I’ve spent my life trying to understand why people do what they do.

I began professionally in a world of brands, consumers, markets, and business. But the subject underneath all of it was always people. What do we believe? Why do we choose? What do we trust? Why do we say one thing and do another?

I was born in India and built my life and career across cultures, categories, companies, and countries — working inside major businesses, leading organizations, building companies, advising executives, and spending thousands of hours watching what happens when strategy meets human behavior.

Over time, I stopped believing the most interesting insights live neatly inside disciplines. Marketing teaches you something about identity. Economics, about incentives. Behavioral science, about irrationality. Music, about tension. Comedy teaches something brutal about truth: a room tells you almost instantly whether the belief you carried onto the stage survives contact with actual people. Leadership teaches that being correct and being followed are not remotely the same thing.

I’ve written three books, including a Wall Street Journal bestseller. I’ve built and led businesses. Today I’m Chairman & CEO of Shapiro+Raj, where our work sits at the intersection of behavioral science, strategy, technology, and human understanding. I’ve also spent years mentoring younger people, because knowledge becomes more valuable when it moves forward through another human being.

Outside work, I play guitar and harmonica — blues, country, folk, and the musicians who reveal something enormous with three chords and one honest line. For a period I performed stand-up. I came second in a competition once, which is an elegant way of saying I lost.

And some of the most consequential lessons of my life arrived much later, and weren’t ones I would ever have chosen. Loss has a way of changing the scale of the questions — turning ideas I’d discussed for decades into things I could no longer hold at arm’s length. It didn’t make me wiser. It made my old certainties harder to defend, and the human questions impossible to ignore. I’ve written about some of it, as honestly as I know how, in the quietest room of Lateral Truths.

Somewhere in all of it — boardrooms and songs, algorithms and loss, strategy and stand-up, leadership and love — I realized I’d been circling the same territory for most of my life. The things that matter most are rarely contained inside the category where we first encounter them. A business problem becomes a human problem. A harmonica becomes a theory of innovation. The truth arrives sideways. That became Lateral Truths.

A mentor I hadn’t spoken to in more than thirty years wrote to me recently: “You, Zain, are today’s Montaigne.” I don’t know whether I deserve that. I do know Montaigne believed ordinary life was worth serious thought — a commute, a song on the radio, a dog waiting at the window. So do I.

I still spend plenty of time in boardrooms. I still care deeply about business, growth, and technology. But increasingly the question underneath my work is simpler: what does enormous change reveal about being human? I don’t expect to finish answering it. That’s probably why I keep writing. I live outside Chicago with my wife and a goldendoodle named Lennon.