Why my school motto matters most now

Some phrases don’t just inspire you. They quite literally raise you. There are certain things you only understand twice: once when you hear them, and later, when life forces you to live them.

At my school, we had a motto. It was everywhere, from assemblies to our diaries to the black-and-white noticeboards. It sat above us like a quiet instruction, almost like a blessing you didn’t fully deserve yet: “Nāyam ātmā balahīnena labhyaḥ” (the highest self is not attained by the weak). 

As a kid, I thought it was just one of those grand lines schools love, which was meant to sound profound; it was supposed to make you stand a little straighter. But with the passage of time, I realized it wasn’t ornamental at all.

The bala (strength) mentioned in the above mentioned motto isn’t derived from muscle or bravado. It’s all about inner strength. It’s about staying focused. 

It was basically a warning; a gentle nudge in the right direction. And more importantly, it was a roadmap to leading a more fulfilling life. 

It took me a long while to fully acknowledge that the “weakness” it talks about isn’t physical. It isn’t about being loud or tough or intense either. In fact, it’s about the softer kind of weakness that ruins good people:

• inconsistency,
• comfort addiction,
• avoidance,
• fear of judgment,
• and the inability to stay steady when things get hard.

Turns out the world doesn’t break you with one big moment. It breaks you with a thousand small negotiations. And this rather simple-sounding motto has kept pulling me back from those negotiations, again and again.

To help you understand better, let me trace three chapters of my life to it:

1. how it took a non-sporty, overweight kid to national-level hockey,
2. how it helped me leap from consulting into startups, and
3. how it keeps making me a better operator.

1) I was the “fat kid” who chose goalkeeping (and found strength in an unlikely place)

I wasn’t sporty. I was the kid you’d assume would be sitting on the sidelines. On top of that, I was overweight. Quite slow and extremely self-conscious. So when I got into hockey, I picked the position that felt… possible. Goalkeeping.

It sounds dramatic, but it was practical. I thought: I can’t outrun everyone, but maybe I can out-react them. And in the most unexpected way, I had a headstart.

Interestingly, it came from my greatest “bad habit” as a kid: video games.

Hours of gaming had trained reflexes: hand-eye coordination, micro-timing, pattern recognition. Early on, it helped me more than any gym routine could. It gave me those quick saves that surprise people. It gave me enough of an edge to stay in the mix.

But that phase didn’t last, mainly because talent (especially accidental talent) has a ceiling. What took me from “this kid might be decent” to “this kid can be trusted under pressure” wasn’t gaming. It was something deeper: practice. And it was the boring kind

The drills that don’t look heroic. The repetition. The bruises. The missed saves you don’t tell anyone about. The days you show up knowing you’ll be average again, and you show up anyway. That is the first form of bala, not intensity. Just plain boring consistency.

2) Consulting to startups: strength is choosing uncertainty without asking for permission

Consulting teaches you to think in frameworks. Startups teach you to live without one. When I moved from consulting into the startup world, people assumed it’s about ambition. Or risk appetite. Or chasing upside. But the real shift was internal.

In consulting, life is structured:

• there is a ladder,
• a brand,
• a known definition of “good,”
• and a path that thousands before you have walked

In startups, you trade that for:

• ambiguity,
• messy inputs,
• decisions with incomplete information,
• and accountability that is personal

The weakness that keeps talented people from making the leap isn’t lack of skill. It’s the need for certainty. The need to look smart combined with the fear of becoming a beginner again. Startups strip that away. They ask: “

“Can you move forward even when you don’t feel safe?” “Can you commit without a guarantee?” ‘Can you be wrong quickly, learn fast, and keep going?”

That’s bala too. It’s highlighted in your ability to stand, not your ability to talk fast.

3) Becoming a better operator: strength is not what you say, it’s what you repeat

Operating is where you learn that most outcomes are boring. They don’t come from well-oiled systems, not one brilliant day. And systems require strength because they require repetition.

Operating generally punishes four types of weakness more than anything else:

Weakness #1: avoiding hard conversations

Weakness #2: mistaking movement for progress

Weakness #3: needing validation to function

Weakness #4: letting emotion write the decision

Over time, I’ve realized operating is just goalkeeping in a different arena. The stakes are real and the errors are (almost) visible. During these tides, calm becomes the most underrated competitive strength..

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Now, as we enter the most defining stretch of our company’s life (the next 12–18 months of our IPO journey), I truly feel its weight in a way I never did in my previous phases of life. Why so? Well, because IPO preparation demands the same thing that sport demands. Think of it as a gymnast preparing for the Olympics or a tennis player preparing for the grand slams. 

The whole journey is filled with compelling demands: physical, mental and emotional. 

It’s the same spirit startups demand.

It’s the same discipline operating at scale demands.

The next 12–18 months will demand a very specific kind of bala from us:

Strength of consistency: Markets don’t reward one good quarter. They reward repeatability and we will need cadence, predictability, and clean performance, not random heroics.

Strength of truth: Governance, controls, disclosures, reconciliations, audit trails. You can’t “manage” your way through gaps. You close them.

Strength of restraint: There will be distractions: noise, optics, shiny initiatives. Strength is protecting focus and choosing what compounds.

Strength of leadership under pressure: Scrutiny rises. Anxiety rises. Strength is staying calm, fair, and decisive, without letting pressure distort values. In hockey, what made the saves possible wasn’t the save itself.

It was the unseen stuff:

• positioning,
• repetition,
• discipline,
• and the calm that comes from knowing you’ve done the work

IPO preparation is the same. The spotlight will go up. The questions will get sharper. The tolerance for ambiguity will go down. And what will carry us through is not confidence. 

It will be bala.

Lastly, we don’t become IPO-ready through intent. We become IPO-ready through strength, something that is built daily, quietly, without negotiation. My school called it a motto but life has made it a promise.