A career in finance can look linear on paper. Krishan Rattan says the lived version is anything but, and that sport, health and recovery are essential parts of staying effective through the difficult periods.
A long career in business can look remarkably smooth when compressed into a biography. Krishan Rattan&rsquo;s certainly can: senior banking roles, entrepreneurship, more than US$12 billion in transactions raised, deployed or overseen, an alternative asset manager built to more than US$1.2 billion in AUM, and now Terra Invest.
But Rattan is sceptical of biographies for precisely that reason. They remove the difficult days. They leave out the deals that did not happen, the businesses that took longer than expected, wrong calls, exhausting stretches, market shocks and the uncertainty that comes with taking financial risk for decades.
&ldquo;Business careers only look linear when somebody writes them backwards. When you are living them, they are anything but.&rdquo;
It is one reason he increasingly talks about sport, health and wellness not as lifestyle accessories, but as part of the infrastructure required to remain effective through a long career.
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Success creates its own distortions</h1>
Business culture spends enormous time discussing how people handle failure. Rattan thinks less attention is given to handling success. Both can distort judgement.
Failure can make an entrepreneur overly cautious or desperate to recover what was lost. Success can create the opposite problem, persuading people that a favourable outcome validated every assumption that preceded it.
&ldquo;One of the hardest things after something goes very well is figuring out how much was skill, how much was circumstance and what should actually be repeated.&rdquo;
Sport gave him an early framework for this. Winning one match does not guarantee winning the next. Losing one does not make someone a bad player. Both outcomes generate information, but neither needs to become an identity.
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Uncertainty is physically exhausting</h1>
There is another element of leadership that receives surprisingly little attention: decision-making is physical.
A founder running a business through a difficult period is not experiencing uncertainty as an intellectual abstraction. Neither is an investor responsible for other people&rsquo;s capital. Poor sleep changes judgement. Chronic stress changes behaviour. Inactivity affects energy and cognition.
That is part of the reason Rattan has retained a close relationship with sport, particularly tennis. Tennis demands presence. For the period you are on court, there is little value in worrying about tomorrow&rsquo;s meeting or yesterday&rsquo;s portfolio performance. There is a ball travelling towards you and a decision has to be made.
&ldquo;Sport forces your mind into the present. Most people in business are mentally living five meetings ahead of where they actually are.&rdquo;
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Resilience is recovery, not invulnerability</h1>
The business world can reduce resilience to a caricature: sleep less, work harder, ignore discomfort, never show uncertainty. Rattan takes a different view.
Resilience is not the ability to remain unaffected. It is the ability to recover.
A company is resilient because it has cash, diversified revenue, strong people and operating flexibility. A portfolio can absorb shocks because risk has been sized intelligently. A person also needs reserves.
&ldquo;You cannot build a company with zero redundancy and call it resilient. I do not know why we expect human beings to operate that way.&rdquo;
Sleep, health, relationships, exercise and the ability to periodically disengage from work are not the opposite of performance. They support it.
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Do not make every problem existential</h1>
Experienced leaders often develop another useful skill: calibrating the size of a problem correctly. In the middle of a crisis, everything can feel existential. Most things are not.
A financing delay matters. A disappointing quarter matters. A senior executive leaving matters. A failed transaction can matter enormously. But companies survive all of them.
Rattan again returns to tennis. A player can be broken on serve without losing the set. A set can be lost without losing the match. The score matters, but context matters too.
&ldquo;One of the great disciplines is asking what actually happened here, not what my adrenaline tells me happened.&rdquo;
<h1 style="text-align: left;">Wellness as performance infrastructure</h1>
Rattan&rsquo;s interest in health has deepened as Terra Invest has developed its focus around longevity, preventive care and AI-enabled healthcare.
For high-performing professionals, he believes wellness is gradually being recast from something cosmetic or indulgent into performance infrastructure. Sleep quality, metabolic health, cardiovascular fitness, strength and cognitive performance influence not only lifespan, but everyday output.
The point is not to optimise every minute of life. It is to create enough physical and mental capacity to make good decisions repeatedly over a long period.
&ldquo;You can be in every meeting and still be making poorer decisions because you are exhausted. Presence and performance are not the same thing.&rdquo;
<h1 style="text-align: left;">A longer career changes the meaning of a setback</h1>
Longevity creates another possibility. If people remain healthy for longer, the traditional shape of a career may change. A professional life does not necessarily need to peak at 45 or 50. An entrepreneur can build several companies. An investor can compound judgement through multiple market cycles. Reinvention becomes normal.
Rattan&rsquo;s own career has already crossed institutional banking, entrepreneurship, alternative asset management and investing. That creates a different relationship with setbacks.
&ldquo;The longer your horizon becomes, the less important it is to win every individual moment. You become much more focused on staying capable, staying curious and being around for the opportunities that come next.&rdquo;
That may be where sport, wellness and investing converge most clearly. All three reward consistency. All three punish ego. And all three make more sense when the time horizon gets longer.

Krishan Rattan explores how sport, wellness and recovery can strengthen resilience and decision-making in business.

Krishan Rattan of Terra Invest on the Highs and Lows of Business, and Why Resilience Is Built Outside the Boardroom

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Krishan Rattan of Terra Invest on the Highs and Lows of Business, and Why Resilience Is Built Outside the Boardroom

Other Articles

Mid-Day Fast