Solitude: The Founder Skill Nobody Trains For
The deliberate practice of stepping away for reflection can save you from the loneliness of not being able to hear your own judgement, and from mistaking acquired goals for the chosen ones.
From Yeats to Eliot, poets have romanticised solitude as the wellspring for reflection, creativity, and self-discovery. For a founder, though, it would either take a lot of chutzpah or nonchalance to claim solitude as a wonder skill for building. But here’s my justification for why every founder needs to learn to step aside and reflect in solitude before making everyday decisions that make or break companies. Indeed, building has never been easier than today, but so has building the wrong thing amid the clutter and chaos of information overload, and therefore the need for solitude.
Each week, when I meet founders in Mumbai and Bangalore, I find them overwhelmed by advice on how to raise a company, sometimes even from people who haven’t run companies. There are courses, mentors, networks, and now AI as well, all feeding founders with more information than ever, but this crucial skill is still not part of any conversation.
Solitude.
Solitude is a trainable skill that helps you filter the noise in a full room, unlike loneliness, which makes you feel isolated in the same room. It’s true that the higher we go, the lonelier it gets, but the skill I’m arguing for here is not learning to endure loneliness. It’s learning to cultivate solitude as a tool for thinking clearly about what you are building and why.
How I discovered solitude
I’m grateful I built my first company before ‘being in the loop with the world’ became fashionable. Today, a typical person touches his/her phone thousands of times a day. In this environment, you don’t just lose your ability to think critically; you lose the ability to be alone with your own judgement long enough to decide what you truly want to build.
When I was in my early twenties and starting as an entrepreneur, I did what everyone thought a ‘serious’ founder should do: I was always online. I joined every meeting, took every call, and answered every message. I measured my worth by how much visible effort I could show each day. Two things happened. First, I didn’t realise my way of building a company couldn’t scale. I tried to solve everything by just being present and working hard, instead of using structure or judgement. Second, I started to crumble under the pressure of making a choice that would ultimately decide the fate of our 740-member team: should we build a new lending arm or switch to an international SaaS product?
Advice poured in from every direction. Investors, friends, mentors, Twitter, LinkedIn, conferences and everyone had an opinion about what I should do. I couldn’t tell if the advice that helped me so far was the same advice I could trust for my future.
Even though I was surrounded by people, I felt a very specific kind of loneliness; the kind you feel when you know the decision has to be yours, despite being surrounded by advisors. With barely enough money in the bank to pay my colleagues, I cut myself from the world and unexpectedly entered into a week-long solitude.
We keep mistaking more input for a better answer
When I talk about solitude, I don’t mean cutting yourself off from people. I mean choosing to step away from others and from the constant stream of information so you can sit with your own thoughts and data. Loneliness is different. It’s the perceived gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. Constant company can coexist with deep loneliness. Voluntary solitude can coexist with a strong sense of belonging. The problem is that founders often mix up the two. We stay lonely in a crowd and never take the solitude that could actually help us.
We’re taught that having more information gives us an advantage. Read more, follow more, ask more people. In a fast-moving world, staying surrounded by input feels like staying ahead. But why does more input leave founders feeling lost? Because real excellence comes from years of focused work, and you can’t find that focus in a crowd. The crowd gives you a hundred directions and calls them options.
AI has made this problem even worse. The small moments when you used to think - like in the shower, on a walk, or during a drive - are now filled with feeds or chatbots that think for you. We’ve taken away the last bits of quiet corners in our day where you hear the real voice that builds your company.
When you start wanting what the room wants
In my week-long solitude, I learned something I couldn’t have found in any online thread or presentation. I hadn’t returned to India to build an international SaaS. What mattered to me was something harder and less glamorous: making affordable, accessible credit possible and pushing for real financial inclusion. That was the work I was willing to sacrifice my youth for, or die trying, even if the more celebrated story belonged to the SaaS founder.
Psychologists have shown that we can automatically adopt other people’s goals just by observing their behaviour. Your social environment can invisibly reprogram your ambitions. When you are unsure, you look at what the people around you are doing, and you copy it. Robert Cialdini, the author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’, called this ‘social proof’, claiming that under uncertainty, the actions of others become your evidence for the right move. It’s an ancient and efficient instinct, and it’s also how you end up wanting things you never sat down and chose.
If your team wants to scale, you start wanting to scale too. If investors want a bigger funding round, that becomes your dream. When another founder nearby raises a big Series C, you suddenly feel left behind. Before long, your environment shapes your thinking, and the ideas you started with get lost in the noise.
For founders, it's an operational risk. A company built on someone else’s goals can still hire, raise money, launch products, and grow, but each successful quarter can pull you further from the work you truly care about.
The deliberate practice of stepping away for reflection can save you from the loneliness of not being able to hear your own judgement, and from mistaking acquired goals for the chosen ones.
From Yeats to Eliot, poets have romanticised solitude as the wellspring for reflection, creativity, and self-discovery. For a founder, though, it would either take a lot of chutzpah or nonchalance to claim solitude as a wonder skill for building. But here’s my justification for why every founder needs to learn to step aside and reflect in solitude before making everyday decisions that make or break companies. Indeed, building has never been easier than today, but so has building the wrong thing amid the clutter and chaos of information overload, and therefore the need for solitude.
Each week, when I meet founders in Mumbai and Bangalore, I find them overwhelmed by advice on how to raise a company, sometimes even from people who haven’t run companies. There are courses, mentors, networks, and now AI as well, all feeding founders with more information than ever, but this crucial skill is still not part of any conversation.
Solitude.
Solitude is a trainable skill that helps you filter the noise in a full room, unlike loneliness, which makes you feel isolated in the same room. It’s true that the higher we go, the lonelier it gets, but the skill I’m arguing for here is not learning to endure loneliness. It’s learning to cultivate solitude as a tool for thinking clearly about what you are building and why.
How I discovered solitude
I’m grateful I built my first company before ‘being in the loop with the world’ became fashionable. Today, a typical person touches his/her phone thousands of times a day. In this environment, you don’t just lose your ability to think critically; you lose the ability to be alone with your own judgement long enough to decide what you truly want to build.
When I was in my early twenties and starting as an entrepreneur, I did what everyone thought a ‘serious’ founder should do: I was always online. I joined every meeting, took every call, and answered every message. I measured my worth by how much visible effort I could show each day. Two things happened. First, I didn’t realise my way of building a company couldn’t scale. I tried to solve everything by just being present and working hard, instead of using structure or judgement. Second, I started to crumble under the pressure of making a choice that would ultimately decide the fate of our 740-member team: should we build a new lending arm or switch to an international SaaS product?
Advice poured in from every direction. Investors, friends, mentors, Twitter, LinkedIn, conferences and everyone had an opinion about what I should do. I couldn’t tell if the advice that helped me so far was the same advice I could trust for my future.
Even though I was surrounded by people, I felt a very specific kind of loneliness; the kind you feel when you know the decision has to be yours, despite being surrounded by advisors. With barely enough money in the bank to pay my colleagues, I cut myself from the world and unexpectedly entered into a week-long solitude.
We keep mistaking more input for a better answer
When I talk about solitude, I don’t mean cutting yourself off from people. I mean choosing to step away from others and from the constant stream of information so you can sit with your own thoughts and data. Loneliness is different. It’s the perceived gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. Constant company can coexist with deep loneliness. Voluntary solitude can coexist with a strong sense of belonging. The problem is that founders often mix up the two. We stay lonely in a crowd and never take the solitude that could actually help us.
We’re taught that having more information gives us an advantage. Read more, follow more, ask more people. In a fast-moving world, staying surrounded by input feels like staying ahead. But why does more input leave founders feeling lost? Because real excellence comes from years of focused work, and you can’t find that focus in a crowd. The crowd gives you a hundred directions and calls them options.
AI has made this problem even worse. The small moments when you used to think - like in the shower, on a walk, or during a drive - are now filled with feeds or chatbots that think for you. We’ve taken away the last bits of quiet corners in our day where you hear the real voice that builds your company.
When you start wanting what the room wants
In my week-long solitude, I learned something I couldn’t have found in any online thread or presentation. I hadn’t returned to India to build an international SaaS. What mattered to me was something harder and less glamorous: making affordable, accessible credit possible and pushing for real financial inclusion. That was the work I was willing to sacrifice my youth for, or die trying, even if the more celebrated story belonged to the SaaS founder.
Psychologists have shown that we can automatically adopt other people’s goals just by observing their behaviour. Your social environment can invisibly reprogram your ambitions. When you are unsure, you look at what the people around you are doing, and you copy it. Robert Cialdini, the author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’, called this ‘social proof’, claiming that under uncertainty, the actions of others become your evidence for the right move. It’s an ancient and efficient instinct, and it’s also how you end up wanting things you never sat down and chose.
If your team wants to scale, you start wanting to scale too. If investors want a bigger funding round, that becomes your dream. When another founder nearby raises a big Series C, you suddenly feel left behind. Before long, your environment shapes your thinking, and the ideas you started with get lost in the noise.
For founders, it's an operational risk. A company built on someone else’s goals can still hire, raise money, launch products, and grow, but each successful quarter can pull you further from the work you truly care about.
Solitude: The Founder Skill Nobody Trains For
The deliberate practice of stepping away for reflection can save you from the loneliness of not being able to hear your own judgement, and from mistaking acquired goals for the chosen ones.
From Yeats to Eliot, poets have romanticised solitude as the wellspring for reflection, creativity, and self-discovery. For a founder, though, it would either take a lot of chutzpah or nonchalance to claim solitude as a wonder skill for building. But here’s my justification for why every founder needs to learn to step aside and reflect in solitude before making everyday decisions that make or break companies. Indeed, building has never been easier than today, but so has building the wrong thing amid the clutter and chaos of information overload, and therefore the need for solitude.
Each week, when I meet founders in Mumbai and Bangalore, I find them overwhelmed by advice on how to raise a company, sometimes even from people who haven’t run companies. There are courses, mentors, networks, and now AI as well, all feeding founders with more information than ever, but this crucial skill is still not part of any conversation.
Solitude.
Solitude is a trainable skill that helps you filter the noise in a full room, unlike loneliness, which makes you feel isolated in the same room. It’s true that the higher we go, the lonelier it gets, but the skill I’m arguing for here is not learning to endure loneliness. It’s learning to cultivate solitude as a tool for thinking clearly about what you are building and why.
How I discovered solitude
I’m grateful I built my first company before ‘being in the loop with the world’ became fashionable. Today, a typical person touches his/her phone thousands of times a day. In this environment, you don’t just lose your ability to think critically; you lose the ability to be alone with your own judgement long enough to decide what you truly want to build.
When I was in my early twenties and starting as an entrepreneur, I did what everyone thought a ‘serious’ founder should do: I was always online. I joined every meeting, took every call, and answered every message. I measured my worth by how much visible effort I could show each day. Two things happened. First, I didn’t realise my way of building a company couldn’t scale. I tried to solve everything by just being present and working hard, instead of using structure or judgement. Second, I started to crumble under the pressure of making a choice that would ultimately decide the fate of our 740-member team: should we build a new lending arm or switch to an international SaaS product?
Advice poured in from every direction. Investors, friends, mentors, Twitter, LinkedIn, conferences and everyone had an opinion about what I should do. I couldn’t tell if the advice that helped me so far was the same advice I could trust for my future.
Even though I was surrounded by people, I felt a very specific kind of loneliness; the kind you feel when you know the decision has to be yours, despite being surrounded by advisors. With barely enough money in the bank to pay my colleagues, I cut myself from the world and unexpectedly entered into a week-long solitude.
We keep mistaking more input for a better answer
When I talk about solitude, I don’t mean cutting yourself off from people. I mean choosing to step away from others and from the constant stream of information so you can sit with your own thoughts and data. Loneliness is different. It’s the perceived gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. Constant company can coexist with deep loneliness. Voluntary solitude can coexist with a strong sense of belonging. The problem is that founders often mix up the two. We stay lonely in a crowd and never take the solitude that could actually help us.
We’re taught that having more information gives us an advantage. Read more, follow more, ask more people. In a fast-moving world, staying surrounded by input feels like staying ahead. But why does more input leave founders feeling lost? Because real excellence comes from years of focused work, and you can’t find that focus in a crowd. The crowd gives you a hundred directions and calls them options.
AI has made this problem even worse. The small moments when you used to think - like in the shower, on a walk, or during a drive - are now filled with feeds or chatbots that think for you. We’ve taken away the last bits of quiet corners in our day where you hear the real voice that builds your company.
When you start wanting what the room wants
In my week-long solitude, I learned something I couldn’t have found in any online thread or presentation. I hadn’t returned to India to build an international SaaS. What mattered to me was something harder and less glamorous: making affordable, accessible credit possible and pushing for real financial inclusion. That was the work I was willing to sacrifice my youth for, or die trying, even if the more celebrated story belonged to the SaaS founder.
Psychologists have shown that we can automatically adopt other people’s goals just by observing their behaviour. Your social environment can invisibly reprogram your ambitions. When you are unsure, you look at what the people around you are doing, and you copy it. Robert Cialdini, the author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’, called this ‘social proof’, claiming that under uncertainty, the actions of others become your evidence for the right move. It’s an ancient and efficient instinct, and it’s also how you end up wanting things you never sat down and chose.
If your team wants to scale, you start wanting to scale too. If investors want a bigger funding round, that becomes your dream. When another founder nearby raises a big Series C, you suddenly feel left behind. Before long, your environment shapes your thinking, and the ideas you started with get lost in the noise.
For founders, it's an operational risk. A company built on someone else’s goals can still hire, raise money, launch products, and grow, but each successful quarter can pull you further from the work you truly care about.
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Solitude is a skill, and almost no one trains for it
When psychologists gave people short periods of intentional solitude - about fifteen minutes with little outside stimulation - they found something interesting. Solitude dampened intense emotions like excitement and anxiety, making it easier to feel calm. For founders, whose days are often filled with urgency, this is important: you can’t make big, long-term decisions if you’re always feeling stressed.
Studies further showed that when solitude was combined with simple positive-thinking exercises, people could use that quiet time to improve their mood. Negative feelings went down, but positive feelings stayed strong. Solitude can calm your nerves without taking away your drive. Stepping away from the social noise lets your mind settle, while your ambition remains.
That’s why the ‘unwitnessed stretch’ in ambitious work isn’t just a romantic idea about lone geniuses. It’s a necessary time when your emotions settle, your independence grows, and your real goals become clear. In my own mornings, that quiet time was when I stopped reacting to what investors wanted and started asking myself a tougher question: what do I truly want to spend my life building, and what am I willing to give up to do it?
But solitude isn’t always helpful. If you don’t approach it with some structure, it can turn into overthinking, self-criticism, or daydreaming. If you go into solitude already exhausted or see it as a punishment for not being productive, the quiet can make your worst thoughts louder instead of helping you find the truth. Founders who are already burned out or feeling unsafe may find that long, unstructured time alone makes things worse.
So the real skill isn’t just being alone. It’s learning to use short, intentional periods of quiet to calm yourself, build independence, and separate goals you picked up from others from the ones you truly chose. At the same time, you need to stay connected to real data and a few trusted people who can help if your thinking goes off track.
How founders can approach solitude, practically
As I started taking solitude seriously, I did something that felt almost criminal: I blocked my calendar until 11 a.m. every day. No meetings, no calls, no ‘quick syncs.’ For a founder who had built his identity on being always available, it felt like I was breaking some sacred rule of responsiveness.
My team noticed, and not always kindly. People were annoyed, puzzled, sometimes quietly angry. It was hard to explain that me ‘not doing anything’ for the first part of the day was, in fact, one of the biggest services I could offer the company. I wasn’t meditating on a mountain. I was sitting with our numbers, our commitments, and a handful of hard questions: What are we actually building? What have we quietly caught from the market that doesn’t belong to us? Which decisions today will still matter in five years?
At first, those hours felt useless and indulgent. I was used to measuring my worth in replies, meetings, and visible effort. But over time, something shifted. The rest of the day stopped being a blur of reactive decisions. I said ‘no’ more often, killed projects faster, and stopped chasing every shiny opportunity that fit someone else’s story but not ours. The calendar looked less busy. The company moved more cleanly in one direction.
If solitude behaves like a muscle, the way you train it matters. The studies that found benefits didn’t ask people to disappear for weeks; they asked them to spend brief, voluntary stretches alone with minimal stimulation, often just fifteen minutes at a time. Inside those windows, autonomy strengthened, and goals felt more self‑driven.
For a founder, a workable starting point is simple:
- Block a small unwitnessed stretch. Thirty to sixty minutes, once a day or a few times a week. No meetings, no calls, no new input.
- Bring only three things into the room: your numbers, your commitments, and one hard question. For example: Which of my current goals would survive if nobody I knew was watching? Which decision today will still matter in ten years? What am I building that I would still choose if it never made a good slide?
- End with one concrete choice. Just one small decision that came from your own judgement, and that you’re willing to act on before you ask anyone else.
Run this often enough, and solitude stops feeling like an absence of work. It becomes the place where you do the kind of work that differentiates caught goals from chosen ones, and the quiet commitment to the company you are actually willing to pay for in years.
My deliberate pause
For the first half of my time as a founder, I couldn’t be alone. I packed every hour with people, calls, and activity. I told myself this was leadership, but it was really fear.
What was I so afraid of in an empty room? When I finally set aside time to think, three worries always came up, and each one seemed like a virtue.
The first worry was feeling unproductive. Time was passing, and I wasn’t making anything. For someone who likes to get things done, an idle hour feels like a wasted hour.
The second worry was that something might go wrong. If I stepped away, I feared a problem would pop up that I couldn’t fix. The company needed me to be reachable. Being available was part of the job.
The third worry was the hardest. Being always available was how I showed my team I was committed. Going into a closed room felt like leaving them behind, as if I didn’t trust them to handle things without me.
All three worries had something in common: being productive, reliable, and trusted. The very instincts that made me a good operator were also the ones stopping me from listening to myself. My own strengths had built a kind of prison I couldn’t see.
Solitude did not ask me to abandon those qualities. It asked me to aim differently. To be productive enough to protect unwitnessed time, reliable enough to build systems that don’t collapse when I step away, and trusting enough to let my team carry their share of the weight. The empty room became less of a betrayal and more of a responsibility. It was in those empty rooms that I made the decisions that eventually paved the way for our success.
If you are a founder who cannot remember the last time you were alone with your own judgement for more than a few minutes, you are not failing at discipline. You are succeeding at a contract you never consciously signed. The world has taught you to treat loneliness as the price of ambition and solitude as a threat to it. I am arguing the opposite. The day you learn to sit in an empty room, not to escape your work but to face it, is the day you finally stop building the wrong life with all the right qualities.
To be continued…
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