The Goal Has to Be Bigger Than You

My father bought his first car at 45. I spent a large part of my childhood on his scooter. If all of us went somewhere together, one person had to take a bus or a rickshaw. When he finally bought the car, he was trembling.

That car carried years of savings and sacrifice. He kept asking himself one question: am I making the right decision? I had forgotten the weight of that moment until our showrooms reminded me.

I keep returning to my father's trembling hand when people ask me why Flatland can work. At Cars24, Flatland has no titles. Everyone is a Builder. Work forms around problems, in pods, and owning a problem does not make anyone a permanent boss. AI is part of what makes this practical because one Builder can now carry work that used to need a much larger function. But it does not answer the basic question. If there is no ladder to climb, why would anyone take the hardest problem in the building?

It is a fair question because, in most companies, the ladder is still the answer. Do the hard thing, get the bigger title. Remove the ladder and you had better replace it with something stronger. The only honest replacement I know is the goal itself.

Pull comes from inside

Earlier this month I put it like this in a discussion. "Pull is always better than push. Because pull comes from inside."

For years I supplied a lot of the push at Cars24 myself. I chased, reviewed, escalated, sat in rooms I probably had no business sitting in. Push works, and every company needs some. But push has a ceiling. An institution cannot depend forever on a few people manually driving everybody else. Either the few wear out, or everyone else quietly learns to wait for the driving.

Pull is a Builder moving because they can see what the work means and want it done, with nobody watching. A quarterly target rarely creates that kind of pull, and it should not depend on my enthusiasm either. People need a goal that is worth wanting.

That is why the goal cannot be small. If you want people to bring their best without being pushed, the purpose has to be legendary. The goal should attempt something the world has not done.

What bigger actually does

Call it purpose, vision or goal. The exact vocabulary matters less than whether it changes what we choose. Better Drives, Better Lives is about service to a customer making one of the biggest purchases of their life, and to the teammate standing next to you while it happens. We have also held enormous ambitions alongside it, including building a $100 billion company and CrashFree India. Those ambitions matter only if they move us closer to that service.

A goal you can reach as your current self is a task. It asks for your time and nothing else. A goal bigger than you demands that you become a better version of yourself, and then, once you arrive, a better one again. I have told Builders that if the biggest problem you are working on doesn't give you some butterflies, it isn't big enough. Butterflies just mean you are standing in front of something your current skills cannot yet do. That is information about growth, not a badge of exhaustion.

The same holds for the institution. Cars24 in its current form cannot deliver the whole vision. We will have to keep changing ourselves as the standard rises.

There is a colder reason the goal must be big. It has to be too big to steal. A goal one person can achieve becomes that person's trophy, and trophies drag work back into politics. When the goal is genuinely beyond any individual, including the founder, the only honest relationship anyone can have with it is contribution.

I have to be blunt about where this goes wrong first, because it usually starts with the founder. The $100 billion number is useful only while it enlarges what we can do for customers and what our Builders become. The day it turns into my trophy, it has lost its purpose. Big goals can also become an excuse to overwork people or treat suffering as proof of commitment. A goal that improves customer lives while consuming the people building it is not Better Drives, Better Lives.

Purpose shows up in costly choices

The difference between purpose and a grand slogan appears when doing the right thing has a cost. That is when the company has to choose.

In Lucknow, one of our advisors sat with a buyer and spent the whole conversation on the buyer's actual budget and actual daily use. Condition, mileage, warranty, paperwork. No pressure to move him to something more expensive. The standard we ask for is honest matching over the fastest close. Recommend what you would recommend if your own family member were buying the car.

I want to be careful with the cost, because this is where founders start inventing heroic numbers. I cannot give you a rupee figure for what that conversation cost us, and I will not invent one. Honest advice may take more time. It may mean not pushing an upgrade. Telling the customer the whole truth can slow a transaction or stop it. The proof of a purpose is what you keep choosing when the choice shows up, knowing it costs something.

I will also be honest that not every conversation in every city meets this standard yet. In Lucknow, the buyer's budget was treated as a boundary to respect, not something to push him past. Would we be comfortable if our own family were sitting across that desk? That is the test.

The contract runs both ways

There is a version of "the goal is bigger than you" that I refuse. The version where the Builder becomes small and people become replaceable inputs into something grand. If the goal is bigger than all of us, the logic has to cut the other way too. A big goal should be the strongest argument for investing in people, never an excuse to spend them.

When I wrote our values I called them a contract between you and Cars24, and between Cars24 and you, and I asked to be held to them first. That order matters. Cars24 is bound before the Builder is. Before we ask anyone to stretch, we owe them the context to understand why, tools that work, standards that are honest rather than political, room to recover, the freedom to disagree with me out loud, and a real chance to leave more capable than they arrived.

Service here does not point only at customers. It points sideways at teammates, and it shows up in unglamorous decisions. Aggressive on goals. Gentle with people. Both halves count. We should be embarrassed to miss a goal we committed to, and just as embarrassed if hitting it required grinding a teammate down. I do not want Cars24 to be a place where people burn out and brag about it. The rhythm I want is sprint, recover, sprint again. A sprint with no recovery eventually weakens both the person and the work. That is why we do not say only the paranoid survive. We say: only the paranoid survive, but the regulated thrive.

So when I say the goal has to be bigger than you, I mean bigger than me first. Bigger than my need to be the hero of it. My father's trembling hand is still the test. Every family walking into one of our showrooms is carrying some version of that fear and hope. Cars24 has to understand it without waiting for me to push anyone.