If you ask me the one thing I wish I had learned earlier in life, it is not a business lesson. It is this: how to be kinder — to myself, and to the people around me. The hardest, sharpest voice in my life has always been my own. And quietly, it has hurt me for years.

I have built companies from nothing. I have pushed people to do things they never believed they could. I never cared much about money — I only wanted the work to be right. But that same need for things to be right has a dark side. My mind never stops looking for what is wrong. In my work. In my plans. In myself. And far too often, in the people I love and lead.

My Mind Never Switches Off

For as long as I can remember, one quiet question has run in my head all day: what is wrong here, and how can it be better? It is the same question that helped me teach myself electronics and build an industry. Pointed at a machine or a problem, it is a gift. Pointed at a person — or at myself — it turns into a weapon.

I am never happy with what I achieve. I finish something and at once I see the better version I did not make. I win, and the first thing I feel is not joy — it is the gap. For most of my life I thought this was just how hard-working people are. I did not know it had a name. I did not know so many gifted minds carry the very same thing.

When It Turns on Others

The hardest thing to admit is what this did to other people. I have lifted many up. I have believed in them, backed them, pushed them higher. But I have also been hard on them — sometimes to their face, too sharply, and sometimes behind their back, when the frustration had nowhere else to go. It pushed good people away. Some quietly left. Some stopped trusting my warmth, because they were always waiting for the sharp word to follow.

The people close to me got two of me from the same man: the leader who believed in them, and the critic who could not let one mistake go. That is a confusing person to work for. I understand that now, far better than I did then — and I wish I had understood it much sooner.

Why So Many Gifted Minds Work This Way

When I finally learned about giftedness — at 47, far too late — a lot of this began to make sense. People who study gifted minds say it plainly: the gifted are very often their own worst critic. The same sharp mind that can see what might go wrong turns that gaze inward, until even small mistakes feel huge.

A psychiatrist named Kazimierz Dabrowski had a word for this intensity — he called it overexcitability. He said such people are deeply independent in thought, and can come across as critical. He was describing me, decades before I ever read his name. And there is a reason it begins so young: many gifted children quietly learn one dangerous lesson — I am only worth as much as I achieve. If you believe that, then every flaw feels like a threat, and the critic inside you never goes to sleep.

Two Kinds of Wanting It Right

The most useful thing I have learned is that there are two very different kinds of perfectionism. One is healthy — the wish to do things well, the drive that builds companies and solves hard problems. That one I want to keep; it is part of who I am. The other is cruel — the endless self-criticism, the fear, the doubt. It does not make your work better. It only punishes you, and the people near you, when things are not perfect.

I am slowly learning the difference. The goal was never to want less. It was to keep wanting it right — and to stop the punishing.

What I Am Still Learning, at 63

Seeing a flaw and saying it are two different things. My mind will always spot what is wrong — I have stopped fighting that. But I am learning to leave a small gap between noticing it and speaking it. The noticing can stay. The words need a pause first.

The criticism behind someone's back must stop completely. It never reaches the person who could change anything. It only quietly damages them, and me.

And the hardest lesson of all — being gentle with myself. People who study this say self-kindness is the single best thing for minds like mine. To speak to myself the way I would speak to someone I am guiding — honest, but kind — is the hardest skill I have ever tried to learn. It may also be the most important.

A note to the gifted grown-up — and the parent of a gifted child

If you see yourself here — the mind that never rests, the success that never feels like enough, the sharp word you regretted the second it left your mouth — you are not a difficult person. You are most likely a gifted one, carrying a gift that has no off switch. And if you are raising a gifted child who is hard on themselves and hard on others, they are not being arrogant or unkind. They feel everything more deeply than most people ever will. They do not need to be scolded. They need to be understood — and taught, early, the thing I had to learn far too late.

I am building GiftedKids.in so that a child does not have to wait until 47, or 63, to be handed the words for their own mind. This is the thing that cost me the most in life. If saying it out loud spares even one person some of that pain, then it was worth saying.

— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder, GiftedKids.in | June 2026