Why I wrote Making Change Happen

At twenty I had a head full of advice and no idea what to do with any of it.

I had left my small town in the Northeast for Chennai at sixteen — not Bangalore, not Delhi, just the first city that felt far enough away to start over in. I was running little businesses on the side of college, first-generation, no template, watching my plans get rearranged by forces I didn’t understand. And every book I picked up to make sense of it told me the same beautiful, useless thing: believe in yourself. Stay positive. Follow your passion. I believed in myself. I was extremely positive. I was also broke, lost, and quietly terrified.

What I needed wasn’t another sermon. I needed a map. Something that said: here is the thing that is changing, here is what it looks like from the outside, here is what it feels like on the inside, and here are three things you can actually do on Monday. Nobody handed me that. So years later, I wrote it.

The lie of “you just need to want it more”

The self-help shelf has a favourite story. It says the difference between the person who changes and the person who doesn’t is desire. Want it badly enough and you’ll get there. Vision boards. Affirmations. 5 a.m. clubs.

I lived long enough to know that’s mostly false. The gap was never information. I knew I should save, exercise, have the hard conversation, leave the job. As I ended up writing in the book, the challenge was never identifying what needed to change — it was implementing it. Knowing and doing are separated by a canyon, and motivation is a rope bridge that holds for about a week.

Interest is fleeting. Commitment is what carries you on the days you feel nothing at all.

That’s the line I wish someone had said to me at twenty. Interest got me started a hundred times. Commitment — the unglamorous, show-up-anyway kind — was the thing I had to build, because nobody is born with it.

A blueprint, not a sermon

So I made myself a rule for the book: no inspiration without instruction. If a chapter made you feel something but left you with nothing to do, it failed.

That’s why Making Change Happen is built across eight spheres of life — business, finances, relationships, the physical body, the mental, the spiritual, family, and lifestyle — instead of one big abstract idea about “growth.” Change doesn’t arrive as a concept. It arrives as a layoff, a diagnosis, a move, a breakup, a child, a parent who needs you now. It’s specific. So the help has to be specific too.

And every challenge in the book gets split the same way, on purpose:

• On the Outside — what others see. The visible symptom. The thing that shows up on your calendar and your bank statement.
• On the Inside — what you actually feel. The fear under the behaviour, the story you’re telling yourself at 2 a.m.

Most advice only treats one side. It either fixes your spreadsheet and ignores your dread, or soothes your dread and never touches the spreadsheet. I wanted both columns on the same page, because that’s how change actually works — or refuses to.

You don’t have to read it front to back, either. It’s a jump-in-anywhere reference, the kind of book you keep on the desk and open to the sphere that’s on fire this month. I built it to be used, with trackers and tools — including free ones, which you can find over at the resources page — not admired.

The part I almost didn’t write

There’s a reason this one is honest in a way my younger self would have found embarrassing.

I lost my mother, Pramila, after a long medical struggle. That loss did two things. It reignited a stubborn need in me to fix healthcare problems in this country — and it taught me, in the most expensive way possible, that change is inevitable but suffering is optional. Not optional in the sense that grief is a choice; it isn’t. Optional in the sense that we get a say in what we do with the change once it has already arrived, uninvited, and refuses to leave. We launched the book’s cover on her first death anniversary. That wasn’t marketing. That was me keeping a promise.

So the book opens its spheres with personal stories — the bamboo-and-tin house I half burned down as a kid experimenting with fire, the businesses that failed, the city I ran to — not because my life is interesting, but because abstract change is easy to nod along with and ignore. Specific, slightly humiliating change is the kind you remember.

The whole thing in one lens

If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know my obsession: the journey from effort to effortless. Real, lasting change isn’t the result of permanently trying harder. It’s the result of redesigning your defaults until the right thing becomes the easy thing — a Delta-4 improvement so clearly better that you never drift back.

A sermon makes you feel guilty for not trying harder. A blueprint shows you where to put the friction and where to remove it, so that less trying is needed next month than this one. One leaves you motivated and stuck. The other leaves you slightly less stuck, repeatedly, forever.

I’m not writing this as someone who arrived. I’m still travelling — co-learning, co-hustling, co-building with whoever’s reading. That’s the whole posture of the club and the book both: not a guru on a mountain, just someone a few steps up the same trail, turning around to say watch this part, the footing’s loose.

I wrote the book I needed at twenty and didn’t have. If you’ve ever stood in front of a change you didn’t choose and felt that exact, specific helplessness — it’s yours now. That’s the only reason it exists.