As I wrote in my last piece published a little over a week ago, I prayed twice a day, morning and night. The liturgy never changed, and it was short and clear.

Please keep my family safe. Give me the strength to do the right thing.

I did not ask for wealth. I did not ask to win. I asked for these two things and for a long time it seemed the line was open. The connection was good. Someone was on the other end.

Then, in 2024, my wife was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. A disease she lives with, which is its own kind of sentence.

Then, on May 13, Sanaa was gone.

I went back to the door I had knocked on for most of my life. I brought the only two requests I had ever made. And I found exactly what C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, A Grief Observed, more than six decades ago.

I did not find this book. It was handed to me at lunch.

On July 27th, twelve weeks after Sanaa’s passing, I met with Malachy Walsh, one of my first professional mentors in my early years in the US. He was one of the senior strategic planners at J Walter Thompson, where we worked together on the Motorola business creating the original consumer market for “cellular” phones. He took me under his wing and taught me to think differently — a habit of mind I have lived on ever since.

We had three decades to account for and spent almost all our time talking of my last three months. He didn’t preach. He didn’t guide. He just left me with the book.

It was a strange gift. I didn’t realize its importance until a day later, when I read his note: “Zain, When we write we move others and sometimes ourselves. Tibi ex animo condoleo.” It means I offer you my heartfelt condolences.

A book about a dead wife, put into the hands of a father who lost a daughter. But Malachy had seen what I could not yet see. The sentences I had been writing alone, at night, were sentences another man had already written more than sixty years before me. I found my own life in someone else’s writing. Not similar to mine. The same. The same accusations. The same silence. The same door.

This is not a book review. And this is not another grief missive. It is a report from inside a room I did not know had another occupant. And he had been in it longer than me. He had gone further in than I have.

Which means his four notebooks are not only company. They are footprints. If our grief is this nearly identical — the same accusations, the same silence, the same door — then maybe the path his took, deeper in or finally out, tells me something about mine. I am not reading Lewis for comfort. I am reading him for a map I am not sure exists.

In 1960, Lewis lost his wife. Joy Davidman. He calls her only “H.” on the page, unwilling to put her whole name into the fire he was about to write. She died of cancer, quickly, after believing she was in remission. Lewis filled four notebooks he found lying around the house with what came out of him, and published A Grief Observed under a false name, N.W. Clerk, because he did not want the book attached to his own earlier writings.

You have to understand why. He was the most famous “defender of God” in the English-speaking world. The man who had written The Problem of Pain, an entire book explaining, calmly and cleverly, why a good God permits suffering. The man of Mere Christianity. If anyone had the argument, he had the argument. He had built the house himself.

And when he walked to the door in his hour of need, it did not open.

Here is the passage from the book. The one that stops everyone who has ever grieved and prayed at the same time. “When you are happy, so happy you barely feel your need of Him — if you turn to God with gratitude and praise, you are welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when every other help has failed, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face. Then the sound of bolting, and double bolting, on the inside. After that, silence.”

I read that and I put the book down.

Because that’s what I’m living. The praise years, the safe years, the years my two prayers were answered, those years the arms were open. I felt received. I felt blessed. Then the one time I came to the door not with thanks but with my daughter’s name, the door was not just shut. It was barred from within, by someone who could hear me and chose the bolt.

That is the accusation at the center of the book. And it is the accusation at the center of what I have been writing since May. Lewis just got there first, and said it eloquently.

Here is what surprised me. Lewis’s real terror was not the one everyone assumes.

You would expect a grieving Christian to fear that God isn’t there. That the door is bolted because the house is empty. Lewis says plainly: that is not the conclusion he dreads. The thing he is afraid of is worse. He is afraid the house is occupied. He is afraid the door is bolted by someone. His dread is not “so there’s no God after all.” His dread is “so this is what God really like. Stop deceiving yourself.”

Read that again, and then read the first line I wrote in “The Bridge”:

I still believe in God. I am just no longer sure what I believe about Him.

I wrote that sentence in July. Lewis wrote its twin in 1960. Neither of us had lost our faith. That is the part people keep getting wrong when they try to comfort us. We did not become atheists. Atheism would be a relief. You cannot be betrayed by someone who was never there. What happened to Lewis, and what happened to me, is the harder thing. The belief survived. It was the character reference that collapsed. God did not disappear. God became a stranger.

Lewis even gives the stranger a name. He wonders, out loud, on the page, whether the truth is that God is not good at all and whether what runs the universe is a “Cosmic Sadist,” an eternal vivisector who keeps us alive precisely so the experiment can continue. He does not stay there. But he says it. The greatest Christian apologist of this century wrote the words Cosmic Sadist about God, in grief, and did not cross them out.

I take a strange comfort in that. Not because I want him to be right. Because it means the rage I have been carrying is not a failure of faith. It is a stop on the journey. He walked through it too, and he had the whole argument in his pocket, and the argument did not save him from the station.

There is a trapdoor Lewis walks right up to, and it is the same one I found under the dinner table in “The Bridge.”

You remember the shape of it. My friend’s husband was laid off in September after twenty-one years. In January his mother was diagnosed. Because he had no job, he had the time to make every appointment, spend every hard night, right to the end on May 2nd. And what people always say: maybe that was planned. Maybe the layoff was a mercy in disguise.

And I say: if you want the layoff to be mercy, you have to take the tumor with it. The same hand wrote both. You do not get to accept the gift and refuse the invoice. They came from the same sender.

Lewis builds the identical trap, but more brutally. He says: the tortures happen. Those are the facts, they are not in dispute. Now, if they are unnecessary, then there is no God, or a bad one. But if there is a good God, then the tortures must be necessary, because no even moderately good being would inflict or permit them if they weren’t. There is no third door. Either the surgeon’s knife is doing something, or there is no surgeon and the knife is just a knife.

That is the logic that keeps me up. Because I do not want a God who needed to do this. A God who needed Sanaa in heaven — needed her more than her mother needed her, more than her brother, more than I did — is not a God I recognize as good.

Don’t all the beautiful souls go? Why does He need more? And I refuse this version just as much. I will not turn my daughter’s death into a lesson God arranged for my instruction. She was not tuition. She was not a curriculum. She was my daughter.

Lewis refuses the same comfort. He is savage about the people who offer him theology when he wants H. He does not want the doctrine of the resurrection explained to him again. He wants his wife in the next room. The abstractions, he says, are cold porridge. I have eaten that porridge. People have served it to me warm and with love and I have wanted to throw the bowl.

So does he get out? He does not “get over” it. He is very clear about that, and it is the most honest thing in the book. He says the loss of someone you love is an amputation. The stump may heal. The man learns to get about on one leg. But the leg does not grow back. He will not become who he was. There is no recovery. There is only a new gait.

Hold onto that when someone tells you time heals. Lewis, who had every reason to sell you the healing, tells you instead: you will limp forever, and the limp is not a sign you failed to grieve correctly. It is the shape of the missing leg.

But something does shift, and it happens at the door. The very door that was slammed and double-bolted. Late in the notebooks, Lewis goes back to it, and he finds he can no longer describe it the way he did at the start. When he lays his questions in front of God now, he writes, he still gets no answer, but it is a peculiar kind of no answer. Not a locked door. Not a bolt shot from the inside by someone cruel. More like a gaze. A silent, and — this is his word — not uncompassionate gaze. As if God were shaking His head, not to refuse the question, but to set it aside. Not “no.” More like: Peace, child. You don’t understand.

And then he goes further. He begins to wonder whether the door was ever bolted at all. What he had taken for a bolt was the sound of his own need. A drowning man cannot be rescued while he thrashes; his own grip defeats the hand reaching for him. Maybe his desperation itself was the deafness. His own cries drowning out the voice he strained to hear. The door was open the whole time. He was pounding on it too hard to notice it had no lock.

I will admit something here. Reading Lewis this way. Tracing four notebooks to see where they let out is its own kind of bargain. They tell you grief has stages. Bargaining is supposed to be one of them. I don’t believe the staircase; Lewis didn’t climb one, he circled. But I catch myself bargaining anyway, and this is the shape of it: show me the map, Lewis, and I will keep walking. Tell me your story found an ending, and I will believe mine can too. I know it is a bargain. I am making it, because following a man who has already walked this is the closest thing to a way forward I can understand.

Let me be clear. I am not telling you Lewis is right. I am not offering his reframing as a bridge back to solid ground. There is a bridge I cannot walk. The one that runs from doubt to tidy certainty, the one that makes May 13 reasonable. Lewis does not build that one either. He never gets an answer. The question is not solved. It is only, in the end, framed differently.

And I am not sure I can see it his way. I read his silent, not uncompassionate gaze, and part of me says, a gaze is not enough. A gaze did not keep Sanaa safe. I cannot talk myself out of that, and I will not pretend to.

But watch what Lewis is doing across those four notebooks, underneath the arguments. He is still talking to God. Every accusation is addressed. Every “why” has a You on the end of it. He calls God a Cosmic Sadist to His face. You cannot slam a door on someone who was never in the house. You cannot rage at someone you believe does not exist. The rage is the relationship. It is not the opposite of faith. It is faith with the gloves off.

That is the bridge I can walk. Not belief that understands Him. Belief that keeps arguing with Him. To rage at Him without abandoning Him. To ask why without accepting a manufactured answer. Lewis spent four notebooks proving that bridge holds weight, because he stood on it the whole time he was cursing the water.

Lewis ends his book not with himself, and not with an answer. He ends with her.

In her last days H. said, to the chaplain and not to him that she was at peace with God. And then she was gone. He closes with a line from Dante, from the very top of Paradise: she turned back to the eternal fountain. Beatrice, at the summit of everything, turns her face away from the poet who loved her and toward the source of all light. The last image in the whole book is not the widower. It is the woman, turning toward the light, leaving him looking at the back of her head.

I know why that ending kills me.

We called her Sunny. Short for sunshine, and accurate. This whole series is named for the lights I am leaving on. The foundation we are building in her name carries one instruction: carry her light forward.

I do not know if the door is bolted or only guarded by a silence I am too loud to hear through. I have not decided, and I may not decide, and Lewis gives me permission not to. But I notice that both books, his and the one I am accidentally writing, end up in the same place, reaching for the same word. Not answer. Not reason. Not plan.

Light.

He watched H. turn toward the fountain. I keep the lights on for Sunny.

Neither of us got the door open. We just learned to stand at it differently and to say her name into the silence as if it were a prayer that had finally been shortened to the only word that matters.

Light. Sunshine.

A quick explanation.

For the past few months, I haven’t written about business. I’ve been writing about the loss of my daughter and my journey in grief. If you followed those pieces, thank you for being there with me. I truly appreciate the support and care.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve started to come back. Back to the calls, the meetings, the work. Back, as the phrase goes, to the land of the living. What has struck me is how much the conversation has shifted in this short time that I’ve been gone. Last week, I spent time with a number of clients, and they all wanted to talk about AI.

It was no longer about the tools, models, or trust, but about how AI can accelerate the commercialization of their new products and do it more efficiently. This piece came out of those conversations. And it felt right. It’s the second business thing I’ve written in almost four months, and it felt wrong to publish it without saying so.

Here it is.

Every conversation about AI in pharma starts in the wrong place. It starts with capability. What can the model do? Can it synthesize existing data, write the POV, build the deck, segment the physicians, draft the claims, tell the rep what to say? And many more other questions across the value chain.

These are reasonable questions. They’re also the least interesting ones. Because capability is not where AI transforms businesses. Capability is the magic trick. The great pitch. The pilot that gets funded. But this trick works by misdirection. While everyone watches what the model can do and whether it meets the promise, the real change is happening where no one is looking. It happens on people’s calendar.

The time compression is real. AI is collapsing work that took weeks into days and hours into minutes, and while the ratio varies by task and controls, the direction is no longer debatable.

Merck, with McKinsey’s QuantumBlack, cut the time to produce a fully human-reviewed first draft of a clinical study report from roughly 180 hours to 80, turning a two-to-three-week task into three or four days while halving certain errors. Takeda cut content-approval time by 20 percent after redesigning its review process. McKinsey describes commercial deployments where better AI-enabled pre-call planning lifted revenue one to two percent.

These numbers matter, but what matters more is what happens next, because when a fourteen-day process becomes fourteen hours, you don’t have a more productive fourteen-day organization. You have a legacy organization waiting to be invented, and most companies haven’t invented it yet. What they’ve done is to put a faster engine inside the same vehicle. Installing AI into a business whose meetings, governance, budgets, and decision rights were all built around the latency of the old world.

And those rhythms are older than we care to admit. The monthly business review exists because information used to take weeks to assemble; the quarterly re-plan, because knowing last quarter’s results took armies of people reconciling multiple systems. The cadence followed the speed of information.

The constraint became the ritual. We forgot why the meeting was monthly, why the deck needed three weeks, why decisions climbed four levels before anyone could make them. We institutionalized latency, and what began as an accommodation to slow information hardened into “the way we work.”

This is why I think leaders underestimate what AI actually is and what it actually is doing. AI isn’t merely automating work. It is removing “the waiting syndrome,” that is buried deep inside their companies.

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I’ve spent enough time around musicians to know the person who controls a song isn’t the lead guitarist or the vocalist at the front of the stage. It’s the drummer. Tempo is power. Change the tempo and you change the song even if every note stays the same; play a ballad twice as fast and it becomes a different piece of music. Speed isn’t a characteristic of the music. Speed changes the music. That is what AI is doing to the commercialization process. The notes are familiar — insight, journeys, segmentation, targeting, forecasting, messaging, access, execution — but they can now be played at a tempo this industry has never played at.

Most pharma commercial organizations are ballad organizations, built and governed for a slower song. You can hand a ballad band the world’s best sheet music, but at a faster tempo, they won’t become a funk band. That’s because the organization is the instrument, and the instrument is tuned slow.

This explains one of the challenges of corporate AI initiatives. Why a revolutionary capability becomes very ordinary inside the enterprise. Here’s what happens. You have questions. Where it took two weeks, you get robust answers in two days, say Tuesday. But Tuesday has no meeting, so the answer waits until next week Monday. Monday surfaces the implication, but the brand lead needs alignment from analytics, insights, medical, access, and the field, so a working team convenes the following week. Someone asks for more analysis. Another meeting is scheduled. By the time the organization acts, the forty-eight-hour insight has spent thirteen days sitting in an inbox.

Congratulations. You’ve used AI to faithfully reiterate your old operating model.

This is why the conversation has to move past efficiency. Efficiency is seductive because we can measure it, but it may be the least valuable thing AI provides.

The real prize is decision velocity.

Picture two brands starting Monday with the same information. The first runs the familiar cadence — analyze, commission research, debate, review, and six weeks later move. The second has redesigned the loop so its intelligence system continuously absorbs the relevant data; you and your people interrogate it Tuesday, decide Thursday, adjust the programs Friday. The difference isn’t about whether you use AI. Both do. The difference is how many times each can turn and learn.

This is the metric I am asking CEOs to add to their dashboard. “How many high-quality learning-and-action cycles can you complete in the time it takes your competitor to complete one?”

A rival that senses, decides and acts weekly doesn’t need to be four times smarter than one moving quarterly; it just gets four times as many chances to become smarter, and that compounds. By the tenth cycle the gap isn’t ten decisions, it’s two organizations that now know genuinely different things about the same market. That is how tempo becomes strategy. And drives impactful activations.

This matters in every industry. It matters more in biopharma because time here is much more expensive. McKinsey’s own submission benchmarking makes it concrete. Filing one month faster on a billion-dollar asset is worth roughly sixty million dollars in net present value. One month. If we carry that logic to the commercial clock. A four-week delay in learning that your positioning isn’t landing isn’t just four weeks; it’s four weeks of prescriptions written, habits formed, competitor relationships deepened, patients started on another therapy, reimbursement turning to routine.

Companies like to treat time as reversible. Oops, we got this wrong in March, we’ll fix it by June. Markets don’t work that way. An HCP who has prescribed a competitor successfully twenty times between March and June has experience and so has the office staff, the payer, and the patient. Behavior hardens into habit. The real cost of latency isn’t the delay. It’s everything the market learns while you wait.

The industry’s own investments show where this is heading. Veeva now has more than 125 customers, including multiple top 20 biopharma’s, live on its next-generation Vault CRM and moving toward agentic engagement, with agents already flagging compliance issues in call notes before they’re filed. Novartis has signed a five-year engagement to rebuild its operations around autonomous agents. Adoption isn’t transformation. But take a look at the language in the senior AI roles these companies now write. It isn’t “build models.” It’s becoming about portfolio governance, decision rights, planning routines. These are organizational words, not technology words. The real work has shifted from “what can AI do?” to “how should this workflow operate if the task gets done in a fraction of the time?”

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But there’s a trap. Take the tempo argument to its crude conclusion and you get a terrible organization. Everything in real-time, every signal triggering action, every dashboard flashing, people spending their lives chasing noise. That isn’t agility; it’s organizational ADHD.

The answer isn’t to accelerate every decision but to see that different decisions deserve different clocks. Some are machine-tempo: high-frequency, reversible, bounded choices automation can run continuously inside preset rules. Some are management-tempo: consequential but reversible calls needing cross-functional judgment which can now happen weekly rather than quarterly. And some are human tempo: positioning, the meaning of the brand, which patient you intend to serve, what the organization will refuse to do even when the algorithm recommends it.

Some decisions should become radically faster; others should stay stubbornly and deliberately human. The sophistication of an AI-era organization shouldn’t be measured by how fast it decides, but by whether it knows which clock each decision belongs on.

Fast hands, calm head. Or as the gunfighters say: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

That distinction matters, because a machine can detect a prescribing shift without understanding its meaning, surface a correlation without knowing whether acting on it serves a patient, optimize toward whatever objective we give it and still leave us wondering whether we gave it the right one. Human judgment doesn’t disappear as intelligence gets cheaper; it appreciates. Scarcity determines value, and AI simply moves the scarcity: when analysis was scarce, analysis was valuable; when answers are abundant, deciding which answer deserves belief is what’s scarce; when production is instant, taste is.

The most valuable commercial leaders will not be the ones who know the most, but the ones who know what deserves attention. Attention, judgment, and conviction become the scarce resources. The machine can accelerate the road to a decision; it cannot absolve the leader of making one. Speed without judgment is just faster stupidity.

Which leads to the most uncomfortable implication of all. Your competitor doesn’t need a better model than you. Not more sophisticated agents, not even better data. They may simply need to act on what they know before you do, which makes much of the technology arms race beside the point. The enduring advantage will belong to whoever builds the shortest, responsible distance between signal and action.

Responsible matters. But responsibility and slowness are not synonyms. Rigor and latency are not synonyms. Governance and bureaucracy are not synonyms. We let them fuse because our old processes bundled them together, and AI now gives us the chance to unbundle them: keep rigor, remove waiting; keep judgment, remove repetition; keep governance, remove unnecessary permission-seeking; keep human accountability, remove human busywork. That is a far more interesting definition of transformation than deploying another copilot.

So don’t start Monday with the AI roadmap. Open the calendar instead and take every recurring review, planning process and agency check-in, and ask one question of each: what constraint created this cadence? You’ll find that many of the rhythms running your business aren’t strategic choices at all. They’re fossils. We meet monthly because the report comes monthly, but does it still take a month? This is organizational archaeology, and it will surface a remarkable amount of behavior built around constraints that no longer exist.

Don’t just automate their current processes; ask the more transparent question, if we are inventing this today, with today’s data and today’s AI, would we design it this way at all? Sometimes the honest answer is that we wouldn’t have the process at all. And then ask the question that will changes everything: what would we do differently if we knew we could get this answer tomorrow?

That is AI’s biggest gift. Not prediction. Adaptation.

So, stop asking what AI can do to your brand. Your brand is fine. The molecule is still the molecule, the evidence is still the evidence; the physician still has to believe it, the payer still has to cover it, the patient still has to trust it, the story still has to matter.

What changes is the distance between knowing and doing. Ask instead what happens when your competitor reads the market Monday, understands it Tuesday, intervenes Wednesday and knows by Friday whether it worked, while your field force is still absorbing last month’s PowerPoint. Ask whether the monthly business review still makes sense when the business no longer moves monthly. Ask whether your governance protects the company from risk or protects the organization from having to decide.

And then open your calendar because buried in all those recurring invitations is something far larger than meeting etiquette. There is your operating model. There is your hierarchy. There are your decision rights. There is the latency you’ve quietly agreed to tolerate. There, in other words, is your strategy.

AI won’t disrupt your brand. It’ll disrupt your calendar. And your calendar, it turns out, is holding you back.

— Human truths for an accelerating age.

I still believe in God. I am just no longer sure what I believe about Him.

For most of my life, my relationship with God was remarkably uncomplicated. I prayed twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, and despite all the things I could have asked for, my prayers were simple. I asked for two things:

Please keep my family safe.
And please give me the strength to do the right thing.

That was it. Two lines, twice a day, for most of my adult life. And for a long time, He kept His side of the bargain.

Then, in 2024, my wife Lubaina was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. It’s an incurable cancer she will have to live with for the rest of her life. We have fought it together. She endured the early treatments, went through a stem-cell transplant, and has lived since with the fear, the uncertainty, and everything else that comes with a disease that might never leave.

And then, on May 13 of this year, God, or fate, or chance, or whatever force governs these things, took my daughter. Sanaa was twenty-eight.

Suddenly the prayer I had said thousands of times felt useless.

Please keep my family safe.

I had asked very clearly. It wasn’t answered. And there was complete silence. Was He even listening?

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I had dinner a few weeks ago with a friend and her husband. He is grieving too. His mother died on May 2 after a short and dreadful battle with liver cancer, eleven days before Sanaa. As he told me the story, it devastated me.

Last September, he was laid off after twenty-one years. Twenty-one years at one company, and suddenly the job was gone. I imagine it felt like rejection, like an ending you neither wanted nor understood. A few weeks later, his parents came to visit.

In January, his mother was diagnosed. She became very sick, very quickly. She needed help, his father needed help, and because their son had lost his job, he had something he would not otherwise have had.

Time.

He took her to all her appointments. He stayed with her through the tests, the treatments, hospice. He was fully present through those terrible final months, right up until she passed.

And as we talked, inevitably, the question emerged. Was his layoff part of the plan? Was her death part of the plan too? Did God know in September what was coming in January?

It is a comforting thought, and it is also a terrifying one, because once you believe that God arranged the layoff so a son could be with his dying mother, you have to follow the logic all the way down. If the layoff was mercy, the same hand wrote the tumor. Why?

You don’t get to accept the gift and refuse the invoice. They came from the same sender.

This is where I get stuck. This is why I am mad.

People have told me repeatedly since Sanaa died that God has a plan. They mean it kindly. Perhaps they are right. But thirteen weeks as a Vilomah, I still cannot understand what kind of plan needed my daughter to die.

The day before Sanaa died, the daughter of a friend of mine died too. We had reconnected the prior week, after more than a decade apart, and suddenly two fathers who had not been in each other’s lives found themselves standing in the same impossible place. Part of the worst, most exclusive club. When we spoke that Friday, one of the first things he said to me was, “I don’t know what fate has planned for us to take both of our daughters away.”

At that time, I couldn’t give a f**k about fate. Or karma. Or God. Or any higher power with a plan.

What plan? What possible cosmic architecture requires two young women to disappear from the lives of people who loved them? Who needed them?

Sanaa brought sunshine wherever she went. She was gentle, kind, caring, funny, creative. She made people feel loved. I never met her, my friend’s daughter, but when he talks about her, he uses the same words I use about mine. What celestial shortage was so urgent that heaven needed them both more than we did?

People have offered that explanation too. God needed another beautiful soul in heaven. I know what they are trying to give me. Comfort. But grief has made me argumentative, and I keep snagging on that word. Needed.

A God who needs is not the God being advertised.

And doesn’t every beautiful soul eventually get there? Why now? Why so young? Why couldn’t heaven wait another fifty years? Why couldn’t I have watched her build her life? Why couldn’t her mother have had her beside her as she grew old? Why couldn’t her brother have had his sister for another half-century? Why couldn’t I have had another phone call, another dinner, another ordinary Saturday?

If this is the plan, I want someone to explain it to me. But when I ask. And I’ve been asking non-stop. At the top of my voice. All I get is silence. Dead silence.

That is why I have struggled so much with faith. I haven’t simply lost my daughter. I have lost the architecture that grounded me. One that should be responsive to me.

There was a North Star before. I never believed that good people were immune from suffering. I have lived too long to believe something so childish. But somewhere inside me was an assumption that the universe had moral shape. That prayer mattered. That love mattered. That asking God every morning and every night to protect my family meant something.

Then cancer came for my wife, and death came for my daughter. The two women at the center of my life, two of the kindest, gentlest, most caring human beings. One is harmed. One was taken.

And I am left staring upward, asking a question. Is this how prayers are answered? Is there a reason for your complete silence?

I have gone looking for answers. I have read. I have listened. I have talked to people who believe deeply and to people who do not believe at all. And strangely, I keep arriving at the same two shores.

On one shore are the believers. God has a plan. Trust Him. You cannot understand His purpose yet. Give your grief to Him. Sanaa is in a better place. One day, you will understand. One day you will be with her.

On the opposite shore is the other answer. There is no plan. Terrible things happen because terrible things happen. Cancer is biology, death is mortality, and the universe does not negotiate with fairness, so stop trying to find intention inside randomness. And from there I come to a harder conclusion: if there is a being powerful enough to prevent the suffering and He chooses not to, why worship Him?

I understand that shore now in a way I never did before. But I cannot quite live there either. Because randomness isn’t comforting. Randomness is frightening precisely because it is random.

I wrote about this intellectually in January, after a young man from our community whom I had mentored as a teenager died on a mountain. I wrote then about the randomness of life and death, about our need to impose meaning on events that may have none.

I could understand randomness intellectually then. I cannot understand it the same way now. Because what was once a theory has drowned in the river of tears caused by grief.

And despite everything I have written here. Despite my rage, despite the accusations I have hurled into the silence, despite the weeks when I wanted nothing to do with God. I find myself still talking to Him.

That is the hardest part. I wanted nothing to do with him. But, as I try to find my way, I don’t know if I can become an atheist.

I have had a long relationship with Him. Sixty-two years, in one way shape and form. It’s hard to walk away. But I’m so angry. I’m so very, very angry.

And I’ve come to realize you can’t be angry at someone you believe doesn’t exist.

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Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question.

The question isn’t whether I still have faith. It is whether faith can survive without certainty. I used to think faith was knowing. Now I wonder whether faith is what remains after knowing becomes impossible.

There is an ancient tradition for this, although we don’t talk about it nearly enough. The old texts are filled not only with people praising God, but with people questioning Him, pleading with Him, grieving before Him, even arguing with Him.

Abraham argued with God over the fate of a people. Ayyub cried out that suffering had touched him. And in the Qur’an, Ya’qub grieved so profoundly for his son Yusuf that his sight was affected by his sorrow. When those around him seemed to think his grief had consumed him for too long, he did not deny it or disguise it as acceptance. He said, simply, that he brought his suffering and his grief to Allah.

That stopped me.

Because Ya’qub did not have to choose between grief and God. He carried one to the other. Perhaps I don’t either.

Maybe faith was never supposed to mean that I understand what God has done. Maybe it doesn’t require me to call what happened to Sanaa part of a beautiful plan. Maybe faith can contain accusation. Confusion. Anger. Even the question I keep asking and cannot answer: Why her?

The remarkable thing about these old stories is not that these people never questioned God. It is that their questions did not end the relationship. Abraham argued with Him. Ayyub cried out to Him. Ya’qub wept before Him. They turned toward God with their anguish rather than waiting for the anguish to disappear before turning toward Him.

Maybe doubt is not faith’s opposite. Maybe indifference is. And maybe rage is not the abandonment of faith. Maybe rage is still a relationship.

I don’t know.

Which brings me back to my friend’s husband. Was losing his job part of some divine plan that allowed him to be with his mother when she needed him most?

Maybe.

Or perhaps he lost his job because companies lay people off, and his mother got cancer because bodies sometimes betray us, and in the space between two terrible events something beautiful happened. A son was available when his mother needed him most.

Perhaps the meaning was not hidden inside the events. Perhaps the meaning came from what he did with them. That distinction matters to me, because I am not ready to believe that God killed someone’s mother so her son could discover the importance of being present. And I cannot believe that God took Sanaa to teach me something.

I refuse to make my daughter’s death tuition for my spiritual education. She was not a lesson. She was my daughter.

But maybe there is another possibility. Perhaps God does not author every tragedy. Perhaps He does not move cancer cells around a chessboard or schedule deaths to advance some unknowable narrative. Perhaps the plan is not a script in which every horror was deliberately written. Perhaps God is somewhere else entirely. Not in what happens to us, but in what becomes possible between us afterward.

In the son who happens to have time and spends it beside his dying mother. In the friend I had not spoken to in more than a decade, who suddenly understands a language neither of us ever wanted to learn. In the people who appeared at our door after Sanaa died, in meals delivered, hands held, stories shared, tears allowed. In the huge community of people carrying losses that cannot be repaired, helping one another carry them anyway.

That does not explain Sanaa’s death. Nothing does.

Maybe this is the bridge I have been looking for.

Not a bridge from doubt back to certainty. Not a clever theological argument that makes the unbearable suddenly reasonable. Not a sentence that transforms May 13 into part of some beautiful cosmic design. I don’t want that bridge, and I don’t think I could walk across it even if someone built it for me.

The bridge I need is narrower and much less satisfying. A bridge that allows me to believe in God without pretending I understand Him. To rage at Him without abandoning Him. To ask why without manufacturing an answer. To acknowledge the possibility of meaning without declaring every tragedy meaningful. To believe that something sacred can emerge from suffering without believing the suffering was therefore necessary.

Those are very different things.

Maybe I don’t have to call her death a plan. Maybe I can simply say that something happened on May 13 that shattered me, and I do not know why. And perhaps faith, for me now, begins with refusing to lie about that.

I still don’t pray. I cannot yet return to those simple morning and evening conversations as though nothing has happened.

Please keep my family safe.

I don’t know how to say those words anymore. Because I said them. For years, I said them. And my family was not kept safe.

So if I pray again, the prayer will have to change. I will no longer ask God to protect the people I love from everything that can happen to them; life has taught me, brutally, that I hold no contract guaranteeing that. Maybe the second prayer is the one that remains.

Give me the strength to do the right thing.

Give me the strength to love the people who are still here. Give me the strength to carry Sanaa without turning her into an explanation. Give me the strength to sit beside another grieving father without pretending I know why either of our daughters died. Give me the strength to live inside questions that may never be answered.

And perhaps, eventually, give me the strength to speak to You again without needing first to forgive You.

I don’t know whether that is faith. I don’t know whether it is doubt. Maybe it is both.

For now, it is the only bridge I can find.

And I am standing on it.

In 2014, I decided to compete in a regional stand-up comedy competition. I came in second.

What I remember is not the second place finish. It is the eleven seconds in the middle of my set when a joke I had tried and tested on many people, all of whom loved it, went out into a room of two hundred and died. Not booed. Not heckled. Worse. Absorbed. The room took it in and gave nothing back, and I stood in that silence wondering seriously about this life choice.

Here is the thing about that kind of room. It tells you in under two seconds whether what you believed about people was true. There is no fielding period. No sample bias. No weighting. The learnings arrive before you have finished delivering the stimuli.

I’ve spent over forty years building a career on the proposition that if you can understand why people do what they do, that understanding is worth paying for. I still believe both halves of that proposition. But I have never once been in a conference room where the truth arrived as fast, or as brutally, as it did in that room. In eleven seconds.

Right now, everyone is still talking about AI, and almost all of them are talking about it in the future tense.

What it will do to jobs. What it will do to margins. What it will do in eighteen months, in five years, at the next inflection point. The conversation is a forecast, and forecasting is a wonderful business to be in, because the reckoning is always scheduled for later, and by the time later arrives everyone has moved on to a new forecast.

Meanwhile something is happening in the present tense, and no one is talking about it, let alone writing about it.

A fellow professional I know was an early adopter of AI. She embraced ChatGPT, used it for all her writing. Got so comfortable with her one model, that she stopped writing her own first drafts, and delegated it to ChatGPT. This was a little over a year ago. Here’s the clincher. She is much better at her job now by every measure. She’s generating more content and is more effective than she ever was.

We met up a few weeks ago, and unprompted, she confessed that she is no longer sure if she can still do it. Start with a blank page. Begin writing a strategic POV without AI’s help. That muscle has gone quiet, the way a second language does when you stop speaking it. She said it lightly, the way you mention something that is embarrassing, and then she changed the subject.

This is the reality in the business world. We don’t have a line item for that impact. It won’t appear in a productivity study. We don’t see the detrimental impact today, and definitely not in the future.

This is not a prediction; it already happened, to a specific person, in the past tense. And it is the most confounding yet illuminating observation about AI’s impact on a real person and the potential impact on our ability to think, create, and strategize.

This is what the forecasters miss by looking too far ahead. This small, unmeasured story is not a footnote to the future. It is the future, arriving early, in one person, before it becomes the trend. Their charts will tell you what the tools will be able to do. They can’t tell you what people will do with them. Whether they will trust them, lean on them, hollow out around them, or quietly change what they believe they are for. That second question is the one that decides which forecasts will come true. It is the one I have spent over forty years learning to read. And to predict their impact.

Let me be clear. This is not a retreat into the present. It is the opposite. What is happening to people now, in the small registers where nobody is measuring, is the leading indicator of what they will believe and how they will behave next. Read enough of these signals, with some understanding of why people do what they do, and you are not guessing at tomorrow. You are watching it happen. That is the truth I chase. Not to describe the moment, but to see where it is going, early enough that we can prepare for it.

In 1571, a man named Michel de Montaigne, then thirty-eight, withdrew from public life to a tower on his family’s estate near Bordeaux and began writing short pieces about whatever had caught his attention. Thumbs. Smells. Sleep. Cannibals. How to raise a child. Whether it is possible to prepare for your own death.

He invented a word for them. Essai. From essayer — to attempt, to try. But also, in the metallurgy of the period, the assay: the test you run on a piece of metal to find out what it is actually made of, as opposed to what it is claimed to be.

He was not writing from a peaceful study in a settled century. France was in the middle of the Wars of Religion. There were massacres. There was plague. Montaigne served two terms as Mayor of Bordeaux and spent years mediating between the factions doing the killing. He saw the consequences up close and at scale.

And he wrote about thumbs.

For four hundred years people have read that as charming, or as evasion, or as the eccentricity of a man with a good library. I think it was a method. I think he understood something the pamphleteers screaming about the fate of France did not. That you cannot see a catastrophe by looking directly at it. Look at it head-on and you get ideology. You get position-taking. You get the thing everyone already believed, restated at volume.

But run the catastrophe through a thumb. Through a specific, ordinary, undeniable piece of life, and it has nowhere to hide. It has to show you what it is actually made of. And an ordinary thing, watched closely enough, shows you not only what the moment is but which way it is leaning.

Small door. Large room.

Lateral Truths. This is the name I have given to what you find this way. The ones you rarely reach by looking straight at the question and sometimes see clearly only from an angle. Sideways. Slanted.

I knew the word essay. I did not understand Montaigne’s method. Then I found it in eleven seconds of silence in a comedy club and looked back at forty years to realize that I was using his model to talk about my truths.

So, when people ask what I write about, and I say a commute, or promiscuity and polygamy, or a chord change, or losing rungs of a ladder, or my dog at the window, or my daughter, they wait for the real answer.

Guess what. This is the real answer.

I am not writing about a commute. I am running the age through a commute to find out what it is made of, and where it is taking us. The commute, or the chord change, or the dog at the window is the assay; any ordinary part of my life serves. Forty years of trying to understand why human beings do what they do is the equipment. The essay is where I find out whether the thing I believed was true.

This is the part I want to be honest about. When I write, I don’t know where my thoughts will go. If I did, they would be organized columns. And I would be doing what everyone else is doing in the digital domain. Pitching a position and reverse-engineering cases and anecdotes that prove it.

That is not writing. That is packaging.

The story is not evidence for the argument. The story is where the argument gets tested. Sometimes it fails.

Montaigne had a motto struck on a medallion, beside a pair of scales. Que sais-je? What do I know? Not a rhetorical question. Not humility as a posture. A working instrument. The thing you hold up against your own certainty to see whether it survives contact.

Everything I publish is an attempt in exactly that sense. Some of it will not land. I know precisely what that silence sounds like. I would rather stand in it than sell you a certainty I do not have. Or, one that I do not believe in.

Because certainty about how AI will change the world is what the people looking at today head-on are selling. But they’re ignoring the real drivers of this change. The people, the humans. You, me and our families and friends. How all these changes are going to change our lives and our futures.

What I offer instead is built on deep knowledge and human empathy. By understanding the small signals, the quiet resistance, and the loud acceptance, I’m able to read the signals early, while there is still time for smart leaders to preempt and get to the future first.

You have a choice. Face this new era head-on. You’ll be with the majority.

Or look at it sideways. And you will be leading the rest.

If you’re into the blues, you know how important the harmonica is to the sound. What most people don’t know is a secret the instrument’s designers never intended.

You don’t play the harmonica in the key it was built for.

Pick up a C harp to play the blues, and you play it in G. Second position. Cross harp, the old players called it. The instrument was engineered in Germany for polkas and parlor hymns. Traditional, cheerful music, played straight. Then it crossed an ocean, landed in the Mississippi Delta, and somebody played it wrong.

And playing it wrong, they found the bent notes. The wails. The blue thirds that don’t technically exist on the instrument. Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter spent their lives pulling music out of a harmonica that the factory never installed.

The truth wasn’t in the instrument. It was in the angle.

We’re now in an age in which intelligence itself has become abundant. Answers are getting cheaper. Expertise is becoming commoditized. Machines write, code, diagnose, and create with a fluency that was pure science fiction a few years ago.

But as intelligence becomes abundant, something else is becoming more valuable.

Perspective.

The ability to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at and see something different.

I have spent over four decades in rooms where paradigms died. Successful companies and brands that disappeared. Across every category and industry. Watching this pattern repeat itself over time, one thing has become obvious.

The people who presided over the collapse were the people most steeped in the business.

They knew everything about the business. They understood its history, operational realities, accepted practices, established rules and best practices. They could explain why the business performed the way it did.

And that is precisely the problem.

They were too close.

The people who see things differently are standing slightly off-axis: outsiders, immigrants, category-crossers, people who have worked across disciplines or have lived in enough different worlds to recognize what one world could not see about itself.

I recognize that pattern because I have never looked at anything completely straight-on in my life.

I’m an immigrant. I learned America the way you learn a second language. Consciously, word by word, watching customs and assumptions that people born here rarely had reason to notice.

I’ve spent much of my professional life studying human behavior and building businesses, but I have moved between worlds that were never supposed to have much to say to one another. I built brands in cereal aisles before I built them in oncology. I’ve spent time in corporate boardrooms and on a stand-up comedy stage, where you learn very quickly that understanding a room is different from knowing what you intended to say. I play guitar and harmonica. I write about business, technology, leadership, music, my commute and occasionally my dog, Lennon.

And this year, I became something else.

A father learning how to live after the death of his daughter. A member of a club no parent volunteers to join, learning a grief English didn’t have a word for. Until Louise and Bernie showed me a Sanskrit one. Vilomah.

For most of my life, I thought these were unrelated chapters.

Now I’m learning that the unrelatedness was the education.

None of these worlds prepared me perfectly for the others. But moving between them taught me something more powerful. How to look at familiar things from unfamiliar directions.

Which brings me to AI, and why I am starting Lateral Truths now.

The accepted paradigm is that if you want to say something worth hearing about AI, you should go deeper into AI. More benchmarks. More model releases. More predictions about which jobs evaporate first. The commentary industry around this technology is enormous, and nearly all of it is playing the instrument straight. Explaining, with great fluency, what the machines can do.

I think that’s the wrong key.

Because the most important truths about AI are not about the technology. Fifty years from now, no one will care which model topped which leaderboard in 2026. They will care what we did with it. What it revealed about us. What we became because machines could suddenly do things only we could do before.

They will care about what happened to work when expertise became cheap. What happened to education when answers stopped being scarce. What happened to creativity when creation itself became abundant. What happened to trust when everything could be generated.

And most importantly, they will care about what happened to us.

That is the territory I want to explore.

Not because technology is unimportant, but because technology is not the protagonist.

We are.

The more capable the machines become, the more consequential the human questions become. Judgment. Curiosity. Trust. Courage. Love. Grief.

AI is not eliminating those questions. In many cases, it is exposing how poorly we understood them in the first place.

Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote about what he called lateral truths: insights that do not emerge by drilling deeper into a system’s existing logic, but by stepping outside it and questioning the assumptions on which the system itself depends.

The truth that arrives sideways. From the direction you weren’t defending.

That phrase perfectly describes both the way I tend to think and the kind of writing I do.

That’s what this space is for.

Lateral Truths: Human truths for an accelerating age.

Most publications are organized around a subject. Lateral Truths is organized around a way of seeing.

AI will appear here often because it is reshaping nearly every institution and assumption. But this will not be another publication about AI. AI will rarely be the protagonist. Human beings will.

I want to explore what technology is doing to us, what our reaction to it reveals about us, and what kind of humans we need to be in an accelerating age. And I’ll get there the only way I know how.

Sideways.

Sometimes through behavioral science. Sometimes through forty years of watching confident institutions discover that their confidence was the problem. Sometimes through a conversation on my commute, a stand-up stage, a song by Dylan or Lennon or Garth Brooks, a guitar chord, an immigrant memory, or something completely ordinary that suddenly makes an extraordinary question visible. Sometimes through my goldendoodle, Lennon, who has taught me more about presence than many books on leadership ever have.

And sometimes through grief.

I have written the past couple of months about losing my daughter, Sanaa, and I will continue writing about her and about grief here. Not because loss carries a business lesson. It doesn’t. I will not insult her, or grief itself, by pretending tragedy exists to produce a useful takeaway. It belongs here for a different reason. This space is ultimately about being human, and nothing in my life has taught me more brutally about being human than losing my baby girl. Some truths only arrive sideways because we would not survive meeting them head-on.

That, too, is part of Lateral Truths.

The goal is not to force connections between everything. It is to remain open to the possibility that the thing we need to understand may be illuminated by something that appears, at first, to have nothing to do with it.

When I play harmonica, Lennon sometimes sits nearby and tilts his head. I’m convinced he is hearing frequencies I can’t. Whole layers of the music, invisible to me as I’m making it.

That head tilt is the job. That’s the method.

Look at the familiar slightly differently. Slanted. Question the note everyone agrees must be played. Move a few degrees off-axis. Listen for the frequencies no one seems to be hearing.

We have the most powerful instrument our species has ever built.

There will be thousands of people explaining how to use it, optimize it, master it, and play it exactly as designed.

I’d rather find out what happens in the wrong key.

That’s where the music is.

I can’t ask Sanaa anymore whether she knew how much we loved her.

That is the question I was left with after writing the essay earlier this week about the Garth Brooks song, If Tomorrow Never Comes. Did our daughter know? Could we have said it more, shown it more, demonstrated it in ways she never expected?

I ended that essay honestly. I don’t get to answer those questions with her anymore. I only get to ask them.

But grief does not respect unanswered questions. It keeps returning to them, worrying at them, asking them differently, as though somewhere inside the question is an answer we somehow missed.

So, this week I did something scary. I tried to answer for her. I climbed out of my seat in that Uber and into hers, and I tried to look at our family, our home, our lives, and our particular version of love through her eyes.

I know the risk in doing this. I am writing her answers, and she doesn’t get to correct me. Every word here is mine, offered from what I remember of her, what I knew of her, and what twenty-eight years of being her father taught me about the way she saw us. I don’t want to get what those beautiful eyes saw wrong. Please bear with me as I try.

Here is what I think she saw.

She saw a father who often left for the office before the sun came up and came home after it went down. She saw a mother who gave up a career to stay home and take care of her and her brother, tending to the thousand small things that make up a childhood and that children rarely recognize as sacrifice until they are much older. And I think she understood, in the way children somehow understand these things long before we imagine they do, that much of what we were doing was for her and Aamir.

Long before children learn to read words, they learn to read us. They notice what we show up for, what we sacrifice, what frightens us, what delights us, what we protect, what we worry about. They learn the meaning of our behavior before they understand the language we use to explain it. Sanaa learned to read us long before any of us realized we were writing something for her.

She saw two immigrants trying to build a future out of very little, and I think she understood that the building itself was one of the ways we loved. Every hour at the office was a deposit into that future. The home, the schools, the extracurricular activities, the vacations, the safety and security, the mother who was always there, the father trying to rearrange an increasingly global life so he could still be there for the performances, the teacher meetings and the moments she considered important. All of that became the vocabulary we had inherited for expressing love.

Aamir was the eldest grandson in the family and Sanaa the eldest granddaughter. That carried expectations, a lot of them, and perhaps too many. I know now that those expectations were an especially heavy burden for her. But I think she saw something else inside them too. She knew everyone was watching her partly because everyone was there for her. The pressure and the love arrived in the same envelope, and Sanaa was perceptive enough to open it and find both.

I think she knew we loved her. Not because we said it enough. We didn’t. But because children raised in homes like ours become fluent in a language their parents do not even realize they are speaking. The love was in the food that appeared without asking, in the way her mother remembered everything she liked, in the things we worried about, in the questions we asked too many times, in expectations that occasionally became too heavy.

Our love had a grammar and a vocabulary of sacrifice, responsibility, protection and provision. She knew how to read it. She knew we loved her. I believe that truly.

But if I let her answer the second question, could we have said it more? I don’t think she would let me off the hook. In fact, I can hear her say: “Yes, Dad. Obviously yes.”

And she would be right, because knowing you are loved and hearing that you are loved are two different nutrients. A child can be full of one and still hungry for the other. I don’t think Sanaa ever doubted the love, but perhaps she wished she didn’t always have to decode it. Perhaps sometimes she wanted the translation removed, the sacrifice converted into words, the showing up explained, the worry stripped of its disguise. She wanted the simple sentence underneath all of it: I love you. Plain language. No interpretation required.

This is where writing the essay took me somewhere I had not expected to go. I think Sanaa understood that I was speaking my parents’ language of love to her, and she was fluent in it. But she also spoke another language. She was born here, raised here. She grew up in a culture where affection was more often spoken directly, where children heard the words, where emotion did not always have to disguise itself as duty. She lived comfortably in both languages. I did not.

In hindsight, I realize that for much of her life I kept speaking to her primarily in the language I had inherited, the one in which love means showing up, providing, protecting, sacrificing and doing. It is an honorable language. It is a profound language. But it is not always a spoken one.

And then comes another thought. I imagine her looking across that table at me and saying, “So did you, Dad. You wanted to hear it too.”

She would have been right. I wanted to hear it too. I was the son of parents who handed down instructions more easily than embraces. There was never any question in my mind that they loved me, but love was rarely spoken. It was embedded in duty, sacrifice, expectation and everything they did to create possibilities for their children that had not existed for them. I learned their language perfectly, and somewhere along the way I learned to stop expecting another one. Without ever intending to, I carried that inheritance forward.

Here is the strangest thing about trying to sit on Sanaa’s side of the table.

From my seat, If Tomorrow Never Comes is almost unbearable now because her tomorrow didn’t come. Every time I hear it, I find myself auditing a lifetime of insufficiently spoken love. I search backward through the years. Did I tell her enough? Did I hug her enough? Did I say the things that were so obvious inside me that I assumed they were obvious to her too? Could I have made her feel more loved? Could I have made absolutely certain that she knew?

It is an audit without an ending because the one person who could close the books is gone.

But this is what I did not expect to discover when I started writing this piece. I don’t think she is auditing anything. Children do not keep the ledger we imagine they keep. We tally every unsaid I love you like a debt. I don’t believe she counted them. I believe she counted something else: the mornings, the meals, the showing up, her mother always being there, her father somehow appearing at the thing she knew he had moved heaven and earth to attend, the vacations, the arguments, the celebrations, the questions, the worrying, the expectations, and the ordinary Saturday nights none of us understood were precious because we assumed there would always be another Saturday.

Those were the thousand structural sentences of the only love letter we knew how to write. And I believe her ledger was full.

The audit is mine. The deficit is mine. She is not the one asking whether she was loved enough. I am the one asking whether I said it enough. Those are different questions, and only one of them was hers.

In the last essay, I wrote that Indian parents of my generation were often taught not to be demonstrative. Not because our parents loved us less, but because love in the cultures and families we inherited was more often expressed through responsibility than declaration. Writing this. Sitting in Sanaa’s seat for a few pages and trying to borrow her eyes has made me even more certain that something about that needs to change.

Not because our children don’t know. They know. They are brilliant translators. They decode far more than we imagine. But they should not have to translate everything, because love in translation always loses something. Sometimes what gets lost is simply the sound of your father’s voice saying the thing his actions have been trying to say.

I’m writing Sanaa’s answers because I can’t ask her anymore, and that may be the cruelest form of deferment there is. Not the trip we postponed, the restaurant we kept meaning to try, or the guitar left in its case. A conversation. A sentence. Three words. Something we were certain tomorrow would allow us to say.

So, this is her side of the song, as best as I can sing it. Did she know? I believe she did. Did I say it enough? No. And both things are true at the same time. She knew, and I still wish she had heard it more.

That may be the lesson. While your tomorrow is still coming, don’t make the people you love translate.

Just say it.

I got into an Uber last night. Settled into the back seat. And a song came on.

Garth Brooks. “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”

I have known this song for most of my adult life. I have heard it hundreds of times. It is one of my favorite Garth songs, because its premise is so simple and so human. A man lies awake beside the woman he loves and wonders whether, if he were gone tomorrow, she would know how much he loved her. Would he have said it enough? Would he have shown it enough? Would she carry with her the certainty that she had been deeply, completely loved?

For all this time, I heard it as a love song.

Last night, I heard it as a father.

And it hit me. Hard.

My daughter Sanaa passed on May 13. She was twenty-eight years old.

There was no warning that morning that by the end of the day our lives would be divided permanently into two parts. The life in which Sanaa existed, and the life in which she did not. There was no opportunity for one last conversation, one more hug, one more crazy exchange, one more chance to tell her something, anything.

There was today. And then there wasn’t tomorrow.

That’s the thing about tomorrow. We talk about it as if it’s a place on the calendar. Waiting patiently for us after we finish today. We make plans for it. We postpone things to it. We say “I’ll call tomorrow. We’ll do it next week. We’ll take that trip next year.” We treat tomorrow almost like a possession.

Until one day it isn’t.

And sitting in the back of that Uber, listening to a song I knew, I finally understood the brutality buried inside its beautiful title.

If tomorrow never comes.

Those four words are no longer hypothetical. Tomorrow didn’t come for Sanaa. So, the song asks me questions now that it never asked before.

Let me tell you how immigrants love.

Not with words. With hours. With effort.

Ask any immigrant parent when they last told their children they loved them and watch them do the translation. The long hours. The double shifts. The savings account that never got touched. The school district they stretched to afford. The college fund they started before the child could walk. That’s the answer. Lubaina and I built our life in this country the way every immigrant couple does. Heads down, future-facing, everything we built was for our children, even when almost nothing we said was.

That was the love. That was the whole language of it. In the vocabulary I inherited, love wasn’t something you expressed. It was an edifice you built, brick by brick, hour by hour, and your children grew up inside it.

And alongside the provision came the other thing immigrants give their children. Expectations.

Aamir and Sanaa were the eldest grandchildren in our family. In an Indian family, that’s not a birth order, it’s a job description. Every expectation the family carried, about grades, careers, character, all of it, reached them first. And the expectations didn’t come only from us, their parents. They came from the grandparents. From the uncles and aunts. From the entire circle of Indian family friends. Another community that appoints itself as the accountability committee, whether you asked for one or not.

So, this is what my children received from us, in overwhelming quantities: provision and expectation. A future, and the standards that came with it.

What they received far less of was emotional demonstration.

Indian parents learn not to be demonstrative. Not to be highly emotional. It’s not coldness. It’s inheritance. Our parents were like God. They handed down instructions, and you followed them. Love was assumed, structural, embedded in the sacrifice. It was almost never in the words. And we set our example based on the example that was set for us. I spoke to my children in the language my parents spoke to me, and I told myself the same thing my parents must have told themselves.

They know.

And she did know. I believe that with all my heart. We loved our baby girl beyond belief. We worked for her, worried about her, celebrated her, protected her. Since she died, people have told us stories about her that have shown me just how much love surrounded her and how much love she gave back.

But grief doesn’t care what you know.

Grief questions. Grief challenges. Grief interrogates.

Could I have told her more often? Could I have hugged her more tightly? Could I have stayed on the phone five minutes longer? Could I have put down whatever I was doing and listened more carefully? Could I have taken one more trip with her, had one more dinner, asked one more question, told one more stupid Dad joke? Could I have said, for absolutely no reason at all, Sanaa, do you know how much I love you?

Of course I could have.

That may be grief’s cruelest truth. There is always one more thing you could have done. There is also one more thing you should have said. There is always more love available than time.

Here is what I would give almost anything for now.

Not a milestone. Not a birthday. Not some spectacular family vacation.

An ordinary Saturday.

Her walking through the door. Her calling because she needed something. Her sitting at the table, laughing. Her being pissed at me. Me being annoyed with her. Her ordering our dinner, sushi or Korean, from DoorDash. Some meaningless conversation none of us would have remembered the following morning.

I didn’t understand how valuable those moments were, because I believed there would be thousands more of them.

I knew Sanaa was precious. But I didn’t know that Saturday was precious. I didn’t know that particular phone call was precious. I didn’t know that dinner, that hug, that hurried goodbye at the door was precious.

How could I? None of us lives as though every goodbye might be the last. We couldn’t function that way. So, we make the only bargain life allows. We assume tomorrow. And almost every day, life keeps the bargain.

Until the day it doesn’t.

This song asks one question: did the person you love know how you felt about them before it was too late?

But grief asks a different question. Grief asks: did you know how precious that person was, while you still had them?

I used to think those were the same question. They’re not.

The vocabulary I inherited — love as provision, love as structure, love built instead of spoken — could answer the song’s question. Sanaa knew she was loved. The hours told her. The bricks told her. On that question, I can stand firm.

But that same vocabulary left me defenseless against grief’s question. Because a love that is always building toward tomorrow is, by its very design, not paying attention to today. I was so busy building her future that I didn’t notice I was standing in the best moments of her life. The expectations, we delivered in full. The demonstrations, we delivered in translation. And the translation is my biggest regret.

I don’t know if the way we were raised and the way we raised our children is right. I think it needs to change. I think an entire generation of us, the ones who built love out of hours and effort, need to learn a language and emotional capacity our parents never taught us.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know I’m living through the process of finding it. And I know this much already. There are people in my life tonight whom I still have the privilege of loving in the present tense.

So do you.

Tell them. Not tomorrow. Not when things slow down. Not when you have the time. Not when you have the right words. Not when you have a reason.

Today. Tell them now.

Say how you feel. Give them a huge hug. Make the phone call with no purpose. Stay five minutes longer. Tell your children you love them even if they already know.

Especially if they already know.

Because I would give anything tonight to tell my daughter one more time. That I loved her. More than she can ever know.

And that is what Garth’s song means to me. It is still a love song.

I just never understood, until Sanaa died, how much love and grief are contained in the same four words.

If tomorrow never comes.

One of our interns asked me a question this week that was different.

She’s 21. Sharp, hungry, interning with us with a passion to find, define, and create her future. You can see it in how she asks questions. She’s not collecting answers; she’s building something. She wants to run hard, run fast, and get to the top quickly. Then, in the middle of our conversation about careers, she asked: What should I be thinking about personally to help me be successful?

I gave her the answer I believe in. Values first. Be a good person before you try to be a great professional. Honor your commitments, big or small. Operate with integrity. Be curious. Be brave. Do what’s right, every time.

Then I gave her one more piece of advice. Something it took me forty years to learn, and that I’m still paying the tuition on.

Do the things today that you’re tempted to defer until tomorrow. Or until you’re 40. Or 50. Or 60.

Because I know so many people who worked their career for thirty plus years so they could finally retire and do the things they wanted to do.

And by the time they got to their retirement, they had no idea what those things were.

Here’s how it happens.

When we’re young, we have visions. Dreams. Ideas. Aspirations. An almost embarrassing excess of them.

I wanted to be a musician. An actor. A comedian. A writer. A successful businessman. The CEO of a company. So many things and more. I tried to do them all at once, perhaps because I have always been constitutionally incapable of wanting only one life, but mostly because that’s what young dreams do.

Then life introduces us to a hierarchy. Whether or not Maslow intended it this way, we begin to treat human needs as a sequence: food first, shelter first, security first, success next. And only after all of that, if time remains, self-actualization.

Upon that hierarchy, we constructed another principle. Something I call the principle of deferment.

It goes like this: I have to work hard and grind today so I can be successful. I have to be successful so I can build a future for my family. And once I’ve built that future, I’ll go back to my past, collect the things I loved, and those will become my next future.

It’s a beautiful plan. It’s completely rational. And it doesn’t work.

When I say this to another immigrant, they think I’ve lost my mind.

I completely understand the reaction.

I came from India with two suitcases, $1,100, and no idea how I was going to support my wife and myself. Lubaina had come to the United States with her parents when she was eleven and grew up here. You’d think that would make her the American in the marriage and me the Indian. Somewhere along the way, we traded. She grew up in America and stayed deeply, stubbornly Indian. I arrived as an adult and became the American. Immigration does strange things to the geography of a marriage.

Then we did what immigrants do. We found the one narrow career pipeline available to us (for me it was advertising) and ground our way to some level of success.

Here’s the deal.

For an immigrant, deferment isn’t a choice. You trade your present for your family’s future. That’s the contract. You don’t get to negotiate the terms. You sign it gladly because you don’t have any alternative. This is why I traded every hour that I could have followed my passion to spend time at work. To build a better life for the people I loved. If I had to, I’d make that trade again in a heartbeat.

But here’s the reality of this contract. It has a clause written in invisible ink.

The clause says: the things you deferred will not necessarily wait for you unchanged.

You can put a passion in storage, but you cannot assume it will emerge unchanged. By the time you finally arrive at the future, where you can afford the time and have the freedom, many discover that you no longer have the same capability to claim it. The fingers don’t feel comfortable on the fretboard. The energy isn’t there for the stage. The friendships postponed formed without you. And worst of all, the dreams themselves go quiet. Decades of being told not yet teach dreams to stop asking.

I’ve watched it happen to people I admire. Brilliant people who worked hard for thirty-plus years, arrived at the summit with money and time, and stood there with no idea what they would do next. They had spent so long deferring the question that they’d forgotten they were the ones who had to answer it.

They reached the future and found that the person who’d dreamed it no longer lived.

That is the cruelest outcome of the immigrant bargain. Not failure. Arrival. Arriving at the exact future you sacrificed everything to build and being unable to enjoy it.

The mistake was not that we sacrificed. Some sacrifices were necessary, and many were acts of love. The mistake was believing that sacrifice had to be total. That the only responsible way to build a future was to vacate the present.

So, here’s what I told her. Here’s what I’d tell anyone at 21, or 41, or 61.

You cannot assume that you can defer your passions into the future and return to them whenever you are ready. The math doesn’t work that way. Passions compound when you invest in them, and they weaken when you don’t. Unlike money, you cannot always make up the lost years with a bigger deposit later.

Do them now. In parallel. Concurrently. Imperfectly.

Play the guitar badly on Sunday mornings while you build your career the other six days. Write the pages nobody will read. Take the stage at the open mic. I would never tell anyone building a future from nothing, to abandon the grind. The grind is honorable. The grind is love in its work clothes.

But the grind was never supposed to be all of you. And the future you’re building is only worth arriving at if the person who dreamed it survives the journey.

I’m in my early sixties. I still play my guitar and sing. I write and write. You’re reading the proof. I got some of it right, mostly by accident, mostly because my dreams were too loud and too many to fully suppress. But I deferred plenty, and I know exactly which parts of my soul are quieter for it.

I do not know which part of our conversation she will remember. Perhaps the advice about integrity. Perhaps the insistence on courage. Perhaps none of it.

But I hope she remembers this: do not become so successful at building your future that you evict yourself from it. Keep something alive that belongs only to you. Play badly. Write privately. Perform before you are ready. Begin before life grants permission, because life rarely does.

Don’t wait until you’re standing in the future to find out what you left behind.

That is what I wanted to tell her.

Do it now.

Two weeks ago, I shared a piece called Get Over It, which began with someone telling me, eight weeks after my daughter Sanaa died, that it was about time I did. I made my case against that idea there, and I will not repeat it here. But there was one thing in that piece I could not get past, and it is the reason for this. Our language has no name for what has happened to us.

Lose a spouse and we call you a widow, a widower. Lose your parents young and we call you an orphan. These words do not contain the whole of those losses, but they acknowledge that something fundamental has happened; they hand the person an identity equal to the rupture. Lose a child, and English offers nothing. It calls you a bereaved parent. Clinical, temporary, a shrug in a nice coat, the kind of phrase you write on a form. I’ve had to fill a lot of them. Bereaved means robbed. Robbed of what, in which direction, at what cost? The phrase does not say.

And this is not a small thing. English will build a word for almost anything. It has one for the smell of rain on dry earth. For what happened to Lubaina and me on May 13, 2026, it had left an empty space. I have been offered a great deal of comfort in these twelve weeks, and I am grateful for every measure of it. But comfort was never what I was short of. What I was short of was language. When there is no word, every conversation has to be built from nothing. That is not a curiosity of vocabulary. It is a tax, and it is levied on the worst day of your life.

Then two friends wrote to me.

Bernie wrote that although English had no accepted word, Sanskrit held one that came close. Louise wrote separately and offered the same word and explained that advocates were working to bring it into common usage. Not as a label, but as recognition of the permanent state a parent enters when a child dies.

The word. Vilomah.

I had never heard it.

I have been thinking about it for the past two weeks. And am trying to understand it. The root, viloma, means reversed, inverted, against the grain, against the natural order. In modern use, vilomah names a parent whose child has died. The ancient root and its new human meaning meet in one devastatingly exact idea: a loss that violates the sequence by which life is supposed to unfold.

Against the natural order.

Not tragic. Not sad. Not unfair. Those are words for things that go wrong inside the order, where the order holds, and something painful happens within it. This is the order itself running backward. Parents are meant to bring children into the world, to protect them through the uncertainty of childhood, to watch them become who they are and prepare them for lives that continue after ours have ended. We expect to worry about leaving our children. We do not expect to learn how to live after they leave us. Fathers are not supposed to stand beside the graves of their daughters. The grey-haired are not supposed to bury the black-haired. I have never encountered a definition that so precisely described an experience.

My first response to the word, though, was not comfort. It was embarrassment.

I was born in India. Sanskrit is woven through the language, the prayers, the philosophy of the place I came from. I am also a writer; words have been the instruments of my whole life. And yet, handed one of the most important words I would ever need, I did not recognize it. I felt ignorant of my own inheritance.

Except that I was not. Because I did know it. I just knew it in a different context.

Anulom vilom.

It is a breathing practice that we follow. Close the right nostril, breathe in through the left; close the left, breathe out through the right; then reverse it and begin again. It is common practice in many parts of India. Many have done daily without realizing the words meant.

Anulom: with the grain, the natural order. Vilom: against the grain, the reverse.

The words belong to the breath. And for many years I have breathed through an instrument without once thinking about what the breathing meant.

I play the harmonica. Adequately, but I play. It is the only instrument I know that you play in both directions. Same hole, same reed, two different notes depending on which way the air is moving. A guitar you strike. A piano you press. A harmonica you breathe. Blow, and it sounds. Draw, and it sounds differently. And the draw notes are the ones that bend. The ones that ache. Every sound on that instrument with any grief in it comes from air moving the wrong way. The wailing sound, the vibrato mimicking the human voice, and bent notes express the deep raw feelings that emerge from draw notes in a blues harmonica.

Anulom. Blow.

Vilom. Draw.

There is one more thing I learned, and I would rather tell you the real version than the cleaner one. The root of vilomah is genuinely ancient. Its use as a name for a grieving parent is not. It came in 2009, expressed by Karla Holloway, the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She lost her son and found herself, in her own words, punished by an empty space in the language. She knew that widow had entered English out of Sanskrit, so she went back into this same old language, searching for a name for herself.

And found vilomah.

She started using it. Other parents began to use it. And now, as Louise mentioned, there are people working to bring it fully into English, so that the rest of the world has a way to speak to us without struggling.

Finding the word did not lessen the pain. It did not make Sanaa’s death more understandable, or fill the rooms of our home, or return the future we had imagined. A word cannot do any of that. But a word can validate a reality. It can tell the person carrying it that what they feel is not excessive or imaginary or illegitimate. It can tell the world that this is not ordinary sadness, not a difficult season before normal life resumes. It can say that the death of a child does not only create grief. It alters identity.

I did not simply lose my daughter. I became someone I had never been before.

I became a vilomah. Lubaina became a vilomah.

We did not choose it. We did not earn it. We do not wear it as a badge. It was placed on us the day the natural order of our lives was overturned. There is no pride in the name, but there may be dignity in finally being able to say what happened to us. We crossed a threshold from which there is no return. We will keep growing, living, laughing, loving, and perhaps one day finding forms of joy again. But we will never again be the people who had not lost a child.

Something else happened after I published Get Over It. More people wrote back. Not only with condolences, but with their own stories. Some had lost children. Others had lost parents, spouses, siblings, friends, futures they had expected to live. Some were walking beside the grieving and trying to learn how.

Jonathan, who lost his son Dylan three years ago, understood at once what I meant by moving forward rather than on. He wrote about the pain of people no longer saying Dylan’s name. About his absence from his sister’s engagement, from the wedding planning, from the bridal party, from the family milestones that should have held him. His note revealed something those who have not lost a child may not see: the loss does not happen once. It happens again at every future moment the child should have been part of. At birthdays and weddings and ordinary dinners. When a photograph is taken and there is a space where someone should be standing. When people slowly stop saying the name, out of a fear of causing pain, not knowing the silence hurts more than the name ever could.

That, too, is being a vilomah. We do not only grieve the life that ended. We grieve every part of the future that died with it.

Barry, who nearly lost his own daughter twice, wrote that while he could not share my grief he could share the other thing. The love between a father and a daughter, which he is right to say is like nothing else in this world or the next. Nelson wrote about supporting his fiancée, Leslie, after the loss of her son, and said these words were helping him understand how to keep walking beside her. Those who love a grieving parent are placed in an impossible position: they want to help, and there is no act that can undo what happened, no sentence that removes the pain, no timetable, no destination where the journey is declared complete. Perhaps their first responsibility is simply to remain. To listen without trying to repair. To say the child’s name. To understand that tears are not failure, and silence is not healing.

Cory put it plainly: moving forward is wise; moving on is not in his nature. Nor is it in mine. I do not intend to move on from Sanaa. I intend to move forward with her. To let her keep shaping who I become, what I notice, what I value, what I do with the years I have left.

And Deb wrote something that blew me away. She said these pieces had created a community, even among people who had never met Sanaa or me, who shared no origin or profession or faith — that all of it had stopped mattering, and that strangers, colleagues, even competitors had found a single common denominator. We are walking with you, she wrote. Keep writing.

I did not start writing to build a community. I started because I did not know what else to do with what was inside me. The grief was too large to hold and too shapeless to understand, and writing gave it structure and it gave me a framework. It let me look at one fragment at a time. I was not trying to teach anyone. I was trying to survive.

But grief spoken honestly seems to recognize grief in others. Not only the loss of a child, which has its own terrible dimensions, but the loss of a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a marriage, a career, a version of oneself. These losses are not equal, and I would never flatten them into one. But nearly everyone we meet is carrying something we cannot see. The community forming here is not united by profession or politics or agreement. It is united by vulnerability. Grief is an uncompromising equalizer. Unimpressed by power, indifferent to wealth, unmoved by titles and achievements. It reduces all of us to one elemental truth. We loved someone. They are gone. And we do not know how to live in a world without them.

Some have told me this writing is teaching them, and the description makes me cringe. I never wanted this curriculum. I would surrender every insight I have gained to have my daughter back. There is nothing noble about being made to understand grief because your child has died. I am not teaching anyone how to grieve. I believe we are learning together how to speak about it, how to sit beside it, how to stop treating it as an illness to be cured or an interruption that must conclude.

Many have asked me to keep writing. I cannot promise a schedule. I will write what my heart allows, when it allows it. But I understand now that these pieces no longer belong only to me. They are becoming a meeting place where parents can say the names of children others have stopped mentioning, somewhere the grieving might feel less strange to themselves, somewhere those who want to help can learn that presence matters more than advice.

And perhaps it can be one more place where Sanaa brings people together, as her friends tell us she did all her life. We have begun a foundation in her name, built around what she believed in — a bright and sunny future for young women, and the chance to shine, or to help someone else shine. It is early. There will be more to say. This is one way we plan to move forward with her. Not by turning from the pain, and definitely not by letting the pain become all that remains, but by letting the love beneath it make something. A conversation. A community. A little more sunshine for people who need it.

I began Get Over It believing there was no word for what Lubaina and I had become. I was wrong. There is a word.

Vilomah. Against the natural order.

But it means something different now, at least for me. It is also the draw note. The breath moving the wrong way through my harp, the one that bends, the one that aches. Still a note. Still music. Still, unmistakably, a sound the instrument was built to make. You do not finish it. You keep breathing for as long as you are here.

I wish I had never needed to learn this word. I wish no parent ever did. But now that I know it, I will carry it beside her name.

I am Sanaa’s father. I will always be Sanaa’s father. And now, I am also a vilomah.

With Sanaa. Not without her.

Yesterday afternoon, at MetLife Stadium, the best footballer who ever lived did what he has always done.

He walked.

Not for a just a moment. Not to catch his breath. Not because he needed a break. For most of the match. While twenty-one other athletes sprinted themselves into the ground, Lionel Messi strolled through (most likely) the last World Cup final of his life like a man taking his dog for a walk around the block.

Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t enough. Spain won, 1–0, deep into extra time. Messi’s world cup career almost certainly ended in silver.

Stay with me on this story. The lesson of Messi’s walk isn’t “walking wins.” The lesson is bigger than that. And the team that beat him yesterday proved the second half of this lesson.

The walk is the work

Football analysts figured this out years ago. Track the GPS data from any Messi match and you find the same anomaly. He covers less ground at speed than almost anyone on the pitch. He walks more than any player in the game. At 39, in his sixth World Cup, he walked more than ever.

The lazy read is that he’s conserving energy. An aging legend, rationing what’s left.

Wrong. Watch closer.

Watch his head.

While everyone else chases the ball, Messi’s head is on a swivel. Left. Right. Over the shoulder. Again. He’s not watching the ball; he’s watching everything except the ball. Where his teammates are. Where the defenders are. Where the space is. Where the space is about to be.

He is not resting. He is building a map.

Every minute he walks, the map gets richer. Which fullback is tiring. Which center-back steps out too early. Which of his own midfielders is finding rhythm and which one is drowning. By the sixtieth minute, Messi knows the game better than anyone in the stadium. Better than the managers, better than the broadcasters, better than the algorithms.

Then, and only then, he spends himself. A burst. A pass threaded through a gap that existed for half a second. A goal.

The sprint gets the highlight. The walk made the sprint possible.

Four games. Zero leads. Four wins.

Here is the statistic that should be taught in every business school on Earth.

In this World Cup, Argentina played four knockout matches to reach the final. In none of them were they leading when the clock hit ninety minutes.

Down two against Egypt in the round of sixteen. Messi drags them level, Enzo Fernández wins it late. Extra time against Switzerland in the quarters. A comeback against England in the semis that broke fifty million English hearts. Twice they won in stoppage time.

Teams don’t do that four times in a row on luck. Luck runs out. Grit alone runs out too.

What Argentina had was a player who spent eighty minutes reading the game so that the last ten belonged to them. When the match got desperate, when everyone else’s map had dissolved into panic, Argentina still had one. The oldest man on the field handed his teammates a picture of exactly where the game was breakable, then put the ball on the foot of whoever was standing at the breaking point.

That’s not a comeback. That’s a plan that takes eighty minutes to load.

And then came Spain.

The team that beat the walking man

Look closely at how Argentina finally lost because it’s not the refutation of the Messi model. It’s the graduation ceremony.

Spain suffocated the final. They dominated possession at an absurd clip, denied Argentina clean passes, and waited. They were patient, organized, disciplined while Argentina’s map ran out of late-game miracles. When Enzo Fernández got the red card in the 90th minute, ten exhausted men held on toward penalties.

Then the goal. Study its anatomy. Pedro Porro delivers the cross. Nico Williams rises and heads it down, not at goal, but into the path of a teammate. And Ferran Torres, a substitute, finishes from eight yards.

The World Cup was won by an assist chain. Three names, three touches, finished by a player who started the match on the bench.

Spain didn’t beat Argentina with a superstar. In Lamine Yamal, Spain has one, nineteen years old, but that’s not what won them the trophy. What won them the trophy is that Spain is the Messi model distributed across eleven players. Everyone scanning. Everyone positioning. Everyone willing to head the ball down for someone else to score. The most complete team in the tournament didn’t need one man to hold the map. They all held it.

Messi spent twenty years proving that one orchestrator can lift a team above its talent. Spain just proved the endgame. An organization where orchestration doesn’t depend on any single walker at all.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

The other kind of great

Now the mirror.

Kylian Mbappé is a phenomenon. Ten goals in this tournament. The Golden Boot, the award for the most goals scored, his for the second World Cup running. He scored twice Saturday in a wild third-place game against England, valiant and electric to the last.

And France finished fourth.

Read that again. The tournament’s top scorer went home with no medal worth melting.

This is not a criticism of Mbappé. It’s a criticism of what we choose to count.

Ronaldo built a career on wanting every ball, every goal, every camera. Haaland is a scoring machine of terrifying efficiency. Jude Bellingham’s explosiveness. These are magnificent players. They are engines. They want to be the impact.

Messi wants to cause the impact. There’s a difference, and the difference is everything.

Because here’s the number that led no broadcast yesterday: Messi now owns the record for the most assists in World Cup history. He passed Maradona this tournament, in the comeback against Egypt. More goals created for other people than anyone who ever played the game’s biggest stage. The stat no kid asks about. The stat that builds teams that reach finals.

He is the coach on the field right up until the moment the game needs him to be the player. Then he becomes the player. Then he goes back to being the coach.

That toggle between orchestrator and finisher, and knowing which one the moment demands, is the rarest skill in football.

It’s also the rarest skill in the C-suite.

We promote goal scorers. We should promote Messi.

Forty-two years in and around Fortune 500 boardrooms has taught me that business has a Golden Boot problem.

We measure leaders by goals. Revenue attributed to them. Deals closed by them. Decisions made by them. The board deck, the LinkedIn post, the earnings call, all of it is a highlight reel of individual finishing.

So, we build a certain kind of leader.

The ball-chaser. You know this executive. I was this executive.

Calendar triple-booked. Copied on everything. First to speak in every meeting. In the room for every deal because no deal is real unless they touched it. Sprinting, always sprinting, from fire to fire, visibly exhausted and secretly proud of it.

The ball-chasing CEO produces spectacular individual statistics.

And most times, their teams finish fourth.

Because when the leader chases every ball, three things die quietly. Nobody else develops finishing instincts. Nobody is reading the whole field. And when the organization goes down two goals late, and every organization eventually goes down two goals late, there is no map. There is only panic, and a very tired leader demanding the ball.

The Messi leader looks lazy by comparison. Walks the halls. Sits in the back of meetings, saying little. Head on a swivel. Watching who’s tiring, who’s ready, where the market is thinning, where the competitor’s back line is stepping up too early. Doing what looks, to the untrained eye, like nothing.

Then, a pass. The right person moved onto the right problem at the precise moment the space opens. A decision withheld for weeks, made in an afternoon. And someone on the team scores a goal they’ll tell their grandchildren about.

The scorer gets the credit. The walker made it happen. The walker wanted it that way.

Walking is a discipline, not a rest

Let me be precise about what the walk actually is because it is not passivity and it is not delegation-by-abdication.

Attention is a finite resource. This is not philosophy; it’s biology. A reactive, adrenalized, ball-chasing brain in sprint mode physically cannot do pattern recognition. It sees the next five yards. It cannot see the shape of the overall game.

Messi’s walk is a decision to spend his attention on perception instead of motion. He traded his legs for his eyes, and it turns out eyes reach three World Cup finals. And win one!

The business translation is brutally simple and brutally hard.

You cannot read the field and chase the ball at the same time.

Pick one. Most leaders pick the ball because chasing feels like leadership and walking feels like guilt.

Three disciplines, for those willing to feel guilty:

Walk more. Block genuinely unstructured time to observe your own organization the way Messi observes a match. Not reviews. Not one-on-ones with agendas. Watching. If your calendar shows no walking, you are not leading, you are playing, and probably not as well as the people you hired to play.

Swivel. Scanning means both teams. Most executives study their competitors obsessively and their own side barely at all. Who on your team is quietly finding form? Who is drowning and hiding it well? Where, on your own field, is space opening that nobody has run into yet? The map has to include your own eleven or it isn’t a map.

Pass. And mean it. The Messi pass is not “delegation.” Delegation is handing someone the ball. The Messi pass is placing the ball, moving the right person into the right space at the right moment, with everything they need to finish, and then sprinting away from the celebration so it belongs entirely to them. Your assist total will never appear in a performance review. Track it anyway. It is the only leadership statistic that compounds. That you can own.

The final lesson was the defeat

So, Messi walks away without the fairy-tale ending. At 39, mostly at walking pace, he dragged a nation to back-to-back finals and lost the last one to the only kind of team that could beat him.

This is an important point to understand. Argentina’s model had a single point of failure. The map was created and lived in one man’s head. For twenty years that was enough, because Lionel was the greatest who ever lived. Yesterday, against eleven players who each carried a piece of the map themselves, it finally wasn’t.

That is Messi’s last gift to every leader paying attention. The walk, the swivel, the pass — master them, yes. But the destination should never be to become the irreplaceable orchestrator. The destination is Spain. An organization so saturated with scanners and passers that the winning goal can come from a defender, a winger, and a substitute. No one needs a legend on the field at all.

The best leaders are not the ones with the most impact. The best leaders are the ones who make everyone around them better.

And the best organizations are the ones where that sentence describes everybody.

So here is my ask for all of you who watched yesterday’s final and felt the familiar itch to be the hero.

Walk more. Look more. Pass the ball to the person best placed to put it in the net.

Then teach them to do the same.

That was Messi’s real record. It will outlast every goal.

“It’s been two months. It’s about time you got over it.”

Someone said this to me at the end of a small gathering we held this last weekend to celebrate the life of our daughter, Sanaa, who died eight weeks ago.

For a moment I wasn’t sure I had heard it right.

What made it harder was that minutes earlier, this same person had told me how inspired they were by the stories they had heard about my baby girl. Stories from her friends. Her colleagues. Her family. Stories about the way she loved people, the way she made them laugh, the way she showed up when someone needed her, the way she made a room brighter just by walking into it.

And now. It’s time to get over it.

A few weeks ago, my reaction would have been immediate. What do you know? Do you have any idea what this feels like?

But something has shifted for me in eight weeks.

Not because the pain is less. It isn’t. Not because I have accepted what happened. I haven’t. The pain is still there every morning when I wake up and remember, again, that she is gone. It still hits me at random moments. A song. An empty chair. A photograph. A Package. Memories that arrive without permission.

The grief has not gotten lighter.

I seem to have gotten better at carrying it.

For the past month I stopped publishing.

I still write. Almost every day. Sometimes several times a day. But I haven’t shared most of it. Partly because I didn’t want my friends and my network to feel obligated to walk through every dark moment with me, and partly because I wondered whether people simply needed a break from my grief.

A lot of friends asked me to keep writing. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

Until that conversation.

Because it forced me to name something I have been slowly learning.

There is an enormous difference between moving on and moving forward.

People use those phrases interchangeably. They are not the same thing.

Moving on means leaving something behind. Closing the chapter. Returning to who you used to be.

Moving forward accepts that you will never be who you were. You become someone new. Someone carrying a weight that was not there before.

In my culture, as in many others, there is the fortieth day. The prayers are completed. The rituals conclude. Life is supposed to begin returning to normal.

The fortieth day has come and gone. Twenty-two days ago.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what that is supposed to mean. And I have spent these eight weeks hearing from a few thousand people.

A father who lost his child thirty-seven years ago, and who thinks about that child every single day.

A friend who lost his daughter the day before Sanaa died.

And a man who lost his little boy two years ago and had never spoken about it. Not once. Not to anyone outside his immediate family. He read what I had written, and for the first time let other people into that part of his life.

Those conversations taught me something.

We have a word for a child who loses their parents. Orphan.

We have words for a person who loses their spouse. Widow. Widower.

There is no word for a parent who loses a child.

I have wondered why. Maybe because no language has ever found a word large enough to hold it.

And because there is no word, there is no roadmap. No framework. No accepted timeline. No finish line where someone gets to say congratulations, your grieving is complete.

So, when someone tells me it is time to move on, I try not to get angry.

I don’t always succeed. My first reaction is still the human one. You have no idea what you are talking about.

And sometimes, if I am honest, my reaction is simply this: f**k off.

But my reaction is not my response.

My response, after I have had a chance to reflect, has become different.

Most people are not trying to hurt you. They are trying to help you. They are uncomfortable watching someone they care about suffer. They want you healed. They want the world to look recognizable again.

What sounds like dismissal is often helplessness wearing the wrong clothes.

They cannot know what this is. Not because they lack compassion, but because they lack experience. Empathy has limits where experience has never traveled.

That does not make them bad people. It makes them fortunate.

And maybe that is what Sanaa is still teaching me. Grace is not for the people who understand us perfectly. Grace is for the people who don’t.

So here is my learning, and my ask.

Give grace before you expect grace.

If you are walking beside someone who is grieving, don’t rush them toward closure. Don’t ask when they will be themselves again. They won’t be. Not because they are broken. Because they have been changed.

And if you are the one carrying the grief, as I am, remember that the people around you are carrying something too. Not your burden. Their own discomfort. Their own uncertainty. Their own inability to find words that could ever be enough.

Respond more than you react. Choose softness over bitterness wherever you can.

I am not moving on. I never will.

But slowly, imperfectly, one hard day at a time, I am learning how to move forward.

With Sanaa. Not without her.

In our culture, we are taught that the fortieth day after a death is the one that matters most. It is the end point. It is the day we are meant to stop grieving for the one we lost and begin our lives again.

Tomorrow, Monday, June 22^nd is the fortieth day since Sanaa died.

And I cannot find the end of my grief.

This is my first Father’s Day without her. And it falls, with what I can only call cosmic bad timing, on day thirty-nine. Of all the days for the calendar to place right before the day I’m supposed to finish grieving, it is the one she loved.

Father’s Day was Sanaa’s production. She took point on it. Not only for me, but for her grandfather and her uncles. She and Aamir would make pancakes. We’d find a way to sneak in nine holes of golf. We’d watch the end of the U.S. Open together, every year, our ritual. This year Aamir is in New York, the Open is on, the pancakes didn’t happen, and the girl who orchestrated all of it is gone.

I have one more day left to grieve. By tradition, I need to pack all of it into today. And then tomorrow, I begin my life again, as if nothing has changed. Really?

I want to be respectful here, because the rule of forty comes from ancient wisdom, and it is meant as a kindness. It exists to keep grief from swallowing the living. I understand that. I honor it.

But I have spent the last five weeks listening to parents who have actually walked this same road. From a gentleman who lost a child thirty-seven years ago, a lady who lost her son nineteen years ago, to a community member who lost her child last year, and a dear friend, who lost his daughter the day before Sanaa passed. And they all say the same thing.

The grief does not end. It continues. It changes shape, it changes weight, it learns to share a room with joy again, but it does not end. The parents thirty seven years out are not done. They have simply learned to carry it.

I find myself caught between these two things. The tradition and the reality. And every analytical instinct I have wants the tradition to win. I love the beginning, middle, and especially the end of things. I want a finish line. I want the rule of forty to be true. I want a date I can circle.

There isn’t one. I’m sure of it now.

Here is what I want the people who love me to understand, because there are many of you, and you have been so patient with me and my musings.

My team would love to have me back. My clients would prefer to have me back. My friends want me back. My family definitely wants me back. I feel all of it, and I am grateful for all of it.

But I can’t be back. Not tomorrow.

I thought I would be further along by now. I truly did. Unfortunately, I am not. I am trying to return to my routine, my business, my writing, the things I used to do without thinking. And I just can’t seem to do it yet. We are looking into grief counseling. We are trying, all three of us, to find our way toward what the world started calling, a few years ago, “the new normal.”

I believe there is a new normal out there for us. I do. I’m just not sure I can see it today, and I am absolutely certain I won’t reach it tomorrow.

So, I’m asking for two things. The first is grace, that you won’t read this as sad, self-centered emotions looking for a place to live. That’s not what this is. This is a status report from inside something most people, mercifully, haven’t been inside of.

The second is time. And space. A little more of both than the calendar says I’m allowed to have.

Grief doesn’t obey the rule of forty. It stays as long as the love does and our love for Sanaa isn’t going anywhere. Neither, I suspect, is the grief. They came in together. They’ll leave together if they ever leave at all.

Tomorrow is day forty. I will honor it. I will observe what my tradition asks me to observe, and I will mean it.

And then, on day forty-one, I will still be her father. Still missing her. But trying to move forward.

Hopefully.

I think a cardboard box just moved me from one stage of grief to the next.

I can’t tell you which stages, exactly. I’ve spent decades studying frameworks for how humans navigate things, and for loss the standard playbook is On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that gave us what clinicians later expanded into the “seven stages of grief”: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression, acceptance.

Here’s what people forget. Kübler-Ross never meant these stages as a neat checklist. She wasn’t even writing about the bereaved. She was mapping how dying patients made peace with their own mortality. But we are obsessed with structure, so we sanitized her thesis into an orderly march. One tidy emotional room, then the next, each door closing behind you as you moved forward.

Into my fourth week, I can tell you the actual mechanics of what I feel defies that clean convention. The stages don’t wait their turn. They collide, they collapse, they blur into a single overwhelming frequency. Nobody hands you a map. There’s no timeline, no labels. You move through these stages in your own order, and episodically, you wake up to find the furniture of your life rearranged by someone who you don’t know, who didn’t ask your permission, and did not leave a note.

This week, the furniture moved. I can tell because I’ve started noticing things again, and worse, finding some of them funny. That’s the unfiltered quirky side of me.

Which brings me to the box.

Our house has been full of people for these three weeks. Friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and folks from our community. Ringing the bell, bringing flowers and food, sitting in our living room, telling us stories about Sanaa we’d never heard. The conversations go everywhere. Laughter, then tears, then long silences.

Yesterday, a few of us were talking about Sanaa. Her smile, her quickness, the way she filled a room... when my eyes drifted to the foyer.

An Amazon box was sitting there. With some other boxes. Unremarkable. But this one had something printed on the side, just above the Prime logo.

Without you.
I’m empty inside.

Somewhere in Seattle, a clever creative decided that these boxes can be brand messengers. That a shipping container should confess its inner hollowness in a humanistic way. Someone put it in a deck. Someone said, “make it,” possibly without fully appreciating the pun…

...on any other day of my life, I’d have found it funny and cute. Which it is.

Yesterday, standing in my foyer, 25 days after burying my daughter, I’ll be honest.

It got me.

Neurobiologists describe this early, acute grief as a kind of cognitive overload. The brain is violently trying to reconcile its deep-seated map of a loved one’s presence with the sudden fact of their absence. And as we move out of that initial, blinding shock, the scaffolding of our ordinary daily life collapses, leaving us in a limbic state of heightened sensitivity.

The reality is setting in, but the mind hasn’t built new defenses. The boundary between internal sorrow and the external world has dissolved. It is a scientifically documented vulnerability. A stretch where the brain’s filtering mechanisms are down, and the ordinary world turns into a canvas of raw, unmediated meaning.

Which is the clinical way of saying, I had no defenses, that’s why a line on a delivery box walked right through the gap.

Without you.
I’m empty inside.

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Five words with a line break...

A piece of experiential marketing, which said what I have been feeling way better than I’ve managed in my two earlier rants. I wrote those pieces without processing. I wrote about my rage, grief, and fear. I didn’t process it into a core insight.

What this box from Amazon, which delivered a power charger for Aamir, and is destined for the recycling can, did was to nail my pain so unbelievably well.

The conversation had carried on without me. I stood in the foyer and read the line a third time. And then I did something I haven’t done much lately.

I laughed. Then I teared up. Then I laughed again. At the fact that I was crying while holding an Amazon box. Funny, yes. Sad, yes. Ironic, yes. Crazy, yes.

Here’s what I figured out.

Grief makes us porous. It cracks the crust of ordinary attention that lets us ignore a thousand small signals every day. And once that crust is broken, everything gets through. A song Sanaa and I would sing. The angle of light in the kitchen when she cooked us a meal. A throwaway line on a shipment box.

The signals were always there. Grief is just the radio that finally picked them up.

I don’t know how long this strange, porous, slightly absurd stretch will last. I’m told the rawness eventually softens into something more bearable. I believe it. I’ll get there. But while I’m here, while the world is speaking to me in this heightened, luminous language, I find I don’t entirely want to leave. Because the same crack that lets a cardboard box break my heart is the one that lets me feel her everywhere.

So, thank you, anonymous copywriter in Seattle. You said the truest thing anyone’s said to me so far. You said it on a box.

Without you, I’m empty inside.

I am Sanaa. Very empty.

But on the other hand, I’m also laughing.

And I’m sure you’re cracking up too.

Saying, “Dad, you’re the only one who would see this!”

Two weeks ago, I wrote about losing my daughter Sanaa.

I wrote that piece because I did not know what else to do with my rage and grief. The truth is that I didn’t even know if I should publish it. Part of me wondered whether my grief should remain private. Whether the pain was too raw, too personal, too exposed. But another part of me needed to put the words somewhere, and a page was way safer than the alternatives.

Then the replies came. Emails, text messages, comments, phone calls…

Thousands of people seem to have read it. The platforms kept sending me the numbers, but the numbers are not the story. The moment I started reading the comments and messages, I realized one thing. The replies were not an audience. They were people. Each one stopping their day to write something to a grieving stranger or a half-remembered colleague or an old friend they had not spoken to in years.

And this is what broke me.

A great many were not writing condolences. They were writing confessions.

They were telling me they are living this nightmare too.

A man wrote to tell me about Bailey, his firstborn, nineteen years old, adventurous, gone. Another wrote about his twenty-four-year-old son, lost three years ago almost to the very day I lost Sanaa. A woman wrote about the brother she lost at exactly Sanaa’s age. Another about a sister. A mother three years out from losing her own twenty-four-year-old wrote to tell me, gently, that I had just joined a club nobody wants to be in, and that she would sit with me in it anyway.

I had written what I thought was a private grief. What came back to me is a map of a vast, hidden cohort. People I have known professionally for years, people whose competence and composure I have admired across conference tables, who have been carrying losses I never knew about. Carrying them the whole time. To every meeting. To every dinner. Behind every ordinary “how are you.”

This is the thing I did not understand until last week and now cannot stop seeing.

We are surrounded, all of us, every day, by people quietly carrying the heaviest things a person can carry. They do not announce it. They do not wear it. They sit across from us in our meetings, and they answer our emails and they ask about our weekends, and inside them is a nineteen-year-old, a twenty-four-year-old, a sister, a brother, a son, a daughter, whose name they would give anything to hear someone else say out loud.

I did not know. I am ashamed of how much I did not know.

Some of the replies came from people who had met Sanaa, and those were a different kind of gift. Someone reminded me she used to tease him that he could never get the steps of the Cha Cha Slide right. Someone called her the sweetest human being they had ever met. Someone who only ever met her briefly, on a video call, said she radiated a beautiful soul even through a screen. They did not have to tell me these things. They told me anyway, because they understood that a grieving father is suddenly, desperately hungry for any sliver of his child he did not already possess. Every one of those memories was a small piece of her handed back to me. I will keep them all.

And some of the replies simply said: I have no words. Over and over, in different ways. There are no words, words fail me, I cannot imagine. I used to think that’s what people said when they had nothing else to say.

I know better now. “I have no words” is not an absence. It is a presence. It means I am not going to look away from this. I am going to stand here during this unbelievably hard thing with you, even though I have nothing to fix it with. That is not a failure of language. That is love with its hands open.

So, this is what I have learned, and it is the only thing I am sure of at this time.

The community we think we have, and the community we actually have, are not the same size. The one we have, the real one, is bigger. It is also quieter. It does not show itself on the ordinary days. It shows itself when we say the truth out loud. This is when we discover that saying the true thing, the hard thing, the raw emotional thing, is what gives everyone else permission to speak their truths.

I asked, at the end of that first piece, that you call the people you love. I will ask for one more thing now, and then I will go back to my family and our grief.

The person across from you today is carrying something. Maybe everything. You almost certainly do not know what it is. You do not need to know. You only need to be a little gentler than you think the moment requires, because the moment almost always requires more than it shows.

To all of you who wrote to me, who told me about your Baileys and your brothers and your sons and your sisters, who handed back pieces of my own daughter to me, who simply stood in the dark beside me and said nothing because nothing was the honest thing to say.

Thank You.

Your kindness mattered. Your presence mattered. Your words mattered.

You helped me see that while grief may be deeply personal, love is profoundly communal. You reminded me that none of us walk through tragedy alone. And most importantly, you helped me see that my little girl is still doing what she always did. Bringing people together. Creating connection. Spreading light.

I see you now. All of you. I did not know how much you were carrying.

I do now. And I will not forget it.

— Zain

I’m devastated.

It’s day five since my little baby girl, the light of my life, the sunshine, Sanaa passed away unexpectedly and without any reason this Wednesday morning.

She was 28. She was beautiful and smart and passionate. She loved helping people. She loved being a resource. The friend you called when you didn’t know who else to call. She always, always, always smiled. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing.

She was the sunshine of my life. Which is why we called her Sunny.

And now she’s gone.

I was getting ready to leave for a meeting in Los Angeles when my wife called, in a tone that screamed nightmare: “Zainul, Sanaa’s gone.”

I said, “What do you mean, gone?”

Lubaina was frantic. “She died.”

My heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe.

What?!

Am I in a nightmare? What?!

Lubaina had found her in the bathroom when she didn’t respond to her calls. She, the mother, had to call 911. Had to be with her. The paramedics and coroner declared her deceased. The light of our life left us while I was in LA for a business meeting. What a horrible feeling.

In our culture and our faith, someone who passes away after sunrise and before sunset should be buried before sunset. Or, earliest the following morning.

I was in LA. My son Aamir was in New York. My brother-in-law, Sanaa’s uncle had just landed in Phoenix to speak at a conference. We all needed to get back home to our little girl.

I had four hours on the plane from LA to Chicago. And for the entire time I could think of nothing else.

Why? Why her? Why would a 28-year-old young woman; beautiful, smart, caring, passionate, who just loved helping other people be taken away from us? Be taken away from me?

I have spent a lifetime trying to understand how people think and feel. Just a few months ago, I wrote about how hard it is for a parent to lose a child. About a young man in our community who died climbing a mountain in Colorado. The year before, another family in our community lost their 19-year-old daughter.

I thought I understood.

Even then, I was hurt. I was sad. I cared. I felt the pain.

But what I felt on that plane, hearing that my daughter, my little girl, would not be there when I got to Chicago was nothing like anything I have ever experienced.

It was pure emotion. So deep and so vast.

Pure rage. Rage at how unfair it is that in this world a wonderful, pure young person could be taken when there are so many of us, including me, who should just as easily not inhabit this earth.

It was grief. Oh my God, the depth of it. I never knew grief existed this deep. I’ve lost both my parents, and I never felt it this hard.

It was fear. Fear of what my future is. What our future is. For my wife. For my son. For her grandparents. For her uncle, who adored her. For all the people she cared for and who cared for her. How are we going to fill that hole? What are we going to do?

It was a level of emotion I had never felt. The depths are scary. The intensity is unbelievable.

I still don’t have an answer.

We buried her on Thursday. My son and I, in keeping with our custom, went down into the grave, took her in, laid her down, covered her, and filled the grave back up. We said our farewell and prayers. And we left my little beautiful girl in a six-by-three, ten-foot-deep hole in the ground in Clarendon Hills, 20-minutes from her home. All alone.

People tried to comfort me. They spoke about how many came to see her off. It shows she was loved. It shows we are loved. It shows what Sanaa meant to the people whose lives she touched.

But while I accepted those condolences, the only thing I could think about was: How am I going to fill this hole in my heart? How am I going to fill this hole in my life? How do I move forward?

Lubaina, Aamir, and I are all working that question. Aamir and Sanaa were the closest of siblings and he is taking it really hard. Lubaina, the mother of our baby girl, is completely desolate.

Devastated.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know it isn’t what everybody tells me it is.

Keep the faith, they say. And I ask: faith with what?

Pray that she finds peace. And I think: pray to whom? Whoever I pray to, I would only ask one thing. Please give me my baby girl back. And if they took her, why would they listen to my prayer? If they took her, why would they ever give her back?

I am at the crossroads of faith and belief and the tender, well-meaning support that everybody gives. And right now, none of it makes any sense to me.

Here’s the one thing I do know. I’ve read about it in stories. I’ve read about it in books. They always said: the worst nightmare a parent has is to lose a child before they lose themselves.

Today I believe that statement is the absolute truth.

So, if you are reading this, call your daughter. Call your son. Call your mom, your dad, your sister, your friend. Don’t wait until Sunday. Don’t wait until the holidays. Don’t wait until the meeting is over. Don’t wait until your flight lands.

Call them now.

Before the phone rings and life divides into before and after.

People talk about heaven and hell as destinations that await us after death.

I don’t know what heaven is.

But now I know exactly what hell feels like.

For the first time in a decade, I went back to India.

Unfinished business. Family. Friends. The kind of trip you put off until you can’t anymore, and then you go and you’re not sure whether you’re a tourist or a son returning.

What hit me first wasn’t the heat or the noise or the way the air smells like jasmine and diesel within the same breath. It was the expressways. Roads where there used to be ruts. My city, the one I will always call Bombay, had grown up while I wasn’t looking.

Everyone I knew had moved up. Bigger homes. Bigger businesses. Better health. Kids in better schools than the ones we went to. There was a swagger I didn’t remember, and it looked so good on them.

And then the question started coming. From cousins. From old classmates. From past colleagues. From my one uncle who turned 100 while I was there.

Why don’t you come back home, Zain?

It’s a fair question. Honestly, it’s the right question. India in 2026 is not the India I left. It’s confident. It’s connected. It’s hungry in the way countries are hungry when they sense the century might belong to them.

I reflected on it. I didn’t rush it. I let it work on me the way tough questions are supposed to.

And then I told them the truth.

My home is in Chicago.

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My wife, Lubaina, who grew up in the Chicagoland area and I have been here long enough that the seasons feel like family members. The brutal February wind off the lake. The first warm Saturday in April when the whole city decides, collectively, to forgive winter and go out in t-shirts and shorts. The smell of charcoal in Lincoln Park in July. The joy around Thanksgiving. And Christmas… my favorite time!

That’s home. Not metaphorically. Literally. All of me loves the rhythm of this place.

But more than that, my kids were born here.

They are American.

They know their parents came from India. They love the food, the festivals, their grandparents, the chaos of a wedding that lasts four days. They carry the inheritance. But when you ask them what they are, they don’t hesitate.

American.

And here’s the thing I want my family and friends in India to understand, because I’m not sure it translates when my kids say American, they don’t mean a color. They don’t mean a religion. They don’t mean a caste. They don’t mean a creed.

They mean an idea.

The idea that we’re all in this together. That the kid whose grandparents came from Lagos and the kid whose grandparents came from Lahore and the kid whose great-great-great-grandparents came over on the Mayflower are sitting in the same classroom, eating the same bad pizza, arguing about the same Marvel movie. That nobody gets to tell anybody else they don’t belong.

It’s a fragile idea. I know that. I’ve been here long enough to know how often we fail it. But the idea itself. The audacity of the idea is what made me an American the day I decided to be one.

Not the passport. The decision.

You don’t inherit American the way you inherit Indian. You choose it. And then, every day, in small ways, you keep choosing it.

That’s why I’m not coming back.

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There’s another reason. And I want to be honest about it, because I think the people asking me the question deserve the honest answer.

I came here with nothing.

I want you to reflect on this for a second, because I sometimes forget it myself, and forgetting is a kind of disrespect. I came here with two suitcases, a business education that wasn’t credible here then, and a wife who grew up here, and her family who were willing to support us. I had less than $1,500. I didn’t have a network. I didn’t have a fallback plan.

And in this country, I would argue, only in this country, can you create an amazing future at this scale and speed. I went from a hungry immigrant, who got nicknamed the Zainiac, to running companies. To building companies. To founding and leading a firm that the biggest names in pharma and life sciences trust with their hardest questions. To advising boards. Mentoring leaders and youth. To writing books that strangers read on airplanes. To raising children who will never know what it feels like to start at zero.

I’m not bragging. I’m doing the math.

This is the solution. There is no other country on earth where a kid who arrived with two suitcases gets to build what I’ve been allowed to build, on the timeline I’ve been allowed to build it. None. I’ve looked. I’ve traveled over 150 countries. I’ve known and worked with people who tried it elsewhere. And the story is always the same. They got somewhere. They didn’t get here. The ceiling exists in most of those places. It’s polite. It’s well-mannered. It’s beautifully decorated. But it’s a ceiling.

In America, the ceiling is something you forgot to look up at.

I’m not naïve about this. I know there are kids born in this country with the deck stacked against them in ways my children will never face. I know the promise isn’t evenly distributed. I know plenty of immigrants who worked twice as hard as I did and didn’t get the breaks I got. The American dream is real, but it isn’t fair, and pretending otherwise is the kind of cheap patriotism that makes thoughtful people roll their eyes.

But here’s what I will say, and I’ll say it loudly enough that my friends in Bombay can hear it over the traffic and music.

The dream exists.

It actually exists.

That country is America.

And every time I forget it. Every time I get cynical about the politics or exhausted by the noise or angry at the latest version of whatever we’re tearing each other apart, I remember the two suitcases. I remember the bet Lubaina made. I remember that my children’s last name appears on company letterhead because this country let it happen.

You don’t walk away from a country that did that for you. You don’t even seriously consider it.

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Now here’s the part that’s been nagging at me since I got off the plane at O’Hare.

Everybody around the world either loves America or hates America. There’s no in-between. You meet people in Bombay, in London, in Dubai, in Singapore, and within ten minutes you know which side they’re on. The love is loud. The hate is louder. And the love and the hate are about the same things. The music, the movies, the money, the swagger, the willingness to throw our weight around, the refusal to apologize for being big.

For a long time, I took that personally. When you’re an immigrant, criticism of your adopted country lands differently. It’s not abstract. It’s a comment on the choice you made. It’s a comment on the bet.

But I’m a student of history, and history shows one thing.

Every civilization that has shaped the world has been loved and hated in equal measure. Rome. The Mughals. The British. The Mongols, the Ottomans, the Spanish, the Dutch when their century came. Pick any empire that mattered and you’ll find the same pattern: adored by some, despised by others, and almost always misunderstood by both.

Civilizations that don’t matter don’t get hated. They get ignored.

The hate is a tax you pay for relevance.

And I’d argue America pays a particularly heavy version of that tax for one specific reason. We’re the only ones who let the outsider in and then let him win. Other empires conquered. They extracted. They ruled. America did something stranger and, in the long arc of history, more radical. America said: come here with nothing, and if you’re good enough, we’ll let you run the place.

You can’t do that in any other country. You can’t do that in any of the polite, well-mannered places I mentioned earlier. You can do it here. The world resents that, even when it’s secretly trying to imitate it.

I’m not saying America is perfect. It’s definitely above criticism. I’m saying the real criticism, the loud kind, the kind that fills foreign newspapers and dinner tables in cities I’ve visited is itself a measure of how much America still matters. The day the world stops arguing about us is the day we should start worrying.

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So, here’s where I’ve landed, sitting at my desk in my study in my home in Naperville. And I’m writing this, not as a piece for social media, but as a reflection of my heritage and my identity.

I’m American. And I’m more.

I’m the kid who grew up in India and the man who built a life in Illinois. I’m the husband of thirty-seven years and the father of two children who don’t see color, caste, creed, or status the way their grandparents had to. I’m the immigrant who chose this country and the citizen who refuses to be quiet about what it could still become. I’m the guy who came with two suitcases and ended up running a company that does work for the names you read in the Wall Street Journal.

The trip didn’t make me less American. It made me clearer about what being American means.

It means you can hold two homes in your chest without either of them getting smaller. It means you can love the country you came from and the country you became without one canceling out the other. It means you can be proud of India’s expressways and still believe that the road you’re on is the one that goes home.

It means a kid can show up with nothing and become something. Not as an exception. As the rule.

My friends back in India may keep asking. Why don’t you come back?

And I’ll keep telling them the same thing, with love.

I’m already am home.

I’m American.

And I’m more.

Every morning, millions of people conduct a private experiment in decision-making.

We call it commuting. But what it really is, is a daily laboratory of judgment, ego, prediction, impatience, trust, and consequence.

Some people think the drive to work is dead time. I think it is graduate school.

Because if you pay attention, the road teaches you how you make choices everywhere else. Yesterday, mine taught me a lesson I apparently need to keep learning.

Yesterday morning, on my way to work, Google Maps told me to turn left on Naper Boulevard.

Naper is a four-lane road. Two lanes north, two lanes south. A real artery. But sitting at the light, I saw a school bus and a small herd of cars stacked up at the turn, and I did what every ambitious commuter does many time. I overruled the algorithm.

I drove another mile east. Turned north on Yackley Road. One lane. No passing. No options.

About 800 feet in, I found myself behind another school bus and a utility van, doing a sedate, dignified twenty-eight miles an hour on a forty-mile-an-hour road. For three-point-two miles. With Lennon, my goldendoodle, in the back seat looking at me the way only a dog can look at a man who has clearly made his own bed.

I rolled into the office twenty-one minutes late.

That’s the story. Now let me tell you what it actually means.

The math people get wrong

Most people, if you asked them, would say I’d cut my options in half by leaving the four-lane road for the one-lane road. Two lanes down to one. Fifty percent less.

That’s wrong. I didn’t cut my options in half. I cut them to a quarter.

Here’s why. On Naper Boulevard, if a car ahead of me stalled, broke down, or just decided to drive at the speed of geological time, I had a second lane to merge into. I had optionality. It’s the financial term for the freedom to choose later, once I had more information. On Yackley, that optionality vanished. One lane means one decision, made permanently, three miles ago, by the slowest vehicle in the column.

So the real math isn’t:

2 lanes → 1 lane = ½ the road

It’s actually:

(2 lanes × ability to switch) → (1 lane × no ability to switch) = ¼ the freedom

This is the part the linear thinkers miss. You don’t just lose lanes. You lose the right to reconsider. And the value of being able to reconsider is, in almost every system I’ve ever studied, worth more than the thing you’re choosing between.

In behavioral economics there’s a name for this. It’s called the option value of a decision and humans are terrible at pricing it. We see what’s in front of us (one lane vs. two) and we miss what’s behind it (the entire architecture of recovery if things go sideways).

Daniel Kahneman would call it a failure of System 2. I’d call it the reason I was late.

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The career version of Yackley Road

Now, I wouldn’t bother you with a story about a goldendoodle and a school bus if it were really about traffic.

How many of us have made exactly this decision in our careers?

We see a side road. A faster track. A specialized lane. A boutique firm, a niche role, a “this will get me there a year sooner” opportunity. And we make a linear prediction: if the highway takes me X minutes, this shortcut takes me X-minus-something. We assume our career ladder is, in fact, a straight thing that just goes up.

And then life, what I think of as Lady Karma, the gravity of fate, the small mercies and small cruelties that make a life what it is, puts a school bus and a utility van in front of us. The market shifts. The boss leaves. The product line gets cut. The acquirer changes their mind. And suddenly we’re three miles into a one-lane road doing twenty-eight in a forty zone, and we can’t pass, and we can’t turn around, and the highway we left is moving fine without us.

The mistake wasn’t taking the side road. The mistake was assuming the side road was a shorter version of the highway, when in fact it was a different kind of road altogether.

A four-lane road is a system with redundancy. A one-lane road is a system with single points of failure. They are not the same thing measured at different sizes. They are different categories.

A framework I actually use: the Redundancy Test

Whenever I’m about to make a meaningful career or strategic decision, I run something I’ve started calling, the Redundancy Test. It has three questions:

1. If the thing in front of me slows down or breaks, what is my recovery move? On Naper, the recovery move was switch lanes. On Yackley, there was no recovery move. The recovery move is the option value. If you can’t name it in one sentence, you don’t have one.

2. Am I confusing speed with progress? Going faster on a road that doesn’t go where you need to go is not progress. It’s just commitment with extra cardio. Most career mistakes I’ve watched smart people, including several times, myself are speed mistakes dressed up as progress.

3. Who else is on this road, and what do they tell me about it? This is the school bus signal. School buses, utility vans, people on cell phones aren’t obstacles, they’re information. The road tells you what kind of road it is by who’s already driving on it. If everyone on your “shortcut” is already going slow, the shortcut isn’t a shortcut. It’s just a road with a flattering name.

What I actually learned

I have a name for what I did wrong yesterday. I call it a failure of delegation.

Google Maps was, in that moment, smarter than I was. Not in some grand AGI sense — just narrowly, specifically, locally smarter. It was looking at billions of connected data points across thousands of cars in real time. I was looking at a school bus. The algorithm had aggregated information; I was running on a hunch and a flicker of pride.

When Google Maps tells me Naper takes thirty-eight minutes, and I overrule it because I have vibes, I am not exercising judgment. I am exercising ego. There’s a difference, and the difference is about twenty-one minutes.

This is, I think, the central question of the next decade of professional life. Not will AI replace us — a tired question that gets tired answers. The real one is: which decisions should I delegate to a system that has more information than I do, and which decisions are still genuinely mine?

Here’s the heuristic I’m settling on:

• If the decision is about what road to take — meaning a question of routing, optimization, prediction, pattern-matching across data I don’t have — delegate it. Let the machine drive.

• If the decision is about where I want to go — meaning purpose, values, what I’m actually trying to build, who I’m trying to become — keep it. The machine has no opinion on that, and shouldn’t.

I went on Yackley Road because I wanted to feel like the kind of person who knows shortcuts. That’s not a routing decision. That’s an identity decision. And I let it override a routing decision, which is exactly backwards.

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The view from the back seat

When I finally made it to the office, Lennon hopped out, did his rounds in the lobby, and went straight to his bed under my desk like nothing had happened. Dogs are amazing at this. They don’t litigate the route. They don’t relitigate the route. They arrive, they get a treat, they move on.

I, on the other hand, sat down with my coffee and thought about what the school bus had cost me. Not the twenty-one minutes. Those I’ll get back. The other thing. The lesson I keep having to learn, again and again, in different vehicles on different roads:

Most of the things I think are decisions are actually just preferences in a costume.

The real decision was made earlier, when I told myself my judgment was better than the algorithm’s. The left turn on Yackley wasn’t the moment. The moment was the assumption underneath it.

That’s the one I’m trying to delegate now. Not the turns. The assumptions.

Another small entry in the masterclass I’ve come to call Leadership Lessons from My Commute. Equal parts fate, freeway, and the dog in the back seat keeping score.

MIT just published a number that should have ended more careers than it did.

95%.

Ninety-five percent of enterprise GenAI pilots delivered zero measurable impact on the P&L. Not disappointing returns. Zero. Thirty to forty billion dollars of enterprise investment in the past three years, and almost all of it lit on fire.

That’s from the MIT NANDA report, State of AI in Business 2025. It landed like a grenade in August and the hype machine has been working overtime ever since to rationalize it away.

Here’s what nobody rationalizing it will tell you.

A huge share of those failed pilots had the same structural flaw. They bet everything on one model.

One vendor. One platform. One chatbot to rule them all. It’s the cleanest slide in the deck and the worst strategy in the market. And the companies that have already figured this out are pulling away so fast the laggards won’t see them again.

Welcome to the era of AI orchestration. This is where the smartest companies stopped asking “which AI is best?” and started asking “which AIs, in which order, for which decision?”

If you’re still picking favorites, you’re not being loyal. You’re being left behind.

A Brief, Unavoidable “I Told You So”

In August of 2025, before MIT’s report dropped, before the Deloitte State of AI numbers came out, before WRITER surveyed 2,400 executives and discovered half of them think AI is tearing their company apart, I published a piece called “Confessions of an AI Polygamist. Why I’m Committed to Many Models.”

In it, I admitted I was an AI polygamist. And a proudly promiscuous one.

Seven models on my roster. Not one. Not two. Seven.

I ran the same problem past multiple models simultaneously and used the friction between their answers as the actual output. At the time, this was treated by most of my readers as a personal eccentricity. A quirk. A thing Zain does because he’s curious and slightly obsessive.

A few of the more senior executives I shared it with told me, nicely, that I was overcomplicating things. Pick a model. Standardize. Train the team. Stop flirting with every new release. That was the procurement-friendly answer. It was also the answer most Fortune 500 companies were quietly giving themselves at the time.

Eight months later, the data has come in and the procurement-friendly answer is the reason 95% of their AI pilots failed.

IBM is running six models in parallel. Coca-Cola runs every major campaign through three. Goldman makes no billion-dollar call with fewer than five. Duolingo routes different learners to different models based on what they’re actually trying to learn.

That isn’t vindication. That’s the market catching up to a thesis that was already obvious to anyone who was actually using these tools instead of theorizing about them.

I’m not writing this to take a victory lap. I’m writing it because the people who lost eight months are about to lose another eighteen if they don’t internalize what the early movers already have.

So let me say plainly what I said in August, and what the data now proves:

Monogamy is a virtue in marriage.

In AI strategy, it is malpractice.

Here’s the autopsy.

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The Single-Model Trap

Let me tell you a story.

In 2023, a Fortune 100 pharma company bet on a single AI platform for drug discovery. Three billion dollars. Eighteen months. Thousands of scientists trained on a single interface. Every workflow re-engineered around one vendor’s roadmap.

The results? Fine.

Not bad. Not transformative. Just... fine. Which in the business world is another word for catastrophic.

When they finally ran the same dataset through a competing model as a quiet side experiment, it surfaced 40 drug candidates their primary system had missed.

Forty.

Forty molecules. Any one of which could have been a blockbuster. All of them invisible to the single model they’d built their entire R&D engine around.

That’s what AI monogamy actually costs. Not efficiency. Not pennies on the margin. Molecules. Markets. Years of competitive advantage that can’t be bought back.

Here’s the lesson every executive running a single-model strategy needs to tattoo on the back of their hand:

Every AI model is brilliant at something.

Every AI model is blind to something else.

The winning strategy isn’t finding the perfect model. There is no perfect model. The winning strategy is orchestrating the imperfect ones against each other until the truth falls out.

Why Monogamy Fails: Cognitive Inbreeding

When you commit to a single AI model, you don’t just inherit its strengths. You inherit its entire genetic code.

Its training data. Its architectural biases. Its blind spots. Its hallucination patterns. Its political lean. Its cultural assumptions. Its failure modes.

GPT-4 was trained on a different corpus than Claude. Gemini sees the world through Google’s lens. DeepSeek was built with a different philosophy of what “good” reasoning looks like. Grok was built to say the things the others were trained to soften. These aren’t minor variations. They’re different species of intelligence.

Pick one, and every decision you run through it will carry that species’ DNA. Forever. You’ll mistake its blind spot for your own. You’ll think the model is being objective when it’s just being consistent.

This is cognitive inbreeding. And like all inbreeding, the symptoms don’t show up in the first generation. They show up three quarters later, when your competitor launches something you should have thought of and you realize your AI never would have suggested it because its training data never put the pieces in the same room.

The Futurum Group’s latest AI Decision Maker Survey made this official in early 2026. Enterprises are abandoning the single-platform dream and moving to multi-model stacks. Not because it’s trendy, but because the single-model approach is structurally incapable of supporting the range of decisions a serious company has to make.

Multi-model isn’t a luxury. It’s how you escape the training data of any one vendor.

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How the Winners Are Actually Doing This

Look past the press releases and you see a pattern nobody wants to put on a billboard but everyone is quietly executing.

IBM’s Cognitive Ensemble

IBM’s consulting arm doesn’t use one AI. They use six, working in concert. Watson for structured enterprise knowledge. GPT for strategic narrative. Claude for ethics and stakeholder framing. Gemini for rapid competitive analysis. Domain-specific models for regulated industries. And orchestration logic that decides which model gets which piece of which problem.

Their consultants stopped being prompters. They became conductors. The work got faster and the work got better — not because any single model got smarter, but because the ensemble refused to accept any single model’s answer at face value.

Coca-Cola’s AI Trinity

Every major Coca-Cola campaign now runs through three models in sequence. ChatGPT generates the creative concepts. Claude pressure-tests them for cultural sensitivity and brand alignment. Gemini runs the predictive analytics against market data.

They don’t average the three. They don’t vote. They use the friction between them. Where the models disagree is where the human strategist earns their salary. The disagreement is the signal. The consensus is just the sanity check.

Duolingo’s Personality Engine

Duolingo figured out something most enterprises still haven’t. Different users learn from different voices. So the platform routes different learners through different models. Some get GPT’s conversational energy, some get Claude’s narrative arcs, some get custom-trained models for pronunciation. The models aren’t backups. They’re collaborators with distinct teaching styles.

When Luis von Ahn talks about this, he uses a word most CTOs are still uncomfortable saying out loud: personality. Every model has one. The companies winning with AI are the ones who stopped pretending they didn’t.

Goldman’s Model Mesh

Goldman Sachs has been the most tight-lipped about its AI architecture. But the internal pattern that’s leaked out is telling: multiple models voting on interpretations of risk, regulatory language, and market signal. No single model gets to make a billion-dollar call. Ever.

Their logic is not diplomatic. It’s adversarial. Different models are asked to disagree with each other on purpose. The humans arbitrate. The consensus of five differently-trained systems is treated as more trustworthy than any one system — no matter how impressive its benchmarks.

Call it diversification. Call it adversarial validation. Call it whatever your risk committee can stomach. It’s multi-model orchestration, and it’s how grown-ups use AI on decisions that matter.

The Fastest-Growing Companies Are Already Polygamous

Here’s the statistic that should end the debate.

The Futurum Group’s 2026 survey of enterprise AI decision-makers makes the pattern unambiguous: the organizations pulling away from their competitors are the ones running multi-model stacks by design. The laggards are still stuck on a single-vendor standardization fantasy that hasn’t aged well.

Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise, released in January 2026, adds weight to the pattern. Organizations transforming with AI, not just experimenting with it, are 34% of their sample. The defining trait of that 34% isn’t bigger budgets. It’s architectural maturity. They don’t treat AI as a single tool. They treat it as a portfolio.

And WRITER’s 2026 AI Adoption in the Enterprise report is where the knife twists. 75% of executives now admit their AI strategy is “more for show” than actual internal guidance. 54% of the C-suite say AI is “tearing their company apart.” 59% are spending over a million dollars a year on AI and only 29% are seeing real returns.

The 29% that are winning aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re doing the one thing the 71% refuse to do: accepting that there is no one tool, one vendor, or one model that solves the whole problem.

They’ve become polygamous. The rest are still filing for emotional damages against their single AI partner.

The Surgical Team: How to Think About Your Stack

Here’s the reframe every executive I work with eventually gets to, usually about six months after they should have.

A hospital doesn’t have one “best doctor” do every job in surgery. It has a team. An anesthesiologist, a lead surgeon, assisting surgeons, scrub nurses, an imaging specialist, a post-op team. Each is world-class in a narrow domain. None of them could do the others’ work. Together, they accomplish something no single practitioner could.

That is the model. Not the LLM. The model.

Your AI stack should look like a surgical team, not a solo practitioner.

Perplexity for research. Cited sources. Current data. It won’t pretend to know what it doesn’t.

Claude for strategic framing and ethics. The one that will tell you your framing is off before it tells you it’s brilliant.

ChatGPT for narrative and first drafts. Speed. Volume. The skeleton other models will sharpen.

Gemini for data and contrarian analysis. The challenger. When everything else starts agreeing, bring Gemini in to disagree.

Copilot for execution. Embedded in the spreadsheet, the doc, the deck. The model that turns decisions into deliverables.

Grok or DeepSeek as wildcards. Different architectures, different cultural priors, different blind spots than the Western stack. On one problem in ten, the difference is the whole ballgame.

Stop looking for the one model that does everything adequately. Start building a team of models that each do one thing brilliantly.

That’s not promiscuity. That’s professional practice.

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The CFO Objection (And Why It’s Wrong)

Every time I walk a leadership team through this, someone from finance raises the same hand with the same objection.

“This sounds expensive. Multiple licenses. Multiple contracts. Multiple vendor relationships. Aren’t we supposed to be consolidating?”

Here’s the math nobody wants to do on the whiteboard.

An enterprise ChatGPT seat is $30 a month. Claude Pro is $20. Perplexity Pro is $20. Gemini Advanced, about $20. Copilot, bundled if you’re already on Microsoft. Call it $100 per user per month for a full-stack multi-model license. It’s the cost of a decent lunch.

Now look at the MIT data. The average enterprise AI pilot costs somewhere between $500K and several million dollars. 95% of them fail. That’s tens of billions in aggregate waste.

A hundred dollars a month per knowledge worker to run five models in parallel is not an expense line. It is the single cheapest form of risk mitigation available to a modern enterprise. You are not over-indexing on AI. You are refusing to put all of your cognitive eggs in one training dataset.

The CFO who blocks multi-model orchestration to save $80 a seat is the same CFO who approved the $3 billion single-platform pharma bet.

Pennywise. Molecule-foolish.

How to Start Monday Morning

You don’t need seven models on day one. You need three.

A generalist. A researcher. A challenger.

ChatGPT or Claude as your generalist. Perplexity as your researcher. Gemini or Grok as your challenger. Same task, three models, in sequence. For thirty days.

Week one, run every major deliverable through the generalist only. Document it.

Week two, add the researcher. Let it pressure-test the generalist’s assumptions with citations the generalist never had.

Week three, add the challenger. Force it to disagree. Pay attention to where it does.

Week four, orchestrate all three deliberately. Not sequentially. Not redundantly. Strategically. And measure what happens to your time-to-decision, your quality, and the number of genuinely new ideas that make it onto the table.

You will not go back. I have run this experiment with dozens of senior teams. Not one has ever returned to single-model work.

Not one.

The Real Question

The cognitive age is here. Thinking is the product. Speed plus diversity plus quality is how winners are measured now.

In this economy, single-model users will produce good work. Efficiently. Consistently. Forgettably.

Multi-model orchestrators will produce work that stands alone because it was built by a cognitive council rather than a cognitive monolith.

The gap between those two groups is not going to narrow. It is going to widen exponentially as models get more specialized, more numerous, more distinct in what they’re good at and what they’re not.

The question is no longer whether you can afford to adopt AI polygamy.

The question is whether you can afford the monogamy you’re still defending.

Pick a side. The next eighteen months are going to make the choice loud.

A CEO called me last week, three years into a transformation initiative, equal parts exhausted and confused. “Zain, the strategy is right. The market is ready. So why aren’t we moving?” I asked him to walk me through a typical Tuesday. By the third sentence, I had my answer and it had nothing to do with strategy.

There’s a belief that still lingers in boardrooms across the world.

That transformation begins with a big idea. A breakthrough strategy. A disruptive innovation. A bold declaration of intent.

And while that makes for a compelling story, it’s only half true.

Because after four decades of building businesses, advising leaders, and helping organizations unlock close to half a trillion dollars in value, I’ve learned something far more fundamental.

And the leaders who understand that distinction are the ones writing the next chapter of business history. They’re the ones who have both the audacity of imagination and the discipline of execution as equally critical imperatives.

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The Seduction of the Big Idea

We romanticize boldness.

We celebrate the visionary who sees what others don’t. The leader who declares a new future. The strategist who reframes the category. TED stages are built for these moments. Boardrooms are seduced by them. Investor decks are full of them.

And yes, these moments matter. I’ve been in enough boardrooms to know that genuine strategic imagination is rarer than it should be. The ability to see the uncontested space, to frame a problem no one else has framed, to articulate a future that makes people lean forward, is a genuine and precious capability.

As Peter Drucker observed, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth most companies won’t acknowledge: transformation initiatives don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because those ideas never translate into something people can easily, intuitively, and meaningfully experience.

The gap between idea and impact is almost always friction.

Friction: The Silent Killer of Transformation

Friction doesn’t announce itself.

It hides in complexity. In too many steps. In unclear value. In processes designed for the company, not the customer. In the assumption that because you understand your offering, your customer does too.

And over time, it doesn’t just persist. It compounds.

I’ve seen this pattern across industries — consumer goods, retail, tech, financial services, life sciences. Brilliant strategies buried under operational drag. Breakthrough innovations slowed to a crawl by internal misalignment. Powerful products made effectively inaccessible by poor experience design.

What makes friction particularly dangerous is its invisibility to those inside the system. When you’ve lived inside a process long enough, you stop seeing it as friction. You see it as structure. As rigor. As “the way we do things here.” The customer’s frustration becomes normalized, rationalized as acceptable complexity, as the cost of doing business, as someone else’s problem.

It isn’t.

This is why Steve Jobs’ principle remains one of the most enduring truths in business: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.” Not forward. Not internally. Backward. From the human being you are trying to serve.

TechManity™: The Framework That Closes the Gap

This is the precise tension that my TechManity™ framework was built to resolve.

TechManity™ is not a technology strategy. It’s not a human strategy. It’s the understanding that technology without humanity is cold and alienating — and humanity without technology is slow and unscalable. The future belongs to organizations that blend both, without apology.

The companies that create the most enduring value across categories, industries, and decades operate at a very specific intersection:

Bold imagination. Relentless simplification.

Not one without the other.

Bold ideas without simplification create confusion — beautiful strategies that no one can activate, visions that inspire in the boardroom and evaporate in the field. And simplification without boldness creates irrelevance — operational efficiency in service of a diminishing proposition, executing perfectly against a strategy that was already losing before it launched.

But when you do both? You create transformation.

TechManity™ asks organizations to use technology not as a replacement for human connection, but as an amplifier of it. To use data not to depersonalize the customer journey, but to make it more relevant. To use AI not to automate the relationship away, but to deepen it at scale.

And critically, to use all of it in service of one overriding goal: make it easier for people to get the value you’re offering.

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Where Transformation Actually Happens

Apple turned complexity into elegance. Amazon built an empire by systematically eliminating every step that stood between wanting something and having it. Those stories are boardroom gospel.

But let me give you four you might not know. Four companies that didn’t win by out-imagining the competition. They won by out-simplifying it.

Stripe: Seven lines of code instead of seven weeks

Before Stripe, integrating online payments was a multi-week developer ordeal. A tangle of bank relationships, legacy APIs, and compliance paperwork that made e-commerce feel like a heavily regulated industry just to collect a credit card number.

Stripe didn’t invent a new payments paradigm. They asked one clarifying question: what if this took seven lines of code instead of seven weeks? They removed the friction of integration so completely that an eighteen-year-old with a laptop could build a global business over a weekend. The idea of online payments wasn’t new. The ruthless simplification of access to it was. Today, Stripe processes nearly a trillion dollars a year, not because they were bolder than their competitors, but because they made the existing idea actually work.

Duolingo: Making fluency feel possible instead of punishing

Language learning had catastrophic dropout rates long before Duolingo existed. The problem wasn’t motivation — millions of people genuinely wanted to learn another language. The problem was friction. Complex curricula. Expensive classes. Time commitments that felt punishing against the reality of modern life. Guilt when you missed a day.

Duolingo didn’t invent a new pedagogy. They surgically removed the friction of commitment. Five-minute lessons. Streaks that rewarded consistency without punishing imperfection. Zero cost to start. They transformed language learning from something you intended to do into something you actually did at the margins of your day, on your phone, without a classroom or a tutor or a textbook.

680 million users later, the lesson is clear: the best product doesn’t always win. The most accessible product does.

Zocdoc: Removing the most friction-filled step in healthcare

Healthcare scheduling was a phone-tag nightmare. Calling an office, being put on hold, learning the next available appointment was six weeks out, being transferred, calling back. For a system designed to help people, it was remarkably effective at discouraging them from seeking help.

Zocdoc didn’t reinvent medicine. They removed the single most friction-filled step in accessing care — finding and booking a doctor. Real-time availability. Instant confirmation. Insurance verification upfront. A transaction that used to take forty-five minutes of phone time now takes ninety seconds on a smartphone.

Quietly transformational in a sector that resists change — and a direct preview of what’s coming for life sciences more broadly.

Notion: One canvas instead of a dozen conversations

Productivity tools were either too rigid or too scattered — Microsoft Office’s cathedral of menus, a sprawl of separate apps that didn’t talk to each other or to you. The work of doing work had accumulated layers of friction that most people had simply stopped noticing.

Notion didn’t invent a new way to work. They removed the friction of context-switching — the cognitive tax of moving between tools, reformatting information, searching across platforms, and maintaining a dozen systems each solving one piece of the puzzle. One canvas. Documents, databases, wikis, project tracking all in one place. The idea wasn’t radical. The simplification was.

Four different industries. One common truth: the winners didn’t out-idea the competition. They out-simplified it.

Pharma’s Next Frontier: From Molecules to Moments

Today, I see this same inflection point playing out in life sciences and it may be the highest-stakes version of this challenge in any industry.

For decades, competitive advantage in pharma was driven by molecule superiority. Best clinical data. Most favorable safety profile. Most differentiated mechanism of action. Full stop.

That model is eroding — not because science is less important, but because science alone is no longer sufficient.

In a world of increasing therapeutic parity, where multiple agents compete within the same mechanism, where biosimilars reshape the economics of established categories, where the FDA calendar is crowded with approvals, the battleground is shifting decisively.

Not just what the molecule does but how it fits into a patient’s life.

And beyond the patient: how it fits into the physician’s workflow. The payer’s coverage calculus. The specialty pharmacy’s operational reality. The caregiver’s daily burden.

Think about Zocdoc’s lesson applied at scale. If removing the friction of booking a doctor changes healthcare access, imagine what becomes possible when a pharma organization removes the friction of reaching the right diagnosis, navigating prior authorization, affording the first fill, staying on therapy through month six. Each of those friction points represents not just a patient experience failure, it represents clinical outcomes never achieved, value never realized, a molecule that worked in the trial and failed in the world.

The organizations that will define the next era of pharma are those that understand this holistically and act on it. Simplifying diagnosis pathways so patients reach appropriate therapy faster. Reducing access barriers that are invisible to the manufacturer but catastrophic to the patient. Designing treatment journeys that feel human rather than institutional. Building communications that are intuitive, not clinical.

This is the shift from product-centric to human-centric. From molecule to meaning.

It is, at its core, a TechManity™ challenge. The science is extraordinary. The question is whether it will be deployed in service of the human being at the center of it — or in spite of them.

What We Actually Do

When clients come to us, they often believe they need a better idea. A sharper positioning. A more compelling narrative. A new growth strategy.

Sometimes, they do.

But more often, what they actually need is something more fundamental and more difficult. They need someone to help them see the friction they’ve become blind to.

Because friction is insidious. It becomes normalized. It hides behind process. It gets justified as “the way things work here” or “the regulatory reality of our environment.”

Our work, whether through TechManity™, through Stella.ai and the Stellaverse, through our Digital Avatars platform, or through our broader strategic and behavioral science frameworks is designed to do three things:

Surface the unseen. Through behavioral science, AI-driven simulation, and deep human insight, we uncover the moments where customers struggle, hesitate, or disengage — often before the client is even aware those moments exist. The Stellaverse doesn’t just model customer behavior. It reveals the invisible architecture of belief, doubt, and decision that sits beneath the surface of stated preferences.

Challenge internal assumptions. Every organization has sacred cows — beliefs about customers, the market, their own capabilities that have calcified into gospel. We bring uncomfortable truths to the surface, because transformation doesn’t happen in comfort. It happens in the productive discomfort of confronting what you assumed was true and discovering it isn’t.

Redesign for simplicity and impact. Not just what the strategy says but how it is experienced in the real world. By the physician in a four-minute patient encounter. By the patient navigating a complex treatment protocol. By the brand team trying to activate a global strategy through a regional field force. Strategy that cannot be activated is just theory. Beautiful, well-articulated, thoroughly researched theory. But theory nonetheless.

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A Different Definition of Rigor

The industry often defines rigor as more data, more analysis, more complexity.

I define it differently.

And that confidence doesn’t come from a thicker deck or a longer methods section. It comes from knowing that what you’ve designed makes sense to the customer. That it fits naturally into their world, removes friction rather than adding to it, and creates value they can actually access and experience.

Anything else is intellectual theater.

The most effective leaders I’ve worked with over four decades share a common quality: they are relentlessly focused on the gap between intention and experience. They are not satisfied when the strategy is brilliant. They are only satisfied when the strategy is working — when the people it’s designed to serve are actually being served.

That focus is rarer than it should be. The machinery of large organizations tends to reward the production of strategy over its activation. The deck gets celebrated. The launch gets the press release. And then the quiet, unglamorous, critical work of making it actually work for real human beings gets underfunded and under-led.

TechManity™ is a direct counter to that tendency. It insists that the work isn’t done until the human being at the end of the value chain is better off. Not theoretically. Actually. Measurably, experientially, undeniably better off.

The Question Every Leader Should Ask

Don’t just ask: Do we have a bold idea?

Ask something far more important:

Where are we making life harder for the people we serve?

Where is the friction hiding? Where have we built complexity into the customer experience because it was easier for us, not for them? Where have we optimized for internal processes at the cost of their ability to get the value we’re offering?

And then, ask the hardest question of all:

Removing friction is rarely simple. It requires challenging assumptions with organizational history behind them. It requires investing in the unglamorous work of experience design when more exciting strategic priorities are always competing for the same resources. It requires being willing to say that a process that has been “working” for years is actually a barrier in disguise.

But the organizations that do this work, that hold the boldness of imagination and the discipline of simplification, that deploy technology in genuine service of human experience, are the ones that will define their categories in the decade ahead.

Because in the end, transformation isn’t about what you build.

It’s about what you remove.

And the leaders who understand that aren’t just building better businesses. They’re building the future.

I’ll go first: I’ve watched brilliant C-suite leaders fall in love with the idea of change while quietly avoiding the conversations that would actually create it. If you’re honest with yourself, which friction point in your last big initiative did you underestimate? Was it misaligned incentives, unspoken fear, or something else? I’m sure our readers would like to know.

I read the Fierce Pharma article on the top 10 drugs losing their exclusivity this year, published a few days ago. Billions in revenue. Ticking clocks. Generics waiting in the wings.

And I had a strange reaction.

Not anger. Not fascination. Sadness.

I sat there reading about Januvia. Eliquis. Xeljanz. Drugs that have saved lives, extended lives, changed lives, being discussed in the language of asset management. “Loss of exclusivity.” “Patent cliff.” “Revenue erosion.” Cold. Calculated. Rational.

I didn’t grow up in pharma. I grew up in CPG. Consumer packaged goods in the 1980s. The golden era of brand building. SC Johnson. Quaker. Pepsi. Kraft. Mars. Procter. Unilever. General Mills. That world.

In that world, when you launched a brand, you launched it to live forever.

You didn’t birth a product knowing it would die on a specific date. You built it, grew it, extended it, defended it, repriced it, re-promoted it, repositioned it. You fought for it. You never, ever, accepted its death as part of the plan.

Pharma does it differently. Every molecule enters the world with an expiration date stamped somewhere in the fine print. Seventeen years, give or take. Then hospice. Then generic erosion. Then, eventually, the brand fades into the background noise of pharmacy shelves.

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I found that hard to reconcile. Until Lennon helped me gain perspective.

We got Lennon on May 18, 2018. He was eight weeks old. A goldendoodle. Ridiculous ears. Enormous paws he hadn’t grown into yet.

He just turned eight years old. Two weeks ago.

His vet tells us he’s heading into his senior years. In dog terms, he’s already lived more than half his likely life.

I don’t want to think about that. My family won’t even say it out loud.

But here’s the thing about Lennon. He has never once wasted a day. He has never read the actuarial tables. He doesn’t know he has a dog’s lifespan. He just shows up. Every. Single. Morning. Tail going. Eyes bright. Ready.

Lennon lives in dog years because that’s all he has. And he makes it count.

That’s when it hit me.

Every pharma drug lives its life in dog years.

Not human years. Not the forever arc of a CPG brand. Dog years. Short. Concentrated. Full. Purposeful.

Januvia didn’t fail because it’s losing exclusivity in 2026. It succeeded. For over a decade, it helped millions of patients with Type 2 diabetes manage their disease. It generated billions in revenue that funded the next generation of breakthroughs. It did what it came to do.

Eliquis hasn’t lost. It’s won and it’s still winning. Thirteen-plus billion dollars in sales last year. It will face generics eventually. And when it does, those generics will make anticoagulation affordable for patients who couldn’t reach it before. The molecule keeps serving. It just changes hands.

That’s not death. That’s legacy.

I recently wrote about AI aging in dog years. About how artificial intelligence is compressing decades of technological evolution into just a few years. The analogy was about speed.

The companies that understand how to find new molecules, nurture them, grow them, extract maximum value from them and then, without flinching, go find the next one, those are the companies that win. Not just financially. Strategically. Spiritually.

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They’re doing what great pet owners do.

You bring a dog into your life knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind, that this relationship has a horizon. You don’t dwell on it. You invest in it. You celebrate it. You make every year count. And then, when the time comes, you carry the loss with dignity, and you open your heart again.

The pharma lifecycle isn’t cold. It isn’t calculated. It’s actually the most honest business model I’ve ever encountered. The terms are disclosed upfront. The clock is visible. The pressure to create value in a finite window is absolute.

There’s no pretending. No evergreen illusion. Just real stakes, real science, real impact, and a real goodbye.

That’s harder than building a consumer brand. Way harder.

I’ll be honest. I cried a little writing this. I’m a sap. Ask anyone who knows me.

But I also believe this. The way we talk about the patent cliff is wrong. It’s framed as a crisis. A cliff. A revenue catastrophe.

What if we reframed it?

What if we said, these drugs completed their mission. They ran their race. They helped people live longer, better, more fulfilled lives. And now they step aside. By becoming cheaper, more accessible, more democratized, while the next generation of molecules steps in.

That’s not a cliff. That’s a relay race.

And the companies building pipelines, making acquisitions, funding early-stage science, staying in relentless motion understand that. They’re not just managing their business cycle. They’re honoring the nature of the work.

They’re the ones who get another dog.

I’m not sure I will. Lennon is my first. Maybe my last. The thought of losing him is something I file away and refuse to open.

But what I understand now is why pharma keeps going. Why the researchers don’t stop. Why the investors keep writing checks. Why the commercial teams suit up for the next launch even as they’re winding down the last one.

Because every drug has a dog’s life.

Short. Purposeful. Irreplaceable.

And worth every single day of it.