In May 2020, at my desk in Mysore, I wrote down five reasons I hadn't quit Infosys yet.
- Fear of uncertainty
- No guidance
- Fear of failure, the kind you don't say out loud
- No friend circle doing anything different than what I was doing
- Not knowing what to do instead
Then, underneath the list, I did the math, because that's what I do when I'm scared.
Ten years to save one crore off a good salary. By the time I got there, inflation would have quietly eaten a chunk of what it was worth. So I wrote down a different number: by 2027, by age 35, get to something like a crore that's actually still worth a crore. Stop saving from a salary. Start building something that compounds on its own.
I've started to notice that naming a fear correctly doesn't make it move.
It just makes you very precise about why you're staying.
I'd written down exactly what was wrong with my life and exactly why, and then I got up the next morning and went back to the same desk. Pata sab kuch tha, phir bhi kuch nahi badla. The list stayed true for a long while after I wrote it.
What actually changed it wasn't a sharper insight. It was doing the small unscary version of the scary thing, often enough that the scary version got smaller.
- "No guidance" stopped being true the day I started actually messaging people whose work I respected, instead of just admiring it from a distance.
- "No community" stopped being true somewhere in a 10k Designers cohort call, surrounded by people doing the exact thing my list said nobody around me was doing.
A lot of us are sitting on a version of this list right now, dated, specific, and completely accurate. The hard part was never getting it right. The hard part is that you can be exactly right about why you're stuck and still be stuck, because being right was never the thing that was going to move you.
If you've got a list like that somewhere, in a notes app, in a journal you haven't opened in months, open it tonight. Don't edit it. Don't check how true it still is. Just pick the smallest line on it and do the twenty-minute version of the opposite of it, before you go to bed.