Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

I've been noticing lately how all my relationships have this invisible ledger of giving and taking. Not that I'm keeping score exactly, but my feelings are pretty reliable indicators of when things are out of whack.

That project at work last month was a perfect example. I found myself staying late every night finalizing presentations while my "co-lead" was nowhere to be found. That simmering resentment I felt wasn't just me being petty—it was a legitimate response to an unfair situation. When I finally spoke up about it, we restructured how we divide tasks, and suddenly my awkward feeling disappeared.

Then there's the flip side. When our friends Sriram Padmanabhan and Lavanya hosted us not once but twice (once in Melbourne, Australia (2015) and next time in Cologne, Germany (2018) and treated us like royalty.  Because of their work schedule, we couldn't really reciprocate.  I felt this nagging guilt. That guilty feeling was another signal worth paying attention to—maybe I need to find ways to show appreciation to them when the right time comes.

Sometimes the hardest part is letting go of situations that don't serve us anymore. Like that friendship I held onto for years even though every interaction left me emotionally drained. The familiarity was comforting, even as it was hurting me. Breaking that pattern felt almost as scary as staying in it.

What I'm learning is that I'm the expert on my own experience. No one else lives inside my head or feels exactly what I feel. When something in my life consistently makes me feel resentful or guilty, that's valuable information—not something to ignore or explain away. At the end of the day, I'm the only one who truly knows what's going on in my life—what drains me and what fulfills me. These choices about where to invest my energy are mine alone to make. And when something feels consistently unfair or imbalanced, that's probably not just in my head—it's my intuition telling me something needs to change.

I'm the only one who truly knows what's happening in my inner world. These choices about what I'll tolerate and what needs to change—they're mine alone. And maybe paying attention to these feelings, uncomfortable as they might be, is the first step toward creating more balanced relationships in every part of my life.