The People Who Never Told You

Who changed the direction of your working life, and have you ever told them?

Last week a post of mine ended with one line. If somebody changed the direction of your career, they probably don’t know it. Today would be a good day to tell them. It was written almost as an afterthought, sitting at the bottom, after everything else. Nothing was expected to come of it.

Four people answered it within four days. Megha Agarwal reposted and wrote that some words stay with you forever. Avinash Kumar wrote, underneath a post that was not about him at all, that some people help you grow in your career and a rare few change the way you see yourself. Nithya Karthikeyan wrote that some workplaces give you a job, and the right ones leave you with something that stays.

And one more came quietly, in a private message, from a woman who had worked in the same company for years. Her first line was this. I never got a chance to express myself to you.

Read that line again. Never got a chance. Same company, same floors, same corridors, for years. That’s the thing worth studying here. Not the kind words, which are lovely. The years of silence that came before them, and how completely ordinary that silence is.

The teacher whose name millions of us know

In a small town called Rameswaram, a science teacher called Sivasubramania Iyer taught a boy who was going nowhere in particular. He told the boy plainly that he wanted him to grow until he stood level with the highly educated people of the big cities.

One day the teacher invited him home to eat. His wife refused to serve a Muslim child in her kitchen. So he served the meal himself, sat down on the floor beside the boy, and ate with him. Afterwards he said that once you decide to change a system, problems like this have to be faced.

That boy was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

We know his teacher’s name today for one reason and one reason only. His student wrote it down, decades later, in a book. If Kalam had kept that afternoon to himself, a good man would have lived and died and taught a whole generation, and not one of us would ever have heard of him. Most of the people who shaped you are living that version right now, and you are the only one who can change it.

He served the meal himself, and sat down on the floor to eat beside him.

Why you haven’t said it yet

You’re almost certainly carrying a name. So the honest question is not whether you have one. It’s why it’s stayed unsaid this long, and the answer turns out to be far more interesting than laziness.

Two researchers at Chicago, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, ran three experiments and published them in Psychological Science in 2018. They asked people to write a letter of thanks to somebody who had mattered to them. Before it was sent, each writer predicted how the person receiving it would feel.

The writers got it wrong, and they got it wrong in the same direction every single time. They underestimated how surprised the other person would be. They underestimated how good it would make them feel. And they badly overestimated how awkward it would be.

Then comes the finding that should stop you. How awkward people expected it to be predicted whether they sent it at all. So these letters don’t go unsent because we’re ungrateful. They go unsent because we run the numbers wrong, and then we trust our own arithmetic.

Here’s what that looks like on a Tuesday morning.

You think they already know. They do not. Surprise was the biggest gap of the lot. The thing that changed your whole direction was, for them, a normal week they have half forgotten.
You think it’ll be strange. That’s the single strongest reason people stay quiet, and it is the one we are most wrong about.
You think you’ve left it too late. Ten years late still lands. There is not a version of this where somebody is annoyed you brought it up.
You’re waiting for an occasion. Their promotion, their farewell, their funeral. Waiting for your occasion is usually the reason it never gets said at all.

The letter is written. It is the sending that does not happen.

The list I hadn’t checked

Now the harder half, because this is not a piece about being thanked.

Twenty years of this work means thousands of people, and hundreds who went on to something much bigger. Very few ever said anything. Some climbed up and walked out without turning around, and on certain days that stings more than it should. That part is true and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is also exactly why this week was so unusual.

And then that private message arrived, and the obvious thing finally landed. Somewhere out there are people who feel exactly that way about a manager, a teacher, a neighbour who backed them once. Some of them are on my list. I have never said a word to them either.

So silence is not something that happens to us. Most of us are running it in both directions at the same time, and we only ever notice the direction that hurts.

If nobody ever said it to you

Some of you are reading this from the other side of the table, and you should hear something too.

In 1946 a man called Tribhuvandas Patel set up a small milk cooperative in Kaira so that farmers would stop being cheated by middlemen. He then hired a young engineer to run it for him. That engineer was Verghese Kurien, and what followed became Amul, the White Revolution, and the Milkman of India.

Almost everybody knows Kurien’s name. Very few people know the name of the man who started it and hired him. It took until 2025 for India’s first cooperative university to be named after him, in Anand, where he started.

That is not a scandal, and it is not anybody’s fault. It’s simply how it tends to go. The person who opens the door is very rarely the person in the photograph. If that’s you, you’re allowed both things at once. You’re allowed to mind. And you’re allowed to keep opening doors anyway, and to wish them well on their way through.

The person who opens the door is rarely the person in the photograph.

Say it this week

You don’t need a speech. Three sentences will do it, and the real reason people stay quiet is that nobody ever showed them the words.

Name the moment. “In 2019 you put me on the Pune project when nobody else would have.”
Name what it changed. “It’s the reason I run a team today.”
Say the plain thing. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for it. Thank you.”

Send it as a message, not a card. Send it today, not on their birthday. It’ll take you four minutes and you’ll think about it for a week.

Then do one more thing for the rest of us. Put their name in the comments under the LinkedIn edition, with one line about what they did.

Not for me. For the person reading this who’s carrying a name and is not sure they are allowed to say it out loud. Watching somebody else go first is usually what gives people permission.

Who’s yours?

This piece first appeared in The Transformation Playbook, my weekly newsletter on LinkedIn: one idea a week, for women rising at work, at home, and in their own lives.