You're Not As Good As You Think
Why all your wins might be context wins (and what to do about it)
Last month, I wrote about my first jiu-jitsu competition, where I lost.
Now the obvious reasons are boring: diet, sleep, training volume, cardio, nerves, and warm-up. You can point to any of those and say “yep, that mattered,” and you’d be right.
But I think the more interesting reason is harder to measure, and it has nothing to do with athleticism.
It’s false positives.
A false positive is when life gives you evidence that something is working, but it’s only working because the environment is predictable. The moment you change the environment, everything collapses.
Jiu-jitsu is full of this.
Most gyms are small ecosystems. You spar with the same people, week after week. You learn their patterns. You know the guy who always hunts arm-locks, so you become “good at defence” by simply never giving him your arm. You see the wrestler who keeps shooting, so you build a nice little routine around stuffing his entries and snapping a guillotine whenever you can. You know the fast, scrambly guy, so you learn to kill his movement with pressure and your weight advantage.
Over time, it feels like you’re improving fast. And you are, technically. But you’re also adapting to a very specific set of problems, created by a very specific set of people.
Then competition happens.
You’re in Bangalore training with Bangalore folks, and now you’re fighting someone from Mumbai who trained in an entirely different room with a different style, and maybe he’s been coached by someone from the US, and maybe he’s been doing this longer than you, and maybe he’s just built weird.
You don’t know what he likes. You don’t know his rhythm. You don’t know his setups. You don’t know his pace. You can’t “pattern match” your way out of it.
So all the confidence you built in the gym, the confidence that felt earned, suddenly looks meh.
That’s the moment you realise how many of your “wins” were actually context wins. They weren’t fake, but they weren’t universal either. They were real only inside your familiar environment.
That’s a false positive.
And it’s not just sports. I think my career has been one long chain of false positives, too.
For the longest time, I used to flex this line: “I’ve never made a resume. I don’t need one.”
And to be fair, it worked. I got work through my website, through Twitter, through things I built and shipped. My proof was real. My track record was real.
But someone said something that annoyed me because it was true.
They said, “That’s fine until you run into a company with structure. Some HR process. A strong recruiting workflow. A deadline. A template. Even if it’s a startup, sometimes it’s still burdened by that. And you’ll lose an opportunity just because you didn’t have a basic artefact ready.”
One day deadline. Resume required. No exceptions.
And suddenly, my whole “I don’t need a resume” philosophy looked like a false positive. It wasn’t a principle. It was a privilege created by the kind of rooms I’d been in.
The same applies to this other idea I used to carry around: living life without unfair advantages, purely on merit.
It sounds noble, but it isn’t how the world works.
Everyone has some unfair advantage. Some edge. Network, timing, geography, taste, genetics, upbringing, early exposure, the internet, a mentor, a community, a skill they got obsessed with for no reason. And the people who win aren’t the ones pretending those advantages don’t exist. They’re the ones who notice them early and exploit them responsibly.
If you refuse to use your unfair advantages because you want life to be “fair,” you’re not being principled. You’re just opting into losing against people who are playing reality as it is.
Another false positive.
So I think the actual enemy here isn’t losing. The enemy is learning in a way that feels like progress but collapses under pressure. The enemy is mistaking familiarity for mastery.
Which is why, if there’s one thing I’m trying to build now, it’s authentic learning.
In sports, that means you don’t only train for the guy you spar with every day. You train for the unknown opponent. You stop chasing gym wins and start chasing robustness. You put yourself in positions that feel uncomfortable. You do rounds with people you don’t understand yet. You seek styles that expose you.
In a career, it’s the same idea.
You don’t just rely on the one channel that keeps working. You build the boring foundations, too. You prepare for the room you haven’t entered yet. You make the resume even if you think it’s cringe. You keep the website. You keep the proof of work. You reach out to founders, but you also respect process. You talk to HR. You write the doc. You ship the project. You make the video. You tell the story.
Not because you want to play it safe.
But because you want your success to survive outside your usual ecosystem.
Because the only thing worse than failing is winning for the wrong reasons and finding out too late.
A few things from last month
100 users on bangersonly.xyz
I got 100 users to my app, and I couldn’t be happier with the progress so far.
If you asked me 2 months ago, there was a big mental block around all of it. Adding auth to apps. Setting up GCP. Making my AI tool public because I was worried about attacks. Hooking up external apps like Clerk, Dodo, Resend - all that stuff just felt boring. And anything external made me worry about security risks and bankruptcy (haha!)
But that’s not there anymore. I know this stuff now. And on top of that, I can code way better. Add features. Plan. Run multiple agents. Know how to reach my users. So much more.
Yet another 10k
I ran another 10k, but this time really, really slow. Just because I rawdogged it - did nothing at all for prep. So the result was expected. I’m not doing anything like this again without bullying myself into a proper prep phase. Otherwise, I’m fine skipping.
AI & Weekends
Started a new thing with Priyanshu → AI & Weekends. Till now, we’ve seen good traction. Great folks coming, supporting, building. People are volunteering to host in other cities, too. It’s kind of fun to spend my Sundays like this.
What I’ve been consuming
On good Google Docs being a skill, not a tool limitation
I was so wrong. I used to think people who made beautiful, intuitive Google Docs were just shifting blame like “it’s not the tool, it’s you.” But then I saw a couple of docs recently that completely changed my mind. The sheer intuitiveness of them, the way they were structured... I found myself reading them with full force, even when they weren’t in my area of interest. Just someone’s blog and a research paper, but I couldn’t stop. Turns out it really is a skill issue. And I need to get better at it.
Unseen: Story of Deepinder Goyal and Zomato
Say whatever you want, think whatever you want - Deepinder is the most talked-about CEO in India. And he knows how to stay relevant. In the news, building teams, standing up for things, doing the work. He’s a huge inspiration for me.
Getting to know him from birth to IIT to Bain to fundraising to going public... it’s such a bliss. I wish someone would make a web series on this. Like Super Pumped or The Playlist. I’d pay anything to watch it.
I felt the same way when I read The Flipkart Story earlier. If the West has the PayPal Mafia, India very clearly has the Flipkart Mafia. A huge number of today’s successful founders have some connection to Flipkart, and seeing that lineage play out is incredibly inspiring.
That’s it from me this time. Keep building things worth talking about.
Bye!
Loved this one bro
Man's going places 👏🏻