I still remember the first time I heard somebody at work describe a team as a family. It was a very strange feeling. I knew the effect they were trying to achieve, but it didn't feel right. What I didn't realize was why it didn't feel right. As a team, we take care of each other, we're there for each other, we work together, and we face great challenges and solve them together. Why is a team not a family? Or why is a family not necessarily a team? Where does the difference lie? What are the boundaries that separate these collective nouns? 

It was mid-career for me. I had spent the first decade of my career building or trying to build small companies. However, because of time, fate, and the economy, I found myself working for a large company. Not just any large company, but a company that had 100,000 employees. Going from being an entrepreneur to a first jobber in the middle of your career really brought home the importance of boundaries for me. Or at the very least, the need for constantly negotiating and managing those boundaries. 

Before we talk of boundaries and how to manage them as an entrepreneur, as a builder, as a middle-aged man, I think it's useful to look back at where I learned about boundaries. I grew up in a very small village in the lower-middle-class family of an upper-middle-class man. Indian villages are a collective; arranged around tribe and clan. There are no secrets there, for secrets are dangerous in a collective. The secrets are how you rebel. And where secrets are bad, so are boundaries. You learn early on to close the eyes of your mind when something uncomfortable, unseeable, or unbearable happens around you. You learn to wield your reactions as tools. You choose the absence of their use as a way to remove yourself from the situation. And you choose to use them to inflict an effect on people. 

And remember, how you react to people and situations is how you draw your boundaries. 

As I grew up, I learnt that my experience as a child wasn't very different. I saw and met people who had learnt the same thing. In towns small and big. In cities with their chawls and their villas and skyscrapers. Something about our society does this. 

People often complain that Indians don't have a sense of boundaries. I don't think that is correct. It's too general. I think it's a specific generation that does not have a well developed sense of boundaries. I think we were raised in a hellscape of scarcity, of lack, of competition, of unpleasantness, yet always walking towards hope and a brighter future. 

That duality has had such an effect on us. We move forward in this world, building relationships, acting as ever the confident leaders, yet always at our core, remembering where we came from. Knowing that we are balancing on a very sharp edge between being performative and authentic. Never truly managing either.

Honesty keeps us from being purely performative. And fear and conditioning keep us from being truly authentic. 

In his novel The Shogun, James Clavell makes an observation about the Japanese: "It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one... hidden only God knows where." 

A lot of men of my generation know this to be true. Not completely – nothing ever goes from literature to life without some mutation – but there is some truth to it. I learned this early, but everybody learns this eventually. At some point in time, when you go from being one thing, a child, to being many things: the parent, the builder, the partner, and dare I say, the adult? You learn very quickly that you cannot navigate this world without building boundaries. There are simply too many traps. It takes too much energy. In the end, every man must break the chrysalis of their childhood to emerge into this world and somehow learn to fly. Most do not manage this.

It took me a long time to find a semblance of control over my reactions. I left that big company as soon as I could, and I joined a smaller one where I grew very quickly from an individual contributor to a leader of people driving performance at the very front line every single day.

When you work at a small company or a start-up, everything is improbable. Certitude is a gift that is rarely found in such a place. You go from one tightrope to another, balancing scarce resources and trying to do a lot with very few people. The hours can be long, and people can find themselves compressed together in ways that people were never intended to be. There is rarely any time to plan, or organize, or build long-lasting rules. You have the task, the team, and very little time. You do the best you can, while making sure that all of you come out whole at the other end. It is in this situation that setting boundaries becomes difficult. 

Remember, how we react is how we set boundaries. And when the pressure is this high and urgent, our reactions can get away from us. We frequently forget to look after them and our boundaries.

As I made my mistakes, I had to rapidly learn from them. I reacted badly to people, played favourites overshared, was too cruel, and at times, didn't care enough. Forgot to be home on time. Forgot to read books to my children. I got too angry at them for too small infractions. I forgot to take a few minutes to buy flowers on the way home. Forgot to eat slowly. Forgot to listen and not solve when my partner told me about her day. 

Forgot to take a long, hard look at how this was unsustainable.

2020 changed all our lives. I quit my job, and found myself locked up in my house due to the pandemic. It was now that I started contemplating becoming an entrepreneur again. It was clear that I wouldn't be able to go back and do any of this if I did not rein myself in, if I did not structure all my reactions in all the spheres of my life. I spoke to people, mentors, spoke to a therapist. Slowly, a simple framework emerged. It is not perfect, or perhaps even correct, but it works most days, so I will share it here. 

There are four spheres in my life:

  1. A parent
  2. A partner
  3. An entrepreneur
  4. I am me

How I react in one sphere affects how I interact in every other sphere. All reactions, all watching of boundaries takes energy. If I spend that energy in one sphere, I won't have any left for another. I also found that any attempt at balancing these spheres is really hard. So I set some ground rules and central principles around how I react in each of these spheres and what my boundaries are. Because remember, boundaries are defined by my reactions.
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Then I just deal with the sphere that is most exigent on any given day. This is probably not optimal. I am possibly a bad parent, or a bad partner, or a bad founder most days. But this ensures that I do not continue being bad for too long. I let myself slip, and then I catch myself and focus on another sphere. 

Seeking balance is simply too hard. So I decided to forgive myself for not being consistent or being balanced. I gave myself permission to simply be present and be mindful of my reactions.

Here are my guiding principles on how I build boundaries for each of these spheres:

The Parent

Children are exhausting. Working with them as a parent can be scary and maddening because they focus so much on you. I am often sandwiched between their daily schedule, and their tantrums, and their constant exploration of boundaries. To work with children every day is to face a hundred rebellions, incessant rebellions. They test you. It's easy to get angry and throw a tantrum as a parent, but I've learned that the guiding principle should be that you are training tiny human beings to live in a world that you know nothing about. You can only speculate about what the future might hold, but you will never be able to prepare them for the world that is coming. So you must demonstrate to them strategies for dealing with other human beings. To inculcate in them a post-scarcity mindset and instil positive human values such as gratitude, reciprocation, and acknowledgement. I afford them their privacy. I will not pry where I'm unwelcome. But I will always tell them that they can tell me the worst thing. and I'll always be willing to listen. My job is to establish that I am permanent in their lives and a person they can fall back on unconditionally, without fear. They don't have infinite access to resources, but what is scarce is artificially so, and they also know that they can not negotiate or manipulate their way into eliminating scarcity. Device screen time is an example of this. It is generous, but it is also constrained. When they don't have a screen, they have access to books or other activities. They know they need to have a variety in their lives, and as a parent, I would step in if I find them engaging in behaviours that are extremely addictive. And that's it. And that's really it. There really isn't that much more. 

Because everything else, they're going to mimic from me and my partner anyway. I don't sit down and teach them about the great moralities of life. Because it's not what you tell them, it's what you do that they'll really do.

The Partner

Marriage is the art of remaining separate while coming together as a unit. I'm not tied to my partner through biology, I’m tied to her through attachment. I recognise us as a unit while recognizing that the unit becomes unfeasible when you forget about being individuals. I personally do not believe that the institution of marriage will survive our modern times. I think it's a relic of how society organised itself in ages past. A marriage must be between equals, but the genders are not equal. Women are biologically disadvantaged because their bodies must go through an extremely taxing transformation every month. They're economically disadvantaged because that's just how society organises itself and somehow refuses to fix this. They are also politically disadvantaged because in our search for equality, we forgot to account for pre-existing disadvantages. What marriage must be between equals? With my partner, I try to eliminate any inequities that I could. The easiest one was to eliminate any economic inequity. Both of our money is always equally divided periodically, no questions, no arguments. It is almost a principle that neither one of us should have to ask the other for money. We live as two friends who take turns on bills, on expenses, on purchases. Works surprisingly well. And I found that being non-auditable to each other economically is a great boundary to have. We take solo vacations, we take vacations together, and we take vacations with the children. They're all equally important, and we enjoy them equally well. Neither one of our families is allowed to intrude in our home, but each of us makes time for our own families and for the others when required. We haven't quite figured out date nights yet, but we have figured out that spontaneity and small gifts and ad hoc planning work great. 

We are not designing for a perfect marriage; we are designing for friendship, and we understand that that may ebb and flow.

The entrepreneur

This can be hard when you are building something new and doing it with a small team of highly motivated individuals. You also realise that a lot of them are with you because you have infected them with your hopes for the future. They trust you to lead them, while making sure that they will be fine. There is a trap here; an essential balance. We need to balance the needs of leadership with the necessity of self-preservation. I run a small team, extremely focused, very talented individuals. I have realized that the way I must shape my reactions within this team is to mimic a shepherd. My job is to take care of them, to guide them gently, but mostly leave them free to explore the world on their own. I look out for the wolf, I tend to the weak and tired, I make sure they do not have to worry about the changing of the seasons, and I leave them to do what they do best. The hard part is navigating between a supportive leader and ending up as a work parent. I've always been clear that's not a role I can play. I'm already a parent, and that is not at work. My job is to absorb ambiguities and deliver clarity. Sometimes that clarity may itself be based on very, very thin levels of confidence, but it's my job to deliver that clarity. A team should be able to do what they want without having to worry if they'll be taken care of.

Now, the way I draw some of these boundaries makes it hard for me to do this contractually, because this is work, and all relationships here need to be contractual. That said, I have found that there is a place for people who show up to work enforcing a very specific work contract, so I tend to hire these people as contractors. People who are full-time employees get a lot of trust, and a lot of power. They know that my primary job is to absorb their anxieties and their hopes, and ensure that the worst doesn't happen and the best comes true. I've also come to realize that eliminating internal approvals for small things like sundry expenses and travel actually works very, very well in a team that you've built with trust. All travel is pre-approved. We trust people with the company money. We only audit it once every quarter to make sure that no one has, in fact, abused their trust. And even if we find such a case, any punitive action is directed at the individual and not at the group. It is liberating not to be able to exercise summary executive powers on a daily basis. Levels the playing field. 

Me

This comes last, of course, but it often comes last. I wish that weren't the case, but it is what it is. I've learned a few things about how to set boundaries for others and for myself. First thing that I've managed to do is ensure that I have a self-care routine. I use that word routine lightly. I lift thrice a week when I can, but once a week atleast. I walk as much as possible, but forgive myself when I'm unable to. I made sure to learn a little bit about skin care. Just the act of staring at yourself as you apply a gentle face wash and sunscreen every morning as you step out gives you a sense of fulfillment. We didn't learn these things in the scarcity we grew up in. But to know that you are important to yourself in itself is a very important reaction you can have to life.

There are days that are good, and there are days that are bad. Every night, I apply a cleanser on my face, as I brush, as I snuggle into my bed, I remind myself that I'm taking care of myself so that I can deal with tomorrow. When you take care of yourself every little day, it allows you the space to forgive yourself when you're less than perfect, because you are putting in the effort to repair yourself. I write a journal when I can. I read as much as I can. I don't hate myself for spending too much time on screens. I take some time every morning to sit with a cup of tea and stare at parrots who visit my terrace garden. I found these moments to be very important to my well-being. I've also learned not to give in to the fear that we only have 4,000 weeks in life. 

Because if you're rushing to live all of it as quickly as possible, it's a bad reaction to how thoughtful life can be. Reactions are how we set our boundaries, and I have set boundaries for myself that some of my time must be mine.

I think it was Richard Feynman who said we're made of star stuff. That's a beautiful thing. We are star stuff, endowed with intelligence and emotions, capable of such greatness. But we're also fragile sacs of water, protein, carbohydrates, and fats. We feel the world around us. The only certitude is that the sun always rises. In such a world, it is our duty to make every day slightly better than yesterday. I think we do it by choosing our reactions to this world. Reactions are how we set our boundaries. This is how I set mine: As a father, as a lover, as a builder, and as a kid who is constantly surprised that he's now considered an adult.

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