Growing Every Day: Sonny Garg of Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity On What We Can Do To Grow Every Day
Growth, by that definition, isn’t a project with an end date. It’s a feedback loop you never fully close.
Growth is an essential part of life, both personally and professionally. Every day presents an opportunity to learn, evolve, and become better versions of ourselves. But how do we seize these opportunities? How do successful writers, leaders, and influencers ensure they are constantly growing and improving? What daily habits, practices, or mindsets contribute to their continual growth? In this interview series, we are talking to authors, leaders, influencers, and anyone who is an authority about “What We Can Do To Grow Every Day”. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sonny Garg.
Sonny Garg is the author of Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough, (Amplify Publishing), a memoir exploring achievement addiction, immigrant identity, and the search for meaning beyond success. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, Garg was a White House Fellow and rose to executive leadership in a Fortune 125 company. Yet despite achieving many of the milestones he had spent his life pursuing, he found himself asking a difficult question: why didn’t success make him feel successful? Through his writing and speaking, Garg explores how inherited expectations shape our identities, and how we can create lives defined not only by achievement, but through connection and kindness to ourselves and others.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I grew up in a small town of about 15,000 in Ohio called Maume, and in a household running on what I later came to call the Desi-American Dream operating system: excel, achieve, prove that my parents’ sacrifice was worth it. My father left India as a young man convinced that the only way out of the life he’d been handed was to become something undeniable. My mother followed a path she never fully chose. By the time I arrived, the fourth and last of their children, the family’s entire narrative had organized itself around one idea: if we achieved enough, the sacrifice would have meant something, and we would have proven we deserved it.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
Today I am Distinguished Executive in Residence at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and I lead a nonprofit called the Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity. However, most of my career was spent chasing prestige, titles, and recognition. I worked at a research center at the University of Chicago, was an assistant to Mayor Daley of Chicago, a White House Fellow appointed by President Clinton and eventually C-suite executive and member of the executive committee of a Fortune 125 company. All those experiences were, on paper, exactly to the life my programming was expected to lead to or to quote Hamilton, ‘to the rooms where it happens’. What brought me to where I am today was when I got to the top of a ladder I’d spent my life climbing and found myself asking a friend, out loud, why my life still sucked. That question is the reason I do what I do now.
What does “Personal Growth” mean to you?
I’ve come to think of it less as self-improvement and more as closing the gap between the self I perform and the self I actually am. In the book I borrow a phrase from software development: a Minimally Viable Me. You don’t design the perfect, finished version of yourself in advance. You build the simplest honest version you can, put it into the world, see where it doesn’t fit, and adjust. Growth, by that definition, isn’t a project with an end date. It’s a feedback loop you never fully close. I’m suspicious of anyone, including me, who describes their growth as complete.
Why do you believe that it’s important to commit to growing every day?
Because the alternative isn’t neutral. Left unexamined, we default to whatever programming we inherited, and mine was not particularly kind. Every day I don’t ask questions about why I’m doing what I’m doing is a day I hand the wheel back to a twelve-year-old version of myself who learned that love was conditional. Commitment has to be daily because the old patterns don’t go away when you notice them once. They’re patient. They wait for a stressful week and come right back.
What are the key upsides for those who mindfully engage in a journey of personal evolution?
The one I’d underline is coherence, the feeling of your outside life actually matching your inside values instead of performing a version of you that other people find impressive. Alongside that: relationships that don’t have a transcript attached to them, the ability to be present with the people you love instead of half-present while calculating your next move, and, eventually, something close to relief. I didn’t expect relief. I expected pride. Relief was better.
When we stop evolving in intentional ways, what do you think are the biggest downsides?
I lived the answer to this one for the better part of two decades before I could name it. Left on autopilot, achievement stopped being something I did and became something I needed, each milestone buying a shorter high than the one before it. I was isolated inside relationships that looked full from the outside. My health went before my self-awareness did, which is usually how it works. The most painful part wasn’t the exhaustion. It was mistaking recognition for love for so long that I nearly missed the difference entirely.
What specific practices, if any, do you have in place to ensure that you don’t become stagnant in life?
A few. I check in regularly across what I think of as the different boards I’m playing on at once — work, family, community, and self — because it’s easy to be thriving on one and quietly failing on another without noticing. I ask myself some version of the same blunt question on a bad week: what am I actually optimizing for right now, not what I’d say if you asked me at a dinner party. I try to protect unscheduled time with my wife and daughters where nobody’s phone is a third party to the conversation. And I keep a small number of people in my life who are allowed to ask me the uncomfortable question and expect an honest answer instead of a polished one.
Is there any particular area of your life where you are most committed to growth (e.g., spiritually, professionally, socially, internally, relationally)?
Relationally and spiritually, without much competition. Professional growth came easily to me. It was the thing my whole operating system was built to produce. What I had almost no practice in was receiving love without earning it, or offering it without keeping score. That’s still the muscle I work hardest, whether it’s with my wife, my daughters, or the friends I’ve come to think of as chosen family. I’m better at it than I was. I wouldn’t say I’m good at it yet.
If you could offer five tips to readers on how to stimulate and perpetuate self-growth, what would they be?
1. Build the minimally viable version of yourself before you try to build the polished one. When I finally sat down to redesign my life, I didn’t write a grand new mission statement. I wrote five plain criteria — prioritize time with family, earn enough rather than maximize, work somewhere growing but not chasing quarterly stock price, work with people who actually practiced their stated values. Small, testable, honest. That did more than any vision board ever could.
2. Ask what you’re actually optimizing for, not what you’d claim at a dinner party. For years I told myself I valued my family above my career while quietly losing entire weekends to squeezing a company’s earnings per share up by two cents. The gap between what I said and what my calendar said was the whole diagnosis, if I’d been willing to look at it sooner.
3. Keep at least one person in your life who’s allowed to ask you the six-word question. My friend Tim asked me over dinner, what are you chasing, and why? I didn’t have an answer. That was the beginning of everything that came after, not because he told me what to do, but because he asked something I’d spent years avoiding.
4. Do the math on what “enough” actually costs. There’s an old Tolstoy story about a man who dies chasing more land than he could ever need. My wife and I eventually sat down and calculated, in real numbers, what our life actually required, not what would impress anyone. It was an uncomfortable afternoon. It was also the first time “enough” stopped being an abstraction.
5. Choose the people who love you without a resume, even when that means unchosen distance from people who share your blood. I eventually built what people have come to call a chosen family, people who earned their place through their actions rather than biology. It cost me something. It also taught me what unconditional actually feels like, which I hadn’t fully known before.
What advice would you give to someone who feels stuck and unsure of how to start their personal growth journey?
Don’t start with a five-year plan. Start with removing all constraints — what Professor Harry Davis at Booth calls the ‘shoulds’ — and ask yourself what you would do if you could do anything. Don’t worry about money, or what people would think or its feasibility. I have spoken to probably hundreds of people at this point and while that answer(s) is most likely not what you will go do, it begins to reveal clues about what excites and interests you. You need to dissect that answer and ask why you would go do that — break it down into its littlest parts. Is it creative, does it involve helping others, what type of people would you be working with, what type of environment? I call each one of those lego blocks and once you have them, you can begin to explore how they might fit together to reveal opportunities that align with your interests more. We all have more talents and more options than we think but we get stuck in limiting our thinking to roles/positions and that is a disservice.
Are there any books, podcasts, or other resources that have significantly contributed to your personal growth?
Honestly, the resources that moved me most weren’t a curated reading list, they were people. A mentor named Harold taught me the difference between the virtues that build a resume and the virtues people actually remember you for at your funeral. My friend Tim’s six words did more work than any book on my shelf. My wife, Julia, who has never once let me get away with a convenient version of the truth. If I have to name a book, Tolstoy’s short story about the man and the land has stayed with me longer than almost anything I read on purpose to improve myself. Stories about human experiences to me are more valuable than any business or leadership books.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I’d want it to start smaller than a movement usually does, with two questions instead of a manifesto: whose definition of success are you actually living by, and did you ever agree to it? How do you define your worth and who told you weren’t enough? I think about this especially for children of immigrants and high achievers of every background, people who inherited a scoreboard they never chose and have been playing by its rules ever since. I’m not interested in telling anyone what to build instead. I’d just like more people to notice they’re allowed to ask the questions at all.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I have limited to no presence online, except LinkedIn. I’ve tried my best to ask the questions that have helped me in my book, Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough, which is available now through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can find more about the book and my other writing at sonnygarg.me.
Thank you so much for the time you spent with us today! This was a very inspiring conversation.
Growing Every Day: Sonny Garg of Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity On What We Can Do… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.