Feeling Stuck in Life? Rebuild Your Luck
For founders and high‑achievers who feel stuck in life and a little “unlucky,” this essay shows how victim mindset shrinks your agency and how to start getting your luck back.
When I was eleven, my school participated in a soccer tournament, and I hoped to be in the team. I had skipped a grade, so I was always the youngest, two years behind the other boys. They were taller, and their voices were starting to change. I still had a round face and a slightly plumpy body. When we lined up, the coach walked past us with his clipboard, barely glancing at me, almost as if I wasn’t there. I became sure my name wouldn’t be there. The day the list was pasted outside the hall, I read it twice, hoping the names would change, and then watched a boy I always outperformed in class run off to tell his mother he’d made it to the team.
I went home and studied math, because math was the one thing that never let me down. The boys who made the team were taller, older, faster. They were the athletes; I was the studious one. The world had just put us in our places, and the list only confirmed what I already “knew.” I was good at math. I wasn’t good at sports. I held onto that belief for years and never once checked if it was still true. Needless to say, I never got lucky in athletics.
But I did get lucky with some things I tried later in life - raising a startup, and lately writing - because it involved taking a leap of faith, and doing so involved taking control of your agency. Educationist Sir Ken Robinson had argued that childhood conditioning - primarily through traditional, standardised schooling - systematically trains children out of their natural creativity, curiosity, and diverse ways of thinking. And that is why our story here starts in childhood.
Babies are agentic
Most evenings after dinner, I walk the promenade on Carter Road in Bandra and watch the children. There is always at least one just learning to walk. She falls a hundred times in an hour, lands flat on her face, sits up, goes again, and not one of those falls seems to touch her. She cannot think “I am not a walker,” because there is no “I” in there yet for the fall to stick to.
We even know roughly when that “I” arrives. Put a dot of rouge on a baby’s nose and sit her in front of a mirror. Before roughly eighteen months of age, she reaches for the baby in the glass. A few months later, she reaches for her own nose because, for the first time, there is a “me” that the mirror is showing her. Psychologist Michael Lewis traced the next part: shame, pride, embarrassment; the whole family of feelings that need a self to measure against do not exist before that moment.
So the baby does not feel ashamed of falling because there is no self to be ashamed of. Failure stays what it actually is: information. She runs a hundred experiments an hour and keeps none of the verdicts, and that is why every story is still open to her. Nothing in her whispers “people like me can’t do this,” because there is no “people like me” yet.
This, in fact, is true for each one of us. We fell and rose and spoke our first impossible words, and if anyone had spoken to us in three languages during those years, we would have walked away fluent in all three, without ever deciding to be “a language person.” By venturing into unfamiliar territory without the "I" to defend, we were unknowingly increasing our surface area for luck to succeed in things we tried out. But our social conditioning forces us to conform, fear failure and protest the “I” at any cost.
Stories define your self‑worth
Recent work in neuroscience, including the Free Energy Principle, describes the brain as an inference machine that constantly predicts the world to avoid surprises. Its job is simple: guess what’s coming next and steer you away from nasty shocks, because some surprises really can kill you. Later, culture and experience give you a story about who you are, and the brain quietly starts treating threats to the stories that define your self-worth almost like threats to survival.
As a child, you run experiment after experiment. You try things, fall over, get up, try again, and none of it yet adds up to a story about your worth. Adolescence and adulthood introduce that story, and the irony is that it’s mostly written by other people. A teacher says you’re the clever one. A report card agrees. A board outside a hall confirms it. Slowly, the soft “me” hardens into a specific sentence: I am the studious one. I am not the athletic one. Once this narrative crystallises, the brain takes on a new mandate: prevent anything that might contradict the self‑image.
From that point on, every unfamiliar thing becomes a possible verdict against the sentence, so you quietly drift away from it. This is the part worth sitting with. The self is not dangerous just because it exists. It becomes dangerous the moment it has been told what it is, because now there is an identity to guard, and a possibility of failure feels like a threat to that identity. At a deeper level, your brain starts to treat “this might prove me wrong” almost like “this might hurt me,” so you steer clear.
And because we hate blaming ourselves, we learn to blame everything around us instead: the environment, the timing, the market, the room we weren’t invited into. Psychologists call this self‑handicapping: you set up the excuse before the half-hearted attempt, so that whatever happens, the failure can be pinned on the excuse instead of on you. A “brutal market,” a “broken system,” or “bad timing” becomes a shield between reality and your identity.
I did the same thing. I never wandered toward another field again, not this sport, not the next one, not the school play, not the debate team, nothing outside the one sentence I trusted. I told myself I was focusing on what I was good at, being honest about myself. I blamed it on being the youngest, the gifted kid, the one from a non‑athletic family. It was none of those things.
For founders and high‑achievers who feel stuck in life and a little “unlucky,” this essay shows how victim mindset shrinks your agency and how to start getting your luck back.
When I was eleven, my school participated in a soccer tournament, and I hoped to be in the team. I had skipped a grade, so I was always the youngest, two years behind the other boys. They were taller, and their voices were starting to change. I still had a round face and a slightly plumpy body. When we lined up, the coach walked past us with his clipboard, barely glancing at me, almost as if I wasn’t there. I became sure my name wouldn’t be there. The day the list was pasted outside the hall, I read it twice, hoping the names would change, and then watched a boy I always outperformed in class run off to tell his mother he’d made it to the team.
I went home and studied math, because math was the one thing that never let me down. The boys who made the team were taller, older, faster. They were the athletes; I was the studious one. The world had just put us in our places, and the list only confirmed what I already “knew.” I was good at math. I wasn’t good at sports. I held onto that belief for years and never once checked if it was still true. Needless to say, I never got lucky in athletics.
But I did get lucky with some things I tried later in life - raising a startup, and lately writing - because it involved taking a leap of faith, and doing so involved taking control of your agency. Educationist Sir Ken Robinson had argued that childhood conditioning - primarily through traditional, standardised schooling - systematically trains children out of their natural creativity, curiosity, and diverse ways of thinking. And that is why our story here starts in childhood.
Babies are agentic
Most evenings after dinner, I walk the promenade on Carter Road in Bandra and watch the children. There is always at least one just learning to walk. She falls a hundred times in an hour, lands flat on her face, sits up, goes again, and not one of those falls seems to touch her. She cannot think “I am not a walker,” because there is no “I” in there yet for the fall to stick to.
We even know roughly when that “I” arrives. Put a dot of rouge on a baby’s nose and sit her in front of a mirror. Before roughly eighteen months of age, she reaches for the baby in the glass. A few months later, she reaches for her own nose because, for the first time, there is a “me” that the mirror is showing her. Psychologist Michael Lewis traced the next part: shame, pride, embarrassment; the whole family of feelings that need a self to measure against do not exist before that moment.
So the baby does not feel ashamed of falling because there is no self to be ashamed of. Failure stays what it actually is: information. She runs a hundred experiments an hour and keeps none of the verdicts, and that is why every story is still open to her. Nothing in her whispers “people like me can’t do this,” because there is no “people like me” yet.
This, in fact, is true for each one of us. We fell and rose and spoke our first impossible words, and if anyone had spoken to us in three languages during those years, we would have walked away fluent in all three, without ever deciding to be “a language person.” By venturing into unfamiliar territory without the "I" to defend, we were unknowingly increasing our surface area for luck to succeed in things we tried out. But our social conditioning forces us to conform, fear failure and protest the “I” at any cost.
Stories define your self‑worth
Recent work in neuroscience, including the Free Energy Principle, describes the brain as an inference machine that constantly predicts the world to avoid surprises. Its job is simple: guess what’s coming next and steer you away from nasty shocks, because some surprises really can kill you. Later, culture and experience give you a story about who you are, and the brain quietly starts treating threats to the stories that define your self-worth almost like threats to survival.
As a child, you run experiment after experiment. You try things, fall over, get up, try again, and none of it yet adds up to a story about your worth. Adolescence and adulthood introduce that story, and the irony is that it’s mostly written by other people. A teacher says you’re the clever one. A report card agrees. A board outside a hall confirms it. Slowly, the soft “me” hardens into a specific sentence: I am the studious one. I am not the athletic one. Once this narrative crystallises, the brain takes on a new mandate: prevent anything that might contradict the self‑image.
From that point on, every unfamiliar thing becomes a possible verdict against the sentence, so you quietly drift away from it. This is the part worth sitting with. The self is not dangerous just because it exists. It becomes dangerous the moment it has been told what it is, because now there is an identity to guard, and a possibility of failure feels like a threat to that identity. At a deeper level, your brain starts to treat “this might prove me wrong” almost like “this might hurt me,” so you steer clear.
And because we hate blaming ourselves, we learn to blame everything around us instead: the environment, the timing, the market, the room we weren’t invited into. Psychologists call this self‑handicapping: you set up the excuse before the half-hearted attempt, so that whatever happens, the failure can be pinned on the excuse instead of on you. A “brutal market,” a “broken system,” or “bad timing” becomes a shield between reality and your identity.
I did the same thing. I never wandered toward another field again, not this sport, not the next one, not the school play, not the debate team, nothing outside the one sentence I trusted. I told myself I was focusing on what I was good at, being honest about myself. I blamed it on being the youngest, the gifted kid, the one from a non‑athletic family. It was none of those things.
Feeling Stuck in Life? Rebuild Your Luck
For founders and high‑achievers who feel stuck in life and a little “unlucky,” this essay shows how victim mindset shrinks your agency and how to start getting your luck back.
When I was eleven, my school participated in a soccer tournament, and I hoped to be in the team. I had skipped a grade, so I was always the youngest, two years behind the other boys. They were taller, and their voices were starting to change. I still had a round face and a slightly plumpy body. When we lined up, the coach walked past us with his clipboard, barely glancing at me, almost as if I wasn’t there. I became sure my name wouldn’t be there. The day the list was pasted outside the hall, I read it twice, hoping the names would change, and then watched a boy I always outperformed in class run off to tell his mother he’d made it to the team.
I went home and studied math, because math was the one thing that never let me down. The boys who made the team were taller, older, faster. They were the athletes; I was the studious one. The world had just put us in our places, and the list only confirmed what I already “knew.” I was good at math. I wasn’t good at sports. I held onto that belief for years and never once checked if it was still true. Needless to say, I never got lucky in athletics.
But I did get lucky with some things I tried later in life - raising a startup, and lately writing - because it involved taking a leap of faith, and doing so involved taking control of your agency. Educationist Sir Ken Robinson had argued that childhood conditioning - primarily through traditional, standardised schooling - systematically trains children out of their natural creativity, curiosity, and diverse ways of thinking. And that is why our story here starts in childhood.
Babies are agentic
Most evenings after dinner, I walk the promenade on Carter Road in Bandra and watch the children. There is always at least one just learning to walk. She falls a hundred times in an hour, lands flat on her face, sits up, goes again, and not one of those falls seems to touch her. She cannot think “I am not a walker,” because there is no “I” in there yet for the fall to stick to.
We even know roughly when that “I” arrives. Put a dot of rouge on a baby’s nose and sit her in front of a mirror. Before roughly eighteen months of age, she reaches for the baby in the glass. A few months later, she reaches for her own nose because, for the first time, there is a “me” that the mirror is showing her. Psychologist Michael Lewis traced the next part: shame, pride, embarrassment; the whole family of feelings that need a self to measure against do not exist before that moment.
So the baby does not feel ashamed of falling because there is no self to be ashamed of. Failure stays what it actually is: information. She runs a hundred experiments an hour and keeps none of the verdicts, and that is why every story is still open to her. Nothing in her whispers “people like me can’t do this,” because there is no “people like me” yet.
This, in fact, is true for each one of us. We fell and rose and spoke our first impossible words, and if anyone had spoken to us in three languages during those years, we would have walked away fluent in all three, without ever deciding to be “a language person.” By venturing into unfamiliar territory without the "I" to defend, we were unknowingly increasing our surface area for luck to succeed in things we tried out. But our social conditioning forces us to conform, fear failure and protest the “I” at any cost.
Stories define your self‑worth
Recent work in neuroscience, including the Free Energy Principle, describes the brain as an inference machine that constantly predicts the world to avoid surprises. Its job is simple: guess what’s coming next and steer you away from nasty shocks, because some surprises really can kill you. Later, culture and experience give you a story about who you are, and the brain quietly starts treating threats to the stories that define your self-worth almost like threats to survival.
As a child, you run experiment after experiment. You try things, fall over, get up, try again, and none of it yet adds up to a story about your worth. Adolescence and adulthood introduce that story, and the irony is that it’s mostly written by other people. A teacher says you’re the clever one. A report card agrees. A board outside a hall confirms it. Slowly, the soft “me” hardens into a specific sentence: I am the studious one. I am not the athletic one. Once this narrative crystallises, the brain takes on a new mandate: prevent anything that might contradict the self‑image.
From that point on, every unfamiliar thing becomes a possible verdict against the sentence, so you quietly drift away from it. This is the part worth sitting with. The self is not dangerous just because it exists. It becomes dangerous the moment it has been told what it is, because now there is an identity to guard, and a possibility of failure feels like a threat to that identity. At a deeper level, your brain starts to treat “this might prove me wrong” almost like “this might hurt me,” so you steer clear.
And because we hate blaming ourselves, we learn to blame everything around us instead: the environment, the timing, the market, the room we weren’t invited into. Psychologists call this self‑handicapping: you set up the excuse before the half-hearted attempt, so that whatever happens, the failure can be pinned on the excuse instead of on you. A “brutal market,” a “broken system,” or “bad timing” becomes a shield between reality and your identity.
I did the same thing. I never wandered toward another field again, not this sport, not the next one, not the school play, not the debate team, nothing outside the one sentence I trusted. I told myself I was focusing on what I was good at, being honest about myself. I blamed it on being the youngest, the gifted kid, the one from a non‑athletic family. It was none of those things.
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Become the master of your life
When I eventually started a company, the labels I had grown up with came with me, but the company had no use for any of them. It did not care that I was the studious one, the youngest in the room, the boy who wasn’t a natural. It needed me to pitch to people who could end us in a sentence. It needed me to walk into rooms where I knew nothing, to stand on stages I would once have paid to avoid. It is humbling to attribute success to luck. But a founder, as such, is not born lucky. He manufactures luck by walking into the unknown before he feels ready. In that sense, I consider myself lucky, but to be there, I also put my old identity to rest.
The difference between someone who seems “lucky” and someone who feels stuck is not raw intelligence or even circumstance. It is whether they’ve learned to act as the master of their own life instead of its victim. It’s about exercising agency, being in control of your decisions. It is a decision you make a hundred times a day, usually without noticing you are making it. Two people can stand in front of the same wall: the same market, the same rejection, the same unfair system. One treats the wall as something they might climb, walk around, or chip away at. The other treats it as something that was done to them, full stop. The wall is the same. The key difference is where each person files the cause of the problem.
If you’re intelligent and articulate, you can build a flawless story about why you can’t act, and on paper it will look airtight. But underneath that story, something much simpler may have happened: you saw a move that scared you, and you said no. The freer your mind, the better your reasons sound, and the easier it is for that quiet refusal to disappear behind them. This is where the gap between the serendipity mindset and the victim mindset really shows up. An open mind is more willing to discover, experiment and even fail. When you approach the situation as a master, you treat it as something you can still touch, influence, or learn from, so there are always a few moves left on the table. When you approach it as a victim, you treat it as something that was simply done to you, which seals it off as untouchable by definition. Same wall, same odds, same person. One version of you reaches for a tool. The other can only draft a complaint.
Then, make the self smaller
Once you decide to think like a master instead of a victim, the hard part is sticking with it. Your protected self will keep trying to pull you back to the old pattern whenever you stop paying attention. So the second move is slower and more physical: you turn the volume of yourself down until it’s quiet enough to step around.
Start by analysing what you talk about. You spot a big, important, slightly terrifying move and within seconds you’ve talked yourself into doing some small, safe, busy task instead, telling yourself you’re just being “practical” or “scrappy.” That sudden swerve is your mind protecting its picture of you. To break free, ask one uncomfortable question in real time: am I protecting myself from the verdict? Once you name the swerve loudly, most of the excuse loses its power. Then, run the smallest real rep. You don’t have to bet your life, and you shouldn’t; reckless bets are just the same fear. Take one tiny, survivable step onto a path you had crossed out: one pitch email, one rough prototype shown to a single stranger, one honest post published. The point isn’t whether it “works.” The point is to teach your nervous system that fear and safety can sit in the same room and that you can feel your stomach drop and still be okay.
Finally, spend time in rooms where nobody knows your old labels, because your picture of yourself is propped up by an audience that agreed to it, and a café full of strangers never signed that deal. Meet people who have no idea what you’re supposed to be. Read work from other areas, far outside this week’s panic, so you can see your own from a distance. None of this makes you bigger. But each of these moves makes you lighter, and a lighter self crosses out fewer paths.
Luck is only the paths you left open
Luck was never something you had and then lost. Luck is venturing. The child is lucky because it ventures constantly, toward every field in sight, with no sentence to protect and nothing to lose by being wrong. You stopped being lucky the day you stopped venturing toward the things that might prove you wrong. The paths did not close. You just stopped walking toward them. You do not grow your luck by making yourself bigger. You grow it by getting out of your own way. You get the child's luck back not by deleting the self, which is impossible, but by making it small enough to walk past.
You did not run out of luck. You crossed it out, one reasonable sentence at a time, and it is all still there, waiting behind every door you closed from the inside.
Pick one of those doors this week and draw the road back onto your map. Not to prove who you are. Just to walk it. And do it deliberately. Consciously. Because you are your own master.
To be continued…
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