Midnight Calls and Invisible Sacrifices

In the early days of Majhi Group, many of my clients were based in the United States. The time difference, India to the US East Coast is roughly ten and a half hours, meant that their working day was my late night. The calls that mattered most happened between 10 PM and 1 AM.

I took those calls. Not every night, but regularly, and for a sustained period that stretched longer than I had originally told myself it would. My family adjusted. The people around me adjusted. They did not complain, which made it easier to keep going, and also harder to see clearly what I was asking of them.

I grew up in Junagarh, in Kalahandi, in a household where the idea of building something from scratch, with no institutional backing, no inherited network, no safety net, was not a common story. The decision to start Majhi Group and operate it across time zones was entirely my own. The cost of that decision, it turned out, was not entirely mine to pay.

What stays invisible

Every significant outcome has a private history. The client relationship that looks effortless from the outside required months of 11 PM calls.

Every significant outcome has a private history. The confidence that reads as natural in a pitch meeting was assembled from a long series of conversations that did not go that way. The placement that came together in 41 days required years of building the process that made those 41 days possible. The confidence that reads as natural in a pitch meeting was assembled from a long series of conversations that did not go that way.

This private history is not a secret, exactly. But it does not get told, because telling it requires admitting cost that is socially awkward to acknowledge. Saying "this succeeded because I worked through many nights and asked more of my family than was comfortable" is true and useful, but it is not the story that fits neatly into the version of entrepreneurship that is publicly performed.

What goes invisible in that editing is important: the real accounting of what things actually require, and, more significantly, the people who absorb the cost on your behalf.

The success stories that circulate in entrepreneurship, the ones that get written up, the ones that get told on stages, are typically narrated from a single perspective. The founder's arc. The company's growth. What gets omitted is the supporting cast: the family members who held things together, the partners who made the professional risk possible by absorbing the domestic one, the people who kept believing when the evidence for belief was thin.

The people who absorb the cost

Founders talk about sacrifice as though it is primarily their own. What I have come to understand, with some delay, is that the sacrifice is only partly yours.

The family members who adjusted their schedules around your unpredictability made a sacrifice. The partner who anchored the domestic reality while you were building made a sacrifice. The friends who received less of your attention and continued to be your friends made a small, sustained sacrifice. The people who believed in you before you had proof, and absorbed the anxiety of that belief with you, made a sacrifice that is rarely named.

The midnight call is yours. The disruption it creates in the house is shared. These are not equivalent experiences, and the person building something often understates the asymmetry because acknowledging it fully would make it harder to continue.

I am not arguing that the building should stop. I am arguing for clarity about what it actually costs, and to whom.

There is a period in the early years of building when the costs feel shared in spirit, you are all in it together, the eventual outcome will benefit everyone, the difficulty is temporary. This framing is genuinely true, and it is also genuinely incomplete. The temporary difficulty often stretches. The shared spirit is held more easily by the person who chose the path than by the people who are living alongside someone who chose it. The commitment to the outcome is stronger when it is your outcome.

What honesty requires

There is a version of the founder story that glamorizes the sacrifices: the midnight calls become evidence of how hard you worked, the sleepless periods become proof of commitment, the family difficulties become part of the heroic narrative. This framing is not untrue, but it is incomplete.

The complete version includes the cost to the people who did not choose the entrepreneurial path but who lived inside its consequences. It includes the acknowledgment that their support was not free, it had a cost they paid so that you could pay a different cost. It includes the recognition that the outcome, when it arrived, was not yours alone.

This matters not as an exercise in guilt but as an exercise in accuracy. The decisions you make about what to build, how fast to build it, and what you will ask of the people around you in order to build it, those decisions are more honest when they include the full accounting.

The thing about looking back

What I notice, looking back at the years of midnight calls, is not just the cost. I notice the things I would have done differently if I had been more awake to what was actually happening.

I would have named what I was asking for more explicitly. Not just by working the hours, but by having the direct conversation: this is what the next period will require, this is what I am asking you to absorb, and I see that clearly. Most of the people around you can handle the ask. What is harder to handle is not being asked, being expected to adjust without acknowledgment.

I would have been clearer about the timeline. Open-ended sacrifice, "I'll ease up once we get past this phase", is corrosive because the phase never ends. Each one is followed by another. The people who adjust indefinitely for an indefinitely-deferred relief eventually stop believing the relief is coming. Being specific about the arc, even imperfectly, is better than being open-ended.

And I would have said thank you more explicitly, and earlier. Not the thank you that is implied by a good outcome eventually arriving. The thank you that names what someone did and what it cost them and that you saw it. That costs almost nothing and means more than most things you could do.

The midnight calls were worth it. And they cost more than I was willing to say at the time.

See also: Active Waiting, What Failure Actually Teaches, Books That Changed My Thinking

Sources

Angela Duckworth: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

HBR: The Hidden Toll of Entrepreneurship on Families

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder