There is a question I have asked teams for years, and almost no one gets it right.
If you wanted to build the Taj Mahal, what is the first thing you would need?
People usually answer with the obvious things. Vision. Wealth. Determination. A brilliant architect.
All sensible answers.
All missing the point.
The first thing you need is a Mumtaz.
And for the Taj Mahal we know today to exist, Mumtaz had to die.
Sit with that thought for a moment.
The Taj Mahal was not simply born from ambition. It was born from love, grief and the need to give unbearable loss a lasting form. Whether history would have unfolded differently had Mumtaz lived, none of us can know. But the monument that has endured for centuries was undeniably shaped by what Shah Jahan had lost.
That is an uncomfortable truth, because we prefer to believe that extraordinary things are built through careful planning, abundant resources and relentless ambition.
Sometimes they are.
But many of the things that endure are powered by something deeper. Sometimes grief. Sometimes love. Sometimes duty. Sometimes an injustice someone refuses to accept. Whatever its form, it has usually come at a cost.
I have watched many people try to build a monument out of ambition alone. A bigger company. A bigger title. A legacy with their name on it.
Ambition is a powerful spark.
It is not always a lasting fuel.
It burns brightly at the beginning, when everything feels exciting and full of possibility. Then comes the long, ordinary middle, where progress is slow, setbacks are frequent and applause disappears. That is where ambition often begins to fade.
Ambition gets you to base camp.
It rarely gets you to the summit.
What carries people further is purpose. And purpose is rarely born in comfort.
Over the years I have noticed two kinds of builders.
The first builds because they want more. More success. More recognition. More status. You can usually tell when they have arrived because the building slows, then stops. The hunger that powered the work has been satisfied.
The second builds because they are honouring something.
A person they loved.
A place they lost.
A promise they made.
An injustice they cannot forget.
Or a version of themselves they refuse to abandon.
They are not trying to prove anything to the world.
They are trying to remain faithful to something that changed them forever.
Every enduring monument has an invisible foundation.
We admire the marble.
We rarely see what it was built upon.
I know this from my own life.
The things I have built that mattered most did not come from my easiest years. They came from what I chose to do after losing the life I had known at seventeen, when my family was forced to leave Kashmir.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that became my own Mumtaz.
Not because loss itself is noble.
It isn't.
But because it became the thing that quietly shaped every mountain I chose to climb afterwards.
That is why, when someone tells me they want to build something extraordinary, I no longer ask about their vision or their strategy.
Most people have both.
I ask a different question.
What has this dream already cost you?
Because a purpose that has cost you nothing may not be strong enough to carry you when the climb becomes steep.
Purpose is what remains after ambition has burned away.
It is the work you would still choose to do if nobody applauded, nobody noticed and nobody remembered your name.
Because by then you are no longer building for recognition.
You are building because not building would feel like a betrayal of something that matters.
That, to me, is the real meaning of purpose.
Now the part I am keeping for this letter.
A reasonable objection to everything I have just written is this. What if you have never had a Mumtaz? What if your life, by luck or circumstance, has been largely comfortable, with no great loss to build from? Are you simply destined to build sandcastles?
No. But you have to do something harder, and almost no one does it.
If life has not handed you a Mumtaz, you have to choose one. You have to deliberately commit to something, or someone, beyond yourself, so completely that letting it down would feel like a genuine loss. A cause you would be ashamed to abandon. People whose growth you have made your personal responsibility. A standard you would rather fail publicly than quietly lower. You manufacture the stakes that loss would otherwise have given you for free.
This is the part the comfortable find hardest, because it means voluntarily giving something the power to hurt you. Most people, given a frictionless life, protect it. They keep their options open, their commitments light, their exposure low, and then wonder why nothing they build seems to mean very much or last very long. They have never given anything the right to break their heart, and so nothing they make has any weight.
A Mumtaz, given or chosen, is simply something you love enough to be wounded by. And only the things we are willing to be wounded by ever produce a monument.
It is also why The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose exists. The Mumtaz story is one I have shared with teams for many years because it captures something I have come to believe deeply.
The monuments that endure are not built by what people want.
They are built by what people refuse to let be wasted.
The book releases 13 July: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf
So let me leave you with the same question.
The thing you are building today, your career, your company, your reputation. Is it being driven only by ambition?
Or has life already given you a Mumtaz?
A love.
A loss.
A promise.
A conviction.
Something that has already changed you so profoundly that you would choose the climb all over again.
Until next week,
Avinash