If I had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, I know exactly who I would choose. I would choose the woman in my own book, The Dog Walker, which is probably a slightly unconventional answer because most people would reach for someone whose life comes with a castle, a superpower, a famous surname, or at the very least a handsome man waiting for them in a drawing room. I, on the other hand, would like to climb into the life of a woman I created myself. I have spent enough time writing her, putting words in her mouth, making her fall for things she probably shouldn’t, and watching her navigate the complicated business of being attracted to a man to whom she cannot simply hand over a user manual. After all that, I think I have earned the right to find out what it actually feels like to be her.
There is something strange about creating a fictional woman. In the beginning, you think you are in complete control. You decide what she looks like, where she lives, what she wants, what she fears and, most importantly, what she is going to do next. Then, somewhere along the way, she becomes inconveniently human. She starts making choices that you didn’t plan for. You put a perfectly sensible option in front of her and she walks straight toward the complicated one. You give her a man she should probably avoid and, somehow, she finds a reason to stay interested. You tell yourself that you are writing the story, but there are moments when it feels as though you are merely taking dictation.
That is the part of writing women that fascinates me. I can invent a situation, but I cannot always predict how a woman will experience it once she is inside it. If I were her for a week, I would want to know what she notices that I missed while writing her. I would want to know what happens inside her head when she first sees the beautiful man at the center of her story. Is she immediately attracted to him, or does she resist it? Does she notice his face first, or his manner, or something so small that even he might not realize he is doing it? When he looks at her, does she believe what she sees, or does she immediately begin questioning it? These are the things I find far more interesting than simply deciding that two people are attracted to each other.
I have always been fascinated by the little theatre that happens between men and women when attraction enters the room. We rarely meet another person without bringing our own history along with us. We arrive with old relationships, old disappointments, fantasies, insecurities and expectations that the other person knows nothing about. A woman can meet a man for ten minutes and unconsciously begin filling in the blanks. She can decide that he is confident, complicated, kind, unavailable, dangerous or secretly wonderful without having enough evidence for any of it. Men do exactly the same thing. We are all remarkably talented at writing biographies for strangers.
That is part of what I wanted to explore through Beautiful Men. The men may be beautiful, but beauty is only the surface of the story. What interests me is what happens after the first impression has done its damage. What happens when attraction collides with reality, when two people bring their expectations into the same relationship and discover that the person standing in front of them is not necessarily the person they imagined? Sometimes we fall for a person, and sometimes we fall for the possibility of who that person might become. There are also times when we fall for the version of ourselves that seems to emerge when we are with them, which can be even more difficult to walk away from.
If I could actually become the woman in The Dog Walker for seven days, I suspect I would spend very little of that time simply enjoying her life. I would be far too curious about her decisions. I would want to see the beautiful man through her eyes rather than through mine as the person who created him. I would want to understand what made her trust him, what made her doubt him, what she told her friends and what she kept to herself. I would want to know whether the things that seemed obvious to me as the writer were obvious to her at all. Most of all, I would want to discover what she understood about herself that I had not yet understood while writing her.
Perhaps that is why I find fictional characters so compelling. We spend so much time trying to understand other people in real life, but we rarely get the privilege of knowing what is happening behind their eyes. Fiction gives us a strange kind of intimacy. We can hear the thoughts that a character would never say aloud, understand the fear behind an apparently confident decision, and see the contradiction between what someone wants and what they are actually capable of choosing. We get to witness the private negotiations that make people human.
There is also something slightly embarrassing about realizing that when you write a woman, you inevitably leave pieces of yourself behind. You may give her a different childhood, a different job, a different relationship and a completely different wardrobe, but somewhere in her there is usually a little bit of you. It might be a fear you recognize but would rather not discuss, a romantic fantasy you have never admitted to having, an irrational stubbornness, or the particular kind of curiosity that makes you ask questions you probably shouldn’t. Sometimes you don’t even notice what you have put into a character until she says something on the page and you sit back thinking, “Oh, apparently I believe that.”
That may be the real reason I would choose her if I had the chance to switch lives for a week. I have spent so much time looking at her from the outside that I would like to experience her world from within. I would like to understand the moments I wrote without fully understanding them myself. I would like to know whether the choices I gave her feel as complicated from inside her life as they looked from mine. And after putting her through all the emotional complications that come with being a woman in a story called The Dog Walker, I suppose she deserves a week in which somebody else has to make the decisions.
I might even come back from those seven days with a little more compassion for her. More importantly, I might come back with a little more compassion for myself, because perhaps that is what fiction does when it works well. We think we are inventing other lives so we can escape our own, but somewhere along the way those imaginary lives begin holding up mirrors. They show us the things we desire, the choices we fear, the people we are drawn toward and the stories we tell ourselves about why we are drawn to them.
So if I had to trade lives with a fictional character for a week, I would choose the woman in The Dog Walker. I have already given her the beautiful man, the complicated feelings and the story. After all these years of being the woman behind the keyboard deciding what happens to her, I think it would be interesting to hand her the pen for a change and see what she does with me.
I have always had a slightly questionable taste in fictional men.
Give me the perfectly decent hero, and I will probably admire him. He is kind, responsible, and emotionally available. He calls when he says he will, remembers birthdays and probably owns matching luggage. Wonderful.
Now give me the man who walks into the story with three unresolved childhood issues, a complicated relationship with commitment, questionable communication skills and the emotional availability of a Mumbai BEST bus during peak hour, and suddenly I am interested.
This is not necessarily a quality I am proud of.
There is something about the complicated character that pulls me in: the person who doesn’t quite fit the moral categories, who makes terrible decisions but has a reason for making them, and who can be selfish and tender in the same chapter. Maybe that is because I have never found people particularly easy to classify.
I learned this long before I started writing about them.
I have spent enough of my life looking at people I loved and thinking, Surely there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.
Sometimes there was. Sometimes the explanation was simply that I was in love, which, as explanations go, has historically been responsible for some of humanity’s worst decision-making.
There is a particular kind of foolishness that arrives when you are emotionally invested in someone. You can be an intelligent, independent, reasonably accomplished adult who can make decisions involving data, money, careers and international travel, and then one person sends you a vaguely affectionate message and suddenly your entire analytical framework collapses.
You begin interpreting punctuation.
Why did they use a full stop? Why did they say “okay” instead of “okay :)”? Why did they take four hours to respond? Why did they respond in four minutes? Why did they respond at all?
At some point, you realize you are conducting a forensic investigation into a text message from somebody who probably typed it while standing in line for coffee.
I have been there. More than once.
And the embarrassing thing is that when you are inside the story, you don’t experience the person as a villain. You experience them as complicated.
You know their tenderness. You know the stories they don’t tell everybody. You know the version of them that appears when nobody is watching. You know what they are afraid of and what they have survived. You also know they can hurt you, and somehow the two facts manage to sit beside each other.
That is what I find fascinating about villains. The good ones don’t feel like villains to themselves. They have explanations, just as all of us do.
The villain thinks he is protecting himself. The hero thinks he is doing the right thing. The lover thinks she is following her heart. The friend thinks she is being honest. Meanwhile, somebody else is standing in the corner thinking, Can all of you please stop making such complicated decisions?
Real life would be much easier if people came with labels: HERO, VILLAIN, BAD IDEA, DO NOT TEXT AFTER MIDNIGHT, or EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE BUT VERY ATTRACTIVE.
Unfortunately, nobody does.
We meet people without instructions, fall for them without reading the terms and conditions, and then spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand what happened.
Perhaps that is why I have always been drawn to characters who live somewhere in the grey area. Heroes can sometimes feel like aspirations; villains feel like confessions. They show us the parts of ourselves we would prefer not to discuss over dinner: jealousy, possessiveness, anger, vanity, the need to be chosen, and the ridiculous human desire to believe that if someone loves us enough, they will eventually become the person we need them to be.
That last one has probably caused more emotional damage than most actual villains.
I don’t think being fascinated by a villain means wanting to excuse them. Understanding somebody is not the same as forgiving them. Understanding why someone behaves badly doesn’t require you to volunteer for another round.
That distinction took me a while to learn.
There were people in my life I tried very hard to understand. I examined their histories, wounds, circumstances and fears. I became so good at understanding other people that I occasionally forgot to ask the most inconvenient question of all: What is this doing to me?
That question doesn’t make for particularly romantic storytelling. It does, however, make for a much better life.
Sometimes we are so busy trying to explain somebody else’s behaviour that we don’t notice our own. We overlook how long we have been waiting, how much we are hoping, how many excuses we are making, and how often we remain at an emotional bus stop long after the bus has left.
And perhaps that is where my fascination with the villain eventually became something more personal. I stopped wondering only, Why did they do that? I started wondering, Why did I stay?
That question is much harder because it doesn’t allow us to put the entire story on another person. It makes us look at our own choices, our own patterns, our capacity for hope and our occasionally spectacular ability to confuse intensity with love.
That is probably why, when I began writing Finding Noir, I wasn’t interested in creating a straightforward hero and villain.
Noir emerged from a much messier place. He belongs to that uncomfortable territory where attraction, attachment, longing, and self-preservation don’t line up neatly.
There are people who enter our lives and somehow occupy more space than their actual presence should allow. They leave the room, the city, the relationship, sometimes even the life we once imagined with them, and yet they remain strangely present.
You can move on geographically and remain completely stationary emotionally. You can know something isn’t good for you and still miss it. You can understand that a relationship has reached its natural ending and still wish the ending had been different.
And eventually you can learn that loving someone does not give you the right to keep them, change them, or save them.
Those are much harder truths than “the villain was bad and the hero won.”
Because sometimes there is no villain to defeat. There are simply two people who could not give each other what they needed. Sometimes the person you thought you had to save is the person who teaches you something about yourself. And sometimes the great act of courage is not staying, but leaving without turning the other person into a monster simply so you can make sense of your own decision.
That is what makes me like complicated characters. They don’t always give us clean endings. They make us sit with contradictions and accept that someone can love you and still hurt you, that someone can be wounded without being your responsibility, and that someone can be fascinating without being good for you.
Most importantly, they remind us that we don’t have to hate somebody to let them go.
So, have I ever liked a villain more than the hero?
Absolutely.
But these days, I am less interested in whether the villain gets the girl, the hero gets the girl, or everybody gets on a plane and moves to Paris for some reason.
I am more interested in what happens after the story ends. Who are we when the person we were trying so hard to understand is no longer in front of us? What do we do with all that love? Where does the longing go? And who do we become when we finally stop trying to turn another complicated human being into the ending we wanted?
Maybe the villain was never the most interesting character.
Maybe the most interesting character was always the person who finally learned she didn’t have to stay in the story.
That is where Finding Noir began for me: somewhere between fascination and foolishness, between holding on and letting go, and, as usual, somewhere between knowing better and doing better.
I have never quite understood why we ask people how long a book is. How many pages? How many words? How many chapters? It makes reading sound like an endurance sport, as though there is a finish line at the end and someone is waiting with a stopwatch to congratulate you for surviving 847 pages.
I have read some very long books. The kind that require commitment, a reliable bookmark and a reasonably stable life. The kind you carry around for weeks, occasionally wondering whether you are reading the book or the book is slowly taking over your life.
But these days, I am less interested in how long a book is than in how long it stays with me.
Some books disappear as soon as you finish them. Others follow you for years. You remember a character, a sentence, a feeling, or simply the strange coincidence of having encountered that story at exactly the right moment in your life.
Some books don’t really end when you close them.
They continue unfolding somewhere inside you.
Perhaps that is why I became a writer.
I didn’t begin with a grand plan to write dozens of books. I began with questions. Life had a rather annoying habit of putting me in situations I didn’t understand and then expecting me to behave like a fully functioning adult.
I spent years building a career in technology and data science, living in America and doing what sensible people are encouraged to do: work hard, build a profession and create a life. Then life decided to rearrange the furniture.
A career ended. Immigration became complicated. India began pulling me home.
Returning to Mumbai after so many years was hardly a cinematic homecoming. There was missing luggage at the airport, a rented family home because the old one was caught up in redevelopment, parents, paperwork, visas, phone calls and a ridiculous number of decisions that seemed to produce even more decisions.
And then there was Mumbai itself, which has a remarkable ability to make you question every decision you have ever made while simultaneously making you grateful that you are here.
I started writing about that experience because I was trying to understand it. That became About Life Choices & Potholes, a book about careers, immigration, family, relationships and the unsettling business of starting over when the life you carefully constructed no longer fits quite the way it used to.
Writing it taught me something I would keep discovering in different forms: I wasn’t particularly interested in giving people neat answers. I was interested in what happens when there aren’t any.
That question eventually led me into the stories we tell ourselves about love and identity. We inherit so many rules about how life is supposed to work—follow your heart, know your worth, everything happens for a reason, if it’s meant to be, it will be. We repeat them often enough that they start sounding like wisdom.
I became curious about what happens when we stop repeating them and actually examine them.
Why do we tolerate things we would tell our best friend to walk away from? Why do boundaries make us feel guilty? Why do we sometimes confuse being wanted with being loved? How much of the person we think we are was actually chosen by us?
Those questions became Diary of Cliches, which grew beyond relationships into a book about self-discovery, expectations, boundaries and the stories we inherit about ourselves.
Then writing collided with the less romantic realities of being an author.
There is something wonderfully optimistic about spending months creating a book and imagining that readers are waiting somewhere to discover it. Then you publish it, look at your sales dashboard and discover that the world has apparently been busy doing other things.
I eventually wrote Why Is Nobody Buying My Book?, because sometimes the most honest title is also the most embarrassing question.
That book led naturally into my interest in money, business, creativity and the uncomfortable gap between making something and making something work. I have written about those subjects because I have lived the uncertainty myself. Success looks very different when you are sitting on the other side of it, trying to figure out what to do next.
Somewhere along the way, fiction gave me another place to explore those questions.
Fever Dreams, Finding Noir and my Beautiful Men stories allowed me to step outside my own life and wander through love, longing, attraction, separation and the wonderfully irrational things human beings do when emotion gets involved. Fiction is useful that way. You can give a character a terrible decision and pretend you are merely observing human nature.
Then there were the dogs.
Dogs have a habit of completely disrupting literary ambition. You can spend an afternoon thinking about identity, grief and the meaning of human attachment, and then your dog looks at you because you have stopped throwing the ball. Suddenly your deepest philosophical concern is whether you have failed as a human being.
Romo taught me about loss. Sauli brought chaos, resilience and an extraordinary amount of personality into my life. She also gave me another world to write about, one involving rescue, animals, friendship and the peculiar wisdom of creatures who have never read a self-help book.
That became Adventures of Sauli the Rescue Pup, along with my other writing about dogs, food, Mother Earth and the everyday choices through which we decide what kind of lives we want to live. I have written in very different genres because I am curious about very different things, but when I look back at the books together, I see the same questions underneath them.
What do we do when the plan changes?
Who are we when the thing that defined us disappears?
How do we love without losing ourselves?
What does success mean when nobody else is handing us the definition?
How do we continue after loss?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: how do we make peace with not knowing?
That is the territory I keep returning to.
The books may look unrelated from the outside. A memoir about returning to Mumbai, a book about clichés and self-discovery, an honest look at publishing, fiction about complicated relationships, stories about rescue dogs, and books about food, business and the planet don’t exactly form an obvious shelf.
But from the inside, they feel like one long conversation.
I am still trying to understand the same messy business of being human. I simply keep approaching it from different directions.
Perhaps that is why the question about the longest book makes me think about something other than pages.
The longest book any of us ever reads is our own life.
It begins before we understand the language. Our parents, families, cultures, teachers, and circumstances write the early chapters for us. Eventually, we begin picking up the pen ourselves.
Some chapters make us proud. Some embarrass us. Some contain people we were convinced would stay until the final page. Others contain people who appeared briefly but changed the direction of the entire story.
There are chapters we would happily rewrite. There are others we wouldn’t touch because, painful as they were, they made us who we became.
And then there are the pages we haven’t written yet.
Mine are still being written.
Maybe that is why I keep writing books. Each one gives me another way to sit with a question, make sense of an experience, or simply explore something that won’t leave me alone.
So, what is the longest book I have ever read?
It isn’t sitting on my bookshelf.
It is the one I am still living.
It has no page numbers, no table of contents and no guarantee of a satisfying ending. Unfortunately, there is also no option to skip the boring chapters.
But I have finally learned that I don’t need to know how the story ends before I turn the page.
I know Mumbai has bigger problems. Traffic. Pollution. Garbage. Public transport. The price of a one-bedroom apartment that has approximately the square footage of my childhood kitchen. There are questions about housing, flooding, overcrowding, air quality, public safety, and the small matter of how an entire city can be simultaneously exhausted and in a hurry.
But fix the roads.
Because Mumbai’s potholes are not potholes anymore. They are infrastructure with an attitude. They are permanent features of the landscape, like the sea, the local trains, the monsoon, and the man outside every building who knows exactly where you are going even when you don’t.
You leave home in a perfectly reasonable state of mind and twenty minutes later, after navigating Dadar, Ghatkopar, Chembur, Bhandup, Mulund—or anywhere else where the road has been repeatedly dug up and then abandoned—you have experienced a full spiritual awakening. You have confronted mortality, questioned your financial decisions, reconsidered your relationship with your vehicle, and developed a new respect for the human spine.
THUD.
Your car goes up.
Your body goes down.
Your soul briefly leaves the vehicle.
Your dog looks at you.
You look at the road.
The road looks innocent.
This is how Mumbai teaches mindfulness. Not through meditation apps or silent retreats, but through the sudden and violent reminder that you are not in control of anything. Not your speed. Not your suspension. Not your lower back. Certainly not the municipal corporation.
And perhaps that is why potholes have always felt strangely familiar to me.
My life has had a few.
Actually, if we’re being honest, I’ve had enough to qualify for municipal funding.
I left Mumbai and spent nearly two decades building a life in America. I built a career in technology. I became the person who could explain data to executives without making them want to throw themselves out of a window. I learned how to speak confidently in rooms where everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing. I learned how to make plans, meet deadlines, manage expectations, and use phrases like “let’s circle back” without visibly losing the will to live.
From the outside, it probably looked like I had found the road.
Not necessarily the perfect road, but a respectable one. A road with lanes, signs, exits, and the occasional reassuringly expensive toll. I had a career. I had routines. I had a life that made sense when described in a biography or a family WhatsApp message.
And then life did what life does.
It threw a pothole into the middle of the road.
I lost my job. Plans changed. Certainties became question marks. Eventually, I came back to Mumbai.
Which sounds very graceful when you put it in a sentence.
“I returned to Mumbai after nearly two decades abroad.”
It sounds intentional. Almost literary. Like I had spent years gathering wisdom in the West and then returned to my roots with a suitcase full of perspective.
The actual experience involved airports, missing luggage, redevelopment, rented homes, bureaucracy, complicated decisions, and the general Indian experience of having one person tell you something is absolutely impossible before another person fixes it in twelve minutes. It involved trying to explain to people that I was not exactly starting over, although I was also not entirely sure what I was doing. It involved answering questions about work, money, marriage, housing, and the future while privately wondering whether I had made a catastrophic mistake.
Coming back to Mumbai is not simply a geographical decision. It is an encounter with every version of yourself you thought you had outgrown. The city remembers you differently from the way you remember yourself. It contains your childhood, your family, your old ambitions, your old embarrassments, and the particular smell of rain on roads that have not been repaired properly.
You can leave Mumbai for years, but the city does not leave you. It waits in the background, occasionally appearing in the form of a craving for street food, a sudden irritation with an American supermarket, or the inexplicable conviction that a journey of three kilometres should take no more than seven minutes.
I had spent years believing that if I planned carefully enough, worked hard enough and made sensible enough choices, life would eventually behave itself.
Adorable.
It doesn’t.
Life doesn’t behave itself. It does not reward preparation with predictability. It does not consult your calendar before changing the subject. It does not care that you have already made a five-year plan, colour-coded it, shared it with your family, and created a spreadsheet to track your progress.
It rains on the day you have washed your hair.
Your flight is delayed when you are already late.
The person you thought was forever turns out to be a chapter.
The career you thought defined you ends.
The house you grew up in disappears behind construction barricades.
The restaurant you loved becomes a bank.
The bank becomes a gym.
The gym becomes a restaurant.
And sometimes you are standing in the middle of Mumbai wondering how the hell you got here.
That question has followed me through more than one stage of my life. How did I get here? How did the person who once thought she knew exactly what she wanted end up making decisions she could not explain neatly? How did a career become an identity? How did a country become a memory? How did returning home become both a comfort and a confrontation?
I wrote About Life Choices & Potholes because I know something now that I didn’t know when I was younger: a life can look completely wrong from the outside and still be exactly where you need to be.
That is not the same as saying every difficult thing happens for a reason. I have never been entirely convinced by that idea. Sometimes a bad thing is simply bad. Sometimes a loss is not a lesson waiting to be unwrapped. Sometimes a pothole is just a pothole, created by poor planning and repaired with optimism.
But even when we cannot choose what happens, we can eventually decide what we will do with the road in front of us. We can stop pretending that the route we are on is working. We can admit that the destination no longer matters. We can turn around, pull over, ask for directions, or continue slowly while trying not to damage the car.
We are taught to think of our lives as roads.
Choose the right school. Get the right degree. Get the right job. Marry the right person. Buy the right house. Make the right investments. Have the right five-year plan. Keep moving forward. Do not fall behind. Do not waste time. Do not make a wrong turn.
And whatever you do, don’t make a wrong turn.
The pressure to get life right is extraordinary. We are expected to make permanent decisions at temporary ages, often with incomplete information and very little emotional maturity. At eighteen, we are asked to choose a field of study that may determine our future. At twenty-five, we are expected to know whether we have met the person we should spend our life with. At thirty-five, we are supposed to have a home, a career, a retirement plan, and a calm relationship with our parents.
By forty, apparently, we should be able to explain all of our choices without hesitation.
But what if the wrong turn is where your life actually begins?
What if losing the job gives you permission to become a writer? What if leaving a country teaches you what home actually means? What if heartbreak introduces you to parts of yourself that a happy relationship never had to? What if the plan falling apart isn’t evidence that you failed at life? What if it is simply evidence that life had a different plan?
I know how sentimental that sounds. I also know how difficult it is to believe when you are in the middle of the disruption. It is easy to look back at a difficult period and call it transformative. It is much harder to call it transformative while you are living through the uncertainty, checking your bank account, answering concerned questions, and wondering whether everyone else has somehow received instructions that were not sent to you.
The truth is, most of us do not become wiser because something goes wrong. We become wiser because something goes wrong and then keeps going wrong long enough that we are forced to pay attention.
We notice what we had been tolerating. We notice which ambitions were ours and which ones had been handed to us. We notice how much of our identity was built around being competent, successful, desirable, needed, or admired. We notice that the life we were protecting may not have been making us happy.
Sometimes the pothole does not destroy the car. It reveals that we have been driving in the wrong direction.
I still want Mumbai to fix its potholes. I want the city to repair roads properly instead of applying a thin layer of asphalt that disappears after the first serious rain. I want contractors to be held accountable. I want roads to be planned, maintained, and treated as essential public infrastructure rather than temporary surfaces between construction projects.
I want to drive from one end of this city to the other without having my kidneys rearranged.
I want pedestrians to be able to walk without stepping into traffic. I want older people to cross roads without calculating whether they can survive the journey. I want cyclists, delivery workers, schoolchildren, taxi drivers, and everyone else who shares these streets to be treated as citizens rather than obstacles.
But perhaps I don’t want life to become completely smooth.
Because the smooth stretches are rarely the ones I remember.
I remember the detours. The ridiculous decisions. The terrible dates. The career changes. The airports. The dogs. The people who arrived unexpectedly and the people who left unexpectedly. The moments when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and did it anyway.
I remember the conversations that began as arguments and ended as confessions. I remember the friends who appeared during difficult years without asking for an explanation. I remember the strange relief of admitting that I was tired. I remember discovering that starting again does not always feel brave. Sometimes it feels embarrassing. Sometimes it feels expensive. Sometimes it feels like sitting on the edge of a bed surrounded by boxes and wondering whether you have confused movement with progress.
Those are the stories that became my life.
Not the polished version. Not the version that fits neatly into a professional biography. The real version, with the wrong turns, the delays, the missed exits, the unnecessary detours, and the occasional moment when the road opens up and you realise you have been moving forward after all.
And perhaps that is what I would really change about my city.
I would make it easier for people to admit that they don’t know where they are going.
I would make room for people to change careers at forty, leave a marriage, move home, start again, disappoint their parents, disappoint themselves, and say, This isn’t working anymore.
I would make it less shameful to be uncertain. Less embarrassing to be in transition. Less frightening to step away from a life that looks successful but feels unbearable. We are very good at celebrating arrival and not nearly as good at respecting the people who are still trying to find the right road.
Mumbai is full of people in transition. The student travelling across the city for an entrance exam. The migrant worker sending money home. The young professional sharing a flat with three strangers. The parent commuting two hours each way. The entrepreneur trying to keep a business alive. The actor waiting for an audition. The retiree learning how to live in a smaller home. The person who has returned from abroad and is trying to understand what home means now.
Everyone is going somewhere. Everyone is carrying something. Everyone is pretending to know the route.
Perhaps the city would improve instantly if we became a little more patient with one another. If we stopped assuming that the slow person was careless, the confused person was incompetent, the person changing direction was weak, or the person who had fallen behind had failed.
Perhaps we could understand that every person on the road is navigating a different map.
Because sometimes we spend so much energy cursing the pothole that we forget to look up. We forget to notice the person beside us. We forget that the driver who cut us off may be rushing to a hospital, that the pedestrian who stopped suddenly may be carrying news they do not know how to process, that the person who seems lost may simply be trying to find a way through a city that was never designed to make anything easy.
Maybe the road was never supposed to be smooth.
Maybe the point was never to arrive without a scratch.
Maybe the point was to become someone who could keep driving after the map stopped making sense.
That does not mean we should romanticise difficulty. We should still fix the roads. We should still demand better systems, better planning, better accountability, and better care for the people who live here. Resilience is not an excuse for neglect. People should not have to become philosophical because basic infrastructure has failed them.
But on a personal level, I have stopped believing that a good life is one without potholes.
A good life may be one in which you learn how to recognise them sooner. One in which you stop blaming yourself for every unexpected turn. One in which you understand that changing direction is not the same as losing your way. One in which you can look back at the road behind you without needing to justify every mile.
And if you’ve ever found yourself sitting in a car somewhere between Dadar and your next existential crisis, wondering whether you have taken a wrong turn, welcome to Mumbai.
You’re probably exactly where you need to be.
Just watch that pothole.
And if you do hit it, slow down.
That is something Sauli taught me without ever having to say it.
She came into my life at a time when I thought I was supposed to have everything figured out. She reminded me, in her own quiet way, that life isn’t a straight road and that love doesn’t ask for a map before it arrives. Sometimes it simply sits beside you while you work out where you’re going.
Perhaps that is what I have learned from all the potholes—both the ones on Mumbai’s roads and the ones in my life.
You don’t always get to choose the road.
You don’t always get to avoid the pothole.
You don’t always understand why you ended up here.
But you can choose who you travel with.
And sometimes, when you look across at the person sitting beside you, you realise that the detour wasn’t the disaster you thought it was.
It was the journey.
It was the life.
It was home.
And maybe that is the one thing I would instantly improve about my city—not by making every road smooth, but by making sure that nobody feels ashamed when theirs isn’t.
Because in the end, we are all just trying to get somewhere.
Some of us have better maps.
Some of us have worse suspension.
And some of us are lucky enough to have a Sauli in the passenger seat.
My Best Tip for Budget Travel? Stop Trying to Travel Like a Tourist.
The best way to travel on a budget is surprisingly simple: stop trying to make every trip impressive.
Somewhere along the way, travel became another form of consumption. We collect destinations, photograph landmarks, book the hotel with the infinity pool, and return home exhausted from having had such a wonderful time.
I’ve learned to travel differently.
Some of my most memorable experiences have cost very little. Walking through a city without a particular destination. Eating what the locals are eating. Taking a train instead of the scenic tourist transfer. Sitting in a neighborhood café long enough to become part of the furniture. Getting slightly lost and discovering that the best meal of the trip was hiding behind a door I would never have found on a travel app.
Copenhagen taught me the pleasure of wandering without urgency. London gave me museums, parks and streets that can entertain you for hours without requiring an admission ticket. San Francisco gave me hills, beaches, fog and neighborhoods that were best understood on foot. Mumbai, of course, requires very little money to provide an entire day’s worth of sensory overload.
And then there are the trips that don’t go according to budget—or plan.
I’ve had luggage disappear. I’ve travelled across cities and countries for visas. I’ve moved a dog across continents. I’ve booked things that looked perfectly sensible until reality got involved.
Those experiences taught me something that has very little to do with money.
Budget travel is really about knowing what deserves your money and what doesn’t.
Spend on the thing that will make the experience possible. Save on the things that merely make it look impressive.
Sometimes that means a tiny room in a brilliant neighborhood instead of a beautiful hotel miles away. Sometimes it means a local meal instead of the restaurant everyone has photographed. Sometimes it means taking the cheap train and watching the landscape change outside the window.
And sometimes, the most expensive mistake is insisting that the itinerary must go exactly as planned.
I’ve come to think of travel as a particularly good rehearsal for life. You make a plan, buy a ticket, pack your bag—and then discover that the universe has misplaced your luggage.
You can spend the rest of the trip being angry about it.
Or you can go find dinner.
That philosophy—of finding the story inside the disruption—runs through About Life Choices & Potholes, my memoir about migration, ambition, belonging, and the curious things that happen when life refuses to follow the itinerary.
Travel light. Spend selectively. Leave room for getting lost. The best parts rarely make it onto the original plan.
Someone asked me recently, Who is your favorite cartoon character?
It is supposed to be an easy question. Most people have an answer ready before the question is finished. Mickey Mouse, perhaps. Tom and Jerry. Snoopy. Garfield. Scooby-Doo, if you have excellent taste. There are plenty of obvious choices, characters who have been part of our lives for so long that choosing one feels almost automatic.
I, however, immediately thought of Romo.
That is a problem because Romo was not a cartoon character. He was a Belgian Malinois, a rescue dog with enormous ears, the body of an athlete and the emotional range of a badly written soap opera. He was also, frankly, considerably more entertaining than most cartoon characters.
For starters, he had the ears. They were enormous, upright and permanently alert, as though he were receiving classified information from outer space. Whenever something caught his attention, both ears would point toward it with such complete seriousness that I could not help wondering what important intelligence he had just received. A bird in the garden, a car passing outside, a noise from another room—everything was treated as potentially significant.
He could look deeply offended by absolutely nothing. He could look at me as though I had personally ruined his life, even when I had done nothing more serious than ask him to move away from the door. Then, five minutes later, he would be standing in front of me with a toy in his mouth, expecting me to participate in whatever extremely important operation he had just invented.
That was the thing about Romo. He did not need dialogue. He had facial expressions, body language and an impressive collection of sighs. So many sighs. A dog can communicate an entire paragraph by sitting three feet away from you and turning his head very slowly in the opposite direction.
Fine.
Clearly you don’t care about me.
I shall suffer.
Alone.
Without the chicken.
Romo was particularly good at this. He was also very good at making me believe that whatever I was doing was less important than whatever he wanted me to do. If I was working, he wanted a walk. If I was writing, he wanted a walk. If I was eating, he possibly wanted a walk, although he was also interested in what I was eating. If I was sleeping, he definitely wanted a walk. If I was simply sitting quietly and doing nothing at all, he had a proposal.
Walk.
I sometimes wonder whether dogs invented the concept of interruption. If they did, they perfected it. They have an instinctive understanding of the exact moment when you are about to become absorbed in something. That is when they need to stand beside you, place one paw on your leg, stare into your eyes or produce a sigh so dramatic that you begin questioning your entire character.
Underneath all that comedy was something I did not fully understand until much later. Romo had an extraordinary ability to make an ordinary day feel as though it mattered.
A walk was not just a walk. It was an expedition. A patch of grass was a newspaper filled with urgent reports. A suspicious noise required investigation. A squirrel was a national security threat. A person sitting quietly with a cup of coffee was clearly someone who had forgotten that she had a dog.
He made life immediate. I could not spend an entire afternoon worrying about my future when someone was standing beside me demanding that I throw a ball. Dogs are very good at bringing you back to the present. They do not care about your five-year plan, your unfinished list of tasks or the email you have been avoiding. They care about dinner, the five minutes before dinner, the five minutes after dinner and whatever you are eating that is not dinner.
Romo came into my life as a rescue, and somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of him as a dog I had rescued. He rescued me from several perfectly good opportunities to take myself too seriously.
That was probably his real talent. He made me laugh. He made me get out of the house. He made me notice things I might otherwise have missed: the weather, the changing light, the way a familiar path looked different in another season. He made me understand that love does not always arrive with a grand announcement. Sometimes it arrives with muddy paws. Sometimes it steals your place on the sofa. Sometimes it wakes you at 6:17 in the morning because apparently that is an emergency. Sometimes it lies beside you while you are having a terrible day and does not ask you to explain why.
That last one stays with me.
When Romo died, the silence was strange. Not dramatic. Just strange. There were little absences everywhere, most of them connected to ordinary things. The things I no longer had to do. The things I still automatically looked for. The space where he used to be. The sound that was no longer there. The ridiculous realization that nobody was going to judge me anymore for spending five minutes explaining something complicated to a dog who had absolutely no interest in my explanation.
Although, to be fair, he probably understood more than some people I have explained things to.
For a long time, I thought grief meant remembering. Then I realized it also meant carrying forward. Sometimes you carry someone forward in a photograph, sometimes in a habit and sometimes in a story. Sometimes, without quite intending to, you write them into the next thing you create.
That is probably what happened with dogs and me.
Romo was my first great lesson in what a dog can become in a human life. He was not simply a pet. He was part of the structure of my days, part of the way I understood home and companionship, part of the reason ordinary moments became memorable. Losing him did not erase any of that. It made me more aware of it.
Sauli came later.
She was another rescue, another Belgian Malinois, another set of enormous ears and another very convincing argument that I clearly had no authority over my own schedule. But Sauli had her own personality, her own adventures and her own ability to turn a completely normal day into a story.
She very much rules my world.
She decides when the day begins. She decides when I need a walk. She decides when writing is less important than attention. She decides, with complete confidence, where I sit, when I move and whether any moment is allowed to remain quiet for more than a few seconds.
I may tell myself that I am in charge.
Sauli knows better.
She has a way of making her decisions seem reasonable. If she wants me to stop working, she does not behave as though she is interrupting. She behaves as though she is correcting an obvious mistake. If I have been sitting too long, she looks at me with the patient disappointment of someone waiting for me to remember an appointment. If I try to ignore her, she becomes more persistent. If I continue to ignore her, she becomes creative.
Eventually, I get up.
Somewhere along the way, I began writing her stories down. That became Adventures of Sauli the Rescue Pup.
What began as life with one dog quietly became a whole little world of rescue, mischief, companionship, loyalty and the ridiculous things dogs do that somehow become the memories we treasure most. Sauli gave me new stories, but she also gave me a new way to understand the old ones.
She keeps Romo alive in ways I do not always expect. Not by replacing him—she could never do that, and she does not try—but by keeping certain parts of my life in motion. She keeps me walking. She keeps me noticing. She keeps me laughing at the same kinds of expressions, the same sudden bursts of energy and the same complete confidence with which a dog can take possession of a room.
Sometimes I see a familiar look in her face. Sometimes I recognize the same alertness, the same intensity, the same ability to turn a simple moment into an event. And sometimes she does something completely her own, something only Sauli would do, and I understand that love can carry the past forward without keeping it stuck there.
Romo remains part of my world because Sauli keeps giving me reasons to remember him. She also gives me plenty of reasons to pay attention to the present. She is here. She is busy. She has plans. Most of them involve me.
I like to think Romo would approve.
Although he would probably object to the idea that Sauli gets an entire book series. He would consider that a publishing decision requiring further discussion, preferably over treats. He might also insist that his contribution be acknowledged, perhaps in the form of a larger dedication or a separate volume devoted entirely to his opinions about squirrels.
That is also why I think dogs make such wonderful characters. They do not need to be invented very much. Give them a personality, a pair of ears, a little mischief and a human being who is willing to pay attention. The story usually takes care of itself.
Dogs are already full of contradictions. They can be brave and ridiculous, dignified and shameless, independent and completely dependent on you for the next decision. They can spend ten minutes investigating a leaf and then become deeply offended when you suggest that it is time to go home. They can make a mess, interrupt your work, steal your seat and still be the first creature you want beside you when something goes wrong.
That combination is difficult to manufacture. It has to be observed.
So when someone asks me who my favorite cartoon character is, I could give them the conventional answer. Snoopy is pretty wonderful. Scooby has his moments. Garfield understands boundaries around food.
But my favorite will always be the one I actually knew.
Romo.
A rescue dog with enormous ears, a serious face, questionable opinions about squirrels and absolutely no understanding of personal space. He was not a cartoon, but if he had been one, I suspect he would have been the kind of character who walked into every scene, stole the entire story and left everyone else wondering what had just happened.
Actually, that sounds exactly like Romo.
And Sauli is still here, ruling my world, keeping him alive in the stories I tell and giving me new ones every day. Perhaps that is why I am still writing about dogs. They keep reminding me that the best stories are often not invented at all. They are lived, one walk, one interruption, one muddy paw and one impossible expression at a time.
Transforming Creative Drive Into Sustainable Financial Success
For a long time, I thought financial success depended on how hard I worked.
I had plenty of evidence to support that belief.
I built a career in technology. I spent years working with data, analytics, consulting, and some of the world’s largest companies. I studied, collected degrees and certifications, took on difficult projects, moved countries, reinvented myself, and kept going whenever life decided to rearrange the furniture.
I knew how to work.
What I didn’t always know was how to turn all that work into money.
That distinction took me a surprisingly long time to understand.
Writing made this particularly obvious.
I love creating things.
Give me an idea and I can turn it into a book. Give me a blank page and, eventually, there will be characters, stories, observations, arguments and probably several metaphors that I will later regret.
Over the years, I published book after book.
And then came the rather humbling question:
Why isn’t anyone buying them?
It is a particularly uncomfortable question for a writer because it feels personal.
If someone doesn’t buy a pair of shoes, you can blame the shoes.
When someone doesn’t buy your book, you start wondering whether they are rejecting you.
I eventually wrote Why Is Nobody Buying My Book? because I realized that I had been looking at the problem from the wrong side.
I had been thinking like a creator.
The reader was thinking like a customer.
Those are two very different perspectives.
I could love the book. I could believe the book was useful. I could spend months writing it, editing it, formatting it and publishing it.
None of that created an obligation for somebody else to buy it.
That was a painful lesson.
It was also a useful one.
This is where mindset becomes important.
If my book doesn’t sell, I can tell myself:
People don’t appreciate good writing anymore.
Amazon is impossible.
The algorithm hates me.
Social media doesn’t work.
Readers only buy famous authors.
Some of those things might even contain a little truth.
But none of them answers the question I actually need to answer:
Why isn’t this particular person buying this particular book?
Maybe they don’t know it exists.
Maybe the cover doesn’t communicate what is inside.
Maybe the description doesn’t interest them.
Maybe the book is badly positioned.
Maybe the price is wrong.
Maybe I’m talking to the wrong audience.
Maybe they simply don’t want the thing I’m selling.
That last possibility is particularly difficult to swallow.
But it is also incredibly freeing.
Because if the problem is the product, positioning, audience or price, I can work with that.
If the problem is me, there isn’t much of a business strategy.
I have always found pricing fascinating because the number on a price tag carries far more psychology than mathematics.
How much is your work worth?
How much will someone pay?
How much do you need to make?
How much does your competitor charge?
How much value does the customer perceive?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question:
Why are you charging what you’re charging?
I started thinking about these questions more deeply and eventually wrote The Prizing Puzzle.
Yes, the title is deliberately playful.
Because pricing really can feel like a puzzle.
There have been times in my own life when I have looked at something I created and thought, Surely people should pay more for this.
Other times, I looked at something and realized I was attached to a number because lowering it felt like admitting my work wasn’t valuable.
Those are two very different things.
A price is not a verdict on your worth.
It is a business decision.
I wish I had understood that earlier.
This became particularly clear when I started thinking about small businesses.
There is something seductive about building a business in your head.
You can have the name.
The logo.
The website.
The Instagram account.
The beautifully designed business cards.
The five-year plan.
The spreadsheet.
The pitch deck.
The vision.
You can feel like a CEO before you have made your first dollar.
I have done versions of this myself.
And eventually I became much more interested in a simpler question:
Does this thing actually make money?
That question became the starting point for How To Start A Small Business That Actually Makes Money.
I deliberately put actually in the title because I have become slightly allergic to business advice that stops at “start.”
Starting is easy.
Making something people repeatedly pay for is the interesting part.
A small business doesn’t need to look impressive.
It needs a customer.
Then another.
Then another.
And preferably enough money left after the expenses to make the whole exercise worthwhile.
This may be the biggest change I’ve made.
I used to think about money as something that arrived after I had done enough work.
Work first.
Money later.
Prove yourself.
Eventually, someone will notice.
But money doesn’t work that way.
Money moves toward perceived value, demand, trust, convenience, scarcity, timing, distribution and a hundred other things that have very little interest in how hard you worked yesterday.
That can feel unfair.
It can also be incredibly useful.
Because once you understand it, you stop waiting to be rewarded for effort.
You start designing for outcomes.
You ask what people need.
You test.
You listen.
You adjust.
You sell before you build too much.
You pay attention to numbers.
You stop throwing good money after bad ideas simply because you have already spent money on them.
And you learn to say:
This isn’t working.
Without adding:
Therefore I am a failure.
That distinction has saved me more than once.
We talk a lot about the courage to start.
I think there is another kind of courage that matters just as much:
The courage to look at the numbers.
The courage to charge appropriately.
The courage to ask someone to buy.
The courage to hear no.
The courage to change your offer.
The courage to stop doing something you love when it isn’t economically viable.
And sometimes, the courage to start again.
I’ve had several careers and several versions of myself.
Data scientist.
Consultant.
Writer.
Publisher.
Entrepreneur.
And probably a few titles that don’t fit neatly on LinkedIn.
Each reinvention taught me something about money.
Mostly, it taught me that financial success isn’t a personality trait.
It isn’t reserved for people who were born good with money.
It isn’t created by repeating affirmations about abundance.
It is built through thousands of small decisions about value, risk, spending, pricing, selling and learning.
Absolutely.
But perhaps differently from how we are usually told.
Your mindset matters because it determines what you are willing to question.
Whether you can hear feedback without collapsing.
Whether you can look at disappointing sales without inventing excuses.
Whether you can price without attaching your self-worth to the number.
Whether you can recognize an opportunity without romanticizing it.
Whether you can walk away from something that isn’t working.
Whether you can start something small instead of waiting until everything is perfect.
And whether you can keep learning when the first version doesn’t work.
I’ve written three very different books around these questions: one because I couldn’t figure out why people weren’t buying something I had created, one because pricing turned out to be much more complicated than putting a number on a product, and one because I wanted to understand what it really takes to build a small business that produces actual income.
Looking back, they are really three pieces of the same lesson.
Creating something is only the beginning.
Then comes understanding who wants it.
Then comes understanding why they would pay for it.
And finally comes building a way for that exchange to happen repeatedly.
That is the part nobody can do for you.
And perhaps that is what a financial mindset really is:
Not believing that money will come.
Learning how to create the conditions in which it can.
The Best Advice I Ever Received Was Not About Success
The best advice I ever received did not come in a boardroom, a leadership seminar, or from someone who had figured life out.
It came from the realization that nobody really has.
For years, I believed life was a problem to be solved. If I worked harder, planned better, made smarter choices, collected enough experience, and avoided enough mistakes, I would eventually reach that mythical place called “settled.”
The problem was that life kept changing the questions.
Every time I thought I had found the answer, life quietly changed the exam paper.
A career that looked secure could disappear overnight. A dream could become a burden. A relationship that felt like destiny could become a lesson. A decision that looked like a mistake could become the turning point you needed.
The advice that stayed with me was simple:
“You don’t have to get every decision right. You just have to keep making yourself available for the next chapter.”
It changed the way I looked at mistakes.
For a long time, I saw wrong turns as evidence that I had failed. The job that didn’t work out. The opportunities I missed. The people I trusted. The roads I took that eventually led nowhere.
But maybe life was never a straight road.
Maybe the potholes were part of the journey.
We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid uncertainty. We create five-year plans, career trajectories, financial goals, and carefully designed identities. But somewhere along the way, we forget that the most meaningful parts of our lives rarely arrive according to schedule.
The unexpected friendships.
The accidental discoveries.
The painful endings.
The moments when everything falls apart and forces us to meet ourselves again.
Looking back, many of my biggest transformations did not come from moments when everything went right. They came from moments when nothing made sense.
The layoffs. The transitions. The doubts. The uncomfortable periods where the old version of myself was slowly disappearing, but the new one had not yet arrived.
That messy middle is where most of life actually happens.
We celebrate beginnings and endings. We talk about the dream job, the big achievement, the final destination. But we rarely talk about the confusing years in between—the years where we are rebuilding, questioning, grieving, learning, and becoming.
Those years are not wasted.
They are where we become.
This is the idea behind my book, About Life Choices & Potholes.
It is not a book about having all the answers. It is a collection of reflections about the choices we make, the mistakes we survive, the people who shape us, and the unexpected paths that define us.
Because eventually, we all realize something:
Life is not a highway designed for smooth driving.
It is a road filled with turns, detours, breakdowns, beautiful views, and potholes.
The goal is not to avoid every pothole.
The goal is to learn how to keep driving.
And perhaps the best advice I ever received was this:
Be patient with yourself. You are not behind. You are simply becoming someone you have not met yet.
The Things I Stopped Worrying About (and the Potholes That Taught Me Why)
For most of my life, I worried about getting things right.
The right career.
The right decisions.
The right city.
The right relationships.
The right version of myself.
Like many ambitious people, I believed life was a complicated puzzle, and if I collected enough information, worked hard enough, and made enough intelligent choices, I could solve it.
I built frameworks.
I analyzed possibilities.
I tried to predict outcomes.
I was the kind of person who could spend hours thinking about a decision that would take five minutes to make.
Then life did what life does.
It introduced variables that weren’t in my spreadsheet.
A career I had invested years building changed overnight.
Plans I had carefully designed disappeared.
Things I thought would define me became irrelevant.
Things I never expected became the chapters I remember most.
Slowly, I stopped worrying about being right all the time.
I stopped worrying about whether my journey looked like everyone else’s.
I stopped worrying about falling behind.
Because I discovered something strange:
Most people aren’t actually moving on a straight road. They are simply better at hiding their potholes.
The person who looks successful may be quietly questioning everything.
The person who seems certain may be terrified.
The person who appears to have the perfect plan may be one unexpected turn away from starting over.
We spend so much energy comparing our behind-the-scenes struggles with someone else’s highlight reel that we forget something important:
Everyone has potholes.
The difference is what they do after they hit them.
Do they sit there and complain about the road?
Do they pretend the damage never happened?
Or do they get out, look at what broke, learn something, repair what they can, and continue driving?
That shift changed how I see life.
I still plan.
I still dream.
I still create frameworks and probably still have too many browser tabs open.
Some habits are beyond saving.
But I no longer believe that a perfect plan creates a perfect life.
The unexpected moments—the failures, detours, delays, and breakdowns—often become the moments that shape us the most.
That idea became the foundation of my memoir, About Life Choices & Potholes.
It is a book about the roads we choose, the roads chosen for us, and the unexpected bumps that quietly transform us into the people we were meant to become.
The biggest thing I stopped worrying about?
Whether my life was following the map.
Because I’ve learned that sometimes the best stories begin when you take a wrong turn.
When I first started out, I fell straight into the trap that every new creator and entrepreneur is fed. I thought I needed to look like a million-dollar corporation before I was ever allowed to make my first dollar.
I spent weeks agonizing over color palettes, commissioning custom logos, building a mobile-optimized website, and perhaps even ordering a stack of branded polo shirts to sit proudly in my living room. It felt like productive, hard work.
According to the lessons I break down in How to Start a Small Business That Actually Makes Money, this obsession with looking the part is a profound defense mechanism. And nothing protects your ego quite as effectively—or starves your bank account quite as fast—as hiding behind the safety of a screen.
The Comfort of the Digital Shield
When you step into the unknown world of building something of your own, the human instinct is to frantically grasp for control.
Building a website, tweaking your SEO, or designing a slick social media feed gives you an immediate dopamine hit. It lets you feel like you’re steering the ship, even when you’re anchored safely to the dock.
The Illusion of Safety: Posting a reel on Instagram or launching a polished profile insulates you from terrifying vulnerability. If it gets zero engagement, it feels like passive background noise. It doesn’t sting.
The Cost of Comfort: By choosing the channels that feel safe and insulated, you are actively avoiding the market.
The Reality Check: Safe does not mean fast. Because millions of creators are hiding behind digital noise, trying to play it safe makes you entirely invisible.
Risk the Immediate “No”
If your timeline is a 30-day launch to secure your first paying customer or cover your expenses, you simply do not have the luxury of waiting months for an algorithm to favor you. You have to engage real people in real time.
That means stepping out from behind your screen and doing the unglamorous work:
Tapping Your Immediate Network: Asking your circle low-pressure referral questions like, “Do you know anyone who might need this?” rather than cornering them with a high-pressure sales pitch.
Owning Your Zip Code: Leveraging local community channels and physical proximity just like Dave did with his pool cleaning service, bypassing global competition entirely.
Embracing Direct Outreach: Sending direct messages to decision-makers or having face-to-face conversations where someone might actually look you in the eye and say no.
Why the “No” Is Your Best Data
The fear of direct rejection is visceral. Having a door slammed in your face or getting left on “read” hurts your pride.
But as I learned while turning the wreckage of my own career into a Minimum Viable Business, the cortisol spike of actual market rejection is the only thing that provides real, actionable data. If you can’t convince a single person in your immediate neighborhood to buy your basic offer, a prettier font or a higher follower count isn’t going to magically save you.
You have to risk the immediate “no” to find the immediate “yes.”
Watch the full video here:
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