– 14th September, Andheri Society Mandir, Mumbai
🏋️ Health
This week the body got whatever was left over, and there wasn’t much left over.
Gym on Thursday. A home workout early on Saturday. Then a genuinely mad session on Sunday that I’m still feeling in my legs. Three good ones in a week that had no room for any of them, so I’ll take it.
Sleep is where it fell apart. Wednesday ended at 2AM because something broke at exactly the wrong hour. Saturday ended at 1AM. Sunday didn’t really end — I got home at six in the morning. By Monday I was running on four hours and treating that like a normal way to operate a human being.
Then Monday night I slept at 11:30 like a child. The body had stopped asking and started taking.
It rained all day Sunday. Cats and dogs, for hours. Somehow that was the calmest part of the week.
💻 Work
I’m keeping the specifics out of this one, but the shape is worth holding on to.
The week opened with me realigning something and then doing the genuinely hard part — stepping back and letting someone else finish it. That is not my instinct. My instinct is to take it back and do it myself. I didn’t. It came out fine. I need to remember that it came out fine.
Midweek there was a real panic. Something wasn’t good enough and everybody in the room could feel it. What followed was just hustle — no clever fix, no shortcut, people staying on it until it stopped being bad. It shipped. It was good by the end. I keep wanting there to be a smarter version of that story and there isn’t one. Sometimes you just grind it until it’s right.
Then days of research, and a whole system finished at the end of it. Documents written. A long list built, a sit-down to get it approved, use cases locked. That stretch where you move from “we could do anything” to “we are doing these two things” is the part nobody photographs, and it’s the part that decides everything after it.
The weekend was edits. Two out by 1AM on Saturday. Corrections all through Sunday. Two more after that. Then Monday morning CM needed something urgently and my plan for the day just stepped aside for it. Handled it, sent it, took the notes, sent it on.
Four days out of five this week, the work decided what I was doing before I got to.
📖 Learning
Two, and they’re very different sizes.
The small one is actually enormous.
Thursday I had my first proper briefing session after ages, I still remember my own agency work where i use to consult the brief before onboarding. Standing in front of a team, explaining something I’d built, walking them through how it works and what they could actually do with it. I have been in a hundred rooms. I had never been the person holding one.
It went fine! Genuinely fine. And then I walked out and my head would not shut up for about six hours. How am I actually doing this. How do I get better at it. How do I pitch better, explain better, hold a room better, read a room better. Because that is a completely separate skill from making the thing, and I had never once had to look straight at it until somebody put me at the front.
You spend years getting good at the craft and then you find out there’s this whole other craft sitting next to it that you’ve barely touched.
The big one happened at 2AM in somebody’s living room.
Sunday night, a house full of people, everybody drinking, that stage of the night where the conversation stops being funny and starts being true. And somewhere in there it landed on me properly landed, not the kind of thought you have and forget by Tuesday.
How much life owes me. How much there is still to do. How much of it I’ve been walking past without appreciating, and how much of it I have to go and get back.
There is nothing beyond me and nothing behind me. No ceiling above that I can’t get to, and no floor underneath to catch me if I don’t. Which sounds frightening written down and honestly felt like the opposite. It felt like being handed something.
Because if that’s true, the order is obvious. I have to prove myself to me first. The world comes second. And I can’t skip that first step, because if I can’t agree with myself — if I can’t look at what I’m doing and back it — then where exactly is the growth coming from? How do I take the leap of faith toward any of the things I’ve always said I wanted, if the person taking the leap doesn’t believe in the person who’s landing?
I’m at a point in life right now. It’s not a bad point. But I want the enthusiastic point back. The one where I was moving because I couldn’t not move.
So, plainly: I want to be happy. I want a million dollars in my bank account. I want all of it, the whole thing, the full unreasonable list. And if I’m going to actually chase that instead of just saying it at 2AM, the answer is +1. Every day, every week, one more than what was required. Not a transformation. Not a new me. Just +1, over and over, for long enough that it becomes ridiculous.
That’s the realignment. That’s the actual headline of my week.
☕ Small Wins
Letting someone else finish the job. Small on paper. Not small for me.
The briefing. Whatever comes after it, there was a first one and it was this week.
Two songs out by 1AM on Saturday, two more after that. There’s a specific kind of tired that comes with shipping late at night and it isn’t the bad kind.
The drive. 3AM through Bombay, home by 6, and I was the one driving. The city barely exists at that hour. You get roads that don’t belong to you at any other time.
My first car elevator. I have nothing intelligent to say about this. I was delighted. A lift for cars is still a thing that gets me.
Groceries on Monday evening and then Munna Bhai MBBS. Ordinary domestic nothing, at the end of a week that had none of it.
📚 A Line That Stayed
“Your hard work writes your own luck. Your life decides whether you can fuel it or not.”
I keep turning this one over.
The first half is the part everybody likes to say. Do the work, make your own luck, fine. It’s the second half that’s uncomfortable, because your life is the thing that has to keep the engine running. Your sleep. Your health. The people around you. Whether there’s anything left in you at the end of a day. The work writes the luck and then your life has to pay for it.
Then I look at my week. 2AM. 1AM. 6AM. Four hours. The work got written. I’m not sure I fuelled anything.
🧠 Brain Refreshment
Friday evening
Conversation with people I like. Nothing dramatic, nothing loud. Subtle, smooth fun which was exactly the shape of thing I needed after the week in front of it.
Saturday
RK came over to the house. We ate Chinese, sat around, worked, shipped two things by 1AM. Some of the best working sessions don’t feel like work at all. They feel like two people hanging out who happen to have laptops open.
Sunday night into Monday morning
A house full of people, everyone drinking, a conversation that turned serious in the good way. Then the drive. Bombay at 3AM with the windows down, home at 6. Ganpati the next day.
Monday
Munna Bhai MBBS. I wasn’t planning to watch anything. It just happened, and it was exactly right.
🎵 Music
Kailash Kher — Tere Naina
https://open.spotify.com/track/76Hb0Dyy6kDcR3QEZwAycE?si=6606d716ceff413d
I’ve been on Kailash Kher all week. There’s a rawness in that voice that never gets produced out of it, and after days inside technical work — precision, corrections, fixing things until they’re clean — it was good to listen to something that isn’t trying to be clean at all.
💭 Closing Thoughts
Here’s what I noticed only while writing this down.
This was the week I stopped being the person doing the work and started being the person other people come to. Somebody panicked and I was part of fixing it. Somebody called on Monday and my entire day rearranged itself around it. A team sat in a room and I was the one explaining. I let someone finish a job instead of taking it back off them.
None of that was planned. It all just happened inside the same seven days, and I can only see the pattern now that it’s on the page.
The cost is obvious and it’s sitting up in the Health section. Four hours of sleep is not a strategy. The line about fuelling your luck is right there next to the 6AM drive and I know exactly what it’s trying to tell me.
But I’d be lying if I called it anything other than a good week. Things shipped. Something cracked open on Thursday about who I might be in a room. Sunday handed me something bigger to think about than the next deadline. And somewhere between all of it there was rain, and Chinese food, and an empty city at 3AM, and a lift for cars.
The work was loud. The edges were quiet and good. Both of those are true at once.
Ganpati this week.
See you next week.
PS: This had been written by the claude testing some new stuff!
— Naman
Mumbai
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