Both problems come from the same missing ingredient. A quest. One clear direction you have decided is worth everything else you could be doing. Without it, you either see no path forward, or you see too many and cannot choose between them.

A quest does not have to be building a company or breaking a record. It could be being the best father, the best musician, the best neighbor. What matters is that you have picked one thing and decided everything else bends around it.

But Hormozi’s rant raises a harder question. What do you do when you genuinely do not know what your quest is.

I think the answer is that you cannot think your way to it. You have to go find it. Try things you are curious about, notice what still holds your attention after the novelty wears off, and pay attention to what you are good at that other people seem to struggle with. None of that happens sitting still. It only happens by doing something badly first and seeing what the doing teaches you.

Ed Sheeran said something similar when asked how he became good enough to fill stadiums.

That is the part nobody wants to hear. The people who look like they found their quest early did not skip the rubbish phase. They just did not stop during it.

This is the part I would say to anyone who feels behind. Not knowing your quest yet is not the same as being lost. It just means you are still in the tinkering phase, and the tinkering phase does not resolve itself from a desk. It resolves out in the world, one attempt at a time.

So here is the question I am sitting with this week. If you already have a quest, are you actually moving toward it, or just thinking about it. And if you do not have one yet, what is the smallest thing you could try this week to find out what pulls at you.

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Carse split every game into two kinds. A finite game has known players, fixed rules, and an end. Someone wins, someone loses, and it’s over. An infinite game has no such ending. Simon Sinek picked this up decades later and applied it to business: known and unknown players, rules that keep changing, and no finish line. The only real objective is to keep playing.

I realized I had been treating the bad month like a finite game, something that could be lost for good. But I haven’t made it this far because I had been chasing quick wins. My success has been the result of consistent, relentless progress. The compounding over decades has been possible because I love playing the game I am damn good at. That reminder shifted my mindset from “I am losing what I could have made this year” to “let’s see what you’re capable of, Harsh.” The money is a byproduct. It takes care of itself.

It wasn’t only true of one bad month. The same split runs under everything I do.

On business

“Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.”

A quarter is finite. A revenue target is finite. Beating a competitor this year is finite. The business itself is not. There is no year in which it gets declared won. Every finite result you chase sits inside a longer game, and the only real objective of that longer game is that the business still exists, still adapts, and still deserves its customers, long after this quarter is forgotten.

On craft

I feel this most directly in writing every week. There is no version of this newsletter that gets won. A strong Sunday proves nothing about the next one. The only real goal is to still be reading, still be thinking, and still be showing up to write down what I learned, years from now. Some weeks that looks like progress. Some weeks it just looks like showing up. Both count toward the same game.

On health

Training for one event is finite. It has a date and a result. Staying strong enough, mobile enough, and healthy enough to keep doing what you love as the years pass is not something you win once. You only keep playing it, or you stop.

On relationships

A wedding is finite. It has a date, a guest list, and an end. A marriage is not. There is no version of it where one person wins and the game is over. The only real measure of a good one is whether both people are still choosing, today, to keep playing.

Carse’s harder point is the one most people skip past. A finite player plays to end the game. An infinite player plays to keep it going.

So here is the question I am sitting with this week: the next time something goes against me, will I remember I’m playing an infinite game, or will I mistake it for a final score?

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

Model 1 - The Bedrock

Take a simple idea and take it seriously. Go all-in or it just doesn’t work.

Model 2 - Truth vs Trust

At the tight end of the graph you have extreme truth leading to extreme trust. This is where Jesus and Buddha hang out. Thats aspirational. Life is more convenient with the white lies. Get rid of them.

A personal example of what this means:

A business example of what this means:

Model 3 - Belief Comes Before Capability

This is a very important model to keep in mind when you are embarking on something new. If you really want something, it doesn’t matter what you know or what your expertise is, you got to first believe that it’s going to happen.

Model 4 - Heads I Win; Tails I Don’t Lose Much

Jeff Bezos defines asymmetric bets as high-upside, low-downside opportunities where potential gains exponentially outweighs risks, allowing for 1000-run returns compared to the 4-run maximum in baseball. Look for such opportunities where you either win big or you don’t lose much.

Model 5 - Be a Shameless Cloner

Cloning is a very powerful mental model. You do not need to come up with anything new. The world can accommodate multiples of the same thing. Just copy!

Model 6 - Use Hacks to Improve Yourself

Make a list of your friends and categorize them on who is better than you and who is worse than you. Then delete everyone on the worse category from your life.

Don’t care about loyalties. This model is difficult because you got to be a harsh grader. But when you delete someone, you have room for someone else who can make you better.

Model 7 - Hiring Hacks

Model 8 - Incentives are More Powerful Than You Think

Humans are very heavily driven by incentives.

Book recommendations:

• Copy This!: Lessons From A Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turmed A Bright Idea Into One Of America’s Best Companies

• Les Schwab Pride in Performance: Keep It Going

Model 9 - You Can Start a Business with No Capital

You don’t need money to start, run or be successful in business. Out of 1 million businesses that start in the US every year, only 1% get funding. The economy runs on the remaining 99%.

Model 10 - Pursue Quality Intensely

Book recommendation: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This book will show you the power of bringing extreme quality into everything you are doing, which will give you a big leg up in life.

Model 11 - Focus on Durable Moats

A great business is easier to build than a shoddy one.

Do what’s harder upfront by playing the long game, never thinking of an exit and making it your life’s work.

Model 12 - The Purpose of Business is Not to Make Money

The purpose of business is to deliver a great product or service to humanity. If you do that, then money is a natural side effect.

Model 13 - Outsource Everything that Can Be Done by Someone Else for Less than $100/hour

Put a value on your own time. Almost everything you want done can be done for $100 or less.

Only try to work on things that you are intensely excited about.

Try to have a team that can work on the rest.

Model 14 - Your Customers Will Tell You What To Focus On

Whatever you tell your customers you want to do, will not be correct. But if you listen, they will educate you on what their real pain is.

Model 15 - Two to Three Players Will Own 80-90% of the Market

It doesn’t matter whether the industry is paperclips or airplanes.

If it is a $10 billion market, if you say that you will take 2% of it, you will fail. It shows that you haven’t done the segmentation.

But if you say that your offer is so good that you can take 70% market share, then you have a chance.

Model 16 - Go All-In On No Brainers

For example - If a 1 hour podcast gives you better insights than a 20-hour book read, then go all-in and listen to as many podcasts as you can. It’s a highly efficient way to learn.

Model 17 - Introduce Randomness In Your Life

We sensor what we do. It narrows what data we take in. Introducing randomness broadens our perspective.

Other Models That Were Not Talked About

1. Fast is Slow

2. Take the Road Less Traveled

3. No Calibration in Reciprocation Tendency

4. Assume everyone is wearing an “I’m Important” sign

5. Influence from Association Tendency

6. Social Proof Tendency

7. Contrast Misreaction Tendency

8. Availability Misweighting Tendency

9. Focus on Being Kind vs. Being Right

10. To Be Interesting, Be Interested

11. Clone The Little Things

12. 99% of Success Is Just Showing Up

13. Attend As Many Funerals As You Can

14. Ask God Google The Day You Will Die And Plan Accordingly

15. To Encounter Misfortune and Overcome It Is Good Fortune

16. What you will do tomorrow, do today; What you will do today, do now

17. Your kids will learn from your actions, not what you tell them

18. Be an optimist

19. Take a nap every afternoon

20. Make no small plans

21. The sky is the limit if you do not care who gets the credit

22. Underpromise and Overdeliver

23. When you are young, have friends who are older. When you are old, have friends who are younger

24. Understand compounding

25. Spend less than you earn

26. Play infinite games

27. Read a lot

28. Only work for and with people you like, admire and trust

29. Be a generous tipper

30. Fish and Guests stink after Three Days

31. Do not die at 25 and get buried at 75

32. Get your music out

33. Learn from the Eminent Dead

These 3 books are better than any college degree:

1. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

2. Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion

3. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier

Top 3 Posts from the week on LinkedIn and WhatsApp

• Your spouse is the single most important business decision of your life. Nothing else comes close.

• Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. I have not heard a more honest career rule in a decade.

• Everything is sales. The sooner you accept it, the better your career becomes.

See you next Sunday.

Harsh

I share my learnings as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

On work

• Don’t aspire to glory. Aspire to work. Be useful. A measure of success I’d say is how many useful things you can get done. A useful life is a good life. The target is not status, recognition, or wealth. The target is useful output.

• Are you contributing more than you consume? Try to have a positive net contribution to society.

• Business exists for service. Money comes naturally as the result of service. If someone is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard.

• Have a grow-the-pie mindset. People who do things that are morally questionable often have a zero-sum mindset. They think that to have more pie they need to eat someone else’s portion. The game is not zero-sum. The game is to grow-the-pie.

On finding your path

• Find the overlap of your talents and interests. Even if you are the best of the best, there is always a chance of failure. So it is very important that you really like what you are doing. If you like what you are doing, you think about it even when you are not working.

• Read broadly and meet broadly. Try to learn a little about a lot of things. How else would you know what you are really interested in if you do not explore? Also try to talk to people from all walks of life.

• Actively seek out negative feedback. When friends get a product I tell them: “don’t tell me what you like. Tell me what you don’t like.”

On thinking

• Break it down. First principles boils things down to the most fundamental truths. What are we sure as possible is true? And then reason up from there. Most people reason by analogy. They do what others have done before.

• Reduce the requirements. Start by reducing the number of requirements. The common mistake is to optimize the thing which should not exist. First principles forces a harder question: why does this exist at all?

• Add back. If you are not forced to add back 10% of what you deleted, you are not deleting enough.

On execution

• Scale the problem. Push assumptions to their limits to find where they break. What if our volume was 1 million units a year. Is it still expensive? If it is still expensive, then volume is not the problem.

• Run things in parallel. Any given thing can be sped up. Put as many elements in parallel as possible. Try not to serialise dependencies.

• Speed up what should exist. Never optimise what should not exist in the first place.

• Automate last.

On courage

• It is normal to feel fear. If you just accept the probabilities then that diminishes the fear. But fear does not go away. Accepting the odds shrinks it. “When I started SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10%. I accepted that I would probably lose everything. But maybe we could make progress.”

• Let your troops see you in the fight. Show up, visibly, and the people around you follow. “I was sleeping on the factory floor under my desk for 3 years straight so that during shift change the entire team could see me. They knew I was there. And that made a huge difference.”

Which principle resonated with you the most?

For me it was the first - Don’t aspire to glory. Aspire to work. I love what I do. I love working with my teams. I love waking up everyday with problems to solve. I love playing the infinite game of life. It's not always fun. Sometimes I wake up anxious. Sometimes I cannot sleep. Sometimes I worry about my family and my future. There is always the money worry. But I always find a way to keep moving forward.

Follow the principles above to keep moving forward.

Best,
Harsh

I share extraordinary ideas I’m learning as a business builder, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

They’ve been good bets he didn’t make.

The costly mistakes were not the bad bets. They were the good bets that weren’t taken. The businesses that were understood, could be seen clearly, were known to be valuable, and not acted on.

He understood the business. He knew it was outstanding. He just didn’t want to pay the price. And he calls that the most expensive mistake of his career, repeated over and over again.

You know what to do. You can see it clearly. And you sit there, unable to act.

Here is Munger sharing a story that drives home how much omissions can cost.

$200 million!

Not because he made a bad investment. Because he didn’t make a big enough good one.

I think this goes beyond investing.

• The business you knew was exceptional, but moved on slowly just in case you were wrong.

• The person you could see was great, but you did not pay enough so he left.

• The decision you made correctly in your head, then executed at tenth the scale.

Same error every time.

The question I sit with now isn’t just: am I right? It’s: if I’m right, am I acting at the right scale?

A small bet on something you understand fully isn’t prudence. It’s a more comfortable version of sucking your thumb.

Best,
Harsh

I share what I’m learning as a business builder. Extraordinary ideas, daily on my WhatsApp Community and LinkedIn, and weekly on my Sunday Email.

“Another thing that’s interesting is how little turnover we have. The number of managers that we’ve had to replace in the last ten years are very few. We don’t have a retirement age… Without a retirement age, and with people working because they love their jobs, we get long tenure out of our managers. They like the money as well, but their primary motive is that they really like accomplishing what they do in their jobs… I would argue that’s a huge plus.”

“We have no human relations department, no legal department, no investor relations, no public relations, we don’t have any of that. We’ve got a bunch of all-stars out there running businesses.”

Buffett’s starting point is simple: get very good managers, let them stay a very long time, and don’t build a big headquarters to manage them.

“Some people bat left-handed, some people bat right-handed. Some people stand deep in the batter’s box, some crowd the plate. They all have different styles. And the styles of our managers have proven successful in their own businesses. So, we don’t try to superimpose any system from above… We like paying for performance. That is kind of a fundamental tenet.”

“We don’t have a headquarters culture that’s forced on the operating businesses. The operating businesses have their own cultures. And in every case I can think of it’s a wonderful culture. We just leave them alone.”

Different managers run their businesses in different ways. As long as the record is good, Berkshire does not try to standardise style. The one thing they are explicit about is paying for performance, and only for what is under the manager’s control.

“There are more problems with having the wrong manager than with having the wrong compensation system. It is enormously important who runs Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, or American Express; any compensation sins are generally of minor importance compared to the sin of having somebody that’s mediocre running a huge company.”

“You need a lot of good operating managers, and you need somebody at the top who allocates capital well and who makes sure you’ve got the right operating managers.”

The main risk is not the pay plan. It is having the wrong person in charge of a valuable business.

“The important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. The second thing we do is allocate capital.”

“Our managers know their businesses and they know how to run them. And if they didn’t, we’d do something about the manager, we wouldn’t try and build a bunch of systems.”

Once they have the right people, Berkshire’s job is to leave them alone to run their businesses and to allocate capital from the top, not to design more processes.

“I think culture has to come from the top. We work all the time at trying to behave with other people as if our positions were reversed.”

“Almost every business has problems, and we’d just assume the manager would tell us about them… We give very little advice to our managers, but one thing we always do say is to tell us the bad news immediately.”

Culture, for them, is how the top behaves and how problems are handled: treat people fairly, and surface bad news quickly.

On Monday

If you work with managers (or are one), pick one business you’re involved in and write down:

• Who is actually running it today?

• Is the main issue here the “system”, or is it the person in charge?

• Are they being measured and paid on what they truly control?

• Do they feel trusted to run it in their own style, and to bring bad news early?

Buffett and Munger’s view is clear: talent is scarce, styles can differ, and the biggest leverage is getting the right managers in place and then not telling the .400 hitters how to swing.

Best,
Harsh

I share what I’m learning as a business builder.

Newsletter: Sunday Email
More during the week: WhatsApp Community | LinkedIn

“One thing I would bet my life on is that over a fifty-year period, not only will Berkshire do considerably better than gold, but common stocks as a group will do better than gold, and probably farmland will do better than gold.”

Then he explained why:

“If you own an ounce of gold now and you caress it for the next hundred years, you’ll have an ounce of gold a hundred years from now. If you own a hundred acres of farmland, you’ll also have a hundred acres of farmland a hundred years from now and you’ll have taken the crops for a hundred years and sold them and presumably bought more farmland in the process. It’s very hard for an unproductive investment to beat productive investments over any long period of time.”

Gold just sits there.
Farmland produces for a century and lets you reinvest along the way.

He draws a clear difference between productive and unproductive assets:

“Anytime you buy an asset that can’t produce anything, you’re simply betting on whether somebody else will pay more for it in the future. That’s different from assets that you can value based on what they will produce, what they will deliver. You buy a farm because you expect a certain amount of corn, soybeans, cotton, whatever it may be, to come your way every year. And you decide how much you will pay based on how much you think the asset itself will deliver over time. Those are the assets that appeal to me and Charlie.”

That’s the core insight:

• Productive assets can be valued by what they deliver over time.

• Unproductive assets depend on someone else paying more later.

Then he talks about how people react:

“It’s interesting: But if you say anything negative about gold, it arouses passions with people, which is kind of fascinating, because usually if you thought through something intellectually, it shouldn’t really make much difference what people say. The question is whether your facts are right and your reasoning is right. But you run into people who are really excited about gold … My dad loved gold. But he was tolerant, he could take a discussion of it. I find many people have trouble with it.”

Two more insights sit here:

1. You should be able to discuss your position without feeling personally attacked.

2. The only questions that matter are:

   • Are my facts right?

   • Is my reasoning right?

That’s how I think about my own investing now:

• Prefer assets that produce cashflows I can roughly estimate.

• Be wary of assets that only move because someone else is more excited or afraid.

• Hold positions because the facts and reasoning still make sense, not because other people agree.

On Monday

Look at what you own and, for each asset, write down:

1. Does this thing produce anything (cash, output, rights to a stream of earnings)?

2. Or am I mainly hoping someone will pay more for it later?

The first bucket is your productive assets.
The second is your speculation.

Buffett’s point is simple: over long periods, it’s very hard for the second bucket to beat the first.

Best,
Harsh

I build businesses with extraordinary people.
I share what I’m learning with people who build and run companies.

Newsletter: Sunday Email
More during the week: WhatsApp Community | LinkedIn

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.

I'm Harsh. Subscribe here. Join my WhatsApp community. Find me on LinkedIn.

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.