Here is something you do about 20,000 times a day and have probably never practiced: breathing.

How long can you hold your breath? Most people quit around 44 seconds. The world record is 11 minutes 54 seconds. These people have no second set of lungs. They have learned to relax, to read what the body is saying, and to ignore the signals that don’t matter. Then they have practiced & repeated it for years.

Now let us take the marathon. The average finisher takes about 4 hours 30 minutes. In April 2026, Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London, two and a half hours faster. And the average only counts people who finished. The ones on the couch (most people on the planet) aren’t in the data.

Now let’s look at surgeons. In a 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, surgeons were rated on skill by their peers. Patients of the lowest-rated surgeons had complications 14.5% of the time. Patients of the highest-rated: 5.2%. Nearly three times the harm.

The point here is that being good enough or average is nothing to be proud of. Yet most people settle at “good enough”. Getting to the average feels safe because everyone around you is standing there too. And nobody questions you for being average because that would mean they have to admit their own settling for the average.

If you notice any discipline, you will realise that good enough is nowhere close to best or great. They are vastly apart. Most people can never grasp what best looks like because they have never experienced, seen or heard of the best. And when you do, it is almost always dismissed because it doesn’t fit in the mental models of the “average”.

Why average feels normal

Take chess. A solid 1500-rated player has studied openings, played hundreds of games, and beats every casual player you know. If they play Magnus Carlsen at his peak rating of 2882, they score about one point in 2,800 games. Play one game a day, and they might steal a draw in year four. A win, in year eight. Maybe. Same story in hockey. Wayne Gretzky had 1,963 career assists. The second-highest scorer in history, Jaromir Jagr, has 1,921 total points.

You can only imagine the level of excellence you’ve personally experienced. Once you see what the truly excellent can do, you realise how ordinary the ordinary was.

You see “average” or “good enough” everywhere around you. It is what you see every day. That does not mean it is normal. That does not mean it is your limit. That does not mean that is the most you can aim for. That does not mean you can not dream, aim, and go for something much beyond the “normal”.

It is only when you see the exceptional ones, be it in business or sports or health, that you realise how mediocre or awful “good enough” is. So, I would ask you this, from one entrepreneur to another: where have you settled for “good enough” without ever finding out what excellence looks like?

The gap is easier to bridge than it sounds

We make this mistake everywhere. We try something a few times, see how hard it is, look at the other amateurs near us, and give up. Meanwhile, someone has spent twenty years pushing the capability far past what anyone expected. If we can learn from that person and apply even 30% of what they know, we could probably double or triple our performance.

I’m not suggesting to work harder or do more. As Warren Buffett says, “busy is the new stupid”. Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, in The ONE Thing, name the lie behind it: that everything matters equally. Spread yourself across everything, and everything gets good enough. The gap between average and great is rarely more hours. It’s a few simple habits, done on purpose, repeated long enough that they compound and become who you are.

There is more in every area of your life

Breathing, running and surgery are just the easy ones to measure. The same gap is true for almost everything else you do – whether competitive or not. For each area below, find what average or good enough looks like, what excellence looks like, and the one habit that gets you there – especially with 10,000 repetitions with deliberate feedback & learning loops.

You need no new degree. No new strategy. No extra hour in the day. The same life, run to a higher standard, leads to excellence.

What greatness asks of you

1. Repetition. Nobody gets great at breathing on one lucky day. The freediver, the surgeon, the marathoner and the founder who succeed beyond imagination all do the boring thing again tomorrow. Pick a habit so small you can’t fail at it. They are boringly consistent.
2. Raise one standard. Not everything. The few things that matter most. Prepare for the meeting like it’s the one that changes your life. Say the thing that must be said instead of what is convenient to speak. The more you raise standards, the more you simplify. And the more you simplify, the more your impact multiplies.
3. Refuse the normal. Say NO to normal hours, normal burnout, a normal team that’s mostly checked out. Normal is what happens when nobody points out the elephant in the room. Say “not here.”
4. Be willing to stand out. Excellence is visible. People will stare, and some will judge. Convenience keeps you comfortable and unnoticed. Commitment is doing it anyway. That permits others to do the same.

Why I’m telling you this

I’m an introvert. I grew up in India, became an engineer, and spent 16 years in a lucrative tech career. I used to think I knew what sacrifice meant. Sixteen years in tech, working across continents, climbing the ladder: I thought sacrifice was working late, missing dinner, giving up weekends. I was wrong. Real sacrifice is deeper, meaningful, and scarier.

Here is what I eventually had to admit. I told myself I wanted to make a real impact. But deep down I was committed to being safe. To being liked. To not rocking the boat. To having all the answers before I started. That commitment to comfort was killing my greatness before it had a chance to breathe.

I was making great money, and I was miserable. By every external measure, I was successful, and I felt empty, almost dead inside. Sitting in front of a computer doing the thing I was very good at felt like not being alive. So I started before I was ready. When I first began speaking about leadership, I was terrified. I would shake in front of people. I had imposter syndrome so bad I could barely function. I kept going anyway, and I discovered my limits were not even close to where I thought they were.

If you run a company, this matters beyond you. Your team doesn’t copy your values statement. They copy your standards. Raise your standards, and you raise the ceiling for everyone who works for you.

My stand

My life is a stand for human excellence, and against mediocrity. I love people, including the ones who are settling, because I spent years as one of them. I’m against the quiet agreement that “good enough” is what a human life is for. I held back on my own dreams for a long time, until it was suffocating. I don’t want that for you.

So here is my personal call. Dream. Become more. Not to achieve anything. Not to get somewhere. Not to prove yourself to a parent, a rival or the person in the mirror. Do it because that is what a human being is: something that can keep growing. This life was handed to you. Becoming more is simply how you say thank you.

Nothing is wrong with you today. You are enough. You are not behind. And you are still capable of far more than you have let yourself see. Both are true at the same time.

What are you really committed to?

To be honest, ask yourself: what are you actually committed to? (because you can’t serve two masters)

• You say you want to build a billion-dollar company. Are you committed to what it takes, or to looking like you’re building one?
• You say you want a workplace that nourishes people. Are you committed to the hard conversations that make it possible, or to being the nice boss who avoids conflict?
• You say you want to change your industry. Are you willing to be misunderstood for years while you do it, or do you need to be liked by the people who represent everything you want to change?

You can’t be committed to greatness and to comfort at the same time. You can’t be committed to impact and to being liked by everyone. Most people try to have both and end up with neither. Keller calls the perfectly balanced life a myth: greatness goes lopsided on purpose. Just counterbalance it, and don’t pay with your health or the people you love.

Greatness is built the unglamorous way. Find one sacred routine that nobody will applaud you for, and do it every day, for months, then years. For me, it has been a daily practice of creating myself from the ground up, several times a day. Not because it’s magic. Because it is what it took. Do it first, before the distractions begin. Keller suggests protecting a block of about four hours for it.

As any athlete will tell you, greatness isn’t built in the big moments. It’s built in the space between them, in the thousand small choices nobody sees.

Greatness also requires you to accept that you can not control outcomes, and often it requires you to play a longer game than your ego likes. To look stupid or clueless for a while. To commit to outcomes you might never see, and to find peace in the process, not just the outcome. And sometimes to be lonely for a stretch. I was. That loneliness isn’t a bug. It’s where you learn to stand for something even when your legs are shaking. It is where you build character.

Then watch for the sneakiest trap: fear of success. If you really become what you’re capable of, you can’t hide anymore. You can’t play small. So many of us get to the edge of the breakthrough and quietly sabotage it, because staying stuck is familiar.

The price is high. I won’t lie to you. But the cost and regret of not paying it is higher. The world doesn’t need a watered-down, safe version of you. It needs the full, unreasonable one. Not tomorrow. Not when you feel ready. NOW. Your greatness has been waiting for your entire life. The only question is whether you’re finally ready to choose it.

Do this today

Start with Keller’s question: What is the one habit that would make everything else easier or unnecessary? Pick it from the table above. Give it 30 days to start. Then say it out loud to another human: “For the next 30 days, I will ___.”

Saying it aloud is the point. It turns convenience (I’ll try when things calm down) into commitment (by this date, watch me).

Habits take about 66 days on average to stick (a UCL study found a range of 18 to 254), and one missed day doesn’t undo you. And they take around 3000 days until they become part of who you are – almost automatic and unconscious.

Good enough is comfortable. It’s also the quietest way to waste a life.

So… who do you want to be?

(You are doing things in the wrong order)

Let me ask you something. Finish this sentence: “I’m doing this in order to…” Now try it with a few things in your life:

• I’m working this weekend in order to…
• I’m raising this round in order to…
• I’m going to the gym in order to…
• I’m taking this vacation in order to…

Now keep going. What’s the in order to after that? And the one after that? Notice how the sentence never really ends? There’s always one more step before you get to the part where you feel good, where you relax, where you’re finally proud of yourself.

The trap I lived in

I spent sixteen years climbing the ladder in tech. I delivered big, complex projects and got promotions and raises. From the outside, it looked like I’d made it. And I was miserable. Not because the work was bad, but because I was using every project, every role, and every meeting in order to prove or get something. That I was smart. That I belonged. That I was finally enough.

Here’s how deep it went. I once turned down a job offer because the title didn’t have the word “Senior” in it. It was the same kind of work, just missing one word. And that one missing word made me feel like a failure, so I said no. It sounds silly now, but that’s honestly who I was back then.

Then I finally got the senior role I’d been chasing for more than a year. This was the one that was supposed to make me feel like I’d arrived. And do you know what I felt? Nothing. Actually, worse than nothing, because now I had a brand new worry: What if they find out I don’t deserve this? What if it was a fluke? What if I lose it? I hadn’t escaped the anxiety at all. I’d just upgraded it.

The water you can’t see

Two young fish were swimming. An older fish swims by and says, “Morning. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on. After a while, one of them turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” When something is everywhere, you stop seeing it. And “in order to” is our water. It shows up in every part of our lives:

• With our bodies. We go to the gym in order to look a certain way. We check the mirror again and again. We buy clothes in order to feel like we belong in the room.
• With our hearts. We perform in relationships in order to be liked. We collect approval like trophies, hoping the next person will finally make us feel complete.
• With our minds. I used to be proud of reading 100 books a year. Want to know how many of them actually changed how I lived? Maybe two. I wasn’t reading in order to learn. I was reading in order to feel smart, and then to tell people I’d read 100 books.
• With our work. We chase the bigger office, the next revenue milestone, the new business unit, the impressive hire. All in order to prove that we matter.

Without realising, we put our confidence, our joy, our peace, and our sense of worth on hold. We keep doing things “in order to” have something later. This is a trap. As later never comes. It just keeps moving further away.

What it’s costing you

“In order to” doesn’t just delay your happiness. It drains you right now. When today is only a tool for tomorrow, you’re never really here. You’re in the meeting, but you’re busy managing how you look. You’re at dinner, but you’re quietly checking whether you’re on track. Your body is in the room, but you are not.

And even when you win, you can’t really enjoy it. You get maybe ten seconds of feeling good. Maybe a day, if you’re lucky. Then the fear kicks in: What if I lose this? It’s a game that simply can’t be won. No matter how much you put in, it never feels full.

I see this all the time in my work. Brilliant leaders come to me running for decades and pretending they’re fine. Their lights are dim. And it’s not because they’re failing. Very often it’s because they’re succeeding, and it still isn’t enough. It is because they have become so good at running and chasing that the thought of stopping terrifies them.

You already know how to live differently

Here’s the good news: you already know how to live outside of “in order to”. You just don’t do it everywhere. Think about picking your kid up from school. Do you sit there asking yourself, “what’s in it for me? Will this make me look good?” Of course not. You just go.

If your kid spills his milk over his clothes, you clean up and do what has to be done. It needs doing, so you do it. There’s no drama, no calculating, no overthinking.

Or think about when your best friend calls you at midnight. You don’t lie there working out the ROI of that conversation. You pick up the phone, you listen, and you help however you can. In those moments, you’re not doing in order to get anything. So you naturally ask a completely different question:

What does the person or situation in front of me need from me?

That’s your default as a human being. When you are not doing it “in order to”, you naturally do what suits best for the person and situation in front of you. Irrespective of how it looks or what it says about you. You just serve the moment in front of you the best you can.

In India, we have a name for it: karma yoga. It simply means action for its own sake. You serve what’s in front of you, and the action itself is the reward.

Two ways to act

When you look closely, there are really only two ways to act in any moment:

• “In order to.” This moment is just a stepping stone to something better later. The future matters more than now. So you’re never fully here, and you miss most of what’s right in front of you.
• Serving the moment. You stop using now to get somewhere else, and you give it your full attention. Think of a great athlete in the zone. They’re not thinking about the gold medal. They’re not even thinking about themselves. And that’s exactly why their action has so much power.

The coach Michael Neill says it simply: if you’re doing things in order to be happy, you’re doing them in the wrong order. Happiness doesn’t come after. Courage doesn’t come after. Peace doesn’t come after. They come first, and then you build everything else from there.

“So should I stop dreaming big?”

Hell no. I don’t do small or incremental anything. I work with CEOs to help companies take 100 million leaps. I love big, bold, crazy goals. The dreaming is not the problem. How you hold it is. You can chase a dream in order to finally feel alive. Or you can go after it from already being alive, and let the dream be the way you express that.

For years, I was scared to leave tech. Not because I loved it, but because I was afraid of what people would think. My family, my colleagues, even me. I was deeply attached to being “the smart engineer.”

Then one day I was sitting in yet another meeting about optimizing some algorithm, and I realized I wasn’t even there. I was going through the motions, collecting a paycheck, and protecting an identity that didn’t fit me anymore.

Meanwhile, out in the world, brilliant leaders were burning out. Company cultures were making people sick. People were quitting their jobs because they couldn’t find any meaning in them. I knew I had something to offer. The scary part of quitting wasn’t the money. It was letting go of needing to look successful.

The question I’d been avoiding was a simple one: What does this moment in my life actually need from me? When I finally quit, I didn’t feel certain about anything. I felt relief. For the first time in a long time, I was doing something that felt true.

What becomes possible

When you stop using your work to fix something inside you, everything starts to change. I worked with a SaaS CEO. Let’s call her Shri. Every board meeting was a performance for her, carefully built to make her look like the perfect CEO. She was exhausted.

Then one quarter, the numbers were soft. Really soft. And instead of spinning a story, she told the board the truth: “I know you want aggressive growth. But expanding internationally right now would hurt us. We haven’t solved our home market yet.”

She told me later that something shifted inside her as she said it. She wasn’t nervous and she wasn’t spinning. She was just giving them what they needed to know. The board pushed back at first, and then they came around. But the real reward wasn’t their approval. It was finally getting to be herself in that room.

When I was just starting out, a founder wanted to hire me to “fix” an employee he was about to fire. The more I dug in, the clearer it became that the employee wasn’t the problem. The culture was. I asked the founder to be coached first, and he refused. It would have been easy money, right when I needed it most. I said NO anyway. He didn’t hire me, and I slept better that night than I had in years.

That NO was its own reward, as I didn’t say it “in order to” anything. I said it because that’s what the situation needed from me at that point. This is what happens when you lead from “what does this moment need?” instead of “what can I get?”:

• Your team stops walking on eggshells and starts bringing you the real problems.
• Your peers stop seeing you as competition, because you’re not trying to outshine anyone.
• Your investors trust you more, because they know you’re telling them the truth.
• Everyone relaxes, because people can feel when you’re not trying to take something from them. That’s where real trust comes from.

Try this for one week

You don’t need a big plan for this. Just three small moves, every day for one week:

1. Catch the sentence. Listen for every “in order to,” “once…,” and “when I finally…”. Each one is a piece of your life you’ve put on hold.
2. Before every meeting and every decision, ask: What does this moment need from me?
3. Then ask the braver question: What would I do here if the action itself was the only reward? What would I do if I do not need anything from this moment at all?

Then go and do that thing, even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially if it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes that means:

• Having the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
• Saying “I don’t know” or “I got that wrong.”
• Turning down money or opportunities that don’t fit who you are.

You’ll feel something you probably haven’t felt in a while: relief. And a quiet kind of confidence that doesn’t depend on how things turn out.

The only moment you’ll ever have

Here’s what I know for sure. You are not going to achieve your way into feeling enough. That game is rigged. I played it for sixteen years, and I never won. You can stop playing it today.

So keep your big dreams. Make them even bigger. Go for the impossible. Just stop making your life now the price of getting there. Everything you’re chasing (courage, joy, peace, aliveness) isn’t waiting for you at the finish line. It’s right here, in the action in front of you.

So go do something that matters. Not in order to. Just because it matters.

How’s the water?

A stand for what’s possible for us as human beings

I want to start with something true about me. I’m fully committed to the leaders & companies in my portfolio, except when I’m committed to being right or looking good.

I didn’t enjoy writing that sentence. But when I look honestly, it’s there. Some moments I’m fully there for these leaders and entrepreneurs. Other moments, without deciding to, I am withholding my best. I am saving my full expression for when they mature, when I have spoken to someone else in their team, when a particular result happens, and so on and so on.

My reasons always change – but there is often a reason to withhold and save my highest service to them for some later moment in time. And it is because I am trying to look good or avoid looking bad if I give my best right now.

What I’ve noticed

Most of us, most of the time, aren’t fully in – in whatever we are doing. We are holding back, even if just a little, because of a prudent reason or explanation. We give a lot at work, but hold something back. We love our families deeply, but keep a small part of ourselves in reserve. We show up for friends, our health and our dreams, up to a point.

Werner Erhard pointed out this: we’re all saving it somewhere. We’re always committed to something. Sometimes it’s the person or the dream in front of us. Sometimes, quietly, it’s staying safe, looking good, being right or not getting hurt. The tricky part is that holding back rarely looks like holding back. It looks like being reasonable, busy, humble, careful, even kind. That’s why we so rarely notice it.

Why we do it

None of this makes us weak or wrong. It makes us human. Every one of us learned to hold back for a reason. Somewhere along the way, going all in cost us something. We got hurt, we were let down, or we had to survive. Keeping something in reserve protected us, and it probably worked.

Our reasons are good: “Let’s be careful.” “Not yet.” “I’ve been here before.” They sound like wisdom, and sometimes they are. But a lot of the time, holding back is a habit that outlived its purpose.

How we save our best without realising

I recognise myself in most of these. You may recognise yourself in some.

At work. We share 70% of the vision and keep the really big version to ourselves, so nobody thinks we’re crazy and so we can’t fail at it publicly. We say “let me think about it” when we already know the answer.

We over-prepare with one more analysis and one more week. It feels like rigour. We do things ourselves and call it high standards, when sometimes it’s a quiet reluctance to trust others. We soften feedback until it’s safe and useless.

We hire the good candidate who won’t challenge us over the great one who might. We say “let’s see how Q3 goes,” when we can already see the writing on the wall.

At home. We win the argument and leave the other person alone in the room. We go quiet and call it “not wanting a fight.” We answer “I’m fine,” the most common way of holding yourself back in any relationship.

We sit at dinner with one ear on the phone and half our mind on Monday. We love by providing, fixing and gifting – instead of being there with and for the person. It can become a comfortable way to avoid saying the tender, vulnerable thing. We keep score. And we don’t ask for what we want, because if we never ask, we can never be refused.

With friends. We share the highlight reel and keep the struggle to ourselves. We take the role of helper, always giving and never needing, which is lovely and also very safe. We say “we should catch up soon,” mean it warmly, and it doesn’t happen. We keep friendships comfortable instead of real.

With ourselves. “Someday” is the busiest day on our calendar. It is when we will take action on the book, the trip and the dream. We keep them alive by never starting them. We start strong and then settle at a level that’s safe from both failure and complete success.

We train at 80% and stop just before it would really stretch us. We make the joke about ourselves first so nobody else can. We stay busy, because a full calendar is a respectable way to avoid the things that really matter. And sometimes describing the dream in detail quietly replaces pursuing it.

The disguises we use

Withholding our best rarely shows up as withholding. It shows up as:

Each of these is sometimes genuine. Being realistic is real, and so is patience. The question isn’t whether it is real or not. It’s whether we’re choosing it or it’s running us. A simple test: can I say out loud exactly what I’m holding back and why? If I can, it’s probably a conscious choice. If I get vague or defensive, or start building a case, I’ve probably found where I’m withholding my best.

What it costs

Here’s what I’ve come to see. When we hold back a little everywhere, we don’t get a little less life. We get a different kind of life.

Some things only happen at 100%: real intimacy, deep trust, big breakthroughs, bold ambitions, and feeling fully alive. You can’t be 70% in love or make a 70% bold move. Those things either happen or they don’t. So we end up successful and “good enough” (which is the enemy of greatness). Busy but not fulfilled. Surrounded by people and still a bit alone. Leading teams that are good but never quite extraordinary, because they’re holding back too, just like us.

Often the price isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s the conversation we never had, the idea we never said out loud, and the evening we won the argument and lost the connection. It’s years that went by at 70%, and a vague sense that there was supposed to be more.

How to notice

Some gentle signals that we might be saving our best:

• Our energy drops. Real commitment tends to energise us, even when it’s hard. Withholding is quietly tiring.
• We feel a flicker of relief when something gets cancelled or postponed.
• We have a very good explanation ready before anyone asks for one.
• We feel slightly separate, like an observer of our own life rather than a player in it.
• “Yes, but…” shows up a lot.
• “Not yet” has been the answer to the same thing for years.

Noticing isn’t about judging or blaming ourselves. It’s the moment choice becomes possible again.

What’s possible

I stand for human excellence – be it in business, relationships, or simply the joy and aliveness we experience in life. That doesn’t mean perfection or working harder. It means giving all of ourselves in what matters to us. I’ve seen what people can do when they stop holding back. I’ve also lived it.

In 2011, I was an introverted engineer who decided to organise an anti-corruption march. I had no idea what it would involve. I was full of self-doubt and anxiety. When I told my mother, she said: “Yes, it is crazy. But you can do that. You will find a way.” 400 people walked 11 km with us. The hardest part wasn’t the march. It was the weeks I spent in my head before I took the first step.

Walking away. For 16 years I had a lucrative tech career. I was good at it, and for 8 long years I was holding back my dreams of coaching entrepreneurs. It became suffocating. Leaving looked like the biggest risk of my life. It led to the most cherished, enjoyable, and meaningful phase of my life.

Two days against a year. After two days with his leadership team, one CEO told me: “What we did in those two days I’ve been trying to do for the last year.” A year of trying the reasonable way. Two days all in. Within 2 years, that company had tripled its revenue.

2.5 hours to 45 minutes. Another CEO saw his meetings shrink from 2.5 hours to 45 minutes. A lot of meetings are long because of what nobody is saying. He told me the work “made me a better human being, a better son and a better leader.”

Three years in one. A founder once said to me: “I would have given three years for what happened in one.” I’ve seen founders stuck for years break through once they stopped holding back one conversation.

I helped a client mend a 20-year rift with her estranged family. She was turned away the first time. She didn’t hold back & went again after a few days. They had the conversation they had avoided for 20+ years.

The paradox & power of going all-in

This is what has surprised me the most. Going all-in for an impossible life might be uncomfortable. But it is not harder than living a reasonable one. Often it is easier.

• A reasonable goal asks for more of the same. So you get more of the same effort, the same meetings, the same tiredness. An impossible goal forces you to stop and find a completely different way.
• A reasonable goal doesn’t inspire anyone. You end up pushing alone. An impossible goal gives people something worth their best effort, and they remember it for the rest of their life – irrespective of the result.
• A reasonable goal leaves room for everything. An impossible goal makes it obvious what to drop and say NO to.
• Fear charges you up front. Most of the pain of going all in lives in the waiting and the imagining. Once you’re moving, it’s one foot after the next. People tell me that an impossible goal was worth it even if they didn’t succeed.

Research backs this up. Psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying goals. Across hundreds of studies, they found that specific, hard goals lead to far better performance than easy goals or “just do your best” (goal-setting theory). A big goal pulls out effort that a reasonable one never asks for.

So the reasonable path isn’t the safe one. It just hides its cost. We pay it slowly, in energy, in years, and in the quiet sense that there was supposed to be more. We are all capable of far more than the lives we’re living. Not because something is missing in us, but because so much of us is still held in reserve. That isn’t a problem. That is good news.

An invitation

I’m not asking you to be all-in all the time. I’m inviting us to notice. Where am I holding back right now? What am I committed to instead? What would it be like to give it fully, just once, on purpose? To not hold back? It might be one sentence to someone we love. One honest conversation with our team. One “yes” to the dream we’ve been postponing to “someday.”

My mother once told me, when I shared one of my crazy dreams, “Going all in isn’t one giant leap. It’s one foot after the next, one moment at a time, choosing to give ourselves fully to what matters.” Imagine what becomes possible when we stop withholding our best and go all in.

I keep having the same conversation with CEOs and entrepreneurs. They are working through a real decision with me. A hire, a new market, a product they are about to kill. And every question they ask is about what the right way would be. What the playbook says. What the best operators do.

So I stop them and ask: Forget about the “right way”. What do you want to do?

And there is a pause. Every time. It is not because they can’t answer that question. These are capable people who have built real things. The pause is there because they have not asked themselves what they want to do for a long time now. It used to be: what do I want to build here? Now it is: what is the correct way to build it?

Nothing Wrong With Efficiency Or Optimising

There is nothing wrong with “getting it right”. For most people reading this, it is the reason you have the life you are living today. It got you out of difficult situations. It built the company.

I grew up this way too. My only job was getting my family out of poverty, and every rupee had somewhere to go before it arrived. I optimised my life to get better, ahead, and super productive. That habit worked. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. And I did not stop at the money. I became a productivity and efficiency freak. I optimised every minute of my day. I got a real kick out of it – every single time I made something faster or more efficient than it was before.

It saved me. And then it nearly ate me.

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” — Mahatma Gandhi

What it costs, and why you can’t see it

Here is what happens when a useful habit becomes the only way you know how to live.

You bend yourself to fit the correct or the right version. You might have learned that from a mentor, a book, an old boss, or your industry. You also worked out your own ways of optimising life. You run your life now on autopilot on these “rules”.

The thing that makes you different gets cut. We all have odd habits and ways of working that make sense to nobody but us. On any productivity list, they are the least efficient items. They were also the only things nobody could copy. Keep removing them, and what is left of who you are? What happens to your unique expression?

You forget how to want things. You stop wanting for its own sake, and start wanting the correct things or to get it right or to get somewhere.

Somebody else becomes the judge. You give your own authority to something or somebody outside of you. A framework, a peer, a set of rules, a spreadsheet.

And you get very good at living a life that is super optimised but not yours anymore. Stephen Covey said it long before I did. Getting better and better will get you up the ladder faster than anybody around you. It will never once tell you if the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

Michael Neill says, “There is a way of living that fits you so perfectly it feels as though it was made for you.” His work is about turning up the volume on your own voice and telling it apart from the noise. That noise is not only other people. A lot of it is your own old life lessons, learnings and assumptions, still playing loudly, long after the situation that needed them has gone.

Somebody just made all of this up

Everything you are bending yourself to fit – the industry standard, the right way to run a company, the correct career path, the normal working week, how long a decision should take, any best practice – somebody made that up. It is not physics. Someone decided it once, usually for reasons that stopped making sense years ago. Everyone since has been copying. The people we call innovators are usually not smarter than you. They just noticed the rules were written by people who came before them.

The biologist Humberto Maturana put it in five words: “Everything said is said by someone.” Every rule you have came out of some person’s mouth in some particular year. Steve Jobs said it, back in 1994:

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

Every “that’s just how this industry works” you have ever accepted was somebody’s opinion. Payment terms. Margins. How you hire? What a proposal looks like? How many people you need in marketing, sales, engineering, and so on?

So is it good or bad to optimise?

Neither. It depends on whether you are in charge or the optimisation is in charge.

• As a tool: you choose to use whatever optimisation strategy you have. You know what an hour of your time is worth, so you decide better and faster. If you are in charge, you can also choose not to use your best frameworks and best practices at will.
• As a master: your strategies use you. You do the correct thing because it is correct, and you cannot imagine doing anything else. In other words, you do not have a choice. You feel compelled to do everything the “right” way instead of “your” way.

Reflect on this question:

When the efficient way and your true way disagree – which one wins, and what is the cost of that?

What is actually on the other side

People assume doing it your way means a worse result. Usually the opposite happens. When you do it your own way:

• Nobody can copy you. Best practice is what everybody else is already doing. Nobody can copy your own unique way.
• Decisions get faster. Not because you found a better process. Because you simply intuitively know – without reason or justification.
• No stress or exhaustion. Performing takes energy all day. Being yourself costs nothing.
• You find “your people”. State your terms and the right people come closer, not fewer. I state my conditions in the first conversation now. If that costs me a client on that call, it is always the wrong client.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
— Howard Thurman

And sometimes you lead the way for others

Doing it your way is not only a private decision. Often it becomes the new normal for everybody else. Every unique path looks silly right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy opened an eleven-bed eye hospital in Madurai in 1976, after he had already retired. Everyone told him the model made no sense: paying patients would fund free surgery for everyone who could not pay, same doctors, same quality, both wards. Aravind is now studied in business schools around the world.

Yvon Chouinard built Patagonia around the idea that his staff should go surfing when the waves were good. He wrote a book about it called Let My People Go Surfing. Every serious businessman of the day called it slack. It became one of the most admired companies on the planet, and in 2022 he gave it away so the planet itself became the only shareholder.

Ricardo Semler let people at his Brazilian company set their own hours, then their own salaries. No titles, almost no rules. Everyone said it would fall apart. It didn’t.

None of them found a clever new theory. They refused to do one normal thing, and then did it their own unique way – just because they wanted to.

A life that feels good to live

If you think that your way might work out better, that is its own trap. It sounds like a promise: be yourself, and you will win. I am not saying that. What I am saying is that there is a difference between a well-optimised life that looks good on paper and a life that feels good to live.

Photography is the least productive thing I do. It makes me no money. It moves nothing forward. It is a dying craft and skill in the age of smartphone cameras. On any list of how I should spend a Saturday, it does not appear. Being an engineer, I should never have picked it up.

Yet, it also saved my life. When I lost my mother, I had nothing that helped and nothing to say. I had a camera. Walking around with it was the only thing that gave me any peace for a long time. The most useless thing I did turned out to be the thing that I love most today – for no reason and in a way that I can not explain.

Vivian Maier was a nanny in Chicago for forty years. In her free time, she took over a hundred thousand photographs and showed them to almost nobody. After she died, someone found the negatives in a storage locker. She is now called one of the great street photographers of the century. She never knew any of that. And it was a good life while she was living it, whether anybody found that box or not.

You do not have to be famous to live life your way

Chouinard and Semler have big companies attached to their names. Most of us do not. So below are examples of people who were nobody in particular, and who only got noticed because of the odd thing they refused to stop doing.

• Nek Chand was a roads inspector in Chandigarh. For eighteen years, in his spare time, he secretly built a garden of sculptures out of waste and broken pottery on protected land where nothing was allowed to be built. The city wanted to demolish it. Instead, it became the famous Rock Garden that I visited in my childhood, and have not been able to forget since.
• Lucky Wong ran a diner in San Diego alone for nearly fifty years. Cook, waiter and busboy. He took orders in his head instead of writing them down. He refused to hire anybody, and refused to let a single item on the menu cross ten dollars. When he died, the city renamed a street after him.

None of them had a strategy. Each lived life their way for decades while other people questioned it. As simple as that.

Think about the people you remember from your own life. Not the most successful ones. The most alive ones. Almost none were the most optimised person in the room. They were unmistakably themselves, and you could feel it within ten seconds. That is what stayed with you – who they were – with their quirks. Not their results or achievements.

Nobody has ever said, at the end, that they wish they had run a more optimised life. People say they wish they had been more themselves, earlier.

The Practice

Here is how to practice living life your way in five steps.

1. Catch one “should” a day. Notice when you are about to do something only because it is the right way. Just notice it. Do not change anything yet.
2. Ask: What do I want? Before your next decision, ask what do I want here before you ask what is the best approach. Both questions. In that order.
3. Keep one inefficient thing. Find something you do that makes no sense on paper, and you love it. That is usually where your edge lives.
4. Find one rule that is just somebody’s opinion. Something your industry treats as fixed. Work out who decided it and whether you still agree. Then change one this week.
5. Do one thing your way where you would normally do it the accepted way. Keep it small. Then watch what actually happens.

That CEO could not answer “what do you want” because he had spent fifteen years getting extremely good at “what is the correct way”. You do not have to stop getting better at things. You just have to stop letting that decide who you are. The world you are trying to fit into was made up by people no smarter than you. There is a way of life that will feel like you were born to live that way. You will not find it by doing everything properly.

Sources

• Neill, M. Your Life, Your Way. https://www.michaelneill.org/yourlifeyourway/
• Covey, S. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People
• Maturana, H. & Varela, F. “Everything said is said by someone.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana
• Jobs, S. (1994). Santa Clara Valley Historical Association interview. https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/steve-jobs-on-the-1-remarkably-simple-secret-of-life.html
• Venkataswamy, G. Aravind Eye Hospitals, Madurai. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aravind_Eye_Hospitals
• Chouinard, Y. Let My People Go Surfing. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22155.Let_My_People_Go_Surfing
• Semler, R. Maverick, Semco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
• Chand, N. The Rock Garden of Chandigarh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nek_Chand
• Wong, L. Lucky’s Breakfast, San Diego. https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/the-finest/the-story-of-lucky-wong-and-his-legendary-one-man-diner-in-san-diego
• Maier, V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier

I caught myself doing it again this week.

Someone asked me about what 10GenPartners does. About the leaders I work with. The companies that have doubled, the teams that have grown five to ten times. And I heard something come out of my own mouth that I have spent years training out of myself. I made it smaller. “Oh, it’s nothing really. It’s just coaching people.”

Just coaching. As if any of this were small.

I know exactly where that voice comes from. For sixteen years I lived inside it. I was the introverted engineer who made himself smaller so the room would accept him. Before that, I rarely raised my hand in school and college as I could not stand the whole room looking at me.

I learned to downplay what I wanted, what I was capable of, what I was building. Smallness was my armour. It kept me safe, and it kept me stuck.

Here is the thing I want to tell you plainly. Making yourself smaller does not make you safer. It leaves you frustrated. And worse, it slowly convinces your own mind that your dreams are a fantasy. There are two ways almost all of us do this. With our words. And with our actions. Let me show you both, and then let me show you the way out. Because I found it, and I know it works.

The Language That Keep You Small

The first way you shrink is with your words. And you do it without noticing.

Say you lead a team of any kind. Someone needs to redo something. And you soften it. You apologise for your own standards. “I’m sorry, folks, but I’m going to have to ask you to redo this.” That one sentence plays your standards down in front of the exact people who look to you to set them.

I’ve done this. I know the pull. You think you’re being polite. You’re not. You’re training your team to expect less from you.

There is a cleaner way to say the same thing. “We really want to uphold our high standards. Let’s adjust this part.” One version shrinks you. The other doesn’t. Neither one is rude. The language of minimisation does not serve anyone – the speaker or the listener.

And at home, socially, it gets worse. Around your achievements most of all. You do something real, someone notices it, and you rush to diminish it. “It’s no big deal.” “It’s all my team’s work” “It’s not really that special.” “I got lucky.”

Stop. Either be honest about what you did, or be quiet. But never play down your dreams, what you do, what you want, or what you see as possible. Not out loud, and not to yourself.

The Words You Say To Yourself

Here is the second place it happens. The one nobody else hears.

The voice that says “it’s no big deal” to yourself. “Anyone could have done that.” “A lot of it was luck.” “Who am I to want that?”

That last one will kill your dreams before you even start. Who am I to want that?

I built a whole career on that question. I earned the approvals. I hit the deadlines. I did what was expected. And underneath all of it, a quiet voice kept telling me I was lucky to be there, that people would figure me out, that I should be grateful for what I had (a good career) and not reach for more.

Here is what I’ve learned about that voice. It is not telling you the truth. It is protecting you. Minimisation is protection. It protects you from being vulnerable, from people making fun of you. It protects you from disappointment, in case you try and miss. It protects you from rejection, from the pushback that always comes when you stand for something big.

All of that protection comes at one price. It convinces your own mind that you are small.

Even The Successful Do This

Now, you might be sitting there thinking this isn’t you. I have a good job. I’ve built a real business. I am not playing small.

Let me tell you what I have seen more times than I can count. I work with highly successful CEOs or athletes every week. And I have yet to meet one, not one, who doesn’t know deep in their gut that they are more powerful than the level they are playing.

I’ve heard the same quiet sentence underneath the success of every extreme performer – be it from sport or business. I could be doing more. I’m not.

Making Yourself Small Is Protection

So why does the voice survive every piece of evidence that you are bigger than it says? Because it is not trying to be accurate. It is trying to keep you safe – the main job of the human brain.

It does not matter how old you are or how much you have built. That protective habit was made early, and it does not go away on its own. Mine was shaped in a kid who always felt out of place, who watched his parents sacrifice everything so he could have a chance, and who learned that being too visible was dangerous.

The problem is that protection stops being useful the moment you’re an adult with one life to live. Get this – you will get hit whether you play small or not. Disappointment, rejection, criticism. They come for everyone. So if you are going to take hits anyway, why on earth would you make yourself small to dodge hits that are coming for you regardless? Take the hits going for what you actually want.

Why Smallness Reinforces Itself

It’s not just a habit. Your mind is built to find evidence for the story you keep telling yourself.

There is a name for this. In 1957, a psychologist named Leon Festinger studied what happens when you hold two beliefs that don’t match, like I am capable of extraordinary things and I keep telling everyone it’s no big deal. He called it cognitive dissonance. And he found that you don’t just sit with that tension forever. Your mind will resolve it. And it resolves it by pulling you down to match your actions. Say you are small long enough, and your mind decides you must be small. You settle. Then you build excuses for the settling.

There is a quieter layer under it too. A researcher named William Swann spent decades showing that we all pull the world, and our own identity, toward the version of ourselves we believe in, even when that version is smaller than reality. Believe you’re the kind of person who plays small, and you will act and feel small, and the belief gets stronger. Every time you minimise, you cast a vote for the small version of you. And that version wins.

So I Started Believing Myself

I know the way out because I took it. And it started with the scariest sentence I have ever believed: that my mind and my gut were telling me the truth about what I could do.

In 2011, this introverted engineer who had never organised anything in his life decided to organise an anti-corruption march. There was no sensible reason. I had never done anything like it. I told my mother, half hoping she would hand me a way out. She said, “Yes, it is crazy. But I know you. You will find a way. Put one foot after the other.”

She believed me when I did not believe myself. And I found out that believing was everything. Not the readiness. Believing came first, and the path showed up after. Four hundred people walked eleven kilometres with me.

A few years later, I walked away from a sixteen-year career that looked like winning, because I had finally understood something that changed everything. If your mind is telling you that you can be more, that you are bigger than this, stop kicking that off to the side. Believe it. That is step one. Just believe yourself. The whole world will line up to tell you what you can’t do. Ignore it.

What Bigness Actually Requires

Believing yourself is step one. If you are going actually to live your size, you have to:

Kill the small inputs. Look at what you let into your mind. The social media feeds that tell you to be happy with what you have, that wanting more is greedy. Mute them. All of them. They are not neutral. They are votes for the small version of you. Replace them with optimistic people, people doing great things, people like you who are chasing and building. You cannot fill a room with small thinking and expect to be big inside it.

Get your team together. Start with your spouse. Then the people you call your friends, neighbours, or social circle. You don’t want someone at home pulling you down. Talk to them. Get them on your team.

Take Action consistent with your belief. If you truly believed what your gut tells you you’re capable of, what would be your next move? What would you do if you could not fail? if money didn’t matter? if you didn’t give a damn about what others think of you? Then go do it.

The Practice

Stop letting smallness in. Here is exactly what to do.

1. Catch your minimisations. For the next seven days, notice every time you shrink yourself with your words, out loud or in your head. “It’s no big deal.” “Anyone could have done it.” Write it down when you catch it. Noticing is where it starts.

2. Kill one small input. Find one feed, one page, one person you follow who keeps reinforcing smallness, and mute them today.

3. Say the hard truth once. Pick one real achievement. The next time someone brings it up, don’t bury it. Don’t brag either. Just be honest. “Yes, I did that, and I’m proud of it.” One honest sentence.

4. Have the buy-in conversation. If you have a partner, sit down this week and talk about what you’re capable of and what it might take. Get their honest thoughts. Get them on the team.

5. Name your next move. Write down the answer to “if I truly believed my gut, what would I do next?” One move. Real. Specific. Not someday. This week.

Choose The Right Story

The powerful you cannot live in the same body as the small you – in how you speak and behave. They cannot coexist. One of them will win. In fact, one of them must die.

The only question is which one. Make sure it is the right thing you are killing.

I spent sixteen years killing my bigness to keep the smallness comfortable. It almost cost me everything that matters. Then one day I killed the smallness instead, and I found out the bigness was never a fantasy. It was the truest thing about me. It is the truest thing about you too.

Don’t fall prey to this anymore.

You are a lot more powerful than you think you are. No more small thinking. You know what you can do. Permit yourself to be bigger.

Sources

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. The foundational study on how the mind resolves mismatched beliefs by pulling itself into alignment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
• Swann, W. B. (1983). Self-verification theory: how people seek and keep the identity they believe in, even a smaller one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verification_theory
• Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women.” The pattern of successful people quietly believing they don’t deserve their success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

In 2000, Blockbuster’s leadership team had a meeting that would go down in business history as one of the most expensive examples of righteousness ever. Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph flew to Dallas to pitch a partnership to Blockbuster CEO John Antioco. Netflix was struggling – they were losing money, had only 300,000 subscribers, and were desperate. They offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million and run Blockbuster’s online division.

The Blockbuster executives literally laughed them out of the room. Why? Because they were “right.” They had 9,000 stores, 60 million customers, and $6 billion in revenue. They were the undisputed kings of home entertainment. These Netflix guys with their silly mail-order DVD service? Please. Blockbuster’s leadership was so committed to being right about their existing model that they couldn’t see the future coming. They were so attached to their righteousness – “We’re the biggest, we’re the best, we know this industry” – that they missed the greatest opportunity in entertainment history. By 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Netflix, the company they could have bought for $50 million, was worth $13 billion.

The Blockbuster executives were technically “right” in 2000 – they were bigger, more profitable, and had more customers. But their need to be right, their attachment to their existing success, their inability to be wrong about their core assumptions, killed them.

Being right is killing your momentum and sucking joy out of your life

This is true for all of us in varying magnitudes: you’re so terrified of being wrong that you’ve turned your entire leadership style into one giant hedge bet. And it’s slowly destroying or slowing down everything you’re trying to build. I see it everywhere. In boardrooms where leaders speak in corporate-speak instead of taking clear positions. In strategy meetings where everyone’s “testing the waters” instead of making bold calls. In conversations where executives say things like “we’ll see how it goes” or “let’s wait and see what the data shows” when what their company actually needs is someone to plant their flag and say “this is what we’re doing.”

This is a human epidemic. We live in a world where people are literally willing to get fired, resign from prestigious positions, lose promotions they’ve worked decades for, go to war, and even commit acts of violence – all to protect their righteousness and avoid looking wrong. It goes deeper than business. Look at the political landscape – politicians destroying their careers rather than admitting they were wrong about a policy. Look at international relations – nations sending their young people to die rather than backing down from a position. Look at corporate scandals where executives double down on obviously failing strategies because admitting error feels like death.

Think about that for a moment. Our beings are so fragile, our egos so brittle, that we’ll sacrifice our happiness, our relationships, our success, even our lives, just to avoid the temporary discomfort of being incorrect about something. It’s not being strategic. It’s cowardice dressed up in business casual, and it’s the same cowardice that’s tearing apart families, organisations, and entire countries.

The Global Pandemic of Fake Righteousness

Here’s what’s absolutely insane: we’d rather be right than happy. We’d rather be right than successful. We’d rather be right than loved. Left to our own devices, most of us would choose the bitter satisfaction of righteousness over the joy of actually getting what we want in life. And the most tragic part? Half the time, we’re not even right. We’re just committed to a position we took years ago that we can’t let go of because our entire identity has become wrapped up in it.

I’ve watched CEOs tank their companies rather than admit their strategic vision was flawed. I’ve seen leaders in every industry – from tech to healthcare to government – choose career suicide over the simple phrase “I was wrong, let’s try something different.” We’ve created a world where being wrong is treated like a moral failing instead of what it actually is: information. Valuable, necessary information that helps us course-correct and improve.

You are addicted to appearing certain

Most people think certainty means you have to be right all the time. So they hedge. They qualify. They create escape routes in every sentence they speak (so that they can never be proven wrong). “Well, if the market conditions remain favourable…” “Assuming our projections are accurate…” “We’re cautiously optimistic that…” This hedging isn’t just killing your business momentum – it’s killing your soul. Every time you refuse to take a stand, every time you speak in maybes and possibles, you’re slowly dying inside. Because deep down, you know you’re capable of so much more than this watered-down, committee-approved version of leadership.

Certainty isn’t about being right. It’s about taking a position and moving powerfully from that place. Certainty is about taking action and making shit happen – and being willing to be proven wrong – because life is (drumrolls for dramatic effect) uncertain. You’re so busy protecting yourself from the possibility of being wrong that you never fully commit to anything. And uncommitted leadership? That’s not leadership at all.

When I speak, being certain or not is in my control. What is not in my control is whether I will be right or wrong about what I am certain about. That is the domain of God and above my pay grade, so I do not concern myself with being right or wrong. When I commit to something, I am certain it will happen and everything I say or do comes from that place of certainty.

Having said that, I will see if I am right or wrong about that. And after spending a lifetime wanting to be right and never wrong, today I have stopped hedging my certainty for being right or to avoid being wrong. I am willing to be wrong. I am not willing to live life while being uncertain because I have seen the other side and decided it’s not worth playing life that way.

Once you see life in both these dimensions – certain/uncertain and right/wrong – you will also see where wanting to be right is taking away your ability to be certain in your speaking and actions today. And that is making you play safe, small, not giving your best, not enjoying life, and paradoxically, even limiting or delaying the results you actually want and desire.

Your Need to Be Right Is Costing You Everything

Let’s get brutally honest about what this addiction to being right is actually costing you – because it’s not just professional, it’s existential:

• Your team’s respect. They can smell your uncertainty from a mile away. When you hedge every decision, speak in maybes, and constantly cover your bases, your people lose confidence in your ability to lead them anywhere worth going. They’d rather follow someone who’s wrong occasionally but decisive than someone who’s never wrong because they never actually say anything.
• Your company’s momentum. Momentum requires decisive action. When you’re always waiting for more data, more proof, more certainty that you’ll be right, opportunities slip by. Your competitors – the ones willing to be wrong sometimes – are eating your lunch while you’re still in analysis paralysis.
• Your own joy and aliveness. Think about the last time you felt truly alive as a leader. I bet it wasn’t during a meeting where you carefully managed everyone’s expectations. It was probably when you took a bold stand, made a big bet, or fought for something you believed in. That’s what certainty feels like – and you’ve been starving yourself of it.
• Your capacity to inspire. People don’t follow hedged bets. They follow vision, conviction, and leaders who are willing to put their reputation on the line for something bigger than themselves. When you’re more committed to being right than being powerful, you become utterly uninspiring.
• Your relationships. This doesn’t stop at work. How many marriages have been destroyed by the need to be right? How many friendships have ended because someone couldn’t just say “you know what, I was wrong about that”? Our addiction to righteousness is literally destroying our capacity for love and connection.

The Cost of Our Fragile Beings

This isn’t strength. This is the ultimate fragility – beings so terrified of being seen as fallible that they’ll sacrifice everything real and meaningful to maintain the illusion of infallibility.

John McEnroe was a tennis genius, a player of sublime touch and creativity. But he was equally famous for being pathologically addicted to being right. For McEnroe, every line call he disagreed with wasn’t a judgment call—it was an obvious error by an incompetent official. This conviction fueled his legendary on-court tantrums. His cry of “You cannot be serious!” to an umpire at Wimbledon in 1981 became his global catchphrase.

Throughout his career, he refused to accept an official’s verdict if it contradicted his own. He was so certain of his own perception that he couldn’t mentally proceed until he had raged against the injustice of being proven “wrong.” He berated umpires, smashed rackets, and argued endlessly, believing he was the sole arbiter of truth on the court. The Damage: McEnroe’s addiction to being right cost him dearly. His tirades led to countless point penalties, game penalties, and fines that lost him momentum and matches at crucial moments. Most famously, it led to him being defaulted from the 1990 Australian Open, a Grand Slam he had a real chance of winning.

The Hedge Fund Life (And Why It’s Killing You)

You know what a hedge fund is? It’s a financial instrument that pays off when everyone else is wrong. It’s literally designed to profit from other people’s failures.

And that’s exactly how most leaders are living their lives – like one big hedge fund. Always positioning themselves to be able to say “I told you so” if things go south, always creating plausible deniability, always having an out. If you only said: “I will try”; then you can always come back and say: “I said I would try. I did. What else can I do?” This keeps you free from being wrong and also deprives you of your full potential.

But here’s the thing about hedge fund thinking: it might protect you from being spectacularly wrong, but it also prevents you from being spectacularly right. It keeps you playing small, playing safe, playing not to lose instead of playing to win. People need a leader who’s willing to be wrong in service of something greater. They need someone who values progress over perfection, results over righteousness.

The Courage to Be Wrong in Service of Being Powerful

I’m not suggesting you become reckless or stop using your brain. I’m suggesting something far more radical: that you become willing to be wrong in service of being powerful. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive leadership principle of all time, but it’s also the most liberating. When you’re willing to be wrong, you can:

• Make decisions faster while others are still gathering data
• Communicate with clarity and conviction instead of corporate speak
• Inspire others to follow your vision instead of your hedge bets
• Take the risks that create breakthrough results
• Learn and adapt quickly when things don’t go as planned
• Actually enjoy the process of building something instead of constantly protecting yourself

The best leaders I know aren’t right more often than everyone else. They’re just more willing to be wrong, which paradoxically makes them more powerful and, ultimately, more successful. They’ve learned that being wrong occasionally is the price of admission to playing a big game. And they’ve decided that price is worth paying.

What Your Team Actually Needs From You

Your team doesn’t need you to be right all the time. They need you to be certain about the direction you’re going, even when you don’t know exactly how you’ll get there.

They need you to say things like:

• “This is what we’re doing.”
• “I’m confident we’ll figure it out.”
• “We’re going to make this work.”
• “I believe in this vision completely.”

Not because you have a crystal ball, but because someone has to plant the flag. Someone has to say “we’re going this way” so everyone else can stop looking around wondering what the plan is. Your people are drowning in uncertainty. They don’t need more analysis or more hedging. They need someone willing to take a stand, point in a direction, and say “follow me” – even if there’s a chance that direction might need to change later.

The Daily Practice of Certainty

So how do you break this addiction to being right and start living from certainty? Start small, but start today:

• In your next meeting, instead of saying “I think maybe we should consider…” try “Here’s what we’re going to do…”
• When someone asks for your opinion, give it without hedging. Not “Well, there are pros and cons to both approaches…” but “My recommendation is X because…”
• In your personal life, practice certainty in low-stakes situations. “It’s going to be a great day.” “We’ll get a good table at the restaurant.” “This project is going to work out perfectly.”
• With your team, communicate vision and direction as certainties, not possibilities. Instead of “If everything goes according to plan, we might be able to…” try “When we achieve this goal…”
• When you’re wrong, practice saying “I was wrong about that” without immediately explaining why you were wrong or how it wasn’t really your fault. Just own it, learn from it, and move on.

The Liberation of Letting Go

Here’s what happens when you stop needing to be right all the time: you become free. Free to take bigger swings. Free to communicate with power and conviction. Free to inspire others. Free to fail spectacularly and learn rapidly. Free to change your mind when new information comes in. Free to be human.

You know what the most successful entrepreneurs and CEOs have in common? They’ve all been wrong. A lot. Publicly. Expensively. And they kept going anyway. Jeff Bezos was wrong about the Fire Phone. Steve Jobs was wrong about the Lisa computer. Elon Musk has been wrong about Tesla production timelines approximately 47,000 times. But they’re all still willing to make bold predictions and take big stands.

Because they understand that being wrong occasionally is the price of admission to playing a big game. And playing it safe? That’s not safety – that’s just a slow death.

Your Challenge

Here’s your challenge for the next 30 days: Practice showing up with certainty in at least one interaction every day. And when you’re wrong – because you will be sometimes – practice taking that with grace and moving on. Don’t let the fear of those moments keep you from the power and joy that comes from living with certainty. Your team needs someone with conviction, not someone who’s always covering their bases. And you deserve to experience the aliveness that comes from playing full out, even when you can’t guarantee the outcome. Stop saving your certainty for when you know you’ll be right. By then, it’s too late. The opportunity, the moment, the chance to lead – it’s now.

The world is waiting for what you have to offer. It requires you to offer it with certainty, not hesitation. It requires leaders who are more committed to creating results than protecting their image. It needs people who would rather be happy than right, successful than righteous, powerful than perfect. Your being is not as fragile as you think. You can survive being wrong.