🔥 Excerpt
"A healer is someone who can walk into a room and create a space where everyone feels empowered and full of possibility."
âš¡ TL;DR
In this episode I sit with Dr. Ravi Iyer, a physician, researcher, and teacher who has spent his life asking one question: how do you make life work when it does not seem to work. We explore awareness as the real seat of identity, why time is a mental construct, how attention turns the world on for us, and why founders exhaust themselves by living through mental models instead of direct experience. Ravi shares practical disciplines that help leaders experience infinite time in the present, clean up their word in business, and build companies where every interaction honors people and creates space for growth.
📄 Show Notes
When I invited Dr. Ravi Iyer onto The Relentless Pursuit of Winning, I expected a smart conversation about leadership and maybe a few stories from medicine. What I received was a new operating system for how founders can live their lives and lead their companies.
Ravi opens by reminding me that what we live and experience is entirely a product of where our attention goes. As he walks me through a simple exercise of looking at the boundary of the microphone in front of me, I feel something shift. That boundary did not exist for me until I placed my attention on it. In that moment, I experience what he means when he says our world is created inside the space of our awareness.
From there he traces his own journey. Growing up in India, studying medicine, moving into basic research, then landing at Harvard and later into community practice and hospice leadership. Every move came from one question, repeated for decades. How does life work, and how do you make life work when it does not. That question took him from frogs and earthworms all the way to the inner world of human beings at the end of life.
In hospice, Ravi realized that the most powerful medicine he could offer was not another procedure. It was helping people shift identity from body to awareness, so they could experience themselves as whole while the body failed. That level of presence and grounding is exactly what founders need when a business feels like it is breaking down instead of scaling.
Ravi guides me through another layer of the conversation. He shows how time appears only as records in memory or expectations about the future. Every experience happens now and vanishes as soon as it is felt. What we call time is a story our meaning making mind builds so we can feel some control. When we chase that story, we feel we never have enough hours. When we give full attention to the next true action in front of us, time opens up. The next step reveals itself only after we complete the current one.
For founders who feel buried in calendars, tasks, and shifting priorities, that insight lands hard. Ravi does not stay in the clouds though. He brings it straight into daily structure. He rates his calendar, physical workspace, email, and even the bathroom sink on a simple scale and keeps moving each area toward order. Cleaning the sink after he uses it, even in a restaurant, becomes a discipline that trains him to clean up the messes he makes in life and business.
Then he turns to something every growth minded leader should hear. Business is not made of dollars and cents. It is built from transactions that begin with people acknowledging each other and keeping their word. When life gets in the way of a commitment, honoring the word means owning the miss, cleaning up the impact, and giving a new clear commitment. That simple practice lowers the hidden friction inside a company and calms the nervous system of everyone involved.
As he speaks, I keep seeing our RPOW clients in my mind. We help founders build stable, sustainable companies with the infrastructure, systems, and culture that let growth happen without constant firefighting. Ravi's lens gives that work a deeper foundation. If a founder can see themselves as the space within which the company exists, they gain both humility and authority. Every interaction, every email, every calendar block becomes an expression of attention and care.
By the end of the conversation, I feel both expanded and grounded. Ravi gives me language and practices that touch vision, operations, and soul all at once. For any founder who wants to lead with clarity, keep their word, and experience infinite time in the middle of daily pressure, this episode offers a way of being, not just another set of tips.
✅ Key Takeaways
👤 Bio
Dr. Ravi R. Iyer is a physician, researcher, and leadership guide who has spent decades exploring how life works and how to make life work when it seems to fail. His career spans basic research at Harvard, community medicine, hospice leadership, and coaching leaders who face complex human and organizational challenges. Ravi's work centers on attention, awareness, and integrity in action, helping people experience themselves as whole and powerful in every season of life and business.
🧠Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dr. Ravi Iyer
02:34 From Mumbai to Harvard and community practice
05:25 What it really means to heal
07:59 When life and systems stop working
09:32 Soul, awareness, and direct experience
14:14 How attention shapes time
17:03 Navigating pressure and feeling of not enough time
22:07 Human perception and the meaning making mind
23:48 Menus, meals, and the trap of mental models
26:14 Learning from everyday experience
29:18 Practicing presence in real life
35:50 Structures that help life and business work
43:52 Final guidance for founders
