almost by definition, captures more resources and more influence. Wealth follows ability, and then more ability flows to where wealth and leverage already are. Over time, you get a familiar picture: a small group at the top with outsized power, and a long tail of people whose individual impact is harder to see.

He doesn’t stop there. Left alone, this concentration keeps compounding until something breaks. When the gap between the few who have leverage and the many who don’t gets too large, history shows two recurring outcomes:

• Peaceful rebalancing through laws, reforms, and redistribution.

• Violent rebalancing through revolution, where wealth is not just redistributed but destroyed.

Durant’s point is not moral outrage; it’s pattern recognition. Ability and power concentrating is natural. Periodic correction is also natural. Ignore either side and you misread how groups behave over time.

Inside companies, the same structure appears in friendlier clothing.

A small percentage of people generate most of the sales, ideas, and decisions that actually move the business. A handful of products drive most of the revenue. A short list of customers drives most of the profit. If you map impact honestly, you’ll see your own minority.

At the same time, information, decision rights, and equity tend to flow toward a small leadership group. Some of that is necessary; you can’t run a company by committee. But if you compound that concentration without any designed rebalancing, you get your own version of the historical pattern:

• Quiet resentment that the upside is locked up.

• Politics as people try to get closer to the center.

• Sudden “revolutions”: mass departures, internal coups, or cultural backlash against “the top.”

History suggests a calmer approach. Don’t fight the existence of power laws. Accept that a minority will always drive most outcomes. Then design peaceful, regular ways to redistribute opportunity and upside before you’re forced into more painful resets.

That might look like opening new product lines for emerging leaders to own, broadening equity participation as the company matures, or rotating real decision authority on specific bets. You still bet heavily on your best people, but you also keep creating surface area for the next minority of high performers to emerge.

Durant’s lesson is not to flatten everything. It’s to remember that when the few hold too much for too long, the many eventually find a way to rebalance the game. As a founder or operator, you can either wait for that to happen to you, or you can build controlled rebalancing into how you grow.

Lessons

1. Ability and impact are naturally concentrated
   A small minority of people, products, and customers will drive most of your results. Pretending otherwise makes your planning blurry.

2. Power accumulates where ability and information meet
   Over time, decision rights, budgets, and equity drift toward a small group. Some centralization is necessary; total centralization is fragile.

3. Every system eventually rebalances
   If concentration grows unchecked, the many will eventually push back. In companies, that shows up as attrition, politics, and “revolutions” in leadership.

4. Healthy companies redistribute opportunity on purpose
   You can’t make outcomes equal, but you can keep widening access to meaningful problems, ownership, and upside as you grow.

On Monday, do this

• Map your internal power law. Identify the top 10–20 percent of people, products, and customers by impact. Make that explicit with your leadership team so you’re operating from reality.

• Spot dangerous concentration. Ask where decision power, information, and upside are overly concentrated in a few hands. Focus on one area that would hurt most if a single person left.

• Create one new ladder of ownership. Design a concrete opportunity (a new product, region, or initiative) that an emerging leader can fully own, with clear accountability and visible upside.

• Broaden upside slightly. Choose one mechanism this year to widen participation in success (a profit share on a key product, equity refresh for a broader group, or a transparent bonus tied to team results).

History’s pattern is clear: the few will always move the many, and the many will always, eventually, reshape the few. Builders who understand both sides can design companies that harness power laws without being broken by their corrections.

I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms into a billion dollar enterprise, bootstrapping a food startup and investing through Marcellus Investment Managers. I share my learnings as a business builder daily on my WhatsApp community. I also send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. You can find me on LinkedIn here.

Most people treat optimism as a vague feeling: glass‑half‑full, “it’ll all work out.” That’s incomplete. There are two parts that matter.

The first is how you feel: a quiet belief that tomorrow is worth betting on, and that your effort is not pointless. This is the hope and confidence piece. Without it, you won’t step into hard rooms, make long bets, or invest in people when the payoff is uncertain.

The second is how you think: the way you explain setbacks to yourself. Optimists don’t deny reality. They assume problems, but they see them as temporary and specific (“this plan failed, for these reasons”) rather than permanent verdicts (“nothing works, I’m done”). They separate what was bad luck from what they can change next time, and then they act on the part they control.

Ajay Banga is a good example of both.

Engine‑room optimism

Ajay grew up in India in the 60s and 70s. Basic infrastructure failed often enough that “Plan B and Plan C” weren’t management theories, they were daily life. Later, leading Nestlé for over a decade, he treated these issues as constraints to engineer around, not proof that nothing was possible. He was an optimist who still made sure the company achieved its mission.

The same pattern shows up in his career choices. At Citibank, he was one of the people who could have become CEO of a 250,000‑person bank. Instead of sitting tight and hoping luck crowned him, he left to run Mastercard, then a much smaller company. By the time he left Mastercard it was worth roughly three times Citi. In hindsight, the market caps make it look obvious. At the time, it was a risk.

Ajay’s frame is simple: life is “50% luck, 50% what you do with it.” You don’t control the cards, but “what you do control you better do something about.” That’s optimism in practice: humble about uncertainty, ruthless about agency.

I see the same thing in those I admire and try to emulate. Recently, I spent two weeks flying from Delhi to Singapore to Sydney and back to interview ten candidates. Overall I must have spent 50 hours to make a couple of hiring decisions. On paper, it’s excessive. But you only do that if you believe the right person can meaningfully bend the curve of the next few years. You accept all the things you can’t control about timing, and then you dramatically over‑index on the piece you can control: who is in the engine room with you.

Optimism, properly understood, is not blind cheerfulness. It’s the decision to keep your hands on the controls when it would be easier to sit back and comment from the aisle seat.

Lessons

1. Optimism is a bet on your own agency
   You assume the world will be messy and still act as if your effort can change the trajectory.

2. Optimism separates luck from responsibility
   “50% luck, 50% what you do with it” lets you acknowledge randomness without outsourcing your future to it.

3. Optimism plans for failure modes
   Power cuts and broken roads become reasons to build Plan B and Plan C, not excuses to stop trying.

4. Optimism values the work beyond the income
   Using your mind productively and contributing to society only makes sense if you believe the future is worth improving.

5. Optimism chooses the engine room over the armchair
   You’d rather roll up your sleeves and try to make a difference than sit outside and criticize how others are driving.

On Monday, do this

• Write down one area where you’re acting like a passenger.
  Decide on a concrete step that would move you closer to the engine room: a decision you’ve been avoiding, a risk you’ve been deferring.

• Run the “luck vs control” audit on your biggest problem.
  Two columns: what was bad luck, what is in your control. Stop spending attention on the first column. Design three actions from the second.

• Add explicit Plan B and Plan C to one critical initiative.
  Assume the power will go out: if this launch, hire, or deal fails, what will you do next? Write it down and share it with your team.

• Upgrade one complaint into ownership.
  Take one thing you’ve been criticizing in your company and propose a small experiment you will personally run to improve it.

• Invest one focused block into a “mother quality” decision.
  Use 60–90 minutes to over‑invest in talent, systems, or relationships in a way that only makes sense if you believe the future is worth compounding.

The world won’t suddenly become simple or fair. But founders and operators who feel the future is worth betting on, and think about setbacks as solvable constraints, will quietly own more of whatever comes next.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

Tradition as a safety system, not a prison

Durant makes a blunt claim: out of every hundred new ideas, ninety‑nine are worse than the old response they’re trying to replace. Customs, traditions, and laws are not random; they’re the residue of generations of trial and error. No single clever person, in one short life, sees enough edge cases to safely discard all that accumulated experience.

He compares a society to an individual. When you rip out someone’s memories, their sanity goes with it. Groups are similar. A sharp break with the past often creates collective neurosis: revolutions that start with idealism and end in terror, institutions that abandon every constraint and then wonder why chaos follows.

That doesn’t mean “never change.” It means treat tradition as a filter, not a fossil. The tension between old and new is the point. The young push with fresh ideas, the old resist with skepticism, and most bad ideas die in that struggle. The few that survive have actually earned their place.

You can see this in companies.

In the early days, you have almost no tradition. Everything is an experiment. Over time, some choices keep you alive: how you talk to customers, how you price, how you ship, how you run meetings. These become your “way we do things here.”

Then new people arrive. They bring playbooks from past jobs, trends from Twitter, frameworks from books. Some of that is genuinely better. Much of it just hasn’t been battle‑tested in your context.

If you, as a founder or senior operator, throw the doors open to every shiny idea, you unintentionally turn off the safety system. The “old guard” stops resisting because they assume nothing will stick anyway. The “new guard” stops doing the boring work of understanding why the existing system evolved the way it did.

Durant’s lens suggests a different posture: assume the current way of doing things is guilty of being right until proven otherwise. Not because it is perfect, but because it has survived contact with reality. Treat every proposed change as a hypothesis that must pass through a mill of objections, tests, and time.

That doesn’t make you conservative in the pejorative sense. It makes you responsible for continuity. Your job isn’t to protect the past for its own sake. It’s to protect the parts of the past that still work, while letting better ideas fight their way in.

The companies that navigate this well don’t worship tradition or disruption. They use both. They let the young prod the old. They let the old slow the young down just enough to keep the place from burning down.

Lessons

1. Most “new ideas” are downgrades
   The fact that something is different doesn’t mean it’s better. The existing way has at least one proof: it kept the company alive this long.

2. Resistance is a feature, not a bug
   Internal pushback to change is partly a safety mechanism. Forcing ideas to survive objections is how you avoid breaking what works.

3. Continuity is an asset
   Cultural norms, default processes, and “this is how we do it” store hard‑earned knowledge. Erasing them casually is a hidden form of technical debt.

4. Progress comes from tension, not purity
   You need both radicals and conservatives. The argument between them is how strong ideas emerge and weak ones die.

On Monday, do this

• List your “sacred defaults.” Write down 3–5 ways of operating that have clearly worked over time (how you sell, how you ship, how you hire). Treat these as the burden‑of‑proof areas: change allowed, but only with strong evidence.

• Create a simple trial path for new ideas. For any proposal that touches a sacred default, define: where it will be tested, for how long, and what metric must improve for it to stick.

• Institutionalize one skeptic. In key meetings, assign someone the explicit role of “argue for the status quo” so new ideas have to clear a real hurdle. Rotate the role so it doesn’t become personal.

• Archive the reasons for past choices. Pick one important process and document why it evolved that way. Share it with newer leaders so they argue against the real constraints, not a caricature.

In a world that celebrates constant reinvention, remembering why something has survived is a quiet advantage. The builders who win the next chapter won’t be the ones who change the most; they’ll be the ones who know exactly what to keep while they change what truly needs updating.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

The hidden job of a leader

History, the Durants argue, is not peaceful. Life is competition. When food is scarce, tribes fight. When power is at stake, factions fight. When markets open, firms fight.

But mature societies don’t become less competitive. They just get smarter about how they compete. They learn to cooperate inside the tribe so they can compete more effectively outside it.

War is their sharpest example. In peace, a city can afford to squabble. In war, those same people suddenly line up, take orders, and accept hardship. Not because they turned into saints overnight, but because the external threat makes internal coordination non‑negotiable.

The tribe doesn’t “get along” because it discovered empathy. It gets along because it wants to win.

Durant generalizes this: families, companies, parties, and nations cohere internally to increase their odds in external contests. Cooperation is mostly a tool and form of competition. We bind together in groups so our group can beat other groups.

You see this everywhere once you start looking.

Startups that see themselves as underdogs in a clear market fight rarely drown in internal politics. They don’t have time. There’s a scoreboard outside the building. Every engineer, sales rep, and operator knows which game they’re playing, and what “winning” looks like.

Mature organizations often lose this. The external game is fuzzy or feels already won. Revenue is fine, brand is strong, the castle walls look high. So the energy turns inward. If we’re not united against something out there, we quietly start competing in here: for credit, for status, for resources, for narrative control.

History would say this is not a moral failure. It’s just humans doing what humans have always done when the real enemy disappears: they nominate a new one, usually from the neighboring department. You see the same pattern across eras: once the outside invader or shared threat is gone, the factions that once cooperated often turn on each other. Remove external pressure and competition doesn’t vanish; it just moves inside the walls.

The uncomfortable implication: if you are a founder or senior operator, part of your real job is to define the war. Not in a macho way. In a clarifying way.

What game are we actually playing? Who or what are we trying to beat? On what field? By when?

If you don’t supply those answers, people will still compete. They’ll just compete with each other.

The leaders who last seem to understand this. They use cooperation as a designed tool: shared enemies, shared metrics, shared rituals, shared sacrifices. Not as feel‑good posters, but as competitive infrastructure. They give people something big enough out there to fight for so they don’t burn the company down in here.

Lessons

1. Cooperation is strategy, not sentiment
   Groups don’t cooperate because humans stop being competitive; they cooperate because coordination increases their odds of winning an external game. Culture and org design are tools for performance, not decoration.

2. When the external game is unclear, internal games multiply
   As soon as people can’t see a real, urgent contest outside the walls, they shift their competitive energy to status, politics, and turf wars. Misalignment is often a missing enemy, not missing values.

3. Your job is to define the war and the scoreboard
   Founders underestimate how much energy comes from a concrete opponent, problem, or target. People will endure a lot if they believe it clearly moves the group closer to winning.

4. Strong teams pick alliances to sharpen their edge
   We don’t cooperate randomly. We pick families, firms, and partners that increase our leverage in the real contest. Who you invite “inside the tribe” is a strategic decision.

On Monday, do this

• Name the game. In one sentence, define the primary competitive game your company is playing this year (for example: “Become the default X for Y in Z market before [year].”). Share it with your leadership team and force agreement.

• Clarify the enemy and the metric. In your next all‑hands, spell out the specific external opponent or constraint you’re organizing against (a problem, a category, a standard) and the one or two metrics that define “winning” this year.

• Kill one internal game. Identify one recurring meeting, process, or KPI that mostly optimizes for internal comfort or optics rather than external advantage. Change or remove it, and explain why in terms of the external game.

• Align rewards with the real war. Choose one visible reward (bonus, shout‑out, promotion criterion) and tie it explicitly to moving the external scoreboard, not to individual heroics disconnected from the team’s win.

History’s reminder is quietly optimistic: humans are wired to compete, but we’re also exceptionally good at organizing ourselves when the stakes are clear. If you keep your people pointed at reality outside the building, not at each other, you give them a better story to be part of and a better chance to win the next chapter.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

This week’s story zooms in on a simple shift Saurabh highlights: in fields like finance and education, the money is moving away from the people who run the models and towards the people who can still move humans.

Don’t Automate the Rainmaker

Imagine two young professionals in finance.

One becomes a fund manager, buried in research reports, models, and market data. The other goes into client-facing sales, sitting across tables from families and founders, persuading them to trust a particular fund with their life savings. For a long time, the prestige – and the pay – flowed to the person “running the money,” not the one “selling the money.”

AI is quietly inverting that.

Saurabh makes a simple observation: it is entirely plausible that an AI system can run a diversified Indian equity fund better than most human managers. Algorithms can scan more data, adjust faster, and stay unemotional. But that same system cannot yet walk into a multi‑millionaire’s home in Hyderabad, read the room, handle the subtle status games, soothe fears about volatility, and persuade them to wire $1 million into a new fund.

The manufacturing of financial products is getting automated. The selling of those products – the human, high‑trust, high‑stakes part – is where the value will pool.

The same pattern shows up in education. In the classroom of the near future, AI can grade homework, set custom practice questions, and even explain concepts at different difficulty levels. But it can’t look a restless 17‑year‑old in the eye and say, “I know you’re capable of more” in a way that lands. It can’t run a messy group project that teaches conflict resolution and leadership. So the teacher’s job migrates: less marking, more mentoring.

These are not small tweaks. They’re role rewrites.

For founders and senior operators, the mistake is to think, “AI will replace junior people, but my world stays the same.” In reality, AI is hollowing out entire layers of “respectable” cognitive work: analysts who mostly rearrange data, managers who mostly update decks, professionals whose day is spent inside tools rather than with people.

At the same time, it is amplifying the people who can do what AI can’t: hold trust, frame decisions, absorb complexity, and move others to act.

If you run a business, your leverage is no longer “we have smart people running spreadsheets.” Everyone will have that. Your leverage becomes: “we have machines doing the grunt work, and humans doing what only humans can do – selling, coaching, leading, solving weird problems in real time.”

The uncomfortable question is not “Will AI take my job?” It’s “Is most of my day spent on things a decent model could do cheaper, or on things that require trust, taste, and judgement?”

One side gets commoditized. The other gets paid.

Lessons

1. Production gets automated; persuasion gets rewarded.
   In fields like finance and education, the “making” of the product is getting handed to algorithms, while the hard, messy work of earning and keeping human trust is becoming the scarce, expensive part.

2. Tasks are automated, not entire roles – unless you cling to the wrong tasks.
   If your identity is tied to grinding through analysis, not to guiding decisions, AI won’t just “help” you. It will quietly make you irrelevant.

3. The most resilient careers sit at the intersection of brains and relationships.
   People who can understand complex systems and explain them simply to non‑experts will capture more value than those who only do one side.

4. Founders should use AI to free, not replace, their best people.
   The win is not cutting your top salesperson; it’s taking 30–50% of their low‑leverage work and giving it to a machine so they spend more time in front of humans.

On Monday, do this

1. Audit your own calendar for “AI‑bait.”
   Look at last week. Highlight every block that was data gathering, formatting, summarising, or basic follow‑ups. Ask: “Could a tool do 80% of this?” If yes, start testing one this month.

2. Redraw one key role around human‑only skills.
   Pick a role like sales, account management, or teaching. List the tasks that require trust, persuasion, or coaching. Explicitly redesign the role so that person spends more time on those, less on admin.

3. Change your next hire’s spec.
   For your next knowledge‑worker hire, add one non‑negotiable: evidence they can move humans, not just move information. That might be sales experience, teaching, community building, or leading teams.

4. Design one “AI shield” for yourself.
   Choose one human skill you’ll deepen over the next 12–24 months – e.g., high‑ticket sales, storytelling, negotiation, or coaching. Treat it as your personal hedge against being automated away.

P.S. If you enjoy seeing how real careers and leadership styles are built over decades, I recently spoke with Amrish Shah, Partner at Deloitte and a 37‑year veteran of India’s M&A tax landscape. We got into mentors, long-term client relationships, and how creative structuring turns a standard deal into a win‑win. You can listen here: mnacommunity.com/podcasts/amrish-shah/

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

If the old “study hard, get a degree, get a safe job” script is dying, then the only real safety left is in how we think, decide, and build. The story below is one example of what that shift looks like on the ground.

You Can’t Manufacture Entrepreneurs

In 2013, a billionaire Indian founder tried to solve a simple problem: help ordinary families earn ₹30,000 a month from their own business. He had capital, credibility, and a beautiful blueprint called “Business in a Box.” Three years later, almost nothing worked – until he changed one uncomfortable assumption most founders still cling to.

Anand Deshpande built a ₹70,000+ crore IT services company, Persistent Systems, on a simple personal motto: learn, earn, return.

In his “return” phase, he started seeing the same pattern across India’s small towns: families working brutally hard inside tiny shops and micro‑businesses, yet unable to cross the line into a stable, decent life. Anand picked a clear target: help a family earn at least ₹30,000 a month from their own business. If he could solve that, he thought, he could move millions of people a notch up the ladder.

So he launched deAsra and designed what every management consultant loves: a complete “Business in a Box”.
A 6×6 grid laying out everything an entrepreneur needed to do: market analysis, pricing, compliance, working capital, hiring, bookkeeping, marketing, and so on. If a would‑be entrepreneur followed the plan, they should, in theory, have a functioning business.

On paper, it was flawless.
In the real world, almost nobody used it.

Early‑stage founders didn’t want to sit and fill out detailed grids. They were improvising, hustling, reacting. The people deAsra reached through skilling and education partners weren’t really entrepreneurs at all – they were training for jobs, not trying to create them.

After a few years, deAsra had helped roughly 3,000 businesses. For most NGOs that would be a success. For Anand, it was proof the model was wrong. The gap between the PowerPoint and the pavement was too wide.

So he flipped the problem.

Instead of trying to manufacture entrepreneurs from job‑seekers, deAsra narrowed its focus to people who were already running a micro‑business and were frustrated by its limits. These owners had real customers, real cashflow, and very real pain.

And instead of offering a grand, all‑inclusive “Business in a Box”, deAsra disaggregated its help into small, concrete jobs:

• Set up a GST registration.

• Secure a working capital loan.

• Fix basic bookkeeping.

• Standardize one process.

• Run a simple promo that actually moves inventory.

Each service was defined by a specific outcome an owner already cared about, not by what looked “complete” to an expert.

With this shift, adoption took off. Technology let deAsra deliver narrow, well‑defined interventions at scale, instead of hoping busy, under‑resourced founders would embrace a full curriculum. The organization stopped trying to convert the uninterested and started pouring leverage into the already‑committed.

For Anand, the lesson was humbling: the constraint wasn’t intelligence, motivation, or even capital. It was who he chose to serve and how he defined the job he was doing for them.

That choice made the difference between a smart idea that sat in a binder and a system that actually moved livelihoods.

Lessons

1. Don’t sell transformation to people who want a job.
   If someone’s core goal is employment, you will exhaust yourself trying to turn them into an owner. Your best leverage is with people who already decided to bet on themselves.

2. Design for real behavior, not your ideal user.
   Entrepreneurs won’t complete 36‑cell grids; neither will your customers or your team. Tools must match how people actually work under pressure, not how they behave in workshops.

3. Narrow from “everything” to the next painful step.
   “Business in a Box” tried to solve the whole journey. The scaled version solved one concrete bottleneck at a time. Specific jobs get done; vague missions get nodded at.

4. Scale by disaggregating, then productizing.
   Breaking support into small, outcome‑based services let deAsra use tech, standardize, and reach far more businesses. The same move exists in almost every company: unbundle the value, then systematize delivery.

On Monday, do this

1. Audit your ICP
   List your current customers or users. Mark who is already “all‑in” on the outcome you serve vs who is half‑interested or externally pressured. Decide, in writing, that your next 10 customers will come only from the already‑committed group.

2. Kill one beautiful but unused artifact
   Find the equivalent of your 6×6 grid: a deck, dashboard, playbook, or process nobody on the front lines actually uses. Either strip it down to the 20% they do use or retire it.

3. Define the single next bottleneck you solve
   Rewrite your core offer in one line: “We help [very specific customer] go from [current state] to [next milestone] by [mechanism].” Remove anything that isn’t part of that next step.

4. Disaggregate one “big” service
   Take a flagship project or retainer and split it into 3–5 standalone micro‑services with clear outcomes and prices. Ask: “If a scrappy founder could only buy one, which would hurt enough to pay for today?” Build that one out first.

One last thing

The middle‑class script might be breaking, but that’s exactly where builders get their chance. In a world of brittle plans, the people who stay close to reality and keep adjusting will quietly own the next chapter.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

If you missed the earlier pieces, you can start here: Part-1, Part-2, Part-3

The Real Reason Most Startups Become Fragile

In 2018, MotivBase had a competitor that seemed to have everything Ujwal Arkalgud didn’t.

Let’s call them Company B.

They were venture-backed. Their CEO had the polished keynote slot at major conferences. They had international offices, a sprawling Fortune 100 client list, and the kind of logo slide that makes investors smile.

Ujwal sat in the back of one of those events watching the CEO speak and did anxious math in his notebook: their funding versus his bootstrap budget, their global headcount versus his lean team, their visibility versus his quiet grind.

On paper, there was no race.

They had a jet pack.
He was walking.

But there was one thing Ujwal understood that Company B didn’t: borrowed credibility, like borrowed money, has carrying costs.

While Company B raced to justify their valuation – aggressive pricing, rapid expansion, the constant performance of scale – MotivBase was doing something less glamorous.

They were learning.

Every client interaction taught them how cultural insights actually moved through large organizations. Every project deepened their understanding of when their technology created real behaviour change versus just a cooler slide.

Instead of optimising for “bigger,” they were optimising for “more true” and “more trusted.”

Slowly, the gap closed.

In late 2020, a client who had worked with Company B for years reached out to Ujwal.

“We’ve been doing this all wrong,” she said. “We’ve been chasing trends without understanding why they matter.”

That quiet sentence told him everything.

Real influence doesn’t come from being the loudest voice in the room. It comes from being the most trusted one.

By the time Company B’s borrowed momentum ran out, MotivBase’s earned credibility had become a moat.

This wasn’t a one-off story. Ujwal had been watching the same pattern play out across the startup world.

WeWork raised $47 billion and confused the appearance of community with the substance of it. Humane raised $230 million and missed the invisible trust dynamics that govern whether consumers invite a new brand into their lives.

The companies that become antifragile – that grow stronger under pressure – aren’t the ones with the most capital or the fastest early growth.

They’re the ones that compound earned trust instead of relying on borrowed momentum.

The last decade celebrated blitzscaling. The wreckage it left behind – companies that raised hundreds of millions and imploded just as fast – tells the real story.

If your business is built on borrowed momentum, every funding round becomes a new master to serve. Every board meeting pulls you further from the original questions you set out to answer.

MotivBase bootstrapped to a high eight-figure exit.

The difference wasn’t capital.

It was the willingness to understand the game before trying to win it.

That’s the argument at the heart of Invisible Rules – and it might be the most contrarian (and useful) thing you read this year.

Lessons

• Borrowed credibility has a bill attached. Investor logos and stage time can open doors, but they also create pressure to perform a version of success that may not match reality.

• Antifragility comes from learning, not hype. Each client, project, and failure is either making your product truer and more trusted, or it’s just feeding the appearance of momentum.

• Capital amplifies your habits. If your core motion is shallow, money will scale the shallowness. If your core motion is deep learning and trust-building, money can scale that instead.

• Visibility is not the same as influence. Being known is fragile; being relied on is durable. The former gets you on stages, the latter gets you invited back into decision rooms.

On Monday, do this

• Make a two-column list: “Borrowed momentum” (funding, PR, big-stage moments, big-name partnerships) vs “Earned credibility” (retention, referrals, depth of usage, hard problems solved). Which side actually supports your long-term moat?

• Pick one metric of earned trust (renewals, expansion revenue, NPS from power users, key decision-maker referrals) and set a simple target to improve it over the next 90 days.

• Look at one initiative you’re doing mostly “to look big” – a vanity partnership, a conference spend, a rushed expansion. Ask: if we cancelled this and reinvested into customer learning, what would we do instead?

• Before your next strategic decision, ask your leadership team: “Does this make us noisier, or does this make us harder to replace?” Optimise for the second.

One last thing about the book

Invisible Rules is free on Amazon for 1 more day, get it, read it, and leave a short Amazon review.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build businesses with extraordinary people. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, I am bootstrapping a food startup and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I send one email each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

Details on how to get the book for free on Amazon are at the end of this post.

The Real Game Isn’t Product–Market Fit. It’s Power–Market Fit.

When Ujwal Arkalgud started MotivBase, the product did exactly what every founder dreams of.

In meetings, research leaders at big brands would light up. His platform could surface deep cultural beliefs at scale and explain why customers behaved the way they did, often before the data caught up.

Everyone nodded. Everyone loved it.

And then… nothing happened.

Deal after deal stalled in the same place.

The people who were excited about MotivBase weren’t the ones who could actually say yes. Inside these companies, power didn’t flow to the best ideas. It flowed to the people who could produce a very specific kind of “evidence”: clean charts, simple stats, and a few quotes that reassured executives their existing story was right.

MotivBase had product–market fit with the curious people in the middle.

It didn’t have power–market fit with the people at the top.

The breakthrough came when Ujwal stopped treating this as a messaging problem and started treating it like an anthropologist.

Instead of asking, “How do I pitch better?”, he asked:

• What does credibility look like in this culture?

• Who is actually allowed to challenge the story in the boardroom?

• What invisible rules are my buyers trying not to break?

That lens changed everything.

MotivBase stopped trying to sell “anthropology” as a disruptive new religion and started building what Ujwal calls “safe spaces” inside the existing power structure.

The team redesigned their deliverables so they looked familiar on the surface – yes, the clean charts stayed – but each slide had a deeper anthropological layer baked in.

Executives got something they could digest in 10 minutes.
Internal champions got a superpower: the ability to walk into senior meetings and say, “Here’s something about your customer you’ve never considered,” without getting shut down.

MotivBase didn’t just fit the market. It fit the way power moved inside the market.

Once they aligned with the real power dynamics, the sales motion unstuck. Deals got bigger. The right people started fighting to bring MotivBase in. And eventually, the company sold in a high eight-figure exit.

Ujwal’s takeaway, which sits at the core of Invisible Rules, is brutal and useful:

You’re not just solving for product–market fit.
You’re solving for power–market fit.

Until you understand who is allowed to say yes, what “credible” must look like in their world, and which invisible rules they’re terrified of breaking, you’re asking your buyers to lose status to buy from you.

That’s the deeper game most founders never realize they’re playing.

Lessons

• Product–market fit is not enough. You can have users who love you and still lose if the people with budget and status don’t see you as “safe.”

• Every buyer lives inside a status game. Your champion is trying not to look stupid in front of their peers and boss; if buying from you feels risky to their identity, they will stall.

• Credibility is cultural, not abstract. In some companies, credibility is clean charts; in others it’s “what HQ does”; in others it’s “what the biggest competitor is doing.” You have to speak that language.

• Design for the room you won’t be in. Your real pitch happens when your champion explains you to their leadership. Your materials must make them powerful in that room.

On Monday, do this

• Map one key account and write down: “Who is genuinely excited about us?” vs “Who can actually say yes?” If those aren’t the same person, you’ve found a power gap.

• Ask your current champion: “When you bring new ideas upstairs, what does ‘credible’ look like in that room?” Then adjust one core deliverable (deck, report, demo) to match that format.

• Rewrite your pitch so the explicit promise to your internal champion is: “I will make you look smart and safe when you present this.” Stress less about being “innovative,” more about making them powerful.

• Before your next enterprise meeting, add one slide or summary page built specifically for the senior decision maker who won’t be on the call: 2–3 clear claims, the evidence they care about, and the risk you remove.

One last thing about the book

Tomorrow Ujwal is making Invisible Rules free on Amazon. I’m trying to help him get 50 honest reviews. If you decide to grab it and it helps you, a short Amazon review during the week would go a long way.

Also send me an email to let me know so that I can personally thank you too.

Here is the link again → Invisible Rules

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build, sell, and invest in businesses. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I read books and steal from my own experience, then send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

I’m taking one book – Invisible Rules: How to Outsmart the Entrepreneurial Game by my friend Ujwal Arkalgud – and, over four Sundays, pulling out lessons founders and senior operators can use to run their companies and lives better.

This is part 2.

They Said No. It Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Him.

There’s a version of Ujwal Arkalgud’s story that ends in a boardroom somewhere, building someone else’s dream with someone else’s money.

He almost lived that version.

In the early days of MotivBase, Ujwal had built something genuinely rare: a technology that used cultural anthropology and artificial intelligence to decode how human behaviour was shifting in real time.

Not demographics. Not surveys.

The deep cultural currents that move beneath the surface. The invisible forces that explain why consumers do what they do before the data even catches up.

Fortune 500 companies needed this. He knew it. And when he walked into investor meetings, the room would light up.

They loved the vision.

Then came the question that killed the moment, every single time:

“Can an anthropologist — without a PhD, without a track record in tech — actually scale a company like this?”

Meeting after meeting. The same polite enthusiasm. The same slow fade. The same answer dressed up in different language.

No.

What he only understood later was that they weren’t really evaluating his technology. They were enforcing an invisible rule: who is allowed to lead a technology company, what a founder is supposed to look like, where they went to school, what they’d built before.

The very thing that made MotivBase unlike anything else in the market – his anthropology background – was being read as a disqualifier.

At the time, it felt like failure. The kind that follows you home, sits with you at dinner, and whispers that maybe they’re right.

Then something shifted.

He stopped trying to become the founder the investors wanted and started asking a different question:

What becomes possible if we never take their money?

No VC meant no growth targets designed by people who wouldn’t remember his name in five years. No pressure to scale before the product was ready. No slow drift toward becoming what every other research firm in the market already was.

They built differently. Slower. Deeper.

They chose clients carefully, solved problems thoroughly, and let the results speak in rooms where the invisible rules said their kind of company shouldn’t exist.

Every engagement became proof. Every insight that conventional research had missed became evidence that the anthropological approach wasn’t a liability — it was the point.

The thing the investors called a weakness turned out to be the moat.

A few years later, Ujwal and his co-founder sold MotivBase for a high-eight-figure sum (somewhere in the range of $70 - $100 million). Bootstrapped. Zero venture capital.

The acquirer didn’t pay for a typical market research firm. They paid for something that couldn’t be replicated — built by someone the system had told, repeatedly, didn’t qualify to build it.

The investors who said no weren’t wrong about the rule.

They just didn’t see that Ujwal had already decided to stop following it.

Every industry runs on proxies for trust. Credentials. Pedigree. Track record. The right address, the right accent, the right alma mater.

These proxies exist because evaluating someone from scratch is hard, so systems default to shortcuts — signals that say “this person is safe to bet on.”

If you don’t hit the visible proxies, you get disqualified before you’ve had a real chance to demonstrate what you actually bring.

The room closes before you open your mouth.

What Ujwal lays out in Invisible Rules is that these visible proxies aren’t the only game in town.

In every industry, there are less obvious foxholes: rooms where the traditional gatekeepers have less control, where the usual credentials carry less weight, where someone willing to build trust through demonstrated results rather than inherited credibility can get a foothold.

From that foothold, with the right moves, you can earn your way into rooms where — by every conventional rule — you don’t belong.

That’s not a motivational poster. It’s a practical way to play the game differently.

And it starts with learning to see the rules that are quietly running the game around you.

Lessons

• “No” often means “you don’t fit our proxy,” not “you’re not good enough.” Investors and buyers lean on shortcuts: degrees, logos, past exits. Their rejection is often about their risk model, not your actual capability.

• Your “disqualifier” can be your moat. The same background that gatekeepers distrust is often what lets you see what incumbents can’t, and build what they won’t.

• Bootstrapping changes what you optimise for. Without outside money, you trade speed and vanity metrics for depth, fit, and staying power. That constraint can sharpen the product instead of dulling it.

• There are always foxholes outside the main gate. In every industry, there are smaller rooms where results matter more than pedigree. Win there first, then let those wins carry you upstream.

On Monday, do this

• Think of the last serious “no” you got (from an investor, client, or hiring manager). Write down the invisible rule they were enforcing, separate from your actual abilities.

• List the parts of your background that don’t fit the standard founder / operator template in your space. For one of them, write a single sentence that reframes it as an advantage, not an apology.

• Ask yourself: “If I never raised a dollar, how would I grow this?” Write down one concrete change that would make your product or service more resilient, not just more impressive.

• Identify one “foxhole” where credentials matter less in your industry: a niche community, a smaller segment, a type of problem that’s under-served. Reach out to one potential customer there this week with a specific, results-focused offer.

One last thing about the book

I’ll share two more stories from Invisible Rules this month.

Between March 23–27, Ujwal is making the ebook free on Amazon. I’m trying to help him get 50 honest reviews. If you decide to grab it and it helps you, a short Amazon review for him during that window would go a long way.

I’ll send the link closer to the date.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build, sell, and invest in businesses. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms and Happy Ratio, and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I read books and steal from my own experience, then send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

I’m taking one book – Invisible Rules: How to Outsmart the Entrepreneurial Game by Ujwal Arkalgud – and, over four Sundays, pulling out lessons that founders and senior operators can use to run their companies and lives better.

This is part 1.

My friend Ujwal and his co-founder Jason were sitting at a rooftop bar in Minneapolis. Wine in hand. The Mayo Clinic building lit up against the darkening sky.

They were about to make a decision most people would call insane.

They were going to deliberately kill their $5 million business.

Not a failing business. Not a struggling startup. A business running at 90% margins, with a client roster most consulting firms would envy.

They were going to walk away from all of it — on purpose.

Three years earlier, they had started MotivBase as a consulting firm.

It wasn’t their dream. It was their bridge.

They wanted to build a technology platform — a research tool powered by cultural anthropology and AI — that would transform how large companies understand human behavior.

But they had no venture capital. No wealthy network. No safety net.

So they did the only thing they could: they sold their thinking.

Every workshop, every consulting engagement, every strategic recommendation had a dual purpose: serve the client, and fund the technology.

It worked. The services business grew fast. It became profitable.

And then it became the trap.

Because here’s the invisible rule that almost swallowed them whole:

“If your business is working, you scale it. You don’t stop it.”

That rule isn’t written anywhere. No investor tells you this. No business school teaches it explicitly. But you absorb it from startup culture. From the way we celebrate revenue. From every story we tell about success.

And the rule has real consequences.

As long as the consulting business was generating cash, the technology platform would remain a side project.

The immediate rewards would always win.

Clients needed things. Staff needed direction. Margins were excellent.

Why would you ever stop?

But Ujwal could see what the rule was hiding.

They were building equity for their clients, not for themselves.

They were trading time for money in the most sophisticated way possible — and calling it a company.

The technology they actually wanted to build kept getting pushed to next quarter.
Then next year.
Then “once we land this big client.”

That night on the rooftop, they named the rule for what it was.
Not wisdom. Not prudence.
An invisible constraint dressed up as common sense.

And then they did the uncomfortable thing. They chose to reset. They wound down the services business.
Moved everyone onto the technology platform.

Started from scratch — smaller team, less revenue, more uncertainty.

Four years later, they sold the company for an undiscloses high eight figures (a little bird told me it was between $70-$100 million)

Bootstrapped. Zero venture capital.

The acquirer paid for the technology.
For the client relationships.
For the IP they had spent years quietly building while everyone else was busy admiring their consulting margins.

The exit wasn’t what surprised Ujwal most.

It was the moment — sitting at that rooftop bar, looking at a business any rational advisor would have told them to protect — when he realized what the invisible rule had almost cost.

Not money.
Not the exit.
The permission to build what he actually came here to build.

Lessons:

1. A “working” business can be a trap. Profit and praise are not proof you’re building the right thing; sometimes they’re proof you’ve built a very comfortable cage.

2. Trade time for equity, not just money. High-margin services feel like progress, but if they don’t create durable assets, you’re renting your future out by the hour.

3. Name the invisible rules that run you. Until you can say, “The rule I’m following is X,” you can’t choose whether it deserves to be followed.

4. Rig the game in favour of the long term. If you don’t design your week around building the thing you ultimately want, the “working” thing will keep winning by default.

On Monday, Do This

1. Write down whether your main revenue stream is your destination or your bridge, and set a date when it stops being the main act if it’s just a bridge.

2. List the assets your current work is creating that would survive if you stopped tomorrow; commit to building one new asset and schedule time for it this week.

3. Write three “rules” you feel compelled to follow in your business and ask, for each: “Who said this, and what would I do if it were optional?”

4. Block a recurring weekly calendar slot dedicated only to building the thing you want to own in five years, and treat it as immovable as a board meeting.

One last thing about the book

I’ll share three more stories from Invisible Rules this month.

Ujwal is a dear friend. Seeing him succeed has been a joy to watch. Now that he is sharing his secrets, I am trying to help by getting him 50 honest reviews. Would you like to be one of the 50?

Between March 23–27, Ujwal is making the ebook free on Amazon. If you decide to grab it and it helps you, a short Amazon review for him during that window would go a long way.

I’ll send the link closer to the date.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build, sell, and invest in businesses. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms and Happy Ratio, and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I read books and steal from my own experience, then send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

They write detailed instructions, hover on every decision, and then wonder why nobody takes ownership. Phil Knight built Nike with the opposite rule: hire sharp misfits, tell them what to do, and let them surprise you with how.

The Story: “Tell Them What To Do, Then Get Out Of The Way”

By temperament, Phil Knight wasn’t a corporate manager.

He didn’t want to write thick playbooks or sit through status meetings explaining why someone was 37% complete. His early team at Nike wouldn’t have tolerated that anyway. They were ex‑runners, failed corporate types, and misfits who didn’t fit neatly into org charts.

So he made a simple choice: optimize for sharp minds and deep belief, then give them more autonomy than was comfortable.

There’s a line he loved:

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

It was his operating system.

He hired people like Jeff Johnson, who obsessed over runners, kept handwritten index cards on every customer, and wrote long, strange letters to them. Instead of forcing Johnson into a neat corporate script, Knight let him build his “church for runners” the way he saw it. The result wasn’t tidy, but it was incredibly effective.

He moved Rob Strasser from legal into marketing – a shift most companies would never try. Strasser didn’t have the standard marketing pedigree. What he had was a fast, aggressive mind and deep alignment with the mission. Knight didn’t hand him a 50‑page brand deck. He gave him clear stakes and room to move. Strasser became one of the greatest deal‑makers and brand builders Nike had.

Again and again, Knight’s pattern was the same:

• Choose people who are clearly self‑propelled.

• Point them at a meaningful problem.

• Remove as much babysitting as possible.

This style wouldn’t work for everyone. Some people want line‑by‑line guidance and constant reassurance. They didn’t last long at Nike. But for the right kind of person – competent, slightly rebellious, allergic to bureaucracy – it was jet fuel.

The payoff wasn’t just speed. It was loyalty. People stayed, bled, and stretched because they knew they were trusted. They knew they’d be judged on outcomes, not compliance with someone else’s 17‑step checklist.

Knight didn’t build a perfect org chart. He built a culture where smart, driven people would rather be “in over their heads” at Nike than comfortable anywhere else.

Lessons for Founders & Operators

1. Smart people don’t need step‑by‑step instructions
If you’ve hired well, every extra layer of control is a tax on initiative. The right people want a clear outcome and constraints, then room.

2. Trust has to be extended before it’s earned back
You can’t demand ownership while signaling that you don’t trust anyone to decide. Someone has to move first. That someone is you.

3. Misfits outperform in high‑autonomy environments
The people who didn’t thrive in big companies often carry the exact traits that win in startups, as long as they’re not handcuffed.

4. Role stretch reveals real talent
Moving Strasser from legal to marketing looked risky on paper, but it surfaced a skill set that would have stayed hidden in a narrow lane.

On Monday, Do This

• Remove one layer of approval from the work of a person you already know is strong. Let them ship without you signing off on every detail.

• Rewrite one current project brief from “how” (steps, tasks) to “what and why” (goal, constraints, success metric). Hand it to the owner and ask them to propose the “how.”

• Pick one team member for a role stretch in the next 90 days – a project slightly outside their current box that forces them to own a result, not a task list.

You’ll know this is working when your smartest people stop asking, “What exactly do you want me to do?” and start saying, “Here’s what I’m planning to do – unless you see something I don’t.”

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build, sell, and invest in businesses. I’m helping grow Ideals Virtual Data Rooms and Happy Ratio, and I invest through Marcellus Investment Managers. I read books and steal from my own experience, then send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life. If that’s you, you can join the newsletter here. Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

The Story: When the First Nikes Looked Wrong

When the first shipment of Nikes arrived, they didn’t look like the start of a legendary brand.

The boxes helped the illusion for a moment: bright orange, “nike” in clean lowercase on the side. The kind of touch that makes a founder feel like things might finally be coming together.

Then Phil Knight and his team opened them.

The leather looked off. Too shiny, in a way that felt cheap rather than sharp. The new polyurethane coating made the uppers look like they’d been dipped in wet paint. On some pairs, the swoosh – Carolyn Davidson’s new logo – wasn’t even straight. It literally sat crooked on the shoe.

This wasn’t just a cosmetic issue. This was their first product under their own name, after years of selling someone else’s brand and fighting upstream against suppliers. Their “Independence Day” shipment looked like a quality control problem.

The team did what most teams do in that moment: they started to spiral.

If this batch was bad, what did it say about the factory? The new brand? The whole idea? The instinctive narrative in everyone’s head was:

“We’re screwed.”

Knight felt it too. He was on the edge of losing it. But he noticed something crucial: his people were already over the edge. If he joined them in panic, the company would stall before its own shoes hit the track.

So he chose a different frame.

He told them, in essence:

This is the worst these shoes will ever be. Quality will get better from here. If they could sell these, they’d earn the right – and the cash – to make better ones.

Same facts. Different story.

They didn’t have time to wait for a pristine second run. The trade show was booked. Retailers were coming. Cash was tight. So they packed the imperfect shoes into those beautiful orange boxes, took a breath, and showed up.

At the show, a crowd of salesmen drifted toward the booth. They picked up the shoes, turned them in the light, frowned at the finish, and pointed at the unfamiliar logo.

“What is this?”

“That’s a Nike,” Knight said. Greek goddess of victory.

“And this thing?”

“That’s a swoosh,” he answered. “It’s the sound of someone going past you.”

In one line, a slightly crooked mark on a flawed shoe became a symbol of speed and beating the person next to you. The physical product hadn’t changed. The meaning had.

By the end of the day, they’d exceeded their expectations. Orders came in.

Later, one big account explained why they’d taken the risk. It wasn’t the leather, or the finish, or the logo. It was the people. Blue Ribbon had earned a reputation for telling the truth while everyone else exaggerated. If Knight’s team said this unproven shoe was worth a shot, that was enough.

The first Nikes didn’t win because they were perfect. They won because the founders were willing to ship an honest v1, carry it with a clear story, and lean on years of trust to buy themselves time.

Most founders quietly kill good ideas in the name of polish. Knight used imperfect product to finance the improved version he actually wanted.

Lessons for Founders & Operators

1. Ship before you feel ready
The first Nikes were clearly flawed, and they shipped anyway. Version one’s job was to get into the world, generate signal, and buy time. Waiting for version three quality with version zero resources is how momentum dies.

2. Relationship equity beats product polish (in the short term)
Retailers didn’t buy early Nikes because the shoes were beautiful. They bought because Blue Ribbon had a history of straight talk. When product is temporarily weak, reputation for honesty becomes working capital.

3. Stories make symbols valuable
“Swoosh” meant nothing until Knight tied it to a human idea: the sound of someone going past you. A logo or name is dead weight until you attach a sentence that makes people feel something.

4. Founders set the emotional temperature
Knight saw his team sliding into panic and refused to join them. His reframe – “this is the worst they’ll ever be” – became the company’s story. Teams don’t react to reality; they react to the founder’s interpretation of reality.

5. Use v1 to earn the right to v2
Those early, imperfect sales gave Nike cash, feedback, and proof that the market cared. Version one wasn’t the finish line; it was the bridge to a better product and a stronger brand.

On Monday, Do This

If you want this to change your week rather than just feel interesting, here are five concrete moves:

1. Ship one uncomfortable v1.
   Take a feature, product, or idea you’ve been polishing for weeks and release a minimal, clearly-labeled version to a small subset of customers.

2. Spend trust, don’t hoard it.
   Write to your top 10–20 customers: tell them honestly what’s still imperfect, what you’re improving next, and how you’ll make it right if you miss.

3. Give your product a one-sentence story.
   Replace your main product description with a single line that ties it to one human idea: victory, calm, freedom, security, etc. Test that sentence in your next sales call.

4. Decide your crisis sentence in advance.
   Write down the exact line you’ll use to frame the next setback for your team. Something true, but constructive. Share it with your leadership group.

5. Choose one area to deliberately “launch ugly.”
   Pick one initiative this month where the goal is rapid v1 in the wild, not a polished internal masterpiece. Commit to a ship date, and let reality do the editing.

I’m Harsh. I build, sell and invest in businesses. I also read books to keep getting better. I send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life.

I currently help build Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, Happy Ratio, the M&A Community, and Marcellus Investment Managers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Would it look anything like your degree did?

Most of us were trained to memorize answers, sit still, and reproduce the “right” solution from the textbook. We got good at guessing what the examiner wanted. Then we graduated into a world that doesn’t hand out marks for following instructions. It pays for solved problems.

James Dyson looked at that gap and decided complaining about it was a waste of time. So he built his own university.

The university that pays you to learn

In 2017, the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology took in its first cohort: forty-four undergraduates.

No tuition.
No debt.
No four-year pause from reality.

Instead, students work three days a week on real Dyson research projects alongside Dyson engineers. The other two days, they study engineering. They do this forty-seven weeks a year, for four years.

Compared to a traditional twenty-two week academic year and three-year degree, Dyson estimates his students receive roughly two and a half times the teaching. But it’s not just the volume that’s different. It’s the nature of the work.

They are encouraged to think against the grain. To question, to redesign, to be wrong, and to be corrected in the context of live products that are heading to market. Their “homework” is not a problem set that disappears into a folder. Their work turns into machines on shelves, in customers’ homes, generating real revenue.

They are paid a proper salary. They graduate with four years of experience, products on their CV, and no student debt. Dyson doesn’t lock them in with golden handcuffs. They are free to leave. The only thing he’s betting on is that someone who has had that kind of apprenticeship will want to keep doing hard, interesting work that customers actually buy.

By graduation, they’re not just qualified on paper; they’re professionals with real track records of building things people actually buy.

One email that says it all

One day in October 2020, Dyson received an email from William Thoburn.

Good morning James,

Thank you for your praise and thank you for starting the Institute in 2017 − I’m having a fantastic time!

Here is a brief summary of my achievements this year:

• Averaged a 1st in my first-year studies for a University of Warwick Engineering degree.

• Designed and built an automated system for the Dyson Motors Advanced Test Systems and Validation team.

• Completed LabView Core 1 and 2 certifications.

• Became an AWS certified Cloud Practitioner, whilst deploying a cost saving improvement to the Dyson cloud infrastructure − at Dyson’s Bristol office.

• Learnt about rotor dynamics and used CAD to construct a visualisation rig whilst working in the Dyson Motors’ Mechanical team.

• Pitched and led a summer series project on capturing microplastics from our waterways which won the ‘Most Linked Project to the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ award.

All the best

William Thoburn
Undergraduate Engineer
The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology

Most corporate “graduate programs” would struggle to match that density of real output over three years.

The point is not that William is a genius. The point is that the system he’s in is designed for doing, not knowing. It assumes young people can handle real responsibility far earlier than we typically give it to them. And it asks to be judged on evidence: what did you actually build and improve that matters to customers or the business?

What this means for you

You’re not going to start your own university. You don’t need to.

But you are already designing a learning system, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

If your company runs on status meetings, abstract “training,” and slide decks, you’re running a knowledge-retention system. People get better at talking. Not necessarily better at building, launching, and selling.

Dyson’s Institute suggests a different set of defaults:

• Put people on real, revenue-linked problems as early as possible.

• Make learning inseparable from shipping and selling to real customers or internal buyers.

• Increase the intensity: longer seasons of focused work on one domain, with clear commercial targets.

• Judge people by the trail of things they’ve built and sold, not just the brands on their CV.

You probably already have people on your team who would thrive under that kind of pressure and clarity.

On Monday, do this

Pick one important problem in your business that has been stuck for at least ninety days.

Not a vague aspiration. A real, concrete problem with a revenue or customer outcome.
“Reduce cloud spend by 20% with at least one internal stakeholder who has to approve it.”
“Close three design-partner customers for the new product.”
“Increase win-rate by 10 percentage points on deals over $100k.”

Now:

1. Choose one or two high-upside people.

2. For the next 6–12 weeks, give them a “mini-Dyson Institute”:

   • 2–3 days a week protected to work on that problem.

   • 1 day a week to study everything connected to it: internal data, external case studies, books, talks, calls with people who’ve already sold this kind of thing.

3. Replace your usual update meeting with a single question:

   • “What did we ship or sell this week, and what did we learn?”

At the end of that block, their “exam” is simple: is the problem solved or meaningfully closer to solved? What portfolio of things did they actually ship or sell?

If you repeat that experiment a few times a year, you won’t just have better projects. You’ll have your own version of the Dyson Institute inside your company: a place where capable people learn by being trusted with real problems, and judged by the things they build that actually work and the customers who prove it with money.

If this was forwarded to you
I’m Harsh. I build, sell and invest in businesses. I also read books to keep getting better. I send one story each Sunday for founders and senior operators who want useful ideas to win in business and life.

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Harsh Batra

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

I currently help build Ideals Virtual Data Rooms, Happy Ratio, the M&A Community, and Marcellus Investment Managers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshbatra

The problem is, you can’t predict who they will be. So your job is simply to do the work. Let serendipity do the rest.

I continue to be inspired by James Dyson’s book, Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure. When I read the following story, I immediately sent it to a friend who had just shut down his startup after four years.

It’s a story about the price of ambition.

Dyson recalls when Mike Page, a banker, came to visit him at his coach house:

“What do you need the money for?” he asked.

I told him I wanted to make vacuum cleaners to compete with Hoover and Electrolux.

“That’s very interesting,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

He came back about a week later and said, “We’ll lend you £400,000, but you’ve got to sign over your house.”

Dyson went to Bristol with his wife, Deirdre, and a lawyer.

We signed a nasty grey form making everything we had over to the bank in exchange for the money.

It was taking the ultimate risk. With three young children, we could end up evicted from our home. It was heady and scary stuff, even more so when Mike Page upped the loan to £600,000.

They stood to lose everything. It was their last roll of the dice.

When I read this, I wondered if I would ever take the “ultimate risk.” I am actually quite risk-averse, even though some of my choices seem risky to others.

But here is where serendipity struck James Dyson.

Sometime later, Dyson asked Mike Page why he lent him the money when everyone else rejected him.

“Well, you had fought a five-year lawsuit in America, so I could see you had determination.

And I went home to my wife and told her that you were doing a vacuum cleaner without a bag, and what did she think of that? And she thought it was brilliant not to have a bag.”

What Dyson didn’t know at the time was that the bank had actually rejected the request. Mike Page had to appeal to the ombudsman to push it through.

Serendipity came at the most unexpected time, from the most unexpected person – the bank manager.

Useful Idea: Have ‘no fear’ so serendipity can find you

If you believe in something like James Dyson, you will find a way.

But you have to stay in motion. Dyson didn’t get the loan just because of the idea; he got it because the banker saw he had “fought a five-year lawsuit.” The grit created the luck.

When you have no fear, people from the unlikeliest of places will come to you when you need them the most. You will end up working with people you never expected.

As Dyson’s son says about the company’s culture:

“It doesn’t matter if the challenge is making something entirely new, replumbing a house or taking on a powerful multinational − he just gets on and does it. He has no fear. This is the thing we need to uphold... the no-fear culture, the need to be adventurous.”

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• Ideals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)

I am currently reading James Dyson’s book, Invention: A Life of Learning Through Failure. As an owner of Dyson air purifiers, I wanted to understand why the brand has been so successful. One of the answers I found was in the founders philosophy of being Permanently Dissatisfied.

“I believe that it is crucial to keep on improving and never to relax with a product that appears to be selling well. Permanently dissatisfied is how an engineer should feel.”

Permanently dissatisfied? Wouldn’t one feel miserable if they were “permanently dissatisfied”?

As I read through Dyson’s journey I realized that permanent dissatisfaction had nothing to do with one’s emotional state. It was all about constant improvement through the iterative process.

“DC11 was one neat bundle, easy to carry and to store. DC14 was a new upright with a lower centre of gravity and other design improvements, while DC15 Ball featured the very kind of ball I’d come up with all those years ago.”

Dissatisfaction leads to invention

Eventually the dissatisfaction drove Dyson to take control of the one vital component they didn’t own - the motor.

“While we improved every aspect of the vacuum cleaner, there had always been one vital core component for which we had to rely on others: the motor. Because we were buying from a supplier, any of our rivals could buy them, too, and we had no control over quality. Although at the time we were neither designers nor manufacturers of electric motors, we wanted to come with a breakthrough on their design, creating a quantum leap in performance.”

Despite board members claiming that it was too risky and expensive to compete with established giants, Dyson took a leap of faith.

“With each new version of the motor we aimed to double its power output and halve its weight.”

The result? By 2020, Dyson was manufacturing 24 million motors a year, assembled entirely by robots.

This new technology unlocked entirely new categories:

• 2006: They launched the Dyson Airblade hand dryer. It sold successfully to hotels, airports, schools and hospitals.

• 2016: The Supersonic hair dryer was launched as a response to their question:

  “Could we make a light, quiet hairdryer that could dry hair fast without damaging it?”

“During four years in development and at a cost of £55 million, we made some 600 prototypes of the hairdryer with 103 engineers working on the project.”

Useful Idea: Be Permanently Dissatisfied

Permanent dissatisfaction sounds like an emotional burden, but it is actually a philosophy of never standing still.

When you decouple dissatisfaction from your happiness and apply it only to your craft, you ensure that you reach new heights of success, simply because you never convince yourself that you have “arrived”. And why would you ever arrive if you follow your interests and passions?

“The depth of the research we’re undertaking in programming, AI, machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, energy storage, acoustics, super-conductors and any number of pioneering fields has been scaled up significantly, yet there’s still a lot more empirical testing to do in our labs.”

Be permanently dissatisfied just like Dyson.

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• Ideals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)

I took notes on the useful ideas that resonated with me. I hope you find this as positively impactful as I did.

Duty vs Enjoyment

• Duty is “Push” motivation - “I got to do this”, obligation or willpower. It only goes so far.

• Enjoyment is “Pull” motivation - There is something out there that you want to serve more than yourself. It gets you up early and keep you up late. It doesn’t feel hard; it feels like it’s what you’re made for.

When you tap into “Pull”, your energy and contribution explodes. It won’t happen overnight but it gives you the constant endurance to move forward in a way that you enjoy your life.

I don’t feel a sense of duty. I feel a sense of joy to be able to contribute. To me contribution is what we are made for.

You Need to Grow to Feel Fulfilled

The biggest problems we have as human beings is thinking we shouldn’t have any. Problems make you grow. If you think you’re going to enjoy your life by doing nothing, you’re deluded. Growth is the only thing that makes us feel alive. When you grow, you have something to give, and your life becomes meaningful. You can find pleasure in money, food, alcohol or sex, but pleasure is fleeting. Fulfillment is larger than yourself.

I got so many friends who sold their businesses for billions but a few months later they were starting another business because so many of their needs were met by the demands and the challenges and the growing.

The Words You Attach to an Experience Become Your Experience

Words shape your biochemistry. The language you use trains your brain and becomes your "emotional home." We hypnotize ourselves. The words you attach to an experience become your experience. It shouldn’t be pain or suffering. It should be total joy! You have to rewire your brain or your past training will continue to condition you.

The Difference Between “Have To” and “Get To”

You may have hypnotized yourself to believing that pain = success and happiness = bullshit. If you work only because you are rewarded for it, but have no emotional connection to the work, you are missing the joy of life.

The difference between “have to” (duty) and “get to” (enjoyment) is the difference between rich and poor. Rich is feeling fully alive; poor is working your ass off with plenty of money but zero connection. You have to either connect to your work at a different level or add a new dimension to your life that makes you feel obsessed and alive.

To those that much is given, much is expected. But to me that expectation is a pleasure.

The Brain vs The Heart

Your brain will never make you happy. The brain reduces, analyzes, and compares. The Heart magnifies and connects.

Without energy enhancement, the brain takes over. If you aren’t happy, it’s because the mind is leading. You need new elements to break the “law of familiarity”, otherwise you start taking your impact for granted. For example, having a kid makes you see the world from a whole new perspective because you start living life through their discoveries.

Pain is Part of Life but Suffering is Optional

• Alex - I reframed “passion” as a goal worth suffering for.

• Tony - Fuck that! I don’t have goals that are worth suffering for. Pain is part of life, and suffering is optional. When you make suffering the goal, you get your wish.

Your Identity is the Controlling Force

Identity is the strongest force in the human personality. We have a deep need to stay consistent with how we identify ourselves.

• Transcend means to “end the trance.” Why use an identity you created 10 or 20 years ago? Evolve!

• Name your personalities: Tony challenged Alex to identify two parts of himself: his calculating side (Analytical Alex) and his joyful, heart-led side (Anabolic Alex).

It’s not my duty, it’s my gift, it’s my honor, it’s my opportunity. It’s grace that’s put me in this point in my life.

Remove “I am depressed” from your vocabulary

Tony mentions that he took the word "depression" out of his vocabulary entirely. He still feels down, pissed off, frustrated, sad, or overwhelmed—but never "depressed." Why? Because the word "depressed" carries a weight that makes you wonder if life is worth it at all. Your words shape your psychology. We hypnotize ourselves with the labels we choose.

What makes people feel miserable is when they think that events control them vs they control events.

Make Enjoyment a Priority

Tony pointed out that there are two distinct skills we must master:

1. The Science of Achievement: Which Alex is unbelievably good at.

2. The Art of Fulfillment: Which many high-achievers neglect.

Create a Moonshot

If you create a "moonshot" connected to what you actually care about, you’ll find joy. Tony feeds millions not out of the pain of his past hunger, but out of the joy of contribution.

Ask yourself: "What would be insanely fun and insanely great?" What 24-month goal is so unreasonable that it would get you up early and keep you up late?

I asked Gemini to visualize this tension between the Brain (Achievement) and the Heart (Fulfillment). The result perfectly captures the shift from ‘Analytical Alex’ to ‘Anabolic Alex’. (See below)

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• Ideals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)

It was our Sales Kick-Off. I wanted to inspire everyone in the business — my team and the global organization. I did this by sharing my personal journey, backing it up with hard numbers, and spotlighting the incredible people who made it possible.

My main message was clear: If I can do it, you can do it. But to do it, you need to think big and believe before you can achieve.

Over the next four days, I had colleagues from every department approach me to share the impact the talk had on them.

• “Harsh, after listening to you, I want to join sales.”

• “I journaled after your talk and it unlocked a different mindset in me.”

• “Your story was the highlight of the day. You had every single person paying attention to each word you said.”

• “I have no doubt that we will do incredibly well after hearing you speak. You made me feel lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”

• “Can you please share your presentation because I’d like to revisit it when I feel in doubt.”

All in all, around twenty colleagues came to me with unsolicited, positive remarks. It felt good to have such an impact.

But then came some negative remarks.

I heard that the very things which inspired so many were seen by a few as selfish, authoritarian, and negative. That my style went against the culture of the company. This upset me initially. But after soliciting advice, I realized a fundamental truth: How someone interprets the world depends on the lens through which they see you.

Here is the perfect example:

When I stepped onto the stage, I was nervous. I had two hands, but three things to hold: my phone (for speaker notes), the mic, and the clicker. So, I requested a colleague — who had just presented for North America — to help me click through the slides. He happily obliged.

Later, I was told that someone viewed this logistical act as a “power move.” She felt I was putting him down by making him click my slides.

In my mind, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. I would have done the same for him. But it was a stark reminder of how the exact same act can lead to two wildly different interpretations based on the observer’s bias.

Draw a line in the sand

This whole experience reminded me of a chapter I read in Rework. It said that if you want to stand for something, you have to draw a line in the sand.

Once you stand for something, there will always be people on the other side of the line who disagree with you. They may not like your style, your personality, your message, or your energy. And that dislike will manifest as them finding fault in what you do.

When you reach this stage, it means you are actually making a difference.

Weighing the overwhelmingly positive response against the pocket of negative feedback, I concluded that I made an impact. If I have to take some flak to create that kind of mindset shift in so many people, it is worth it.

I drew a line in the sand.

“I heard you. Thank you for sharing.”

The person who told me the “power move” story also gave me great advice on how to respond to those who come at you with negativity.

She said, “Some people just want to be heard. So the best thing to do, even when you hear something destructive instead of constructive, is to simply listen and say: ‘I heard you. Thank you for sharing.’“

Then, you decide what to do with that information. Sometimes it will be nothing. Sometimes it may be something. Either way, you respond with equanimity.

For example, a colleague came up to me and said “I’ve heard that you like attention. Be careful.”

I did not understand the point of her remark so I said “I don't understand. Can you please be specific.”

She replied “I wasn't there for your presentation but I heard that you like attention. Be careful.”

I walked away perplexed. But I realize that logic doesn't work in that situation. Her message wasn't about the presentation - she hadn't even seen it. It was about me.

The best response would have been a smile and “I heard you. Thank you for sharing.”

Meaning + Challenge + Impact

So why do I keep pushing when it attracts criticism? Why do I not just “blend in” and become “unseen”?

When the CEO was speaking before me, he was asked - “What keeps you going? Why keep working when you have already reached a certain level of success?”

He said that when he evaluates his work, he looks for three things: Meaning, Challenge, and Impact. This resonated with me.

• Meaning: Do I believe in what we are building? Yes.

• Challenge: Is the goal of 4x growth hard? Absolutely.

• Impact: Will achieving this positively impact the lives of my team and myself? Without a doubt.

So when you filter your life through that lens, you stop worrying about the noise.

Don’t be afraid to go all-in

“If you’re going to chase a dream, go all in.
If you’re going to love, love fiercely.
If you’re going to walk away, never look back.
So many people never give themselves a fighting chance because they never fully commit.
If you’re gonna go, go all the way. No half measures.” — Alex Hormozi

I am all-in on everything I do. You will feel my belief in my tone, in my body language, in my words, and in every action I take.

Because if I do not believe in myself and if I do not voice those beliefs, I can never act in ways that make those beliefs possible, for myself or my colleagues.

So next time, do not say – “I will try my best.”

That phrase leaves a door open for failure in your mind.

Say – “I will do it.”

Failure is still possible, but in your mind, you have burned the bridges to retreat. You have to make it happen – and you will.

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• iDeals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)

These biases are based on many factors – our upbringing, preferences, religion, family, culture, language, country, interests, beliefs. A lot of these biases are subconscious. And many are unavoidable. It is just part of being human. We are all flawed in one way or another.

The $600,000 tip

When Robert Cialdini published the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, it opened up the varied ways that we can influence others by tapping into their biases.

This book was so eye-opening that Charlie Munger gave Robert one Class A share of Berkshire Hathaway stock for his work. At the time, that share was worth around $75,000. Today, it is worth over $600,000. Munger didn’t just pay him a compliment; he paid him in equity because he understood the immense value of understanding human behavior. He gifted this book to his family and friends as well.

The Mutiny

I saw biases play out recently when I watched the movie The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial with my parents.

In the film, Queeg, the captain of the ship, puts Maryk, his executive officer, through a court-martial. The reason? On December 18, 1944, Maryk removed Queeg from command in the middle of a typhoon, believing the captain had mentally snapped and was endangering the ship.

At the end of the movie, Maryk is legally acquitted - he “wins” the court case - but the lawyer who defended him (Greenwald) flips the narrative. He drunkenly confronts the officers and argues that Queeg was actually the victim.

It opens up a debate: Was Maryk right to mutiny? Or was Queeg right to demand loyalty?

The answer is that they both were right.

• Maryk was right because he saw a captain paralyzed by fear and paranoia during a deadly storm. He acted to save the ship based on the reality he saw.

• Queeg was right because he was a career officer doing a dirty, lonely job under immense pressure. He viewed Maryk’s actions not as heroism, but as a betrayal by a subordinate who looked for flaws instead of offering support.

This shows that the same reality, when seen from a different person’s eyes, is completely different. How you interpret that reality depends entirely on the bias you bring to it.

Useful ideas:

1. The “Rashomon” Effect of Leadership

We often think reality is objective – that X happened, so Y is true. But in leadership and life, reality is subjective. Maryk looked for signs of madness in Queeg, so he found them in every twitch and stutter. Queeg looked for signs of disrespect, so he found them in every question. We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

2. Constructive Loyalty vs. Destructive Cynicism

The real villain in the movie wasn’t the captain; it was the cynicism of the crew. It is easy to sit back and critique the person in charge. It makes us feel smart to spot their flaws. But as the lawyer Greenwald points out, the harder (and more valuable) path is constructive loyalty – helping a flawed leader succeed rather than waiting for them to fail so you can say, “I told you so.”

3. Context Changes the Verdict

In the safety of the courtroom (or a Monday morning meeting), it is easy to judge decisions made in the “storm.” We often strip away the pressure, the fear, and the chaos when we analyze past decisions. Before you judge a decision, try to inhabit the emotional context in which it was made.

See you next Sunday.

👋 I’m Harsh. I collect useful ideas to win in business and life.

Here’s where I spend most of my time:

• iDeals Virtual Data Rooms – building a $1B business by helping dealmakers close deals faster

• M&A Community – uncovering personal stories and strategies of M&A, private equity, and investment banking leaders

• Happy Ratio – growing a food company the hard way: profit-first, purpose-led

• Marcellus Investment Managers – evangelizing long-term investing to build financial independence

Harsh Batra
(LinkedIn)