Reflection

Last month I caught myself mid-sentence, explaining to my team why I was explaining something to my team. Second-order over-explaining. I stopped, genuinely confused about where that habit even came from. A face and a name came attached. Turns out most leadership advice works like that. Someone hands you a rule to live by, and if you dig a few layers down, it's usually scar tissue from the past. Three Weeks During one of my first internships, I was tasked with predicting whi

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

We've been solving the wrong problem in customer experience for decades. Customers said they hated waiting. So we took their word for it. We threw technology at the wait time. Self-help. Automated responses. Chatbots. Then AI arrived and gave us exactly what we thought customers wanted instant everything, and customers still asked for a human. Were customers being dishonest? Well, not really. What customers actually hated waiting for was not resolution, but reassurance. The a

Every hiring manager has said it. "Skills can be trained. Hire for attitude." I've hired for attitude. It works - until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not a small problem. Here's something experience taught me that no hiring framework will: Attitude gets you in the door. But attitude without the foundational skill to back it - creates a very specific kind of mess. The person works hard. Wants it badly. But can't execute. And because they care so much, feedback becomes

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

When I was 19, I met someone I knew only for a few months. We weren’t especially close. But we spoke about the most obscure things: About what it would be like if everyone had 3 hands, what if everyone in the world spoke the same language. You get the idea. In these conversations, I realised that they saw the world differently from me. Not dramatically different, but enough to wonder. There were two huge realisations in retrospect It was unsettling because I couldn’t agree wi