On People
People are textbooks and mirrors. They teach you two things: information about the world, like a textbook, and information about yourself, like a mirror. Great people are clear mirrors. Each time you talk with them, you see yourself better.
When people get together, dynamics emerge. Study these dynamics and you'll see clearly: how the world works, how you work, and how you and the world work together. The Stanford MBA is designed around this principle. For people build enterprises, so understanding people will help you understand how you can create value. As I wrote in my 2024 letter: “The MBA is, in effect, not a ‘Masters in Business Administration’, but ‘Masters in People Excellence’.”
Since the beginning of the program, I’ve observed people – how they operate, how conversations flow, and how subtle dynamics shape our behavior. This exploration has been fascinating. We all play a mind-reading game in every interaction. Here's how it works:
When you're with people, you have two voices in your head: the quiet voice, and the loud one.
The Quiet Voice: This is what you’re thinking but not saying. Think about thoughts like “This is awkward,” or “I’m exhausted,” or “I’ve run out of things to say and I don’t know how to continue this.” These thoughts feel private and seem socially inappropriate to express; they probably are.
The Loud Voice: This is what you actually say. It often contradicts your quiet voice completely. The loud voice drowns out the quiet one as you feign interest, pretend to listen, and manage impressions. Here, you construct responses rather than express yourself.
Business school is a great way to let your quiet voice become loud, for that builds lasting relationships. Your quiet voice is also not private, because others can sense exactly what you're really thinking. This happens without conscious effort – through micro-expressions, tone shifts, subtle hesitations, and body language so slight you aren’t aware you’re displaying it. But the brain leaks information. Or rather, we are all so perceptive that we have brain x-ray visions.
For example, when you carefully construct sentences, your pupils dilate at certain points to show you’re actually faking being involved. When you try to maintain a perfect smile to show you’re listening, your posture gives away that you’re really not. And when you feign interest, your eye contact breaks a fraction of a second too early. Others process these signals without their own conscious awareness. They don't explicitly think, “Ah, her pupils just dilated, she must not be interested” – they just feel a general sense about your true thoughts that they themselves can't articulate.
Yet, we maintain the collective fiction that our quiet voice remains hidden; we develop a strange relationship with our own thoughts; we don't know what we’re really thinking, and everyone else does the same. So the quality of our connections with others seems directly proportional to how honest we are with ourselves about what we're really thinking and feeling. The more internally aligned the two voices are, the deeper and better each relationship will be.
This internal alignment will also help us navigate another subtle dynamic I've observed in how people connect with people. There’s a curious pattern in how we approach connection. Notice how we unconsciously assign meaning to who initiates contact, who suggests getting together, who follows up when plans are vague. These seemingly neutral actions carry invisible weight—as if each gesture of reaching out shifts some delicate balance between people. The underlying assumption: showing interest or effort somehow surrenders leverage. But there is no leverage, and this framing is misguided. I've noticed how this thinking sabotages potentially valuable relationships. We tend to wait for others to reach out, hesitate to suggest plans, or unconsciously delay responses. All while genuinely wanting more connection.
And this behavior stems from a misunderstanding of how relationships actually work in our overwhelmed world. Most people aren't intentionally ignoring you or calculating their response times. They're simply drowning in commitments, notifications, responsibilities. The person who takes days to respond to your message likely takes days to respond to everyone's messages. Texting fatigue is real, even when people deny it. Even with people we genuinely want to prioritize, the deluge of information requires superhuman effort to manage one’s bandwidth effectively. Only a rare few consistently overcome this to prioritize what truly matters to them.
Understanding this reality is liberating. It means you can stop assigning meaning to response times, stop counting who initiated the last three interactions, and focus instead on the quality of connection when it does happen. The most fulfilling relationships I've developed at Stanford have come from letting go of these unconscious, empty games. I reach out when I want to, respond when I can, and trust others to the same degree as well.
The Hawthorne effect shows us that people behave differently when they know they're being observed. This awareness of being watched naturally changes how we act, what we prioritize, and ultimately, how we experience the world. Instagram has changed friendship and travel into competitive sports where experiences are collected, documented, and curated because we know that others will see these, rather than for their intrinsic value. There’s a reason the anecdote goes: “Which restaurant do I go to?”, to which the answer is “Do you want to see or be seen?”
But this wasn’t natural human behavior eons ago. This is engineered human behavior, something that has also shaped what we want, or rather, what we want to want. Rene Girard’s mimetic theory of desire is helpful here. It proposes that human desire is not autonomous but imitative – we don’t know what we want, so we want what other people want. Our preferences, activities, even our friendships, become reflections of others’ desires rather than our own.
This is perhaps why the most meaningful connections often happen in the liminal moments, the ones that go undocumented—the unexpected detours, the quiet exchanges that never make it to Instagram. I still take photos and videos of experiences, though, but I try to be aware, understanding why I’m documenting what I’m documenting. Is it to preserve a memory, or to signal? If it’s the latter, I try not to do it. But I’m still figuring this complexity out.
Perhaps this is one orthogonal purpose of a Stanford MBA—not just to ‘master business administration’ but to become ‘masters of being authentic’ (MBA). To recognize the subtle games that govern our interactions, and to choose a more intentional path. When we align our quiet and loud voices, when we stop playing empty games, when we maintain the clarity of an observer—we find something valuable: relationships built on genuine connection rather than performance.
Until next time,
Abhinav