Work, to me, starts with expression → Long before titles, salaries, or careers existed, humans expressed themselves through what they made. We know this from archaeology — cave paintings, tools, ornaments — and from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies where craftsmanship and symbolism are inseparable from daily life. Expression seems to be one of the oldest human urges. When you express yourself through craft, something interesting happens: work stops feeling transactional. It becomes meditative. You’re not producing just to produce. You’re revealing something of yourself. That, to me, is the purest form of work.

Work is also how I find meaning → Once basic survival and comfort are taken care of, meaning becomes the real currency. A meaningful life beats a comfortable one every time. Work, for better or worse, occupies a large chunk of our waking hours. If that space is hollow, life feels hollow. If it’s meaningful, life carries weight. I don’t think meaning is found — it’s built, slowly, through effort, responsibility, and choosing to care.

At its deepest level, work is spiritual → Anyone who has been truly absorbed in their work knows this state. You get so immersed that the sense of “you” fades away. Time disappears. There’s only the work. The doer dissolves. This idea isn’t new. The Bhagavad Gita talks about Nishkama Karma — action without attachment to outcomes. Work done for the sake of the work itself. When that happens, work stops being ego-driven and becomes almost sacred. You’re not chasing reward. You’re simply doing what needs to be done, fully.

Work is also a way to give back → On a practical level, yes, work pays the bills and sustains life. That matters. But beyond that, real satisfaction comes when your skills make things better — even slightly. For a person, a team, a community, or sometimes something larger. When craftsmanship meets service, work stops feeling extractive and starts feeling contributive.

Our relationship with work evolves → First, it’s about survival. Then comfort. Then identity and status. Later, impact. And eventually, self-understanding. It’s not linear, and it’s not clean. I’m somewhere in the middle of this journey. Every time I think about changing my work or my environment, I ask myself a simple question: does this move me one level deeper? Not upward — deeper. That’s how I decide.

I work best asynchronously. This wasn’t always something I was proud of. By nature, I’m a deep and slow thinker. Which means in real time, my output is decent — but given time, it’s substantially better. For a long time, this frustrated me. Everyone around me seemed sharp in the moment. They could throw out clever ideas impromptu, connect dots instantly, sound impressive without effort. I often felt behind, even when my final work told a very different story.

I was honestly a bit demoralized by this for years. Until I read Derek Sivers’ piece, “I’m a very slow thinker” That essay didn’t just resonate — it gave me permission. Permission to stop fighting who I am. I realized being slow isn’t the same as being dumb. It just means my thinking matures over time. I started wearing this trait like a badge. It still took a while to be okay with sounding a bit dumb in real time, but over time, when people consistently saw the quality of my work, I stopped caring as much.

That said, life is mostly synchronous. Coffee chats, dates, hallway conversations, elevator pitches, cold calls, meetings where someone suddenly says, “Sorry to put you on the spot.” You can’t escape that. So I didn’t. I practiced. I learned to think on my feet. With enough repetition and some coaching, I got comfortable with real-time situations. I relized when I stop trying to impress and just focus on helping, or genuinely having fun, things flow better. I still don’t love sync work — but I can handle it.

As I’m someone who thrives in deep work and async collaboration, I yearn for teams and leaders who get this — not as a productivity hack, but as a way of working. Where thinking is valued more than reacting, and clarity more than speed. Thanks to remote-first, multi-geo teams I’ve worked with over the last 5–6 years, I’ve been lucky to practice this more than most people. Compared to my first 5–8 years of work, the difference is night and day.

Async work gives me the space to go deep and see problems differently. And now, as a new dad, it gives me something even more important — time and presence. I want to be with my daughter when she needs me. I can’t imagine a rigid 9–5 ever allowing that. This may sound like a recent priority, but I don’t see life in silos. Everything is connected. And right now, this matters the most. I want to relive life through her, a little slowly and deeply.

Async, by default → I work best asynchronously. I’m a slow, deep thinker. In real time, I’m decent (just get the job done). Given time, I’m much better. Async gives me space to sit with a problem without rushing to sound smart. I can work sync when needed — life demands it — but the quality gap is obvious. I’ve stopped apologizing for that.

Belief matters → I don’t do great work on things I don’t believe in. I’ve tried. It never ends well. When I believe in the product or the brand, my bar automatically goes up. I care more about the details. I argue harder for the right things. Effort stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like responsibility. Belief changes how seriously I take my work.

Kaizen → I don’t believe in big breakthroughs. I believe in small upgrades. A better sentence. A clearer deck. One less assumption. One more hard question. I’m not always chasing perfection. I just try to be a little better than yesterday. Quiet improvement compounds. You don’t notice it day to day, but over time, the gap shows. It’s a bit boring, but damn effective!

Ubuntu > individual brilliance → I’m only as good as the team I work with. Ubuntu, an African philosophy, captures this well – “I am because we are”. The right people raise your standards without saying a word. They make your blind spots obvious. The wrong team drains energy no matter how talented everyone is. For me, work has always been about people first. Everything else comes after.

Writing as a crutch → I don’t think I’m exceptionally smart. So I write. Started as a way to compensate but ended up becoming a tool and a way of outlet (some call it creative faucet). Writing slows my thinking down. It forces order. Order creates clarity. When I write, I see gaps I would’ve missed otherwise. Writing doesn’t make ideas smarter. It makes them usable. And usable almost always beats clever.

Culture fit is real → I’ve learned this the hard way. I need to align with the company’s purpose and culture to do meaningful work. If I’m constantly fighting the system, I’m wasting energy. When values align, work flows. When they don’t, even good output feels empty.

The best leadership I’ve witnessed rarely came from a title. It happened cross-functionally, beyond formal authority, in places where no one had to listen – but they did. When you don’t control outcomes, headcount, or promotions, leadership strips down to its essence. You can’t rely on power. You can’t mandate alignment. All you have left is trust, clarity, and the ability to move people without pushing them.

One of the most overrated ideas about leadership is direction. We assume leaders must know where to go. But how do you know you have the best idea? If you’ve done your job right and surrounded yourself with people smarter or more experienced than you, odds are someone else does have a better view of the direction. The strongest leaders aren’t obsessed with being right — they’re obsessed with getting it right. As Peter Drucker put it, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Creating it doesn’t mean dictating it. It means shaping the conditions where the best ideas can emerge, regardless of where they come from.

At its core, leadership is empowerment. Especially when you’re working with senior leaders or peers — people you can’t instruct — influence matters more than authority. You lead by inspiration, not control. That requires understanding what truly motivates people. Interestingly, human motivations aren’t infinite. Most of us are driven by some mix of purpose, mastery, autonomy, belonging, or impact. Great leaders don’t manipulate these motivations — they align work to them. They make the pursuit about them, not about themselves. Nelson Mandela captured this quietly when he said, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front.”

Leadership, ultimately, is about people — not processes, not frameworks, not goals. Here’s my blunt take: if you don’t genuinely care about people, you cannot be a great leader. You might be effective. You might ship. You might even win. But you won’t elevate others. Processes scale execution. Goals provide focus. But people carry belief, energy, and resilience. Every great outcome I’ve seen traces back to someone who made others feel trusted, safe, and capable.

And the best leaders are almost always low-key. They’re rarely the kings. They’re the kingmakers. Often invisible. Often unnamed. You might not know who they are publicly, but once they enter a room or a project, things change. Standards rise. Conversations sharpen. Ego lowers. They don’t seek power because they know power corrupts judgment. They don’t chase fame because visibility often dilutes intent. Gandhi’s idea of “simple living, high thinking” captures this perfectly. True leadership doesn’t announce itself. It reveals itself — quietly, through impact.

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood functions in business. It’s often reduced to promotion. Or worse, advertising. Loud campaigns, clever taglines, forced distribution.

At its core, marketing is a service. It exists to connect people to a better version of themselves, or to a change they are already seeking but can’t clearly articulate yet. Conscious marketing doesn’t create fake desire. It clarifies real desire.

As Seth Godin would put it more beautifully than anyone else: “Marketing is the generous act of helping someone become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories — stories that resonate and spread. We don’t get to choose what people want. We get to choose whether we show up to serve them. If you don’t believe in the change you’re making, if you don’t care about the people you’re serving, then you shouldn’t be doing marketing at all.”

In simple terms, marketing is about communicating value to the right people. Not everyone. And doing it in a way that respects their intelligence. The phrase “creating demand” often sounds manipulative, but demand usually already exists. People just don’t know how to name it yet. Customers rarely wake up knowing exactly what they need. They wake up with friction, frustration, or a quiet sense that something could be better. Marketing is the act of connecting that feeling to a clear, honest explanation of value. Value is subjective, yes. Confusion doesn’t have to be.

This is where the idea that “great products sell themselves” falls apart. They don’t. Not because they’re bad, but because humans are busy, biased, and overwhelmed. We default to what’s familiar. We anchor on what we already know. We overlook better options simply because we never fully understood them. Most great products don’t fail due to lack of quality. They fail because the value never became obvious. If you truly believe you’ve built the right product for someone, you have a responsibility to help them find it, understand it, and try it with minimal friction. Otherwise, the product just sits there — well-designed, technically sound, and mostly invisible. And therefore, marketing is a way to reduce the distance between a good product and the people who would genuinely benefit from it.

reMarkable is an interesting example here, not because they shout less, but because they teach more. Beyond the product itself, they invest in educational talks around deep, undistracted thinking — conversations with researchers and practitioners from cognitive science, neuroscience, and calm technology. That content stands on its own. Even if you never buy the device, you walk away clearer about the problem they care about. The product then becomes an obvious extension of that worldview. That’s marketing as service.

I’ve started believing that product marketing has one real job: take messy reality from the market and turn it into something the market can actually act on. That’s it. Everything else is a deliverable.

This is why PMM feels like a blend of left brain and right brain. Not in the “neuroscience” sense — more like two modes. The left brain part is the discipline: customer research, deal reviews, win/loss, objection mining, segment patterns, what language customers naturally use, what they refuse to pay for, what scares them, what they secretly care about. It’s also optimization: what message converts, what demo flow drops, what channel brings junk leads, where the sales motion breaks. PMM is supposed to be the bridge between product and real-world buyer needs, not a layer of pretty words.

But insight alone doesn’t move anything. I’ve seen teams collect brilliant insights and still ship the same homepage and the same pitch deck. Because the hard part is the right brain: articulation. Choosing what to say, what not to say, what order to say it in, and which words feel “native” to the buyer’s world. This is where positioning lives — the decision of who the product is for, what it’s for, and why it wins. April Dunford is blunt about it: positioning is the foundation that everything else sits on — messaging, branding, lead gen, sales.

A solid B2B example is Notion. Notion’s superpower is flexibility, but that same flexibility creates a very real adoption problem: people open it and don’t know where to start. The “blank page” is intimidating. The market insight here isn’t “we need more features.” It’s “reduce starting friction.” Notion’s response wasn’t just nicer messaging — they leaned heavily into templates: starter templates in workspaces, a template gallery, and an ecosystem where templates show you what’s possible and give you a default path.

As a marketer, I think about ethics more than I admit. What should I promote? What should I refuse to promote? I keep telling myself I need a playbook with clear rules. But I don’t have one. Mostly because I’m still trying to understand what “customer value” even means.

If I decide what’s “good” for customers and the market in a rigid manner, I’m being paternalistic. I’m basically saying: I know what value is for you, better than you do. That sounds noble on paper. It’s also a dangerous assumption. Humans don’t buy products only for health or utility. They buy relief, taste, ritual, status, belonging, nostalgia, convenience, even a tiny break from a hard day. Value is not just objective outcomes. It’s lived experience.

Now take Coca-Cola. From a public health lens, sugary drinks are clearly linked to harm when consumed often and in large amounts. WHO summarizes evidence connecting free sugars, especially in sugar-sweetened beverages, to weight gain, in both children and adults. So yes, if your only definition of value is long-term metabolic health, soda looks like a net negative.

But here’s the part that makes this ethically complicated: customers aren’t always optimizing for long-term health. Sometimes they’re optimizing for today. A chilled Coke on a sunny afternoon can be a real moment of joy. A small, reliable pleasure. That pleasure is not “fake value.” It’s just a different category of value. Economics calls this the subjective theory of value — value is not inherent in the product; it’s determined by the person and the context.

This is where marketing ethics gets real: how paternalistic should I be? Do I get to override someone’s subjective value because I believe I know their “objective” best interest? Public health ethics debates around soda taxes exist largely because of this tension — health outcomes vs. autonomy and freedom of choice. Even “nudges” (the softer form of paternalism) try to influence choice while preserving the ability to opt out. That framing is useful for me: guide, don’t coerce; inform, don’t pretend you’re morally superior.

I’ve seen a kid in an Indian village with just ₹5 in hand buy a Parle-G glucose biscuit and look genuinely satisfied. In that moment, sugar isn’t a villain. It’s cheap calories, quick energy, a small treat. Context changes ethics. The same sugar that’s harmful in excess in one life can be meaningful in another life when choices are limited.

So why am I “okay” with Coca-Cola? Not because I think sugary drinks are healthy. I don’t. I’m okay with the existence of the product because I’m not fully convinced marketers should decide value for everyone. What I do believe is non-negotiable is honesty and responsibility: don’t hide harms, don’t target the vulnerable deceptively, don’t romanticize addiction, don’t market “happiness” while burying the tradeoff in fine print. And if you’re serious, you also invest in better options and clearer labeling.

Second-Order Thinking → Second-order thinking means looking beyond immediate results. Many decisions seem good at first but create problems later. Always ask, “What happens next, and then after that?” For example: Cutting costs improves short-term profit, but reduced quality later causes customer churn.

Inversion → Inversion means solving problems backward. Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail—and avoid those paths. It’s often easier to remove obvious failure than engineer perfection. For example: Before launching, list reasons the product might fail (confusing onboarding, poor reliability) and fix those first.

Probabilistic Thinking (Expected Value) → Probabilistic thinking means judging decisions by odds, not certainty. Good decisions can still have bad outcomes, and bad decisions can sometimes work. Focus on long-term probabilities, not one-off results. For example: Taking a risk with a small chance of big upside can be smarter than a “safe” option with limited growth.

Absence of Evidence ≠ Evidence of Absence → Not seeing a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Many risks stay hidden because effects are delayed or people stay silent. This model protects against false confidence. For example: Few customer complaints don’t guarantee satisfaction—many users leave quietly without feedback.

Incentives Drive Behavior → People respond more to rewards than to intentions or values. Systems shape behavior more powerfully than rules or speeches. If incentives are wrong, outcomes will be wrong. For example: If employees are rewarded for speed, quality will drop no matter how often quality is emphasized.

Latticework of Models → No single idea explains reality well. Good decisions combine insights from multiple fields like psychology, incentives, and systems. This reduces blind spots and oversimplification. For example: A strategy fails not because it’s illogical, but because human bias and incentives were ignored.

Silent Failure (Non-Events Bias) → We notice failures that happen, not failures that were prevented. Prevention looks like “nothing,” so it gets undervalued. This leads to underinvestment in safety and resilience. For example: Cybersecurity seems unnecessary until the one year it fails and causes major damage.

Overfitting Reality → Explanations that perfectly describe the past often mislead the future. Humans love clean stories, but reality is messy and uncertain. Simpler causal thinking usually works better. For example: Copying every visible habit of a successful company misses the hidden reasons they succeeded.

Anti-goals → Anti-goals define what you refuse to do or become. They act as guardrails when ambition or pressure clouds judgment. Avoiding stupidity is easier than chasing brilliance. For example: “I will not trade my health or integrity for career advancement.

Identity Lock-In → People resist changing beliefs because it threatens who they think they are. The more public a belief is, the harder it is to update. Separating ego from truth improves decisions. For example: A leader ignores new evidence because admitting error would harm their reputation.

Problem-solving is the core of any management discipline you’re part of. Product, marketing, sales, ops — strip away the jargon and that’s the job. You’re paid to look at messy reality, make sense of it, and move things forward without creating new messes. There are countless problem-solving frameworks out there. Most are bloated.

The simplest-yet-effective one I’ve found comes from a small book called Problem Solving 101. It was originally written for Japanese kids by Ken Watanabe, an ex-McKinsey consultant. The framework is so simple you’ll question if it can actually work. It does. I follow the first four steps closely and then add three additional steps to make it wholesome.

1. Set a clear goal → If the goal is vague, everything downstream is vague. “Do better in APAC” is not a goal. A goal needs constraints. Time, outcome, boundaries.
Example: “Launch our SaaS in APAC” becomes “Win 20 mid-market customers in Singapore and Australia in two quarters with acceptable CAC.”

2. Define the gap → A problem is just the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Until you see the gap clearly, you’re guessing.
Example: We have zero local pipeline, no proof points, and unclear ICP — that’s the gap between today and the APAC goal.

3. Form a hypothesis → Before data, I make a guess. Not a belief — a working theory. Hypotheses give direction. Without one, data just distracts.
Example: “We’ll win fastest in Singapore and ANZ because regulated multi-location businesses feel this pain more acutely.”

4. Test the hypothesis → Now data earns its place. I’m not trying to learn everything — just enough to validate or kill the hypothesis.
Example: Talk to 10 buyers, analyze competitor wins, test messaging with a simple landing page, sanity-check pricing in sales calls.

5. Choose the time horizon → This comes from systems thinking: the same problem produces very different outcomes depending on the time horizon. Short-term fixes often create long-term issues, while long-term fixes look slow at first. If the horizon isn’t explicit, teams end up solving different problems without realizing it. Example: Short term, enter APAC via partners to land a few lighthouse customers. Long term, build a local narrative and ecosystem that compounds.

6. Consider trade-offs (second-order effects) → As Thomas Sowell put it, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Every solution creates second-order effects. Ignoring them doesn’t remove the cost — it just delays it. Good problem solving is about choosing which trade-offs you’re willing to live with. Example: Partner-led GTM buys speed but costs control. Local hiring builds depth but burns runway.

7. Write it down → This comes from the idea of writing as a thinking tool — Orwell, Munger, and the “if you can’t explain it simply” principle all point to this. Writing forces clarity and exposes weak thinking fast. Example: A one-page APAC GTM brief that explains the goal, gap, hypothesis, horizon, and trade-offs without a meeting.

Who are you without your second brain?

Make hard things unsexy again

Too much introspection is a disservice

Don’t become an actor

Limit your opinions to have stronger ones

Topical themes

Probabilistic thinking

Cut out negative people

Consume long form

Quick Success

Everyone Should Write a Book

Migration of Wealth – The Dark Side of Capitalism

Why Building an Audience is a Disservice to Creation

Beyond the narratives

Paradox of clarity

Dont let AI become your ghostwriter

Marketers must learn from the masters of storytelling

The Guilt of a Marketer

Charity isn’t easy

Have a Charity Strategy

Capitalist by mind, Socialist by heart

Would healthcare companies want me to be healthy?

News is not important, but History is

Wise vs Smart

Conscious Reading