Dearest Darling Friends,

We love them, don’t we?

The before-and-after stories.

• The struggling founder who turned it all around.
• The leader who succeeded after many failures.
• The brand that reinvented itself.

They make transformation look cinematic, a dramatic story from darkness to dawn.

Here’s the truth few talk about. Transformation is never a rushed up, epiphanic, moment. It’s a slow ride.

Every real transformation I have witnessed — whether in people or organizations — was boring before it became beautiful.

It began with quiet discomfort, with someone whispering to themselves, “This can’t be it. Things need to change”.

Then came the awkward middle.

• The crawl through self-doubts
• The meetings that felt pointless
• The habits that took months to form.

No music.
No montage.
No applause.

Just small, repeated choices.

Such as….

• Pausing before reacting.
• Listening openly when the feedbacks were harsh.
• Showing up when no one when watching.
• Making small pivots when things are not working.

A McKinsey study found that over 70% of large-scale transformations fail, not because of poor strategy, but because people crave fireworks where only fireflies exist.

In reality, it is these tiny fireflies that offer glimmers of progress and eventually light up the dark. They also last much longer than the fireworks.

Leaders who sustain deep change learn to love those fireflies.

So, the next time you see a glorious transformation story, remember, what you are seeing is not the magic.

It’s the edited highlight of someone who kept showing up again and again and again.

The world sees a monument. It never strikes them that…

• It was built one brick at a time.
• ⁠It was built when bricks were sometimes not easily available.
• Some of those bricks needed huge sacrifices.
• Some of those bricks caused huge discomfort.
• ⁠Some of those bricks broke and caused anguish

And yet, ‘that someone’ was at it, relentlessly.

Transformation doesn’t happen when the world applauds you. It happens when you quietly decide to change — and you don’t quit, no matter what happens.

And if you are a philosophical kind of a person, here is something for you.

The “after” is never a destination. It’s just another “before” in the making.

May your journey of transformation be glorious and inspire 1000s.

With love, prayers and best wishes,