A question for every second-generation professional still running programming they
never chose.
By Sonny Garg
When my eldest sister finished second in her class in high school, my father had a ready response: who finished first? For years, my sisters and I told that story as a joke, and everyone at the table laughed, especially the other desi kids. It took me five decades, a C-suite career, and a health crisis to notice that I had never actually found it funny. I had found it familiar.
Desi Kids
If you grew up second generation, with the traditional South Asian American Dream of endless achievement and external validation. you have your own version of that line. Maybe it arrived after a 96, in the form of a question about the other four points. Maybe it was the cousin whose class rank or Ivy League admission preceded him into every gathering, or the auntie network operating as a distributed surveillance system for report cards. The lines differ by family. The programming underneath rarely does. It gets installed early, before we have any capacity to question it, and it compiles down to a single instruction: you are what you achieve, and what you have achieved so far is not quite it.
I ran that programming through the University of Chicago and Harvard, into White House and Aspen Fellowships, and eventually the executive committee of a Fortune 125 company and civic leadership. By every metric the program tracked, it worked. And somewhere in the middle of the work, I lost the ability to tell my ambition from my anxiety.
If you are the analyst pulling the all-nighter, the resident running on fumes, the associate refreshing email for bonus news, some of this may sound familiar. The burnout moving through our generation of professionals is not a mystery to anyone who grew up this way. It is the programming, still running now, with no parent in the room.
The Immigrant Sacrifice
Our parents’ sacrifice was real. They crossed oceans, absorbed humiliations we never saw, and built platforms out of nothing so that we could stand on them. That is true. It is also true that in many families, somewhere along the way, the sacrifice stopped functioning as a gift and started functioning as a balance due, collected in grades, admissions, and job titles, with no final payment date. Both truths can live in the same house. In mine, they did.
So instead of advice, three questions I wish someone had handed me earlier in my career. First: when you fall short, and the voice in your head begins narrating, whose voice is it actually using? Mine spoke in my father’s cadences for decades after I stopped needing his approval on paper. I mistook the voice for ambition. It was inherited code. Noticing whose words you use against yourself does not delete them, but it does return the coding to its author.
Second: what did your parents actually give you? For most of my life I answered with the ledger: the sacrifices, the fees, the debt I could never quite retire. Then I looked one generation further back. My grandfather lived in India under British rule, his life so constrained by colonialism and caste that choice barely applied to him. My father crossed the world to escape exactly that, and what his crossing purchased was not a list of required outcomes. It was the freedom for his children to define themselves. The true inheritance was never the expectations. It was agency.
The bitter irony of my first five decades is that I took that freedom and voluntarily rebuilt the fenced-in life it was meant to end, running a program no one was forcing on me anymore. The reframe that finally reorganized me: honoring our parents’ sacrifice does not mean executing their blueprint. It means using the agency they fought to give us, even when it leads somewhere they never imagined. The gift was on the table the whole time. Unwrapping it was on me.
Third: what are you passing forward, uninspected? If you have children, they are downloading what you celebrate, not what you say. If you do not, listen to how you speak to yourself after a setback, because that voice is auditioning to become the one your future children inherit. This programming does not end with the generation that ran it. It ends with the generation that finally questions it.
I have no ten-step plan to offer, and I have learned to distrust anyone in this space who does. I am not above you on some mountain, just possibly further down the same road, still catching myself keeping score in my father’s handwriting. And I am not asking anyone to be less ambitious. Ambition built nearly everything I love about our community. I am asking a smaller, harder thing, the thing I finally asked myself in a hospital bed at fifty-three: is the chase actually yours? Or are you running someone else’s race and calling it a dream?
Our parents paid for the American Dream so that their children would have choices they never did. The strangest way to honor that is to never make one. The American Dream cost our parents more than they ever told us. It is allowed to cost us less.
***
Sonny Garg is a former Fortune 125 C-Suite executive with over 30 years’ experience examining conventional thinking to transform mature organizations and build new ones across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. He is Distinguished Executive-in-Residence at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a White House Fellow, and an Aspen Crown Fellow. He holds an M.B.A. and B.A. from the University of Chicago and an M.P.P. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His new book is Desi 2.0: My Family’s American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough (Amplify Publishing, August 4, 2026), a memoir on achievement culture, inherited expectations, and the difference between a life that looks successful and one that is meaningful. Learn more at Sonny Garg.
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