Everyone says AI is changing the world. Ask how, and the room goes quiet.

William Gibson had the more honest version: the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. I have been watching that future from inside Amazon.

Engineers here can reach for nearly every frontier model.

You stop rationing tokens.
You start rationing attention.

When the cost of generating code collapses, the software engineer does not vanish. The job relocates.

The old edge is gone

For a long time, a good SDE had a private advantage. You knew the domain. You knew which service owned the truth. You knew the failure modes nobody wrote down.

That edge is being flattened. AI is unusually good at understanding as well as writing code, and we have been using it to write almost all of it. Not as a parlor trick. As the default. The gap that used to be “I know this system and you don’t” can now close in an afternoon.

Nobody is better than a well-directed model at producing the first version of the code. What the model does not have is the thing Fred Brooks named in 1986:

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

We treated that sentence as a warning. AI turned it into a job description.

The tools caught up

Two tools make this concrete.

Amazon’s Kiro is a spec-driven environment: requirements, then design, then tasks, then code. If an agent can write the implementation, the scarce skill is writing the spec it cannot misunderstand.

Kiro Crew is the next layer — an open-source, multi-agent workspace that keeps working across sessions. One engineer, several agents, overnight, while you are in a customer meeting.

The tools get better every release. When the instrument improves weekly, the job cannot stay annual.

A week that used to take a quarter

Here is the pattern, collapsed into one week.

An operations team asked for something that sounded too small to staff. When a workflow stalled, they did not want another dashboard. They wanted one sentence on the page they already had open: why this stopped, who owns the next action, and what to do in the next five minutes.

Two years ago, that request would have entered the old machine: a one-pager, a design review, weeks of implementation, a launch checklist. Six weeks if you were lucky.

This time the conversation started Tuesday morning, with the people who actually click the page. They did not want “more visibility.” They wanted to stop guessing. By lunch, Kiro had a spec. By evening, there was a working slice in a branch. The feature was real before the second sunset.

The cycle flipped

The old sequence was: customer, requirements, design, alignment, implementation, test, release. The expensive middle was everything after “we should build this.” Because building was slow, we treated requirements as sacred and kept engineers away from customers.

That logic only holds if building is hard. It is not, in the same way, anymore. Give a clear requirement to an agentic workflow and, depending on the feature, you can have something real the same day.

So the sequence flipped. Implementation can be delegated. The conversation that decides whether the feature deserves to exist cannot. That conversation is landing on the SDE.

The majority of time-to-release is no longer writing code. It is customer alignment and team alignment — often by the engineer who used to be protected from both. You sit with the customer, hear the actual problem, turn it into a spec, keep the team pointed at the same target, and ship again before the last launch has cooled.

The new job, same title

Nobody sent a memo. The work just moved.

The service still has to stay alive. The code still has to be correct. That part got faster, which makes it easier to get sloppy. The engineer who cannot review an agent’s output, or refuse a bad requirement, is not more productive. They are a high-speed liability.

The center of gravity is different. The job is now: talk to the customer without a translator, write a spec an agent can execute, align other humans, and ship so often that the calendar itself becomes the hard problem.

That last one is the part I did not expect. You can spin up five agents. You cannot spin up five versions of yourself to sit in five rooms and mean it.

The title still says Software Development Engineer. The week says something closer to product engineer and conductor of a small orchestra of models.

If you are still optimizing for “I can write this service from memory,” you are training for a race that already finished. Syntax is no longer a moat. Taste is. So is sitting with a customer long enough to hear the requirement they did not know how to say.

AI did not make software engineering smaller. It made coding smaller. The rest of the job — the human part, the “what should exist” part — got louder.

The title has not caught up. The expectations already have.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I am not someone who liked sport.

Not as a kid. Not as an adult. Not even as a viewer.

I liked indoor games. Cards. Boards. Anything with a table between us.

Cricket, tennis, football — the outdoor stuff people mean when they say sport — felt worthless next to studying.

I also hated watching it.

IPL. Football. Whatever was on.

I never understood the dedication. They were having their best time while playing. Why spend yours watching?

Then I got older, and the anxiety got louder.

When people run out of things to say, they talk about the weather. Men usually talk about sports.

A match. A player. A rule I could not explain.

Friends watch on the way somewhere. Colleagues watch between tasks. Someone puts a game on in the car and the car becomes a stadium.

My mind would start before anyone asked me a question.

I don’t know this. I don’t know the rules. If I stay quiet, I look odd. If I speak, I look fake.

So I called the whole thing boring.

That was easier than saying I was scared of the conversation.

The problem isn’t sport. It’s the room.

Here’s what I had wrong.

I thought I disliked a game.

What I actually disliked was being found out in a room where everyone else seemed fluent.

Sport talk is not really about sport.

It’s a shared language. A way to stand a little closer without getting personal. If you don’t have the names, the grudges, or the rules, you are not quiet. You are outside.

Most people in my spot do one of three things.

They avoid the topic.

They pretend they follow it.

Or they decide, forever, “I’m just not a sports person.”

None of those worked for me.

Avoiding made the next conversation scarier. Pretending is a full-time job. And “not a sports person” is a story you tell so you never have to try.

Watching didn’t fix it

Once, I talked myself into a full game.

Not a lifestyle. An experiment.

One thing was obvious fast.

You have to pick a side. That’s how people enjoy it.

I couldn’t.

I kept supporting both teams. The other side had also worked. They had also earned the chance to be there. Why choose one?

It felt fair.

It also made the match almost impossible to feel.

Watching sport works when you borrow a team and the score becomes personal. If you refuse to do that, you are watching a contest and feeling nothing. That’s not a moral win. It’s the wrong job.

I still don’t want that job.

What I hate more is the person eating popcorn, saying ugly things about a player they have never stood near.

You are not there. You didn’t stand a chance in front of that player. The remote is not a whistle.

Theodore Roosevelt said it cleaner than I can.

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You can skip the game. You don’t get to be cruel about it.

What actually worked

I still don’t watch much sport.

I started playing tennis.

About 30 days. One hour at a time.

I am not bad. That surprised me.

I play with a beginner. Same level. We learn together, and the level goes up because neither of us needs the other one to already be good.

That changed more than any match I forced myself to watch.

Shame needs an audience. A partner who is also new removes most of the audience.

I don’t hate playing anymore.

I can also say the true sentence now. I had anxiety about this. There is nothing wrong with admitting that.

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Thirty days is not a new personality. It is enough to stop lying about the doorway.

Good is mostly access

I used to think skill was a verdict.

Good players were good. I was not. Done.

Then I started repeating a swing.

People love the 10,000-hour line. The researcher behind it, Anders Ericsson, said the number was never the point. What matters is repeating the right thing, with feedback, in a place that lets you correct the last attempt.

So here is the version I believe now.

If a player is good, they usually got to do something thousands of times in a decent environment.

If a player is bad, they often never got that chance.

Not a lesser person. A missing hour. A missing court. A missing partner who would let them be clumsy.

That’s the lesson I wish I had earlier.

You are not behind. You are early.

I loved it enough to automate it

Our society books amenities on an app.

Tennis court slots open at midnight, for the day after tomorrow. The morning slots people want are gone before coffee.

I didn’t trust myself to remember the window.

So I set a small job to run at 12:01 and book the court while it was still open.

I am grateful for education (and AI) to get what I wanted here.

This was the first time those tools got me something I actually wanted on a Saturday morning.

That’s the tell.

When you love a thing, you stop negotiating with it. You make tomorrow morning easy.

Try this

If sport talk makes you go quiet, don’t start by becoming a fan.

Do this instead.

1. Say the true sentence. “I don’t follow it. I get anxious about it.” Admission is not a flaw.

2. Play, don’t watch. One hour. A beginner beside you. Same level. Shame hates company that is also new.

3. Judge skill as access. Good is usually reps in a decent environment. Bad is often a missing chance. Neither is a life sentence.

4. If you love it, remove the friction. I booked the court at 12:01 because I wanted the morning more than I wanted the excuse.

You don’t need the rules of cricket to start.

You need one hour, one supporting person, and permission to look new.

I still go quiet when the match comes up. The difference is I no longer treat that as a biography.

I can say I don’t follow it.

I can also say I play.

Reply and tell me the room where you go quiet. That’s usually the thing worth starting.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I moved from Amazon US to Amazon India, the work got bigger, the expectations got heavier, and the habits that made me successful in Seattle started getting in the way.

I had to forget a lot of them.

In Same Company, Different Worlds, I called culture the operating system and the company the application. The application stayed Amazon. The OS changed.

What I did not say then is the harder part.

Coming home was not only unlearning America in the cafeteria.

It was unlearning the job.

Alvin Toffler spent Future Shock arguing that in a world that keeps rearranging itself, the rare skill is not just learning.

I used to think growth meant adding skills. Lately it has felt more like deleting instincts.

Amazon is not one company. It is a lot of small ones.

One thing I still like about Amazon: it lets you change teams. If a hiring manager wants you, you can move. The internal transfer process is not a maze. That is how I got from the US to India in the first place.

This is my sixth team in five years. On average, one team per year.

Not all of those moves were a plan. Re-orgs are normal here. Amazon builds itself out of small, autonomous groups — the famous “two-pizza teams” — each with its own customer, its own roadmap, and its own unwritten rules.

“Amazon culture” is not one culture. It is a collection of microcultures that share a logo.

You feel that the moment you land somewhere new.

The first five teams were in the US. This sixth one is in India.

In the US, I could stay in my lane as an SDE and still be considered strong. If I needed another team’s time, I could take it to my manager. My SDM would talk to their SDM. Priorities got negotiated one layer above me.

Here, that cushion is thinner.

I have watched junior engineers walk into rooms with another Software Development Manager — alone — and ask for what their project needs. Not as a special assignment. As the default.

The first time I had to do it, my body treated it like a mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake. It was the job.

Ownership has a thin line

Amazon’s Ownership principle is short on purpose:

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

Andy Jassy has called Ownership the most attitudinal of all the Leadership Principles. It is not only “I will finish what I promised.” It is “I will pull the right people together when the problem is bigger than my ticket.”

That sounds noble until you live it.

Because once “never say that’s not my job” becomes the air you breathe, the line between your responsibility and your manager’s responsibility gets very thin.

Someone can always say: this is ownership.

Last week I got asked to send an email to senior SDEs and SDMs about a real bottleneck — the kind of efficiency problem that slows a whole project down. I was also asked to include everyone working on it. Basically the org.

Previously, my manager would have done that for me. A meeting. A hallway conversation. A sentence said by someone with the right title, so nobody had to feel called out in writing.

This time, the sentence was mine.

It felt like I was about to upset a few people, and the whole org would be in the audience.

I sent it anyway because it needed to get done.

By the end of the day, the replies were stacked. And they were supportive. The bottleneck got named in public, which is often the only way a bottleneck becomes real. The work started moving.

Nobody died. Nobody piled on. The story I had written in my head — you will look disloyal, you will embarrass someone, you will pay for this — did not happen.

The fear was a forecast written by my old job.

The new job answered differently.

Amazon has another principle for this exact discomfort: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Leaders are obligated to challenge something when they disagree, even when it is uncomfortable or exhausting. They do not swallow the truth for the sake of social cohesion.

I had been practicing Ownership on the code.

I had not been practicing backbone on the people.

Those are different muscles.

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The cave, for me, was not a harder system design. It was putting my name on a sentence that might make a senior person uncomfortable.

I keep a line for yearls like that:

When you feel nervous or anxious, trust that you are on the path of growth.

The nervousness was information. It was pointing at the edge of the old job.

The hardest part of a new job is not the new skill. It is the old reflex.

Psychologists have a name for why this is so sticky.

In the 1940s, Abraham Luchins showed this with a simple experiment. He taught people one way to solve a puzzle. It worked. Then he gave them a new puzzle with an easier answer sitting right there. Most of them never saw it. They kept using the old way. He called it the Einstellung effect: a habit so useful it blocks a better option.

That is career growth in one lab result.

The US version of my job had a method that worked: do excellent engineering, escalate people-problems to my SDM, stay slightly behind the curtain.

On this team, that method is the water jar I have to put down.

At Amazon, the jump from SDE II (L5) to SDE III (L6) is not “write harder code.” L6 is the level where you are expected to move work across teams, influence people who do not report to you, and name the thing that is stuck — in writing, with your name on it.

The email was L6 work wearing an L5 badge.

Forgetting is not betrayal of your past self. It is respect for the present one.

Max De Pree put it in a sentence:

If they can measure you, you can measure the relationship

I was still chewing on that email. Then, I came across Tim Denning’s piece on habits he stole from a millionaire boss.

Point four stopped me.

Every company, every manager, every project has KPIs. The person being measured — the engineer, the project lead, the one whose name is on the date — is treated as accountable. Miss the number, and the pressure comes downhill.

Tim’s point is that this should be a two-way street.

The person being measured should be allowed to walk the same accountability back up the chain: here is the vision, here is what I want, here is what this level of risk should buy.

His boss’s line was blunt:

Most people (including me) would not phrase my career like a movie quote. But I agree with the physics of it.

If you never ask what you want, the table does not magically set a plate for you.

The lesson is not “be aggressive.”

The lesson is: silence is also a negotiation. It just negotiates against you.

I know why people stay silent right now. The tech market has been ugly. I survived layoff rounds at Amazon. A lot of smart people learned the same lesson I almost learned: become a “yes” employee. Don’t push. Don’t ask. Don’t be the person who makes a manager’s week harder.

I understand that instinct.

I am not going to live in it.

I believe this:

No decision is right or wrong. It is always the trade-offs.

By not asking firmly for what you want, you are accepting a trade-off: less money, a slower title upgrade, a smaller surface area to lead.

You can call that loyalty.
You can call that patience.
You can also call it leaving value on the table while you take on more risk.

I don’t agree with that trade-off.

I have been getting LinkedIn messages and direct emails from other companies. All smart people receives that.

That is not a threat I plan to drop on a table. It is information. The market is still willing to talk to me. So why would I be less willing to talk to the people I already work with?

A date is not a plan

I already sat down with my manager and my skip-level once.

We aligned on a target: submit for SDE III (Level 6) in Q2 2027.

I wrote that down in public three weeks ago. Ambition without shared reality is just a private fantasy. That meeting made the fantasy a calendar item.

A date is not a plan.

What that meeting did not fully put on the table is the rest of the vision.

The projects I am on are high priority, high importance, and urgent. This is a high-pace team. The work matters. The dates are real. And the team is already asking me to do L6-shaped things: talk to other SDMs myself, send the org-wide email, own the bottleneck instead of handing it upward.

That is the next conversation I will have with my manager and my skip-level.

The work already looks like the next level. Let’s treat the reward like we treat the risk.

Not as a demand. As alignment.

Technically, this is part of their job. Amazon wrote it down. Hire and Develop the Best says leaders develop leaders and take coaching seriously. Strive to Be Earth’s Best Employer asks a manager a set of questions that should make any skip-level sit up:

Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next?

A good manager’s job is not only to extract delivery. It is to inspire, to motivate, to put the team’s needs and the individual’s growth in the same room, and — when the evidence is there — to promote.

Here is the vision I will share:

I want to be promoted from SDE II (L5) to SDE III (L6).

Then I want to try the SDM path.

Not because I am bored of code. Because the part of this work I keep coming back to is other people’s growth. That is also why I write Master Mentee. I like being close to someone else’s career while they are still becoming who they are.

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Most people don’t do this conversation because it can go the other way. It can bruise an ego. It can be heard as impatience. It can be filed under “ungrateful.”

That is the trade-off.

Jeff Bezos used to talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. Most decisions, he said, are two-way doors: if you are wrong, you can walk back. You should make those quickly, at the team level.

A career conversation with your manager is a two-way door.

Staying quiet for two more years because the market is scary is how a two-way door rusts shut.

If your manager (or your employer) cannot meet you on growth, title, and the shape of the work — after you have done the uncomfortable version of Ownership — you may be working for the wrong person (or company).

That sentence used to sound dramatic to me.

It sounds like hygiene now.

What to carry forward

Four things I want to remember — and maybe you do too:

1. Growth is often subtraction.
The skill that got you here can become the reflex that keeps you here. If a new country and a new team ask you to do things your old manager used to do, that is not a glitch. That is the curriculum.

2. Ownership without backbone is just extra work.
Taking on more tickets is easy to confuse with leadership. Naming the bottleneck, in writing, with your name on it, is closer to the real thing. I thought that email would land like a fight. It landed like support. The story in my head was the last thing I needed to unlearn.

3. A date is not a plan.
Aligning on Q2 2027 mattered. It is not the whole conversation. If the company can hand you KPIs, dates, and org-wide visibility, you can hand them a clear vision: L5 to L6, then the path after that. Silence is a decision.

4. Accountability should travel in both directions.
Your manager’s job is to grow you. Your job is to make that growth impossible to misunderstand. If the door stays closed after an honest ask, you learned something more important than a yes.

I don’t know yet how the next conversation will go. I will write about that when I have the ending.

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Until then, I am practicing a smaller sentence:

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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What I left behind

In the US, a few things felt like defaults at job — not perks, just how work was supposed to work:

• You are respected more. People listen when you speak.

• You are treated better. Your time, your personal boundaries matter.

• Your work timings matter. Nine to five is not a fantasy; it is the baseline.

The smaller comforts fade into the background too:

• Free barista coffee at the office

• Leaves auto-approved

• Flexibility that is assumed — “I have a hard stop at 5” accepted without drama

None of this felt special while I was there. It felt normal — almost invisible. You do not wake up grateful for a predictable calendar. You assume that is just how professional life works.

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It is only when those things disappear that you realize how much you had taken for granted.

What I found when I landed

Then I started working from India, and all of those defaults disappeared — quietly, without announcement, as if they had never existed.

Meetings are scheduled for US time zones. PST-friendly slots dominate the calendar. Nobody asks whether 8 PM IST works for you; they ask whether the US team is available.

There is no shared concept of 9-to-5. Work hours are not defined. They stretch. They bleed. They follow whoever holds the most power on the call, not whoever is sitting in the most inconvenient time zone.

Manager’s asked me to schedule meetings past 6 PM. Not once as an exception — as a pattern. The implicit message: your evening should be flexible.

Here, even sick leave needs approval. When you are unwell, system still need permission.

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That is the part nobody warns you about when you move back. Not one big loss — a hundred small defaults you never named, suddenly missing all at once.

I am not writing this to complain about India or to romanticize the US. I am writing because it is surprising — genuinely surprising — to watch how land changes your external value.

The same person. The same skills. The same employer. The same job title. Mostly the same work.

Different geography, different country, different rules. The respect, the treatment, the regard for your time — it did not travel with person in their suitcase.

A story from a very different world

There is an old story that I can relate — not because my situation is the same, but because the shape of the pressure feels familiar.

Sir Thomas More was King Henry VIII’s powerful Lord Chancellor. When Henry broke from the Catholic Church to declare himself Supreme Head for Church of England, everyone was expected to fall in line, take the oath, and echo the crowd.

Thomas More refused. He did not organize opposition, but chose absolute silence instead. Under Henry’s 1534 Treason Act, however, staying silent was legally treated as a denial of the king’s title. Silence became treason.

He was tried in July 1535 with a foregone conclusion. He was sentenced to the brutal death of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, though the king later commuted it to beheading as a rank-based mercy.

More was executed on July 6, 1535. His crime was not violence, but simply thinking differently and refusing to repeat what everyone else was saying.

Henry’s England tolerated no dissent. The crown used trials as public performances to demonstrate that defying the group carried a devastating cost.

On the scaffold, More’s last words were:

“I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

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He had refused to say what everyone else was saying. He paid for it with his life—not because he was loud, but because he would not pretend.

Setting a boundary — and paying the social cost

So I am setting boundaries around my work hours.

At minimum, I am starting with this: no calls between 8 PM and 9 AM.

If you are reading this from a US or European time zone, you might think — what is the big deal? That is just thirteen hours.

See it through my eyes for a week.

If your manager says: Prioritize this meeting over everything. Every colleague shows up in zoom meeting at 10 PM.

You are the only person who does not. Then peer pressure comes into the picture.

It is not a scheduling conflict. That is social isolation inside your own team. You are not just declining a meeting. You are visibly, repeatedly, going against the group. And groups notice.

Previously I declined a 8 PM sync. Maybe everyone else joined. I don’t know. Nobody said anything — which somehow made it feel worse, not better.

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We are not in Henry VIII’s England

Here is what I hold onto:

It is not the same world anymore.

At Amazon — my employer — the culture claims to reward people who push back on right things. Disagree and commit. Have backbone. Challenge ideas, not people. Whether that holds at 10 PM IST is a different question — but the principle is there.

The pressure I feel is not state power. Nobody is going to the Tower of London for declining a 10 PM call.

But the human pattern — the discomfort of being the one who goes against the group, the subtle cost of visible difference — that pattern is old. Very old.

Recognizing that does not make the boundary easier to hold. It makes it easier to understand why it is hard, and why holding it anyway matters.

What I am taking forward

I am not moving back to the US tomorrow.

I am building a life here. But I am also building rules for how that life includes work — rules that protect my mornings, my evenings, and my ability to show up as myself, not just as the person who always says yes to the late call.

If you have a similar story, I would genuinely like to hear how you handled it. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.

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I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Disclaimer: I use AI to proofread and help shape the final version of my articles. But every piece is reviewed and published by me. Not an automated newsletter.

I’ve been at Amazon for more than 60 months — almost five years. This is my sixth team.

Changing teams wasn’t always my decision. Only twice did I move intentionally. Every other time, it was a re-org or a business need. But I always liked working in different teams, and still do.

Six teams. Four different organizations within Amazon. Four completely different work styles.

This might help if you’re joining Amazon and trying to understand the team you landed on. Or if you’re a manager trying to build an environment where people actually thrive — not just deliver.

This piece goes one level deeper: same company, same pay band, same leadership principles — but the team culture can change everything.

When salary stops being the motivator

In FAANG, including Amazon, people are paid well. In most cases, salary alone doesn’t drive the work.

After five years across six teams, one pattern became impossible to ignore.

There are two ways to get work done.

1. Inspire internal motivation

The original idea: driven by autonomy (choosing the right path) and mastery (doing it well).

2. Apply external pressure

The opposite: driven by deadlines (meeting demands) and avoidance (not wanting to fail others, or not wanting to be seen failing).

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I’ve lived in both. Not once. Many times. That’s how I arrived at what follows.

When pressure gets the job done — and poisons everything else

External pressure works. Things ship. Deadlines get met. Dashboards turn green eventually.

But not in the right way.

You accumulate complexity. Tech debt piles up. People stop caring about the craft and start caring about survival. The environment stops feeling human.

The main concern is bureaucracy.

Every decision needs a document and approval. Every mistake needs a narrative. Process replaces judgment. Velocity replaces quality.

A few other things I noticed in pressure-first teams:

Status theater. Weekly meetings become performance reviews in disguise. People learn to report progress, not discuss problems.

Documentation as armor. Design docs aren’t written to clarify thinking. They’re written so that if something breaks, someone else takes the blame.

Hero culture. Firefighting gets rewarded. Prevention gets ignored. The person who does the production fix at 2 AM gets praised. The person who fixed in BETA stays invisible.

Quantity over quality. The work is never “the right thing.” It is just “the delivered thing.” Shipping beats correctness. Closing tickets beats solving problems.

People come and go. There is no long-term tenure. Those who stay usually aren’t the strongest builders. They’re the best at playing the visibility game — always in the right meeting, always aligned with whoever holds the red pen, always quick to attach to a win and slow to own a mess.

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Out of this, the end product as a person is angry and frustrated.

And here’s the part that stuck with me most:

I’m not in touch with anyone from those teams.

Not because we had a falling out. Life just moved on. When pressure is the glue, the relationships don’t survive the re-org.

The other side: slower, quieter, and built to last

The inspiring side can feel boring at first.

Nobody is yelling. Nobody is counting your hours. Nobody is treating every sprint like a referendum on your worth.

But it has long-term value.

Innovation comes out of it. Yes, pressure can force a breakthrough once in a while. But it doesn’t scale. You can’t scare your way to a second great product.

You like the people around you. You go above and beyond — not because someone is watching, but because the work and the people deserve it.

You find the right project and the right person to do it. That person does an amazing job and never need to re-do that again.

Deadlines still exist. But they’re used in the right amount — as guardrails, not weapons.

Motivating people is hard. You do it by helping someone find their motivation — the impact of the project on real people, the craft of doing it well, the trust of the team counting on them.

You show up on Monday morning with energy. You go home with more energy than you arrived with.

That environment creates a different kind of person. Not soft. Not naive. Grounded. Generous. Ambitious.

The manager — and the culture they protect — is the difference.

What the research says about this

This isn’t just my experience. Psychologists have studied it for decades.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed Self-Determination Theory, which distinguishes between autonomous motivation (you act because the work matters to you) and controlled motivation (you act because of pressure, rewards, or fear of judgment).

Their research — and a recent meta-analysis of workplace studies — consistently finds the same pattern: when people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they perform better, stay longer, and report higher well-being. When those needs are blocked — when work is driven by compliance and fear — burnout, turnover, and disengagement follow.

Dan Pink popularized a simpler version of this in Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose beat carrots and sticks for knowledge work.

On the other side, Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows why inspiration scales and pressure doesn’t. Teams where people can ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas learn faster and perform better over time. Teams where people stay quiet to survive may hit a deadline — but they rarely build anything that lasts.

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Pressure can produce a successful sprint. It rarely produces a career, service, product, — or a friendship — you’re proud of five years later.

How to spot which environment you’re in

Early signals matter. Within a few weeks, ask yourself:

• Do people admit mistakes openly, or rewrite history in retros?

• Is the best engineer the most respected person — or the most politically visible?

• Are design discussions about the customer — or about who will get credit?

• Would you recommend this team to a friend?

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Same company. Same LP deck on the wall. Completely different operating system.

What to carry forward

Three lessons — for any team you might one day lead:

1. Pressure delivers. Inspiration compounds. One hits the date. The other builds people who stay, learn, and raise the bar around them.

2. Watch how work gets done, not just what gets shipped. Tech debt, turnover, and silence in meetings are data. Read them early.

3. If you lead, choose the environment on purpose. Autonomy and mastery aren’t perks. They’re how you get work that survives the next re-org.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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That was December 29, 2024 — the first time I’d ever put my career hopes on a page where other people could see them: Reflecting Past: Years of Growth and Looking Ahead.

It wasn’t a flex. It was a commitment.

Today, if you only looked at my headline, you might think nothing much happened. The work tells a different story. So does the writing.

1. Career: Same title, different altitude

I’ve taken on more complex and ambiguous projects. I’m leading projects end-to-end by myself. The work itself is the proof — not a new badge on a business card.

More importantly, I started owning my career instead of waiting for someone else to “notice.”

I aligned with my manager and my manager’s manager on a clear target: submit for promotion in Q2 2027.

That alignment matters.

Ambition without shared reality is just a private fantasy.

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Next step: don’t chase promotion in a silo

I don’t want this to happen in isolation.

My next move is to talk to Senior SDEs early — not for approval theater, but for honest feedback while there’s still time to course-correct.

I’ll tell people around me, plainly:

I’m pushing myself to operate at the next level. I’m aiming for the next-level promotion. Tell me where I’m falling short.

Growth gets faster when it’s visible — and when you invite criticism early.

Takeaway: Don’t wait for a title to prove you’re growing. Make the work louder — and make your ambition public to the people who can help you raise the bar.

2. Writing: No fancy title needed

Since I started writing publicly in October 2024, I’ve published 42 posts.

At the moment, I don’t want a fancy writer title. I’m happy being the Master Mentee author.

Thinking and sitting down for a few hours on the page has been life-changing. I see the world differently because writing forces me to slow down enough to notice it.

I suggest everyone start writing — and publish it.

The first few pieces feel hard. Then you learn a liberating truth:

The world is so busy that almost nobody cares about your articles as much as you do.

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That sounds harsh. It’s actually freedom.

You’re not being watched as closely as your fear imagines. Publish anyway.

Takeaway: Writing isn’t about becoming a “writer.” It’s about becoming someone who can watch their own mind clearly enough to learn from it.

3. Self-awareness: Watching the mind

I became more self-conscious in the useful way — not more anxious, more aware.

I watch my thoughts. I notice which direction they’re going. I mess up from time to time. Then I try to learn the mechanics behind the mess, not just the surface story.

That leads to a belief I keep coming back to:

Mistakes never happen in the present

A mistake always lives in the past.

Think about how people talk about old relationships:

“I chose the wrong partner.”

In the moment, it rarely feels that clean. You’re choosing with the information, courage, and self-knowledge you have then. Years later, with new information, the same choice suddenly looks “obviously wrong.”

That’s when many of us do the cruelest thing: we beat up our younger self for not knowing what only time could teach.

A famous story of the same trap

In 1985, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple — the company he co-founded.

At the time, it looked like the ultimate wrong turn. Public failure. Humiliation. A “bad choice” stamped on a brilliant career.

Years later, Jobs said getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to him. It stripped away success-ego, forced him to start again, and eventually led back to Apple with clearer judgment.

The point isn’t that firing is good.
The point is this: the “mistake” only looked like a mistake after the ending was known.

In the present, Jobs was making decisions under uncertainty. In hindsight, the world rewrote the story.

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Psychologists call this hindsight bias — the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect. In the 1970s, researcher Baruch Fischhoff showed that once people learn how something turned out, they rewrite the past. Outcomes feel inevitable. Uncertainty disappears. Past-you starts looking foolish.

But past-you didn’t have future-you’s information.

So I try not to beat myself up the way I used to. I ask a better question:

What did I learn that I couldn’t have known before?

After a breakup, a bad hire, a failed project, a “wrong” career move — everyone becomes an expert. “It was obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious.
It only became obvious after the ending was known.

Takeaway: Don’t punish your younger self for choosing without today’s wisdom. Judge the choice by the information available then. Learn. Update. Move.

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What to carry forward

Three lessons from this season — for anyone, not just me:

1. Own your growth in public. Don’t wait for a title to prove you’re leveling up. Do next-level work, tell the right people what you’re aiming for, and ask for feedback early — before the decision is already made.

2. Keep writing without needing a new identity. You don’t need a fancy identity to start. Write. Reflect. Share. The habit changes you more than the title ever will.

3. Treat mistakes as information updates. New data doesn’t prove past-you was stupid. It proves present-you knows more. Learn the lesson. Skip the self-punishment.

If this resonated

If you’re in a season where your title looks the same but your insides don’t: you’re not behind. You might be compounding.

Visualize again. Write it down. Tell someone. Then go do the work that makes the next title feel inevitable — not surprising.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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It stopped me in bed.

Not because of the big ending. Because of the small scenes. The unpaid Dean Witter internship. Sleeping in a BART bathroom with his son. The paint-stained interview. The father who refuses to turn hardship into anger.

Chris Gardner gets hit again and again - right when things start to look up. Most people in his shoes would become bitter.

He doesn’t.

In the film’s quiet thesis, Gardner wonders about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence:

“How did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue…”

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That line hit me harder than the Oscar-bait ending.

I was him in my early 20s. And the struggle started long before that.

1. Hardship doesn’t require a hard personality

I can imagine almost anyone in Gardner’s position becoming irritated, agitated, and angry all the time. Life throws a hard ball the moment things look good.

But Gardner keeps walking. He protects his dignity. He protects his son. He protects the dream.

“You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.”

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That hit close to home. The financial struggle was real. I had to find ways to earn money. And I was always pulled toward computers and the internet.

2. The night I broke my father’s laptop

I was 12 when my father bought a Lenovo laptop.

In India then, a laptop wasn’t “a gadget.” It was luxury. Closer to a cleaning robot or VR headset.

I wanted to help him. Viruses were everywhere. Antivirus subscriptions were expensive. So when a friend’s brother offered a “free” install file, I felt like a hero.

I plugged in the pendrive. Installed. Rebooted.

The laptop froze.

No touchpad. No keyboard. No restart. No shutdown. Just a dead machine until the battery died.

I cried myself to school the same day. My father worked late nights on that laptop. I was sure I’d destroyed everything. I wasted all those father’s night.

You might wonder how “antivirus” freezes a laptop. Twelve-year-old me had a conspiracy theory: antivirus companies spread viruses to win customers. Looking back, it was almost certainly malware dressed as help. The lesson wasn’t tech. It was what happened next.

My father didn’t yell.
He didn’t shame me.
He said: We’ll get it fixed. If not, we’ll buy another one.

We did get it fixed. No data lost.

And that soft landing lit a fire. I didn’t run from computers. I ran toward them. I needed to know how they worked and what they could do to a life.

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset helps explain why that moment mattered. When adults treat mistakes as recoverable, not as proof you’re “bad” -- kids stay curious instead of collapsing into shame.

My father gave me a soft landing. Curiosity did the rest.

I later saw the same trait in Chris Gardner: do the hard thing without turning your pain into punishment for everyone around you. Life can go wrong. Every move can veer off course. Character is how you respond.

3. When family finances collapse, the mind goes into survival mode

Few years later, my father got a chronic illness. Hospital bills crushed the family income. Savings started to look temporary.

So I started saving. Thinking twice before eating out. Hunting deals to buy stuff cheap. Finding money where most people only saw apps.

Behavioral science has a name for that pressure. In a famous Science study (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao, 2013), researchers found that money worry can tax cognitive bandwidth, roughly like a 13-point IQ drop or losing a night of sleep.

Scarcity doesn’t only empty the wallet. It captures attention.

That was our house. Survival first. Ambition second.

India’s new application market boom had one loud game: refer and earn.

I played it hard.

I promoted apps while studying full-time. Resold rewards in the secondary market. Then came LINE’s big scheme:

• Every 25 referrals → bonus

• At 300 referrals → a new iPhone

25 was easy. 300 was war.

I hit the milestone. Held the iPhone. My sister wanted it but we sold it for the money our house needed.

Then I did it again, not on one account, but more than ten. Then I moved into direct dollar payouts for installs. Enough to keep the house running, paying hospital bills and tuition fees.

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In Gardner’s language: this was the unpaid internship season of my life. Ugly work. Necessary work. Not glamorous. But forward.

4. Progress has a bill - pay attention to which one you’re paying

But progress has a bill.

I failed two subjects in my first college semester.

That was the fork.

If I kept grinding referrals at full speed, I might have saved more months… and lost the path that later led me to Amazon.

So I stopped. Recalibrated. Kept moving, just in different direction.

This is the part inspirational movies sometimes skip: the edit.

Hustle without a steering wheel becomes self-sabotage. Gardner didn’t only grind. He chose the path with the highest long-term compounding, the brokerage seat, even when it meant unpaid months and sleeping on bathroom floors.

“Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something. Not even me.”
— Chris Gardner to his son

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The quieter version for students and early-career hustlers:

Don’t let short-term survival tell you that long-term self-destruction is “necessary.”

The Soft Landing Rule (a simple mental model)

Chris Gardner taught me one thing the movie never says out loud:

Most people turn pressure into anger. Anger into bad decisions. Bad decisions into more pressure.

The successful ones do something else:

1. Take the hit without becoming the hit. Life can be unfair. You don’t have to mirror it.

2. Turn soft landings into fuel. My father’s calm didn’t erase the mistake. It converted shame into curiosity.

3. Hustle for survival — then edit for the future. Referral schemes paid bills. Stopping them protected the career. Both mattered. Timing mattered more.

4. Walk forward in baby steps. Not every stride has to be dramatic. Forward is forward.

Call it the Soft Landing Rule:

When life throws the hard ball, respond soft enough to keep learning — and firm enough to keep moving.

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Chris Gardner slept in bathrooms and still showed up like a professional.
My father faced a dead laptop and still chose repair over rage.
We faced hospital bills and still chose curiosity over bitterness.

One question to keep (and one research-backed reminder)

The next time life hits you mid-progress, ask:

Am I about to harden… or land soft and walk forward?

Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec (1994) found a painful pattern in regret:

So protect the dream. Take the baby step. Edit when needed. Keep walking.

Because happiness isn’t a finish line you own.

It’s a pursuit you practice. Every ordinary day you refuse to quit.

“Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don’t just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn’t have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.”
― Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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One month later, I’m still adjusting coming back to India — but this time the surprises weren’t about meetings or lunch breaks. They were about money, customer support, and a reminder that even carefully chosen career moves can suddenly feel uncertain.

The hardest upgrade isn’t the lifestyle. It’s the mindset.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed since moving back is this:

Not because they don’t want better things, but because spending still feels wrong.

I see it most clearly in my parents. They spent their lives optimizing every dollar (rupee). My mother will go out of her way to buy the same vegetables for a few cents less. Leftovers never go to waste — they go to someone who needs them, or at the very least to animals. Every hour, she turns off every extra bulb (or fan), even when the house still needs light. My father keeps old slippers for years. Buying new ones feels like disrespecting what still works.

I inherited some of this too. I still check three online stores before buying anything — not because those few dollars would make me rich, but because if I paid X and later found the same item for less, it felt like someone had tricked me. Or worse, like I had been careless.

I’ve intentionally improved a lot in this area. My parents still struggle. They don’t get happier by upgrading their lifestyle, and that surprised me more than I expected.

Why don’t people enjoy spending — even when the money is there?

This isn’t just my family. I see it in my friends too. One of them makes more than half a million dollars a year, and he will still spend an hour to save $10. Anyone looking from the outside would say that trade-off doesn’t make sense. But he isn’t doing it consciously. His mind learned that path years ago — and it never fully left.

Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.”

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Money habits are no different. Financial psychologist Brad Klontz has a useful idea for this: our money behavior is driven by unconscious “money scripts” formed in childhood.

One of them is money vigilance. It looks healthy — save carefully, avoid debt, stay careful. Taken too far, it becomes anxiety and an inability to enjoy financial success.

Another is money avoidance. It links wealth with guilt, and that can lead to under-spending even on reasonable purchases.

When a carefully made decision suddenly feels fragile

Recently, Amazon announced another round of layoffs — this time specifically in its AGI organization, the same org I recently moved into.

You know that feeling when you make a decision carefully, and then the ground shifts underneath it? That was me. I moved from another team into an AGI team just one month ago, and then the layoffs arrived. Luckily, I wasn’t impacted. But I’m with everyone who was.

Layoff news is rarely gentle. It arrives suddenly, and it can change a life overnight. I saw that up close with a roommate who was laid off in Amazon’s first wave, just when it started across companies.

It’s scary — not only for the people who lose their roles, but for everyone around them who suddenly wonders what “secure” even means.

And yet, over five years — or twenty — that same disruption can become useful in ways you can’t see at the time.

A friend of mine is in London today because a layoff pushed his career onto a different path. At the time, it felt like an ending. Looking back, it was a beginning.

Steve Jobs put it better than I can:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

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There is not one path in life, my friend. Sometimes the path you didn’t choose is the one that opens next.

The other shock: customer support

The second big realization this month has been simpler — and more frustrating. Customer support here is often poor, and even international companies don’t feel the same.

Amazon US customer support is not Amazon India customer support. You can’t return many items easily, even when the quality is wrong, or the product arrives different or damaged.

That gap became very real when I recently bought term insurance. I wanted to protect my family from the unexpected.

The agent filled out the entire application for me — without asking, without sending it for review, and without even sharing a copy.

Then Indian law did something useful. An automated email landed in my inbox with the filled details, and many of them were inaccurate. I asked them to correct it. Over the phone, the agent casually said they had.

That “yes” didn’t give me comfort, so I sent a formal email to their official address and asked for a written response.

Then I went ahead with multi-step, multi-day, multi-week process of getting term insurance. Eventually the policy became active. Then I received the final documents — and the application still hadn’t been updated.

I reached out to customer service. The responses were unclear. Sometimes they closed the case without a proper explanation. I finally said something simple: if I don’t get a clear answer, terminate the policy and refund the money.

That got their attention. They filed a complaint, and I finally received a short written response that gave me just enough comfort to keep the policy:

“We have carefully re-evaluated the application and the information shared by you. We would like to inform you that, as per our underwriting guidelines, there is no impact on the aforementioned policy with respect to the declaration made by you regarding your health status.”

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Not a long explanation or specific details. Just a few generic lines.

I’m staying with what I have — not because the experience was great, but because I already spent weeks getting here.

Maybe the next company’s support would be worse. I don’t know.

What I do know is this: I need to change my expectations around customer support in India. Not lower my standards completely — but stop assuming every system will behave like the ones I got used to abroad.

What this month taught me

Coming back after years away doesn’t just reset your calendar. It resurfaces old habits, and it exposes new gaps.

Some of those gaps are personal — like the money scripts we carry from childhood.
Some are structural — like how customer support works from country to country.
And some are professional — like realizing that even a thoughtful move into the “right” organization can still leave you standing next to sudden uncertainty.

Same person. Same country I grew up in. Different expectations.

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Coming home has felt a lot like that. The place looked familiar. The current does not.

And that difference is still teaching me.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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This week, I want to talk about work.

I spent nearly five years at Amazon US before moving to Amazon India.

Same employer.

Same leadership principles.

Same performance reviews.

Same engineering bar.

Yet after just a few weeks, it felt like I had joined a different company.

Not because Amazon had changed.

Because culture had.

I’ve started believing that culture is the operating system. The company is just the application.

The application stayed the same.

The operating system didn’t.

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My first culture shock happened before anyone arrived.

On my third day, I reached the office at 9:00 AM.

The lights were on.

The coffee machine was running.

The cafeteria was open.

The office wasn’t.

Almost nobody was there.

I checked Slack.

Silence.

For a moment, I wondered whether I’d accidentally come in on a holiday.

Later that morning, one of my colleagues smiled and said,

“This is completely normal here.”

That was the moment I realized I had moved countries, but my internal clock hadn’t.

For five years, my mornings started early.

Now I was the only one following that schedule.

Ironically, a month later...

I stopped coming at 9.

Reverse culture shock isn’t just learning new habits.

It’s slowly letting go of old ones.

Lunch became my daily reminder that I had changed.

In the US, I naturally ate around noon.

Here, most of my teammates eat around 2 PM.

Two hours doesn’t sound like much.

But every day, I found myself sitting alone in the cafeteria.

At first, I thought,

“I’ll just wait.”

I never could.

My stomach was still living in Seattle.

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It sounds like a small thing.

But culture often hides inside small things.

Not holidays.

Lunch breaks.

Meetings taught me that time has different meanings.

One thing I quickly noticed was how differently people treated calendars.

In the US, if a meeting starts at 10:00, people usually join at 9:59.

Being on time is almost an unwritten rule.

Here, meetings often begin a little later.

And unlike what I was used to, they frequently run beyond their scheduled end time as well.

At first, that bothered me.

Now it doesn’t.

Not because meetings changed.

Because my expectations did.

The biggest surprise wasn’t work.

It was relationships.

During five years in the US, I almost never exchanged personal phone numbers with colleagues.

Slack.

Email.

Chime.

That was enough.

Here, sharing phone numbers is completely normal.

Managers call.

Teammates call.

Work flows naturally into personal communication.

I’ve chosen to keep my own boundary and still prefer messaging first.

But I also understand why many people don’t see that boundary the same way.

Different cultures optimize for different things.

One optimizes for personal space.

Another optimizes for accessibility.

Neither is objectively better.

They’re simply different.

One conversation made me genuinely uncomfortable.

It was an intern’s last day.

People started asking about the internship.

Then the questions became surprisingly direct.

“Who was the worst Senior Engineer L6?”

“Tell us three good things and three bad things about your manager.”

Everyone laughed.

The interns answered.

But I noticed something else.

Their voices became quieter.

The people they were talking about were sitting right there.

Including their manager.

I kept wondering how I would have answered that question as an intern.

I’m still not sure.

Then there were the late-night meetings.

One thing I appreciated in the US was predictability.

Most meetings were over by 5 PM.

Here, I’ve heard stories of meetings continuing at 2 AM to accommodate global teams.

Does everyone work insane hours?

No.

That’s actually one misconception people outside India often have.

But global collaboration does create schedules that can stretch far beyond the traditional workday.

It’s less about working harder.

More about working across more time zones.

What surprised me in a good way

Not every difference made the adjustment harder.

Some made it easier.

People spend more time talking before meetings.

Lunches are longer.

Conversations are more spontaneous.

Someone drops by your desk just to chat.

Teams celebrate together.

Food is better.

Relationships feel warmer.

It reminded me that productivity isn’t the only thing workplaces optimize for.

Sometimes they optimize for belonging.

The biggest lesson

When I first moved back, I kept asking,

“Why is everyone doing this differently?”

A few weeks later, I started asking a better question.

“Why do I assume my way is the normal way?”

That’s when I realized something.

I thought I knew my own country.

Five years abroad had quietly taught me a different set of invisible rules.

Coming home wasn’t about remembering India.

It was about unlearning America.

And that’s what reverse culture shock really is.

Not forgetting one culture.

But discovering that you’ve become part of another.

I’m curious.

For those who’ve worked in multiple countries:

What invisible workplace rule surprised you the most?

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I’d love to hear stories from places beyond India and the US.

Pack a few bags. Parcel few packages.

Book a flight.

Start a new chapter.

Reality had other plans.

It’s been a couple of months since I moved from the US back to India, and I’ve learned something interesting:

Coming home can feel just as foreign as moving abroad.

People often talk about culture shock and reverse culture shock when they move back to Indai.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

The hardest thing to rebuild is trust.

In the US, shopping became effortless.

If an item arrived damaged—or simply didn’t fit—I returned it.

No arguments.

No stress.

A refund showed up a few days later many times few minutes.

That experience builds trust.

Back to India, I realized many products don’t even have a return policy. Once you buy something, it’s yours.

I never appreciated companies like Costco or Amazon.com until I no longer had them.

The difference isn’t just about refunds.

It’s about confidence.

When customers trust a company, they buy more without overthinking every purchase.

Trust is invisible.

Until it’s missing.

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Punctuality is more valuable than most people think.

One experience taught me this the hard way.

I hired a moving company, agarwalpackers.in “Bade Bhaiya”, to transport my belongings.

The sales representative confidently promised delivery within 8–10 days.

Day 10 arrived.

My shipment hadn’t even left my hometown.

Customer support repeatedly told me, “It will reach in two days.”

That wasn’t even possible because the shipment hadn’t been dispatched yet, and the journey itself takes around three days.

Eventually, the salesperson stopped answering my calls.

Emails didn’t help either.

After countless follow-ups, my belongings finally arrived on Day 21.

The delay was frustrating.

The lack of honest communication was worse.

People can accept bad news.

What they struggle to accept is being misled.

I’ll write a separate article about how the corporate culture within the same company surprised me.

But moving back also gave me something priceless.

I get to live with my parents again.

That sentence means more to me than any salary increase ever could.

For the past three years, I couldn’t even meet them in person because of circumstances outside my control.

Now I get to have breakfast with them.

Talk to them.

Simply be around them.

You don’t realize how valuable ordinary moments are until they’re no longer ordinary.

One idea changed my perspective forever.

I once read about author Sahil Bloom calculating how many dinners he had left with his parents.

Instead of thinking in years, he thought in moments.

The number wasn’t as large as most people would expect.

That idea stayed with me.

It made one thing obvious:

Success means very little if you’re too far away from the people you love.

Moving back wasn’t only a career decision.

It was a life decision.

Another dream quietly came true.

My parents lived in the same house for 35 years.

I always wanted to give them a better living experience.

Because my work required relocating to another city, renting was the practical choice.

Compared to apartment rents in the US, I found a beautiful apartment with something I’d always wanted:

A balcony.

Every evening, I come home, sit outside, and watch the lake, the skyline, and the trees.

Nothing extraordinary happens.

That’s exactly why I enjoy it.

Sometimes happiness isn’t buying something new.

It’s finally having enough time to appreciate what you already have.

My biggest takeaway

Moving back to India has been a mix of frustration and gratitude.

I’ve experienced broken promises, delayed deliveries, and moments that tested my patience.

I’ve also gained something far more valuable.

Time with my parents.

A home I genuinely love coming back to.

And a reminder that the best decisions in life rarely optimize only for money.

Sometimes they optimize for people.

Looking back, I’d make the same decision again.

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“At the end of life, nobody regrets not spending more time at the office.”

A few days ago, I did something many people dream about but few actually do.

I left the United States and moved back to India.

Not for a better salary.
Not for a startup opportunity.
Not for some glamorous “digital nomad” lifestyle.

I moved back for family.

And the experience has already forced me to rethink money, success, comfort, and what actually matters in life.

The Shock of Living in Two Different Worlds

When I left the US, the weather was around 49°F.

When I landed in India, the afternoon temperature crossed 110°F.

It felt like my body traveled between two planets.

The heat here is relentless. You don’t casually “go outside” in the afternoon. You plan around it.

For the first few days, my entire strategy was simple:

Stay indoors.
Sit under the AC.
Survive.

Thankfully, modern India has evolved in ways many outsiders still don’t realize.

Amazon delivers quickly.
But what truly amazed me were the 10-minute delivery apps.

Need cheese? Need ice cream?
10 minutes.

Need PS5?
10 minutes.

Household items?
10 minutes.

It felt futuristic in America.

Ironically, some parts of India feel more convenient than America.

Yet at the same time, some things are much harder.

Most homes don’t have central air conditioning (HVAC) like in the US. Sometimes only one room has AC.

You suddenly become aware of energy usage, airflow, and even which room you spend time in.

Comfort becomes intentional.

The Dust Nobody Talks About

One thing that surprised me wasn’t the traffic or noise.

It was the dust.

In America, I almost never thought about cleaning floors daily.

In India?

You may need wet mopping every single day.
Sometimes twice a day.

Dust becomes part of your routine.

At first, this sounds annoying.

But then you realize something deeper:

Every country optimizes for different problems.

America optimizes for convenience and personal space.
India optimizes for adaptability and resilience.

Neither is perfect.

Both teach you something.

The Hardest Working People I’ve Ever Seen

One thing became obvious almost immediately:

People in India work incredibly hard.

Delivery workers bring packages in brutal heat without complaint.
Laborers work outdoors in temperatures that would shut down parts of other countries.
Small shop owners stay open long hours every single day.

It changed the way I look at “hard work.”

Many of us sitting behind laptops talk endlessly about hustle culture.

But real hard work often looks very different.

It looks like survival. It is survival.

The Salary Difference That Broke My Brain

The biggest mental adjustment hasn’t been weather.

It’s economics.

For example, household help here may cost around $10 per MONTH for washing dishes every day.

In America, similar work could cost $10 per HOUR.

That’s nearly a 30x difference.

Same human effort.
Same hour.
Completely different value assigned by geography.

Even in tech, the pattern repeats itself.

Same company.
Same role.
Same responsibilities.

But salaries in the US can be dramatically higher than salaries in India.

For years, I accepted this as “normal.”

But once you live in both countries, you start questioning everything.

Why does location determine human value so heavily?

I understand cost of living, currency conversion, and global economics all play a role.

But seeing it firsthand makes you realize how unequal and complicated the world really is.

That sentence feels very real after moving countries.

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Why I Actually Left America

Most people assume moving away from the US means something failed.

But sometimes leaving is not failure.

Sometimes it’s clarity.

The real reason I moved back was simple:

I wanted to spend time with my parents while I still can.

As parents grow older, time starts moving differently.

You begin realizing there are only so many conversations left.
Only so many dinners left.
Only so many ordinary moments left.

And one day, those moments disappear forever.

Modern society teaches us to optimize for:

Income.
Status.
Productivity.
Career growth.

But very few people teach us to optimize for presence.

That realization changed me.

The Lie We’re All Quietly Told

We live in a world that constantly tells us:

Make more money first.
Spend time with family later.

Build the career first.
Enjoy life later.

Sacrifice now.
Live later.

But “later” is never guaranteed.

I’ve seen people become financially successful while emotionally disconnected from everyone they love.

I’ve seen people spend decades chasing promotions only to realize they missed their children growing up.

And I’ve noticed something else:

At the end of life, nobody wishes they attended more meetings.

They wish they had more time.

More conversations.
More memories.
More ordinary moments with people they loved.

Success Means Different Things at Different Stages of Life

Maybe success in your 20s is ambition.

Maybe success in your 30s is stability.

Maybe success later becomes peace.

Right now, my definition of success is changing.

Yes, moving back may affect my income.
Yes, it may slow down parts of my career.
Yes, my lifestyle will be different.

But I’m willing to make that trade.

Because some things are more valuable than maximizing earnings.

Presence is one of them.

Health is one of them.

Family is definitely one of them.

Final Thought

Living in both America and India has shown me something important:

A higher salary doesn’t automatically create a better life.

Sometimes the richest moments are the simplest ones:

Eating dinner with parents.
Having tea with family.
Being physically present for people you love.

Money matters.

Career matters.

But eventually, life asks a deeper question:

Who were you there for?

And that answer can’t be outsourced, automated, or delayed forever.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Imagine you’re driving a luxury car down a perfectly paved highway. The AC is crisp, the music is perfect, and the GPS says you’re heading toward “The Dream.” But as you look out the window, you realize every other car is exactly like yours. Everyone is driving at the same speed, toward the same destination, with the same look of quiet exhaustion behind their eyes.

You want to take the next exit but the dirt road that leads to the unknown. Your hand freezes on the steering wheel. A voice in your head whispers, “Don’t. It’s safe here. Just one more mile.”

I recently held the “golden ticket” to stay on that highway forever. And then, I did the unthinkable: I took the exit.

The Gold-Plated Cage

I finally realized why so many people feel “stuck” in a life that no longer fulfills them: they struggle to find the courage to take non-average actions.

But the moment you decide to forge your own path, the same crowd starts to whisper.

The “Comfortable” Trap

Recently, I was selected in the H1B lottery. For many (myself included, a few years ago), this is the ultimate dream. It’s the permission slip to stay in the “Land of the Free” and stack U.S. dollars until your bank account looks like a phone number.

However, I am moving back to India. Since then, I’ve been met with a constant barrage of warnings. People tell me it’s the “worst decision” I could make. They point to:

• The USD Income: The sheer math of earning in dollars is hard to walk away from.

• First-World Convenience: Pristine roads, clean air, and organized systems.

• The “Kids’ Future”: The perceived responsibility of providing a “world-class” education.

• The Social Reset: The fear that your social circle will evaporate or change beyond recognition.

• Falling Behind: The internal panic that you are going “backwards” in life.

• Status Anxiety: Losing the prestige that comes with “living abroad.”

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The Elephant and the Rope Story

There is a famous story about a circus elephant.

As a baby elephant, it is tied to a small wooden stake with a thick rope. The baby elephant pulls and tugs, but it isn’t strong enough to break free.
Eventually, it gives up.
Years later, that elephant is a five-ton beast that could easily uproot a tree, yet it stays tied to that same small wooden stake. Why? Because it believes it is still stuck.

It has forgotten what it is truly capable of.

Many H1B holders are like that elephant. It’s not a lack of courage; it’s that they have been conditioned by the system for so long that they’ve forgotten their own power.

The Invisible Weight of the H1B

Nobody tells you what the H1B actually does to your psyche. It’s not just the 60-day grace period; it’s how it changes the way you carry yourself.

• Year one: You’re just excited to be here.

• Year two: You start noticing you word things differently in meetings.

• Year three: You realize you haven’t disagreed with your manager once.

Not because they are always right, but because the “visa math” doesn’t favor the bold. You watch a friend with Canadian PR quit their job to take a three-month sabbatical, and while you call it “amazing,” you don’t mention that you haven’t taken more than five days off in two years.

You make great money. Life looks perfect on Instagram. But there is a low hum of anxiety running in the background of your mind - a constant, vibrating frequency of “what if” that becomes your new normal. You forget what it feels like to be truly relaxed.

The “One More Year” Syndrome

The cycle is predictable. You work hard to get to the U.S., you get the H1B, you adapt to the culture, and you start a family. Your social circle becomes a mirror of your own life. Everyone has the same background, the same fears, and the same visa constraints.

You think about moving home, but you delay.

“I’ll move back in March 2028,” you say.

But 2028 arrives, and things got changed so suddenly it’s “just one more year.” Before you know it, 11 years have passed. You are now in a Green Card backlog that will take 50 years to clear. The “usual logic” takes over: “It’s stressful, but the pay makes it worth it.”

Escape the Average

This isn’t just an H1B story. It’s a human story.

Most people never take the exit and stay in their “cages” because they are gold-plated. They stay because the crowd is staying on highway. But to live a life that is truly yours, you must be willing to do what the average person won’t: Listen to your own intuition over the collective fear.

As Buddha said:

“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.”

If your thoughts are constantly guarded by the fear of losing what you’ve built, you aren’t living; you are merely “maintaining.”

True security doesn’t come from a document, a title, or a location - it comes from the realization that you are the one who built your success, and you can build it again anywhere.

Ask yourself this: “Are you staying on the highway by choice, or because you’ve forgotten you’re strong enough to take the exit?”

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I opened an email from immigration.

I was selected in the H1B lottery.

For most people in the world, this is the Super Bowl. The Olympics. The Golden Ticket to the “American Dream.”

This was my fifth attempt. For four years, I asked the universe for this email. I checked my inbox with a shaking hand, hoping a computer algorithm would finally validate my existence.

But this year was different.

I’d already booked my flight to India. I’d already secured my internal transfer. I was ready to go.

Then luck threw a 100mph fastball at my head.

The Luck Trap

The H1B isn’t about skill. It’s not about your “impact” or your fancy job title.

It’s a casino.

The house usually wins. But this time, the slot machine hit triple cherries right as I was walking out the exit door.

Most people would turn around. They’d see the flashing lights and stay for one more round. They’d let a random number generator decide the next few years of their life.

Not me.

The Power of Agency

Here is the mental shift that changed everything:

Before today, my story was: “I’m leaving the U.S. because of visa issues.” It was a story of a victim. A story of someone being forced out by “the system.”

Now? The story is: “I’m leaving because I want to.”

That is a 10x more powerful narrative. When you move from having to do something to choosing to do it, you reclaim your soul.

I’m not staying for the “Golden Ticket.” I’m going back to India because that’s where the high-quality version of myself lives.

The Noise of the “Standard Path”

My friends think I’ve lost my mind.

My family is worried.

In India, social comparison is a national sport. People look at the U.S. visa as the ultimate trophy. One relative told me indirectly, “Only a fool would lose this opportunity. People work hard just to get a foot in the door, and you’re walking away?”

But here’s what they don’t get: Market value is not the same as personal fulfillment.

They are looking at my life through a spreadsheet. I’m looking at it through my heart.

The Fear of “What If”

The hardest part isn’t the move. It’s the “unknown.”

We stay in mediocre situations because we are terrified of future regret.

• What if this decision is a mistake?

• What if I miss the dollar salary?

But we never ask the real question: What if I stay and live someone else’s dream for the next ten years?

That is the true risk.

The Common Ground Rule

I’ve started living by a new rule: Spend your energy where it helps everyone.

Focus on the spaces where nobody argues. Nobody argues with giving to charity. Nobody argues with being a better human.

I want to be in a place where my growth isn’t a debate or a point of comparison. I want to be in a place where I can contribute.

The lottery result gave me a choice.

And I am sticking with my initial plan.

Have you ever walked away from a "perfect" opportunity because it wasn't your opportunity? Tell me your story in the comments. Let’s break the silence of social comparison together.

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They pick a job, then try to squeeze a life into the gaps between Zoom calls and spreadsheets. It’s a slow death. That’s how you end up in your 70s, staring at a wall, wondering where the time went.

I was living the same. But I’m done with it.

I’ve officially booked a one-way ticket to India which I covered under “The Unwritten Roadmap”. I decided where my soul wanted to be first. My career? It can follow me there or get out of the way.

The Jeff Bezos Regret Minimization Framework

Success isn’t about how much you make. It’s about how much you don’t regret.

I work at Amazon. My “grand-boss,” Jeff Bezos, is the king of this philosophy. When Jeff wanted to quit his high-paying hedge fund job to sell books in a garage, his manager took him for a long walk in Central Park. His manager told him:

“This sounds like a great idea, but it would be an even better idea for a person who didn’t already have a good job.”

Jeff didn’t look at his bank account. He used a Regret Minimization Framework. He imagined himself at 80 years old. He knew he wouldn’t regret trying and failing at a startup, but he would forever be haunted by the “what if” of never trying.

He chose “adventure and service” over “ease and comfort.” He chose to advance humanity.

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The Prison of the ‘Golden Handcuffs’

The “Golden Handcuffs” are a psychological cage.

When you have a steady, high-paying job, you become addicted to the “Ease.” You start to believe that “starting over” is a loss. This is the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action.

We focus on the years of effort we’ve invested in one place (job or career or resources) and fear “burning it to the ground.”

But here is the blunt truth: You have to experience an “ego death” to reinvent yourself. You have to be willing to lose the title to find the purpose.

Life is Not a Spreadsheet

My manager recently left Amazon to return to his own home country. We were in the same boat. His exact words regarding making this big decision: “Life is not all about money and status.”

Those aren’t just words; they are a lifeline.

After booking the flight ticket, I’ve interviewed multiple internal teams for job transfer. The interviews are done. Finally, I submitted my application for an international transfer to India. Team, hiring manager and I have shaken hands.

I’m not just changing offices; I’m reclaiming my time.

I refuse to leave a legacy of “I’ll go home next year.” I’m going home now. I’m going to have quality time with my father and mother while they are still here to enjoy it.

Adventure over comfort. Service over ease. Presence over status.

Thanks to God and every person who pushed me toward this cliff. I’m jumping, and I’ve never felt more alive.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Recently, a viral Substack essay titled “THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS” painted a vivid scenario where the global economy is upended by the rapid rise of AI (or AGI). This kind of discourse doesn’t just stay in tech circles; it’s all over my family WhatsApp chats and group get-together.

Even the markets are feeling the tension. When Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block, announced a 40% reduction in workforce, a move many saw as a shift toward AI-driven productivity replacing traditional white-collar roles.

While these narratives focus on what we might lose, very few people are talking about what we stand to gain. I am deeply optimistic. We are the first generation to hold advanced intelligence (AI) in our hands to shape the future. Here is why.

When Machines Replaced Muscle

To understand where we are going, we have to look back at the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Before this era, most work relied on human muscle, with limited mechanical power.

Fact Check - To give you an idea of the scale: During the mid-1800s, a single steam-powered excavator (like the Otis Shovel) could move as much earth in one day as 50 to 100 men working with hand shovels.

In the construction of early railroads, what used to take a crew of 100 men several weeks to clear could suddenly be done by one operator and a machine in a fraction of the time.

At the time, people were terrified. If one machine could do the work of 100 men, the math seemed simple: 99 people would be out of a job. This fear led to widespread protests. In the early 19th century, groups like the Luddites famously smashed textile machinery, fearing that automated looms would destroy their livelihoods.

If I had been living in that era, I probably would have been right there with them. If your entire life is built on a specific physical skill and a machine suddenly does it better, fear is a natural response.

But looking back, we don’t regret the “loss” of back-breaking manual labor. We appreciate the convenience of the modern world that those machines built.

History shows that every technological leap triggers fear before its benefits become clear. We are watching that same cycle play out again today.

The Modern Resistance - Cones and Cabs

We see this same pattern today with autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars have become one of the most protested technologies in recent years.

In San Francisco, activist groups like “Safe Street Rebel” began a campaign of “coning”, placing traffic cones on the hoods of Waymo and Cruise vehicles to “brick” them and shut them down. Organized labor unions and taxi associations joined the fray, arguing that the expansion of autonomous vehicle permits would lead to mass unemployment for low-income workers and drivers.

Whenever a technology directly impacts a person’s safety or their immediate paycheck, it leads to a battle. AI is no different; it’s just the newest front in a very old war.

The Shift from Physical Muscle to Mental Might

What makes humans unique is our combination of physical and mental ability. For the last two centuries, we used technology to automate our physical limitations. We stopped using our backs to lift rocks and started using engines. We liked the convenience, even if we feared the change.

Now, it is the “mental muscle’s” turn.

Today, the most high-paying jobs require deep, specific knowledge and the ability to make complex decisions. Because of AI, machines can now analyze vast amounts of data and make those decisions in a fraction of a second. This is why it feels so personal this time, it’s affecting “mentally exhaustive” jobs, including my own as a Software Development Engineer.

At Amazon, I see this every day. Tools that we use for software development can now complete tasks in minutes that used to take me two full days of coding and debugging. Our “speed to delivery” is getting faster, much like that steam shovel lifting rocks.

A Gift for the Year 2125

Our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be thankful that we had the courage to launch this technology. We are moving toward a world where human potential isn’t spent on repetitive mental tasks, but on higher levels of creativity and connection.

If you’d like to hear my thoughts on what the world will actually look like in the year 2125, leave a comment below and I’ll dive into that in my next post.

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I became a father to a baby boy.

For a software engineer used to the comfort of logic and the reliability of predictable code, the chaos of new parenthood was a wake-up call I wasn't "totally" prepared for.

The Addiction We Don’t Talk About

In the hospital, things got complicated.

I remember the suffocating silence before my son’s first cry. When it finally happened, the relief was more intense than resolving a production-breaking bug after days of struggle.

But that’s when the “addiction” started which I noticed to myself.

We usually think of addiction as drugs, alcohol, or the dopamine hit of social media. For me, it was my newborn.

I found myself checking his breathing every few minutes. I was obsessed with his safety, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown.

In the world of dev-ops, we call this “over-monitoring.” In fatherhood, it’s just the raw, terrifying reality of love.

The Physics of Sleep Deprivation

Because of the birth complications, I stayed awake for 48 hours straight. I maybe managed two hours of shallow rest.

When I finally lay down, my entire body started to vibrate.

It felt like a different kind of intoxication. It turns out, that’s because it is.

The Research: Science shows that staying awake for 24 hours straight impairs your cognitive performance as much as a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.10%. That is well above the legal limit for driving.

For programmers and managers who brag about “the grind,” let this be a warning. You aren’t being productive; you’re just drunk on exhaustion.

A Fracturing Corporate World

While I was navigating fatherhood, the corporate world was fracturing.

I survived two rounds of tech layoffs at Amazon. The uncertainty was a ghost that followed me down every hallway.

I still have my job, but the “Amazonian” spirit feels different now.

I’ve always believed that change is the only certainty in life. If you can’t get comfortable with change, you won’t survive in this industry.

But the recent shifts in Big Tech culture don’t feel same.

The Decision to Walk Away

I’m about to make a decision that would make most career-driven professionals sweat.

I’m moving back to India.

I have no certain plans. I have no “next move” lined up on LinkedIn.

For a person who usually craves a roadmap, this is deeply uncomfortable. But comfort is often the enemy of growth.

The career will always be there. This time with my son and my family won’t.

Stay tuned. The next chapter is unwritten.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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It got me thinking. What's the real juice? What did I actually learn from watching it, again and again?

You Can't Connect the Dots Forward (So Stop Trying)

Jobs started with the truth bomb: trying to predict the future is a fool's errand. Seriously, how often do your "master plans" actually play out?

But here's the kicker: it's ridiculously easy to connect the dots backward. Think about it.

My job at Amazon right now? Not some grand vision from 2014. It's just the messy, beautiful result of a bunch of tiny past decisions. I was in India, doing my Bachelor's. Made a friend. He came to the US for his Master's. I was in the same boat. Different universities, different internships.

He landed Amazon internship. I was at ABB. My dream was a FAANG company, sure. But when he got that offer? That's when it fueled my own ambition to crack the interview.

And yeah, I got in. We even became roommates. Back in 2014, sitting in India, surrounded by millions of other students, thinking I'd work for Amazon in the US? Impossible. Utterly insane.

But looking back, every single small activity – even just making that one friend – pushed me here. The lesson? You can only connect the dots backward. Always.

So, How Do You Live Life Forward? Trust the Damn Process.

Here's the flip side. I started writing online in October 2024. Did I have a grand plan? Nope. Do I know how it'll help me in 2035? Still no clue. I'm just… doing it.

But here's my promise: I will have the answer in 2035. You, reading this right now? You don't know how it's gonna help you. But let me tell you this: your reading habit? It's benefiting you. Guaranteed.

So, here's the deal. Trust something bigger. God, destiny, karma, reincarnation – whatever your flavor. It's the only way to navigate this crazy ride called life.

Death is Life's Best Invention (Seriously)

You know that thought: "Today's my last day." One day, you'll be 100 percent right about it.

And the thought of death, suddenly, all the fear? Gone. External expectations? Who cares. Becoming successful? Nah. More money? Irrelevant. FAANG company? Promotion? Impressing colleagues? Delivering the best presentation ever? All that noise just melts away.

I've felt it. That moment when all your worries vanish. I even wrote about it in this post.

Just the thought of death can flip your entire day upside down. The trick is to use that power for something meaningful.

We avoid so much. Speaking up to that Senior SDE or your boss. Chasing money when you should be chasing purpose. Obsessing over what other people think.

Ask yourself one question, right then and there: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do?"

That question? That's your biggest life decision maker.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you're enjoying it, I'd be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Imagine waking up every day with a headache that isn't physical, but a mental burden. That was my reality during my time at Amazon. Finding no pleasure in anything, yet continuing on as if there's no escape. Your mind is constantly fatigued, and you can even feel the exhaustion in your body.

A Mind on Overload

The worries quickly piled up: health, relationships, upcoming meetings, current projects, colleagues, future career, finances, politics, and even laws. The list became endless. You feel perpetually on the verge of being exposed as an impostor, and every meeting brings a chill.

Your heart pounds loudly, and you experience moments of black vision, like a scene from a movie. Your mind can go completely blank, a sensation you've never known before. One moment you might feel on top of the world, but most often, you're utterly helpless.

The Weight of Decisions

Simple choices, like what to eat, felt as monumental as farming in a desert. Even after ordering from a restaurant, you'd second-guess the decision. You become so mentally drained that it's hard to recover. Regret over past choices weighs heavily.

Your mind races at an uncontrollable speed, like a falling star. It's impossible to stop; it's just out of control.

During these times, you perceive life in a way others don't. You can't share your thoughts with friends, fearing they'll think you're crazy. While they enjoy Netflix or sports, you find it all a complete waste of time. Eventually, you learn new words to describe what you're feeling: anxiety and depression.

The Grip of Anxiety

Anxiety is at its peak in this state, making you easily irritated. Even a small mishap, like wasting toothpaste, can lead to intense self-punishment. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you just want to start working.

After many nights of this, sleep itself becomes an incredibly difficult task. Sometimes, you just don't want to go to bed, feeling a relentless restlessness.

You can't even sit still for more than a few minutes. Whether it's the middle of the night or during lunch with friends, your thoughts jump to distant future events, like the year 2055, with little or no reason for concern.

The Rabbit Hole

After many days, you just beg for a single minute of peace from your thoughts. But it never stops. Your mind becomes consumed with negative outcomes, pulling you deeper into a rabbit hole of endless "what if" scenarios.

Even when you consider taking time off, an internal critic whispers that you're running away from your problems. It calls you names: coward, not smart, fearful, weak, stupid. You begin to believe you're misusing PTO and taking benefits unfairly. Anxiety then convinces you that your misuse will be discovered.

Both your inner and outer worlds suggest you're using a "sympathy card" instead of solving the real problem. So you keep repeating what you’ve been doing.

Finding the Good

While these experiences are incredibly challenging, they also have a silver lining. This period taught me profound lessons that one adult could never learn in a normal life. I began questioning everything, like a child, including unanswerable and answerable questions.

I asked myself:

• "What am I doing with my life?"

• "Why am I not making progress?"

• "Am I living up to expectations or letting others down?"

• "Am I going in circles?"

• And critically, "What is the purpose of life?"

• "Why do we exist on Earth?"

In this state, you learn at the speed of a child, finding answers that most people never even conceive, as they are too caught up in the rat race.

At the time, you may not understand what you're fighting or how severe it is. However, later in life, you'll share this entire journey with your spouse, friends, parents, or children.

The Power of Support

The only thing that truly helped me was a supportive team, especially my manager. Managers are human too, and my manager was able to sympathize with me. This is a testament to true managerial skill, and it highlights the difference between a manager and a leader.

Every leader can be a manager, but not every manager can be a leader. My manager, in this instance, was a true leader. You, too, will find someone who stands by you and has your back. You'll never forget that feeling. These types of connections will be deeply real and last a lifetime.

A New Beginning

Ultimately, the universe wanted you to learn and change. I emerged as a new person with new values from that time. One value I want to share today is a deep desire to help humanity, without any expectation in return. This value is incredibly challenging, but I will strive to uphold it consistently.

I learned to truly listen to my inner voice, something I'd always ignored before. The relentless 'what ifs' eventually forced me to confront my deepest fears and redefine success on my own terms.

Finally, remember this:

This means you are strong enough to create this mental-state and trying to navigate even the most challenging states, just like a resilient child.

From what I’ve come to understand, anxiety and depression come from feeling mentally stuck. It’s like mind keeps replaying the SAME problem over and over, trying to solve it but never quite getting anywhere. The longer it loops, the heavier everything starts to feel starting from low mood.

If you're reading this and feeling lost, remember that even in the darkest moments, there's always a path towards understanding and healing. You're not alone.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you're enjoying it, I'd be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I shared it with my family. They hit me with a very real question:
"What about all your stuff?"

My answer, at the time, was simple:
"I'll just use storage services."

We laughed, moved on. I forgot about it. Life, as it does, got in the way. Job, promotion, marriage – the usual beautiful chaos. The dream gathered dust.

When Life Throws Balls, You Learn to Catch (and Store)

Then, something wild happened. Not "travel the world" wild, but something that unexpectedly connected to that old dream:
I needed storage. For the first time ever.

That fleeting thought from years ago, about using a storage service, came back. I didn’t overthink it. I went to the storage service website, booked a unit, and dropped off my things the next day. It was seamless.

I remember stepping out of that storage unit, keys in hand, and breathing in the early evening air. It smelled like dust and summer—familiar, but also oddly freeing. Something inside me shifted. That old dream? Maybe it hadn’t died after all. I am almost free to pursue that dream that I had years ago.

That simple act of using a self-storage unit wasn't just about moving boxes. It was a vivid reminder: those "wild thoughts" you have? They're rarely just wild. They're often whispers of your future, blueprints for your resilience.

Life will throw balls at you. Some will be small, glancing blows you barely notice. Others will be massive, gut-punching impacts that leave you reeling. You’ll get injured. It’ll hurt. For a while. But here’s the kicker, the profound lesson I’ve learned: you will recover.

It might take time. A lot of time for the big ones. But over time, the weight redistributes. What feels unbearable today might become the very thing that makes you stronger tomorrow (or you will laugh about it).

How Worry Fuels Overthinking

And that brought me to a different realization—one that’s less about action and more about what happens in the mind.

This journey of unexpected connections and resilience also shed light on another pervasive challenge: overthinking. Why do we do it? Because we worry.

It’s almost never about the present. You don't worry about the breath you're taking right now.

Worry is the mind’s anxious dance with the future (anxiety) OR
the regretful replay of the past (regret).
It’s the "what if" game. And it’s exhausting.

So, the next time those "wild thoughts" surface, don't dismiss them. Maybe they're just life's way of setting the stage for something bigger. And when life throws those inevitable curveballs, remember: you’ve got this.

The Unshakeable Belief in Your Path

The secret to all of this? It’s not complex.

It’s about belief.
Believe in your God, your karma, your soul, your destiny—whatever it is.
Lean into it.

Trust that bedrock.
And then, keep taking action.

That's it.
Simple, profound, and utterly necessary.

So, what’s one “wild thought” that’s quietly followed you for years? Maybe it’s not so wild after all. I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you're enjoying it, I'd be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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It wasn't just a physical presence; it was a psychological invasion. My carefully constructed world, built on routines and future plans, crumbled.

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The Echo Chamber of Fear

The fear of death, they say, is the deepest. All other fears feel like small bubbles against it, popping instantly when that primal dread hits. But for me, in that moment, it was the fear for my loved ones that truly suffocated me.

My own mortality felt distant, almost an afterthought, compared to the crushing weight of imagining a world without the people who anchor my soul. My mind, a notorious overthinker, became an echo chamber of worst-case scenarios.

Director meetings?
Presentations?
Performance reviews?
Deadlines?
They vanished into the ether.

All that remained was a primal urge to be with my parents, to feel the safety of their presence, even as a grown adult.

It’s crazy how a primal fear can make your brain go to the most absurd places. My mind even spiraled into worrying about estate tax.

Yes, you read that right.

My life felt like it was crumbling, and my brain decided that was the opportune time to contemplate how much the government would take from my hypothetical savings. The absurdity of it almost made me laugh, a dark, hollow sound, amidst the quiet terror.

I found myself battling an internal urge to make wildly emotional decisions, yet somehow, a tiny voice of sanity—or maybe just sheer stubbornness—prevailed.

Holding On: Sanity in the Chaos

There's an ancient wisdom I cling to:

This became my mantra. My work, my daily tasks, meetings, chores—they weren't just obligations; they were lifelines.

They were the tangible anchors that prevented me from drifting entirely into the abyss of anxiety. For brief moments, anxiety made me think it was me against the universe.

In a world that suddenly felt utterly alien and threatening, the mundane became miraculous. It was the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, of focusing on a spreadsheet or a deadline, that kept me tethered to reality.

Angels in a Stranger World

And then, there were the angels: my friends. Moving into their home felt like shedding a physical weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying.

The air in their space felt different, lighter, cleaner. It wasn't just a roof over my head; it was a sanctuary. It was the quiet comfort of knowing I wasn't alone in this terrifying, unpredictable journey.

They didn't just offer me a room; they offered me peace of mind, a sense of safety that had been ripped away. It truly felt like walking into a luxurious hotel after a long, harrowing journey—except this hotel was filled with the unconditional love of friendship. I'm profoundly, eternally grateful for them.

The Inevitable Embrace of Change

At the end, my so-called created world completely destroyed, but a new one began to build. My daily schedule, routine, and comfort will require adjustment. But now I know from experience and believe in the saying:

This experience, as terrifying as it was, became a stark reminder of what truly matters: not material possessions or future anxieties, but the human connections that pull us back from the brink.

It was a terrifying, beautiful lesson in vulnerability, resilience, and the quiet power of simply showing up for one another.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you're enjoying it, I'd be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

Share

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