Most of the worst decisions I have made in more than a decade of building Cars24 came when I was angry, anxious, or stung. I saw the mistake later, after I had cooled down and the decision was already made. The pressure that pushes us to act can also cloud our judgment.

Andy Grove gave us the line many of us live by: only the paranoid survive. I have lived by it. Stay hungry. Move with urgency. Raise the bar, and raise it again once you clear it.

But read Grove closely. His paranoia was not panic. He directed it toward strategic inflection points, moments when a business is about to change, and toward specific fears worth examining. It was a stance he adopted, not a state he lived in. We can miss that distinction. We can turn an instruction to stay alert into a permanent condition of dread. Then the people around us burn out, and our own judgment suffers.

Survival was never the whole point. We want to thrive. Naina Sahni, my coach over the last two years, helped me see that Grove's line needs another half. The paranoid survive. The regulated thrive. The second half is hers. What follows is what I am learning to do with it.

The most demanding team on earth runs cool

These can sound like opposing ideas: push relentlessly, demand more, and never be satisfied; stay calm, stay kind, and look after the people next to you. One example I return to is a rugby team. New Zealand's All Blacks have won more than three quarters of their matches over more than a century, a record few teams in any sport can match. They hold demanding standards and practice a tool called red head, blue head. Red head is tight, panicked, and overwhelmed. Blue head is calm, clear, and accurate. Under pressure, they practice moving from one state to the other.

Their example suggests that high standards do not require people to stay wound up. They can practice how to steady themselves when the pressure rises.

There is evidence that stress affects the brain systems we use to make decisions. Amy Arnsten at Yale has studied how even mild, uncontrollable stress can quickly impair prefrontal cortex function. That area supports judgment, working memory, and planning. Athletes know that effort without recovery has a cost. Training harder without rest does not keep performance rising. It can lead to exhaustion and worse results. A company that stays under pressure all the time can also lose the ability to think clearly.

Feel the emotion. Do not decide inside it.

Regulation is not the softer sibling of ambition. It helps ambition produce better decisions. It starts with a simple discipline: feel the emotion, but do not let it make the decision for you.

We are human. Bad news arrives, someone disagrees, or a plan slips, and we feel it. That is not a flaw we can engineer away. The risk is treating the feeling and the decision as one moment. Daniel Goleman called one version of this an amygdala hijack, when the brain's alarm response takes over before we have time to think. Daniel Kahneman described a related distinction between fast and slow thinking. The work is to create enough space to notice what we feel and consider what to do next.

That does not mean going numb. Antonio Damasio studied people who had lost emotional processing while retaining reasoning abilities. They did not become better decision makers. Some struggled to decide at all. Emotion carries information. Research by James Gross and Oliver John also distinguishes reappraisal, changing how we interpret a situation, from suppression, pushing down the feeling. Suppression does not make the feeling disappear. A useful response is to notice the emotion, consider what it may be telling us, and choose how to act.

Some people hear regulated as a softer word for slow. It can mean the opposite. A composed face that hides bad news is not regulation. It is suppression, and it can make judgment worse. Regulation does not mean feeling less. It means feeling what is there while resisting the urge to let panic choose the next move. The frantic founder and the falsely serene one can make the same mistake. Each lets a feeling determine what the room is allowed to hear.

Compassion helps standards hold

Ambitious people can treat compassion as a reward they give after good performance. I think it helps make good performance possible. Google's Project Aristotle studied what made teams effective. Its findings emphasized psychological safety, the confidence that a person can take an interpersonal risk, such as admitting a mistake, without being humiliated. Amy Edmondson, who studied psychological safety, has said this does not mean being nice at the expense of standards. It means combining care with high expectations. Kim Scott puts it this way: care personally, challenge directly.

A team afraid of humiliation may hide the very risks a vigilant founder needs to understand. Compassion does not require us to lower standards. It can help people meet them while telling us what is going wrong.

Naina describes one part of this with precision. People do not always lie to a frightened person in charge. They calibrate. They soften the truth, wait for a better moment, or take it sideways. The knowledge still exists in the company, but it stops reaching the person who needs to act on it. The person in charge may experience fewer uncomfortable surprises and mistake that for a well-run company. It can be a warning sign.

Calm is trainable, and it can spread

Calm is not simply a temperament we are born with. We can practice how we respond under pressure. I keep a physical trainer and mental coaches close, and use them. My work is not only the hours in meetings and reviews. The hours I spend on my body and mind matter too. That is one place I can practice responding more steadily under pressure.

Our response also affects the people around us. Calm can help others think clearly, while visible panic can make that harder. A team does not simply receive a founder's strategy. It also sees how the founder responds when the news is difficult. A founder who stays open to what is happening can make it easier for others to speak plainly. That does not guarantee the company will stay calm, but it gives the room a better chance to think and act.

I want to stay alert to the work and steady in myself. Hungry without being frantic. Demanding without being cruel. That takes practice. When I get it right, I can face a risk clearly and give the people around me room to tell me what they see.

The paranoid survive. The regulated thrive. I am trying to build for both.

Notes and Sources