After running my own company for 7 years and eventually closing it down, I was late to realise that at the core of it, business is a game.

A game which had no rules:

• I could have grown faster or slower
• I could have continued to offer services or I could have built my own products
• I could have used ethical means to grow the business or could have gotten away with some shady stuff.

Obviously, there are rules to operate a business but what I mean here is there was no playbook. You can write your own rules and create your own playbook.

And probably that nature of the business was something I was not great at. The immense number of choices I had to make a decision and then working to make it the right one was something I don’t think I did well enough. (A simpler term for this emotion might be ‘regret’).

From all that experience, I started identifying a personality trait: I am good at playing a rule-based game. I expect the game to be fair and once I discover the rules and start playing it, simply by repetition and perseverance I can play the game long enough to win.

Now, I know what you are saying…. huh???? What does that all mean?

Let me explain, until I hit my 30s, I did not know:

• Exercise is good for your health: yes, my mother nagged me a lot but who pays attention to their health in their 20s. Sorry mom!
• Reading books is good: The only good book I had read was Harry Potter and I genuinely hated the ‘self-help books’ genre. I even made fun of people who used to recommend those to me
• Meditation can help: I was introduced to meditation (dhyaan) by my grandmother when I was 4 years old, but it took a couple of bouts of depression in my 20s and early 30s to discover that meditation can actually help