"So what's up? What are you working on these days?"

I've been asked this more times in the last few months than I can count. I simply say "I train jiu-jitsu" and watch the confusion on their face. What does he mean? Is that a job? Is that a hobby? Is that the name of his new startup?

People get thrown off because it's a far-fetched answer. But I'm used to that - this isn't my first year off. I took my first one after 12th standard to "study for IIT", and boy, was I judged. People thought I was losing a precious year of my life. They thought I was aimless and lost. They thought I'd never be able to get back into the system. And boy, were they wrong.

Let me tell you that story.

I studied in NPS. My classmate was the 10th standard CBSE All India Rank 1, and in 12th, at least a dozen of my friends nabbed IIT ranks in the double digits. I was surrounded by high-performing, high-scoring people. But I chose to walk my own path. I took my year off, confused about what to do, and everyone who loved me feared for my future (out of love, of course).

So I set clear goals. Pick something you love - for me, computer science - and work towards excellence. But to my starry-eyed surprise, perseverance was harder than it seemed. And that wasn't even the low.

After a year of studying for IIT, my health had atrophied so badly that I almost fainted. When I went to the doctor, they did a full body check and found a spinal cyst that needed to be removed immediately. That put me on bed rest a week before my second attempt at the IIT exams, and I felt like the entire year had gone to waste. So I licked my wounds, rested for a month, wrote the regular entrance exams for colleges in Bangalore, and decided to go to whichever college took me. But I promised myself I would strive for excellence.

That dream was short-lived too. Unlike a lot of my peers, I really loved to code, and I wrote my code myself, sometimes more optimally than the way we were taught. So I learned the concepts and walked into my first semester CS exams armed with the ability to write good code. I almost failed. Why? Because the examiner could only score me if my code matched the answer. That's when I knew the system disincentivised me from thinking for myself, and that there was more value in memorising code than in learning how it works. The fury.

So I did what it took to get the marks I needed through engineering, and focused on getting to my Master's, where I'd actually learn. But in those four years of succumbing to the system, I lost my love for code. I raced through my Master's to get to a job quickly and learn about something else I'd never understood - business. And so I joined PwC as a consultant.

Fast forward a few years. Somewhere in the middle of my PwC career, I noticed a couple of my classmates from school had joined the firm too. One had gone to IIT, done his MBA in the US, and joined my project as my junior. Another had gone to the best college in Bangalore, then IIM, and joined the Bangalore office as my support team. Somehow I'd overtaken the people I spent my teenage years comparing myself to - and my eyes finally opened.

Life isn't linear, and life isn't a race. You can compare yourself to people one day and feel so small, then compare yourself again and feel so big. Neither feeling meant anything. I was just happy to feel secure enough to look at my friends as friends again, and not as competition.

That's why this year doesn't scare me the way it scares the people asking.

I haven't really stopped in years. I loved every bit of it and I'd do it again. But somewhere in there I stopped asking what I wanted to do, and only asked what needed to be done next, and those are very different questions. So when the last chapter closed at the end of the year, I made myself a promise. A proper career break. Not a two-week trip and then back to pitch decks. A real one.

The thing is, I know myself. I can't do nothing. Even on a break I have to obsess over something, and if I'm going to obsess, I want it to be meaningful - something that'll still be paying me back when I'm sixty. When I sat with that honestly, two things came up, and they turned out to be the same thing.

The first was my health. I've already learned once what happens when you pour everything into a goal and forget you have a body. Running a startup is no kinder than studying for IIT - you sit too much, sleep too little, eat whatever's on the table at 1am, and tell yourself you'll fix it after the next launch. There's always a next launch.

The second was learning. What I love most isn't the win at the end, it's being a beginner at something hard and slowly, painfully, getting less bad at it. I wanted a sport that works like that. Not one where you peak at twenty-five and spend the rest of your life talking about it, but a lifelong puzzle.

Jiu-jitsu turned out to be both, and I found it almost by accident.

I sold my startup on a Friday. That weekend I went to a crypto conference, mostly just to see friends, not to do any work, and I told a few of them I wanted to pick up a sport, maybe a martial art. I was thinking Muay Thai. One friend said, "Come to the Institute of Jiu-Jitsu. It's one of the best gyms in the country." Where is it? Sadashivnagar. I said that's a bit far, it's eight kilometres from me. He said, "I come from Hoskote." That's twenty-five kilometres. If this guy could make that trip, so could I.

I went for a trial class that Monday morning. The gym is on the second floor, and I was in such bad shape that I was panting just climbing the stairs. By the end of the class I was blacking out and throwing up electrolytes. My body had been pushed right to its limit, and somewhere in that haze I knew it was exactly what I wanted.

My body took a while to agree. The first few weeks I could only manage two days a week. Then three. Then four. And in the last week of the year, right around New Year's Eve, I finally trained six days in a row. So that's the plan now. Six days a week, here in Bangalore, for the whole year. My body has filed several formal complaints, and it's only January.

People ask if I'm worried about falling behind. Falling behind is only a problem if you're in a race, and I stopped running that race a long time ago. A year of learning to use my body well, to stay calm under pressure, to lose a hundred times a week and come back the next morning - I think that'll pay off in ways I can't predict yet. And maybe me telling people "I do jiu-jitsu" with a straight face helps someone else who's been scared to take the road not taken.

Nothing would make me happier than going to bed exhausted every day, knowing I gave it my all.

See you on the mat.