Mode Push
Drive doesn't need a troubled childhood
I just took a two-week vacation. My mind was fully occupied by my kids. But one thought kept coming back in the idle moments, and it had nothing to do with work.
People letting life live them.
I kept thinking about people I know. Chained to high income tech jobs while secretly hating them. Just focusing on random intangible things instead of their true passion. Coasting.
Mode push comes from Formula 1. There are moments you push, moments you preserve your tires, moments you cruise so you don’t burn yourself out. Push is the gear the pit wall calls for over the radio. The driver holds it for a few laps and backs off.
It’s a gear most people never reach in their lives. They push when something forces them to, then settle back down. Inertia.
For a long time I thought the difference was discipline. Some people force themselves and some don’t. I don’t believe that anymore. The people in that gear aren’t forcing anything. They just can’t sit still. They’re constantly tinkering, constantly making something, and nobody is making them.
My industry thinks it knows why. VCs secretly want to back founders with a troubled childhood or a chip on their shoulder. The pain supposedly keeps the foot on the gas.
The first people I ever saw in that gear had none of that.
My mom would sit with us patiently, three boys, and teach us all the crafts she knew. She pushed us to learn music, prioritized time spent together as a family, and took us across India and the world young to show us different cultures. My grandfather left a comfortable life in Rajasthan to build his own business far away in Ahmedabad. My dad expanded that business tenfold and taught us the hard etiquette of doing things well and right. My grandmother was the steel, always making something: crochet, crafts, her work at the temple. My great grandmother lived to 95 and pushed to learn till the very end.
Both my brothers grew into builders themselves. To this day they’re my biggest supporters and the ones pushing me to a higher bar.
No one in that house had anything to prove. And yet nobody ever coasted.
Venture is a business of exceptions, and there are more ways to make an exceptional person than we admit.
I frankly still don’t know whether the gear comes from nature or nurture. I just know most people are waiting for a call to push.