Author: Anirudh Chandrakant

In Kannada, there’s a phrase—hane bara—that means “what’s written on your forehead.” Your destiny. The life that was meant for you. But maybe what’s written on your forehead isn’t an outcome. Maybe it’s a starting point.

Success in life should be measured by whether you meet or exceed your potential. To me, potential isn’t some mystical talent, it is the product of your opportunities and your values. Opportunities are almost always a combination of where you are raised, your financial situation, and family network. Values are the intangible lessons that you learn as you grow up. They teach you right from wrong, but they also dictate your priorities and how you should lead your life. These inputs shape what you can become.

We understand this instinctively. We admire rags-to-riches stories not simply because someone became wealthy, but because of the distance they traveled to exceed their potential. We look down on “nepo babies” for the opposite reason. Their achievements might be significant in absolute terms, but we sense the gap between what they were given and what they made of it, and we find it wanting. And we speak with a particular respect about immigrants who leave everything behind to expand their opportunities, carrying values like hard work to give their children a chance to exceed a potential that they themselves never had.

My father worked at a public bank in India, probably in the top twenty percent of income earners. We grew up in large cities: Bangalore and Mumbai. My parents raised us on hard work, frugality, and discipline: study well, stay well-read, save rather than spend, avoid unnecessary risk.

Given that inheritance, I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I finished my degree in computer science, moved to the US for an MBA, and built a career at Google and Amazon. I became a Director at Amazon leading over two hundred people. It looked like success, and in many ways it was. But if I’m honest, I have met my potential, not exceeded it. I followed the script I was given, just at a slightly higher altitude.

What feels different is now. I left Amazon to start my own company, something my inherited values would never have endorsed. Risk-taking wasn’t just absent from my upbringing; it was actively discouraged. I don’t know yet if this company will succeed. But I think, by my own framework, that’s not quite the point. By choosing to step off the path, I’ve already begun to exceed my potential. I’m not rejecting the hard work my parents taught me; I’m applying it to a risk they wouldn’t have taken. I’m building on their map, and then going somewhere there isn’t a line in my forehead for.

“My manager wants me to Think Big. How do I do that?” This was probably the most common question I would get during mentoring discussions at Amazon, because ‘Think Big’ is an Amazon Leadership Principle that everyone is evaluated on. There are versions of this elsewhere: ‘think outside the box’, think different’, ‘10x thinking’, and so on.

The problem with this phrase is that is it is backwards. An idea can be big post-implementation. But it can be debilitating to think of a ‘big’ idea from a blank space. What we need are ways to approach solving problems in non-obvious ways, to look for opportunities where the streetlights don’t shine.

“If I gave you a billion dollars”
It was the summer of 2019 and Jeff Bezos was not happy. The Wall Street Journal had published an article stating that Amazon has ceded control of its site to third-party sellers who were selling counterfeit, unsafe, and mislabeled products. The US Trade Representative had added Amazon to its list of ‘notorious markets’ for counterfeiting. And, worst of all, he was receiving dozens of emails from customers who were unhappy about the quality of products they were purchasing from Amazon. He asked his team for ideas to improve this and reviewed plans for the next year. The plans included incremental improvements, which left him dissatisfied.

He laid out a challenge – “If I gave you a billion dollars, how will you clean this mess up?” This, suddenly freed up the teams from constraining their thinking to annual budgets and current headcount, and think afresh. Without boring you with the details, we came up with a few different ideas that were implemented over the next three years that made a dramatic improvement in the quality of the store and of the third-party sellers selling on the store. The kicker is that we needed only a tiny fraction of the billion dollars to make the changes.

“Let’s take a goal that we will miss”
Everyone thought we were incompetent idiots. It was taking us three months, on average, to onboard a business to become a seller on Amazon, after we ensured that they complied with European regulations. This had slowed down growth and had frustrated all sellers on Amazon even before they sold anything. We had a plan to reduce this time by 10% for the next year. I was sitting in my manager’s office telling him about everyone that was screaming at me and we were wondering what we could do.

After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Let’s take a goal that we will miss. Instead of reducing the onboarding time by 10%, what if we took a goal to reduce it by 90%?” It was ridiculous, but it was also a spark that forced us to approach the problem completely differently. We ended the year by reducing the onboarding time by 70%. We missed our goal, but did hell of a lot better than the 10% we had set out to do earlier.

“Creativity is just connecting things”
New ideas emerge from connecting the boundaries between different fields, specializations, and points of views. There are too many examples to cite: from how reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide triggered an idea that we implemented in a product to how learning about a process in China led us to incorporate a feature in another product. One time, I rejected an idea our team came up with until an expert in Operations showed me that the idea would not only make it a better experience for customers, it would also save us millions of dollars from operational efficiency.

I have learned that reading widely, being insatiably curious, and being open to others’ points of views leads you to new ideas. Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things”. Who am I to disagree with that?

“What could go right?”
There you have it: temporarily get rid of constraints, set goals that are a little silly but not completely unattainable, and seek the intersection of diverse fields of thought. These will allow you to escape the gravitational pull of conventional thinking. Last, remember that new ideas are fragile and ill-formed, so I always ask myself a question when looking at new ideas: “what could go right?”

Growing up, I have realized, is about figuring out two things.

The art of human interaction. As a grown-up, you are thrust into a complex web of relationships. You have to figure out how you will partner, collaborate, communicate, commiserate, conspire, compromise, debate, haggle, and argue with other grown-ups. How you will lead, motivate, mentor, teach, entertain, support, tolerate, appreciate, and sometimes disappoint others. How you will learn from, get inspired by, tell stories to, and enjoy the company of your peers. Kids, on the other hand, do their own thing in their own world and, occasionally, tolerate adult interruptions.

The choreography of time. When you’re young, someone else structures your day – from wake-up time to meal times, from school classes to extracurriculars, and from playtime to bedtime. As a grown-up, you have to figure out how to structure your day. You need to look ahead and think about what a future version of you will appreciate. Both a near-future version of you (“what will I eat for lunch?”) and a distant-future version of you (“where do I want to spend this winter?”). You have to figure out the best way to prioritize, create a schedule, and then follow-through on your plan.

Getting good at these — navigating relationships and orchestrating time — is the key to a high-quality, fulfilling life. It is also exhausting to do consistently day after day and year after year.

This is why growing up sucks.

“I’m done”, she declared, almost unenthused. Five minutes earlier, I had handed her a canvas and acrylic paints. After a brief pause, she created this painting with bold strokes filled with a clarity of purpose.

“What did you paint?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was an idiot for asking such a dumb question. “It’s a beach at sunset. Can’t you see?”

In contrast, it takes me forever to write something. An elaborate internal editor’s dialog ensues – is this worth writing about? what would I say that others haven’t? will I be able to articulate what I am thinking? will anyone read it? if they do, will they think lesser of me?

15 years ago, I had a blog and I wrote consistently. Now, my internal thoughts paralyze me, preventing me from even starting. I blamed it on “writer’s block” and my 5-year old showed me that that’s bullshit. There is no such thing as writer’s block, it’s just fear of judgement.

She made me wonder: what if I didn’t care what others thought? What if I wrote like she painted?

As she started to walk away, I asked her to sign her painting. “People should know who the artist is”, I explained. She turned the canvas upside down before scrawling her name across the bottom.