InjuThere’s a group of men I am part of. We meet every few weeks. No agenda beyond showing up and being honest. What’s working, what’s not, what life is teaching you right now.
That afternoon, someone was talking about meditation. About how sitting with your thoughts had changed something in him. How it gave him clarity on what he actually wanted from life.
I asked him — okay, so what did you find? What do you want?
He said it’s individual. Personal. Different for everyone.
Fair enough. But that got me thinking out loud: how do we even know if it’s genuinely what we want, or just the mind doing its thing? The mind is good at convincing you. It can make anything feel urgent, or pointless, or impossible. How do you know the difference?
That’s when I said something that surprised even me.
Let the dogs run.
Here’s what I mean.
There’s your mind — constantly generating thoughts, impulses, ideas. And then there’s your intellect — the part that evaluates, debates, decides whether to act or not.
Most of the time, the intellect shuts things down before they get a chance to breathe.
It’s too hard; everyone does it. It’s not safe, you won’t enjoy it, it’s expensive and so on.
It’s hard to ignore that voice in your head when you’re thinking of something new.
When I look back at my own life, I believe I’ve addressed this in a different manner than most.
Travel was a thought I once had. Having grown all of my life till 2013 in Hyderabad and at home with occasional temple runs, I never felt exploring nature was even a thing.
So was writing. Music. EVs. Product management. None of these was rational decisions I made sitting at a desk. They were passing flickers. And the only reason they became things that genuinely fire me up is that I let them run rather than cage them early.
When you let a thought run — when you actually go where it pulls you — something becomes clear that no amount of thinking can give you. You figure out whether you actually like it or not. Whether it’s yours or borrowed.
The mind plays tricks. It will tell you this idea won’t work, that one will, that only a very specific, very safe idea has any chance of amounting to something.
But underneath all of that noise, there’s something quieter — how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your life when you run with a thought. That feeling doesn’t lie. It’s more constant than any argument the mind can construct.
So let the thought run. Stay with it long enough to know whether you actually like where it’s taking you.
And if you don’t? Course correct.
Nothing in life is too late — unless you are dead.
P.S: Dumped these thoughts after the Sunday catch-up into Claude to make the blog post out of it. Then editing to suit my style.