Learning

Hope the weekend was kind to you. Mine involved a tennis match I refused to lose even after it was obvious I already had. More on that in a minute. This newsletter isn't a productivity guide, and it's definitely not going to tell you to "never give up." If anything, it's the opposite. Today I want to talk about a difference we've all blurred at some point, at work, with people we love, and in our own heads at 11 PM when we really should've stopped two hours ago. Exhibit A, B,

Welcome to The Growth Lens. If you're reading this, you're one of the first people here, and I mean it when I say I'm glad you are. This is a fresh take, in a new style. Here's what I want this to be. Not another list of leadership frameworks you've already screenshotted and forgotten about​. I want to give you perspective, the kind you only get from watching the same human patterns play out again and again: in startups, ​with friends, in families, in group chats, in your own

Your customers are lying to you. They don't even know they're doing it. They ask for a feature. What they mean is "make my pain go away." They ask for a discount. What they mean is "I don't feel like this is worth it." They ask for a policy change. What they mean is "something in this experience broke my trust." Most companies fulfill the request. The best companies decode the intent underneath it. The average businesses and great ones split by their ability to decode custome

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza. In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment. Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got. Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave. Dom

The worst customer experience in Bengaluru built a 1,000-outlet empire. A man removed chairs from his restaurant in 1983. Bengaluru called him crazy. Municipal corporations eventually created a license category named after him. R. Prabhakar was a businessman from Basavanagudi who'd just returned from abroad. He'd watched McDonald's and fast-food chains operate at a scale that felt almost unfair - fast, cheap, packed, profitable. But he didn't want to sell burgers. He wondered

13 MILLION SELLERS in 2021. ₹0 STARTING CAPITAL. How Two IIT Graduates Built a Business Model So Hard to Copy, Shopsy by Flipkart Failed Trying. In 2015, Amazon and Flipkart were at war for urban India. But these two IIT graduates, Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal went the other direction. They went to the housewife in Nagpur reselling sarees on WhatsApp. The boutique owner in Surat with no supply chain access. The first-generation entrepreneur in Patna who wanted to start a

The customer who never complains is the one you are about to lose. Anger is manageable. It shows up, makes noise, gets escalated, gets resolved. Someone closes the ticket and calls it a win. The expensive emotions don't make noise. Confusion. Embarrassment. That anxiety of not knowing if you're doing it right. The slow loss of control mid-transaction that makes someone close the tab and never come back. These don't generate complaints. They generate silence and silence, in a

Dependency looks like value in the short term. Over time, it is just a very polite career ceiling.

Martin Brundle has a phrase he deploys with surgical precision during Formula 1 broadcasts: "a day late and a dollar short." He uses it when a driver attempts a defensive move too late, or commits to an overtake half-heartedly. The gap has closed. The opportunity has passed. And worse, the hesitation has telegraphed weakness to every other driver on the grid. Business is no different. The difference is that instead of losing a position on lap 34, we lose teams, opportunities,

A year ago, I wrote my first post on my website. I had no sense of where it would lead. I was simply trying to get thoughts out of my head and onto the page. It was not natural, I had to force it out. Why? I still don't understand why at that moment I thought this was something worth doing. Surprising still, I dont know how I stuck with it. What forcing myself to write and publish has since taught me is that many of my ideas stand tall when they live in my mind, but the momen

Free advice gets consumed casually. Nodded at. Rarely acted on. When you give advice away freely, you teach people an unhelpful lesson.That your thinking required no effort. When someone pays (quantum being irrelevant) for your opinion, your words are taken far more seriously. They listen. They question. And act on it. Putting a premium on your opinion, contrary to popular belief, isn’t arrogance. It signals: This perspective was earned. This insight was shaped by mistakes. T