You see the person who makes a brilliant chess move, the doctor who seems completely sure of their diagnosis, or that one person in a meeting who says something so sharp that everyone just goes, “Yep, that makes sense.”
You see the finished product.
That hidden part is where most of the real work happens. And honestly, it's the part we rarely talk about.
I want to talk about that part because once you understand what's really happening beneath the surface, you stop envying people who seem effortlessly good at what they do.
You start seeing the work behind it, and more importantly, you start doing that work yourself.
You Don't See the Years Behind It
Before that championship, he had already spent years playing chess for hours every day. Studying thousands of games, practising openings, working with coaches, travelling for tournaments, losing games, figuring out what went wrong, and then doing it all over again.
And Chennai itself has a lot to do with it. The city has had a strong chess culture for years, which is one reason so many great Indian chess players have come from there.
So when you watch Gukesh make that one brilliant move, remember that the move only took a few seconds.
Everything that made that move possible took years.
The Landing Took One Day, The Work Took Decades
Here's another one we all watched together.
But that moment didn't just happen.
Behind it were decades of work by ISRO engineers. There was also Chandrayaan-2, which crashed while trying to land in 2019, just when it was almost there.
They could have just moved on from that failure. Instead, they went back and looked at what had gone wrong, worked on it, made changes, and tried again.
And they did all of this without some massive Hollywood-sized budget. The whole mission cost less than what some big movies cost to make.
We got to see the few minutes when Chandrayaan-3 landed.
ISRO had spent decades getting ready for those few minutes.
What the Iceberg Looks Like in Normal Life
You don't have to be a world champion or work at ISRO for this to be true. You see the same thing in pretty much every kind of work.
And yes, it's the same in my own world.
For a researcher, when they say, “We think this business is undervalued,” it might sound like a simple thought. But behind that one sentence could be weeks of reading annual reports, listening to management calls, checking numbers, and trying to figure out what everyone else is missing.
You hear the sentence.
You don't see all the work that made them confident enough to say it.
Why This Should Make You Hopeful
This is the part I really want you to take away.
If being great at something was only about having some natural talent that you either have or don't have, then most of us would be in trouble.
But I don't think that's how it works.
A lot of what makes someone really good at something comes from the stuff you can't see. The practice, the iteration, the mistakes, the boring days when they showed up anyway. And unlike natural talent, most of that is something you can control.
And notice I said iteration, not repetition, because that difference is everything.
I've seen completely ordinary people get really good at things over time. They didn't suddenly become smarter or more talented. They just kept doing the work, especially the work nobody else could see.
So when you look at someone who's brilliant and feel like you could never be that good, remember this: you're looking at their finished version while you're living through all of your unfinished parts.
That's not a fair comparison.
You just need to keep building yours.
Start Here
Okay, let's test this.
Pick one skill you wish you were better at. I'd nudge you hard towards writing or public speaking, because they shape almost every career, and yet they're the two skills most people never sit down and practice. But cooking, coding, anything works.
Before you start, record yourself doing it badly. A two-minute video, a messy first draft, your first attempt at cooking something, whatever makes sense. Don't fix anything; keep the ugly version.
On day seven, go back to that first ugly version and compare.
You won't become world-class in a week. But you might be surprised by how much can change when you put in the work.
Keep tagging us throughout the week, and we'll be following along. We'll feature a few of our favourite before-and-afters in a future edition.
Show me your iceberg.
Invest in yourself,
Aswini Bajaj