Proof over plans. Receipts over rhetoric. A rainy trail below Bhrigu taught me a plain rule: confidence isn’t a feeling; it’s proof. Since then, I’ve been paying in small, private promises and building something sturdier than applause. Tonight the ceiling fan hums like it owes me nothing while I run a quiet check:Did I keep one promise today—not a makeover, not a master plan, just one small thing I said I’d do. I did, just about, and my body understands the receipt; my shoulders drop and sleep comes closer. I like starting here …
I Stopped Paying for Quiet
The kitchen light is harsher than the hour deserves, the mug is filled higher than it should be, and my thumb hovers over a message that promises to smooth the room for a few hours if I’m willing to carve a small piece out of myself to pay for it. Steam fogs my glasses and turns the counters soft around the edges, and in that blur the old bargain clears its throat: send the tidy sentence, soften the tone, buy the calm. I know the script by heart and I also know the bill that follows, because the quiet that’s purchased always mails a receipt …
Built for Storms
How discomfort became my teacher—and why I keep saying yes to weather, work, and what-ifs You don’t build grit in comfort. You build it under heat, hunger, and hail. I didn’t first learn grit in the mountains. It started on the streets of Chennai, back when I was a college student with more stubbornness than strategy. I designed my own survival drills and called them “Marketing Experiments.” The rules were clean and cruel: pick an unknown street, arrive with no plan or money, and earn enough that day to buy a meal and a …
Why Design Hiring Is Still Broken
I began as a designer. I know the obsessive joy of nudging pixels until they line up, rewriting copy until it breathes, shipping flows that most people never notice but quietly depend on. Years later, I moved into recruitment—a path that didn’t exist when I started. Suddenly I was on the other side of the table, helping leaders decide whose work even deserved a conversation. Today, after a decade in this seat, I’ve built an unusual record: one out of every three designers I put forward gets hired. That success didn’t come from shortcuts or a …
Grief Gets a Chair, Not the Keys
The kettle had just begun to sing when my phone flashed “typing” and then went quiet. The steam fogged my glasses. Metal hissed. Tea leaves opened in the strainer and the room filled with that sharp, green smell. Nothing catastrophic happened, yet the floor shifted. In the space of one breath, a small present silence pulled a rope that raised a whole stage set from the past: a dusty platform, a bright corridor with antiseptic air, a table where a dial tone drilled through the afternoon. Grief Doesn’t Archive Grief doesn’t archive. …
🏃♂️ The Race I Never Signed Up For
When someone else’s success makes your coffee go cold One Tuesday morning, I opened LinkedIn against my better judgment. There it was: a friend’s promotion. New title. Bigger salary. Dozens of applause emojis raining down in the comments. My coffee sat untouched. Same graduation year. Same starting point. But he was already there. I was still here. And the word echoing in my head wasn’t congratulations.It was should. I should already be there. That one word is toxic. It turns ambition into shame. Where Should Comes …
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