In 2013, I painted my future.
A lousy picture, actually. I am not an artist. But that picture changed my life more than any degree, any promotion, or any salary hike I ever received.
Here’s what was in it.
On the left side: me. Stuck. A nagging boss. Long hours. A beautiful wife and daughter who wanted me home. And a question mark, literally, a large question mark because I didn’t know what I actually wanted my life to look like.
On the right side: the life I wanted. Me, speaking on a stage. A team around me. Abundance. Love. The specific feeling of being fully alive in my work, not just competent at it.
In the middle: three arrows. Three bold steps.
- Step one: Fire my boss. Leave the job.
- Step two: Build Synergist, my own company.
- Step three: Rs 5 lakh per month from my own work, so I could retire early.
I stuck that painting on my bedroom wall. Every morning I woke up and looked at it. Every evening I asked myself, “Did today take me closer to that, or further away?”
The painting came from a workshop.
A trainer asked a room full of professionals, “If you were an artist, how would you paint the masterpiece of your life?”
I had no answer. Most people in the room had no answer. We were sharp, driven, and successful by every external measure. But that question, simple as it was, exposed something. We had spent years building careers. We had spent almost no time thinking about what those careers were in service of.
I went home that evening and picked up a canvas.
Seven years later, in 2020, I wrote a book.
In that book, I described the painting and said publicly, in print, that “I declare I would retire in 2025.”
People who read it probably thought it was motivational language. A nice thing to say. The kind of line you put in a book to make readers feel inspired.
It wasn’t. It was a target.
I have a friend; let’s call him Aj.
Aj holds a CXO at a mid-sized IT company. He has enough savings and is well invested. He owns a few residential and commercial properties. He draws a salary most people would consider a destination, not a milestone. He has rental income on top of that.
However, he cannot picture stopping.
Not because he needs the money. But because he has never seriously asked himself what the life on the other side looks like. Every time he gets close to that question, another goal appears. A new number. A new project. A new reason to keep running.
He visited me in Dehradun last year. He sat on the property, watched the mountains, and had three cups of tea in a row. It was something he said he hadn’t done in years. And then, he told me he was jealous of my life.
After that he went back to Pune and kept running.
I know this feeling from the inside. For twelve years I was Aj. I was performing well, moving forward, and convincing myself I was happy. But something was hollow. I just hadn’t named it yet.
I painted my future. And the painting named it.
It forced me to answer a question that successful people almost never ask themselves: what am I actually building toward? Not the next quarter. Not the next role. The life. The whole thing. When is enough, enough? And what happens on the morning after enough?
Most people don’t have an answer because they’ve never seriously looked for one. And without that answer, the only thing left to do is keep running because stopping feels more frightening than exhaustion.
The painting gave me something to run toward instead of away from.
“I Painted My Future” Actually Came True
I painted my future in 2013. What I couldn’t have known then was how precisely it would arrive.
In late 2022, I left my last corporate job. And then came the in-between—the years of building, of proving the model, of making the income real before making the move. In May 2025, I moved from Pune to the Himalayan foothills of Dehradun. Two months before my 45th birthday.
And it had happened.
Not approximately. Not metaphorically. Precisely, on the timeline I had set, toward the life I had drawn with my own hands in 2013. The stage is real. The team is real. The income is real. The mountains outside my window are real.
That’s not a motivational story. That’s proof that clarity, deliberately built, changes every single decision that follows it.
I’m telling you this not to impress you.
I’m telling you because of what I’ve learned from every senior leader I’ve sat across from since.
Almost none of them have painted their future.
Not because they lack ambition. They have enormous ambition. Not because they lack clarity. They are sharp, strategic, analytical people who run large teams and make complex decisions every day.
But when I ask them, “What does your life look like at 55?” Not your career, but your life? And most of them go quiet.
The sharpest people I know have a 5-year business plan and no picture of how they want to live.
The exercise is simple.
Take a blank page. Divide it in half.
Left side: draw your current life. Be honest. The parts that drain you. The relationships you’re neglecting. The things you keep saying you’ll do later. The question marks.
Right side: draw the life you actually want. Not the life that sounds impressive. Not the life that would make your parents proud. The specific, textured life you would design if you started from scratch today. What work feels like. What your mornings look like. What you’re building. Who’s around you?
In the middle: three steps that get you from left to right. Not a hundred steps. Three.
Then put it somewhere you’ll see it every morning.
The painting I made in 2013 was badly drawn.
Stick figures. Shaky arrows. A question mark that looked more like a cursive S.
It didn’t matter. The act of drawing it forced me to answer a question I had been avoiding for years. And once I had answered it, everything else got easier because every decision had a reference point.
Promotion or purpose? I knew.
Stay or leave? I knew.
Scale or slow down? I knew.
The painting didn’t make the hard decisions easy. It made them clear.
I now run a 4-day retreat in Dehradun called Viram.
It’s built entirely around this question, the one the painting forced me to answer. Not a motivational program. Not a wellness retreat. A structured pause where you do the actual work of figuring out what your life is actually for.
We do the painting exercise on day one. By day four, most people have something they’ve never had before: a picture of the life they want and a plan they actually believe in.
47% of the first cohort returned for the second retreat. We have never advertised that number. We have never had to.
If you’re reading this and something landed, that’s not a coincidence. The Clarity Call costs nothing and takes 30 minutes. Most people leave it with more honesty than they came in with.
Book it. Or don’t. But do the exercise. Take a blank page. Draw the left side. Draw the right side.
Write the answer somewhere you’ll see it tomorrow morning.
It worked for me. Not as a metaphor. As a fact.