For years, I bought into the same story most of us are sold.

Hustle harder.
Grow faster.
Climb endlessly.

Somewhere along the way, we were told the goal was work-life balance. As if work and life are two rival teams locked in a permanent tug of war. The best you could hope for was not letting one completely destroy the other.

At some point, that idea stopped making sense to me.

What if the problem wasn’t balance at all?
What if, instead of balancing, we could design?

I recently spoke about this journey on the Creative Spark Plug podcast  about how I ended up being a brand strategist who also does stand-up comedy, rescues snakes, and spends unreasonable amounts of time waiting for birds to show up in the right light. None of it was planned. But all of it is connected.

Here are five lessons that have shaped how I work and how I live – in ways that run completely counter to modern work culture.

1. Experience Trumps the Deliverable

Twenty years from now, no client will remember the exact report you submitted.

They will remember how working with you felt.

Early on, I realised that a brand isn’t just identity and value. There’s a third pillar most people ignore: experience. And that’s the one that actually sticks. The tone of an email. The way a meeting feels. How clearly expectations are set. How people are treated when things go wrong.

That experience becomes your real reputation.

This applies far beyond client work. It’s in how a receptionist answers the phone. How a delay is communicated. How present you are in a conversation. What people remember isn’t what you delivered, it’s how you delivered it.

2. Core Values Reveal Themselves in a Crisis

Some of the most important lessons I’ve learnt didn’t come from success, they came from chaos.

Early in my career, I was working at a web-hosting company during the dial-up era when a server in Canada crashed. Around 10,000 websites went offline overnight. There was no quick fix. Just angry customers and a mountain of manual work re-entering DNS records one by one.

In the middle of that mess, I stumbled upon a principle that still defines how I operate: respect people’s time.

I couldn’t solve the problem immediately, but I could promise something else. I started telling customers exactly when I’d call them back and then I did. Even if the update was “nothing has changed yet.” That simple act shifted conversations from rage to trust.

That value became so non-negotiable that years later, I walked out of a meeting with a large potential client who was repeatedly late. No drama. Just clarity. The CEO called later and said, “Let’s work together.” Not despite that moment but because of it.

Showing up when it matters applies everywhere. Whether it’s a client crisis or a call about a cobra in someone’s backyard.

3. Define What “Enough” Means

When we started our agency, writeclick, my partner Vidya and I made a decision that sounds almost irresponsible in startup circles.

We didn’t chase growth.

Instead, we asked a quieter, more uncomfortable question: How much is enough?

We calculated what we needed to live the life we wanted including time for hobbies, health, family, curiosity, and everything else – and made that our target. Not year-on-year growth charts. Not vanity metrics. Just sufficiency.

That single decision changed everything.

It gave us the freedom to say no to misaligned work. It protected our integrity. And interestingly, it made us better at what we do. The patience required to wait ten hours for the right bird photograph is the same patience required to build a brand properly. Scale teaches speed. Sufficiency teaches depth.

Choosing “enough” over “more” is a radical act today and a liberating one.

4. Be a Partner, Not a Vendor

The moment an agency presents five options, something has already gone wrong.

To me, that’s an admission: I don’t fully understand your business yet.

If you truly understand the problem, you don’t offer a menu. You offer a solution. And then you invite a discussion around why it works not whether the client prefers option B’s colour palette.

That’s why I stopped thinking of myself as an external agency and started working as an outsourced brand manager. I integrated deeply into client teams. I had employee ID cards. I played in internal cricket matches. I sat through meetings that had nothing to do with branding.

The goal wasn’t proximity. It was context.

Real partnership means saying, “This is the option. Now tell me why it shouldn’t work.” Only then does the second option deserve to exist.

5. Reframe Tragedy as Content

Stand-up comedy taught me something no business book ever did.

There’s an old saying: Comedy is tragedy plus time.

That line isn’t just clever, it’s a survival strategy.

I once went through a brutal kidney stone episode. In the moment, it was pure misery. Later, with distance, I found myself laughing at the absurdity of it. Eventually, it became a comedy bit,  including an observation about how comparing a 3-kg baby to a 4-mm stone ignores the very different “routes” they take.

That shift from pain to perspective is powerful.

Not everything needs to become content. But almost everything can become meaning with enough time and honesty. That reframing builds resilience. It helps you stay curious instead of bitter.

Designing a More Intentional Life

Everything I do – bird photography, snake rescue, comedy, consulting – feeds the same system.

The patience I learn waiting for a bird.
The calm required to handle a snake.
The vulnerability of standing on stage.

None of these are distractions from work. They are the reason my work works.

When a snake rescue disrupts my day, I sometimes say, half-jokingly, “I’m in the business of saving lives.” It’s literally true and metaphorically accurate.

Life Design, for me, isn’t about optimisation. It’s about alignment.

Success doesn’t need a template. It needs intention.

If you have read till here and don’t mind listening to all of this and more alongside Baashobe Majumdar and Rajesh Sharma in the Creative Spark-plug’s podcast, get your headphones out.