.png)
I BUILT THE CAREER I ONCE DREAMED OF.
THEN I REALISED I WAS LIVING THE WRONG VERSION OF SUCCESS.
This is the story of how a boy from Kerala became an engineer at Saudi Aramco — and why walking away eventually led me to the work I believe I was meant to do.
BEFORE THE BIG COMPANIES, THE STAGES AND THE BUSINESS
There was a mother who refused to let money decide her son’s future.
I grew up in a financially constrained family in Kerala, India.
For much of school, I wasn’t an exceptional student.
But somewhere along the way, I became determined to change what life looked like for my family.
Engineering felt like a way forward.
There was only one problem.
we couldn’t afford it.
When I secured an engineering seat, my mother started looking for the money.
She asked family. She was turned down. She kept asking.
She didn’t have the money. She found a way anyway.
ENGINEERING WASN’T JUST A DEGREE.
It was my way forward.
I studied hard. I kept learning. I added professional certifications.
And over the next 15 years, I built the kind of engineering career I once believed would change everything.
Eventually, that journey took me to: SAUDI ARAMCO
One of the world’s largest energy companies.
I became a Senior Integrity Engineer, responsible for the integrity of major oil and gas fields across offshore and onshore operations.
It was serious work. Big responsibility. Constant travel. Very little room for error. And for a while...
I thought I had made it.
From the outside, everything looked like success. On the inside, something was slowly disappearing. the job was prestigious. The salary was good. The responsibility was significant. But I had lost something far more important. THE FIRE
I was still working hard. But I was no longer feeling alive in the work. My energy dropped. My health started paying the price. I gained weight. The frustration I carried from work started following me home.
And perhaps the hardest part was this:
I KNEW I WAS CAPABLE OF MORE.
I JUST DIDN’T KNOW WHAT “MORE” WAS YET.
That period forced me to confront something I understand much more deeply today: You can look successful on paper....while the human system producing that success is slowly running down.
I started studying human performance
because I needed to fix my own
I began searching.
Psychology. Physiology. Neuroscience. Energy. Motivation. Flow. Recovery. Human performance.
One book became ten. Ten became hundreds. Courses became certifications. Curiosity became obsession. And slowly, something changed.
I started understanding myself differently. I started performing differently. I started feeling alive again.
But something else happened that I never expected.
I went looking for answers.
Found my Life's work.
The world is bigger than Aramco.
When I finally decided to leave, my boss reminded me what I was walking away from. People dream of getting into Aramco. Why would I leave? He had a point. I had spent years building that career. But by then, I knew something with complete clarity.
I had lost the fire for the life I was living. And found a new fire for the life I wanted to build.
My ambition was no longer to simply climb another corporate ladder.
I wanted to understand human performance. Teach it. Coach it. Speak about it. Build around it. So I walked away. Not because Aramco was a bad place to be.
Because it was no longer the right place for me to become who I wanted to become.
The first time I stood on a stage I could'nt get the words out. I was still in school. I had prepared. I walked onto the stage. And froze.
Years later, when I began sharing what I was learning about human performance, another doubt appeared.
My English wasn’t strong. Some people close to me told me:
Why don't you just do this in malayalam? For a while, I wondered if they were right. Maybe someone from my background couldn’t do this globally. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I was thinking too big.
But I kept going......I learned. I practised. I spoke. I failed. I spoke again.
And slowly, the voice I once doubted became the voice I built my work around.
Eventually, that journey took me to stages including: TEDx, World Biohack Summit Dubai, ETHRWorld
And taught me something I still believe today:
Confidence didn't come first . The work came first
Long before I studied human performance.. I was already fascinated by what humans are capable
Martial arts became part of my life early.
Karate taught me discipline. Repetition. Pressure. Respect. The importance of preparation.
It taught me that the way you perform in the moment is often decided by what you did long before the moment arrived. I became a Shito-Ryu Karate Black Belt and competed at state level.
Later came other ways of testing myself. Sport. Adventure. Even jumping out of perfectly good aeroplanes. But the lesson stayed the same:
Performance is not an event.
It is something you prepare for.
Years later, that idea became central to how I think about the Executive Athlete.
Career taught me how to perform. Family changed my definition of success
I’m a husband to Zeba. And a father. And somewhere between ambition, business, travel, work and family, one question became impossible to ignore:
What is the point of performing exceptionally at work.... if the people you love only get what is left of you?
That question changed how I think about success.
Because success is not just what you build.
It is also: How much energy you have left. How present you are. How healthy you remain. How deeply you experience your own life.
That is why the word SUSTAINABLE matters so much to me.
I don’t believe high performance should require sacrificing everything that makes success worth having. Your health. Your relationships. Your energy. Your presence. Your life.
AMBITION SHOULD EXPAND YOUR LIFE.
NOT SLOWLY CONSUME IT.
Today, all of these experiences come together in one question:
How do ambitious people keep performing at a high level - without eventually for it somewhere else?
Their health. Their energy. Their relationships. Their quality of life.That question now shapes my work with CEOs, founders and business leaders.
I help leaders build the cognitive, physical and emotional capacity to:
Think clearly. Perform consistently. Recover intelligently. Lead through pressure. And sustain it for the long game. Because the demands may not get smaller.
But you can build the capacity to meet them better
The mission is simple. Help people build the capacity their ambition demands.
We live in a world that keeps asking more from us. More speed. More decisions. More complexity. More information. More pressure. And I don’t believe the answer is simply to push harder.
WE HAVE TO UPGRADE THE HUMAN SYSTEM DOING THE WORK.
That means building the capacity to: Think clearly. Perform consistently. Recover intelligently. Stay strong under pressure.
And still have a life worth enjoying.
Because high performance should not cost you:
Your health. Your energy. Your relationships. Your presence. Your life.