If you are reading this, there is a reasonable chance you are tired in a way you can’t quite explain.
Not tired from the work itself. You can handle the work. You’ve been handling it for years. The tiredness is something else. It’s the feeling of holding things together that nobody sees you holding. Of translating between what’s happening and what the room is ready to hear. Of performing confidence in situations that honestly require doubt. Of carrying, in your body, a gap between what the organisation says it values and what it actually rewards.
You might call this burnout. The people around you might call it burnout. But I don’t think that’s what it is. I think what you’re experiencing is the cost of a leadership model that was never designed to be sustainable. A model that asks one person, you, to metabolise the uncertainty, the contradiction, and the relational complexity that should be held by the system itself. A model that calls this “strong leadership” when things go well, and calls it “poor self-care” when you start to crack. A model that has taught you to see your exhaustion as a personal failing rather than a structural signal.
There is another way. The word for it is unheroic.
I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in India’s civil society and philanthropy. The leaders I worked alongside, in justice, climate, education, water, community organising, were facing conditions of genuine complexity with very little of what the conventional leadership literature considers essential. They didn’t have grand strategies. They didn’t have certainty. What they had was a different relationship to the work: more listening than directing, more holding than controlling, more trust than proof.
As I shared this framing with people outside the social sector — in corporate settings, in government, in education, in tech — I kept hearing the same response.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I just didn’t have a name for it. And I didn’t know it was allowed.
The book asks three questions
What do you actually stand for when no one’s watching?
On values, vulnerability, serendipity, and trust.
Can you build something that doesn’t need you?
On enabling others, empowering communities, and letting go.
What if the system matters more than the leader?
On ecosystems, fractals, shadows, and what happens when the system makes you the hero.
Told through conversations with fifteen leaders across India’s social sector — founders, movement builders, systems thinkers, and community practitioners.
I’m Gautam John. After twenty years of dreaming and doing to make a difference as a civil society leader in India (most recently as CEO of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies), I decided to write my first book. It’s incomplete: I’m still learning, still trying, still inside the practice of getting things right and wrong.
This book is forthcoming.
Leave your email — I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
