Nanni Teacher was reading out the ranks. I was sitting in my fourth standard classroom, hands on the desk, waiting for my name. I had calculated it already—third, maybe second. I had 97%. But when my name came, it came seventh. Or eighth. I don’t remember exactly.
What I remember is the video that started playing in my head: What will I say when I go home? What will happen when they see the result? The classroom sounds faded. My classmates were cheering, laughing—even the ones who barely passed seemed lighter than me. I looked at my buddy who ranked first. He was always first. That never changed. I felt a knot in my chest—desperation, uneasiness, something heavy sitting where breath should be. And somewhere between that knot and the noise around me, I made a decision. Conscious. Instant. Final.
It’s okay to be average from now on.
I didn’t know then what I was protecting myself from. I only knew the weight.
Since first standard, I had been proving something. Not because I understood why, but because that was the rule. Be the best. Be the best among the best. If you can’t do that, you don’t matter. Nobody explained the reason. Nobody asked if I agreed. The benchmark was placed in front of me like a wall I was supposed to climb, and the only feedback I ever received was whether I had cleared it or not.
My sister was average. My cousins were average. But in the neighborhood, there were children who excelled, and their names were spoken in our house like prayers I was supposed to answer. Learn from them. See how they do it. The comparisons came without cruelty—just as facts, as weather, as the way things were. And I absorbed them the way children absorb everything: silently, completely.
That day, when I went home, my parents did what they always did. They did not ask how I felt. They told me I should learn from others. The wound stayed where it always stayed—inside. Never spoken. Never asked about. Never seen.
I want to be careful here. I am not writing this to say my parents failed me. They were surviving. India in the 1980s and 90s was a different arithmetic—marks meant jobs, jobs meant security, security meant your children wouldn’t suffer the way you did. Their pressure was not cruelty. It was fear, wearing the mask of expectation. I see that now.
But what I couldn’t see at nine was that I had options. That 97% was not failure. That being seventh in a class of forty was not shame. That the distance between first place and seventh place was two marks—but the distance in how it felt was infinite.
So I made the only decision a nine-year-old could make to stop the bleeding.
I told myself: Stop expecting to be the topper. Not because I had given up. Not because I was rebelling. But because I needed to survive. If approval would never come—and I had learned, by then, that it wouldn’t—then I would stop needing it. I would adjust the rules of my own game. I would protect myself from the pain of falling short by never reaching again.
That decision was not weakness. It was the first act of emotional self-regulation I ever performed. I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew it made the knot in my chest loosen.
I carried that decision for twenty-five years without knowing I had made it.
It shaped everything—how I approached business, relationships, fatherhood. I never competed with others. I only competed with myself. I told myself this was wisdom. And in some ways, it was. But in other ways, it was a wall I had built so early that I forgot it was there. I stopped reaching for things I wanted because I had trained myself, at nine, to stop wanting what I couldn’t guarantee.
It was only at thirty-four, after my business had collapsed, after my marriage was fracturing, after I sat down and wrote out every significant moment of my life, that I traced the thread back to that classroom. To Nanni Teacher’s voice reading out ranks. To the video playing in my head. To the decision.
And then I remembered something else.
Nanni Teacher had seen something in me. I was always the maths topper, even when I wasn’t the overall topper. And she had chosen me—during recess, during break time—to teach other children. I don’t remember her exact words. But I remember the feeling when she said them: You have something special.
That was the counter-narrative. The quiet voice that got drowned out by the louder one at home. She didn’t give me a rank. She gave me a recognition. And though I buried it under the decision to be average, it never fully disappeared. It waited. For twenty-five years, it waited for me to dig it back up.
The nine-year-old who made that decision was braver than I gave him credit for.
He was not defeated. He was adapting. He was finding a way to stay intact in a world that measured him only by what he produced. He wore his uniform ironed. He stood tall. He had a confidence I lost somewhere along the way and had to rebuild as a man.
What I understand now, that he couldn’t understand then, is this: the decision to protect yourself is not the same as the decision to shrink. He did what he had to do. But he didn’t have to carry it forever. The wall that saved him at nine became the wall that trapped him at thirty-four.
And the work of emotional leadership is not to tear down that wall with force. It is to thank the child who built it, and then—gently, brick by brick—show him it’s safe to come out now.
If you’re reading this, and something in this story feels familiar—the marks that were never enough, the approval that never came, the quiet decision you made to stop trying so hard—I want you to know something.
That decision protected you. It was intelligent. It was necessary. And it was made by a version of you who didn’t have the resources to do anything else.
But you are not nine anymore.
You have language now. You have perspective. You have the ability to look back and see the pattern for what it was—not a flaw in you, but an adaptation to an environment that didn’t know how to hold you.
Somewhere inside you, there is a forte. Something that was always yours. For me, it was the ability to regulate myself before anyone taught me the word. To make a decision, instantly, that kept me intact when everything around me said I wasn’t enough.
That’s not average. That’s survival. And survival is the first draft of strength.
The question now is: what do you want the second draft to say?
This is the first essay in a series on Emotional Leadership—written not from theory, but from the moments that forged it.