What should I wear today?
It’s a question I rarely ask. Most mornings I pick whatever is ironed and walk out. But this was not most mornings.
That day, we were demonstrating our Connected Climber solution for a product evaluation. Nokia had hired a third-party consultant to assess it in India. This wasn’t a friendly walkthrough for people already rooting for us. It was an independent evaluation, and the result would travel far beyond that room.
For us at SMYDE, it was a major milestone. We have been working on this solution for six years. We have spent crores on it. We have rebuilt hardware, rewritten firmware, redesigned enclosures, and argued late into the night over problems no customer will ever see. And still, standing in front of the mirror that morning, I could not tell you with certainty how the day would go.
So back to the question. What should I wear today?
The thought that slipped in
Is this jeans-and-shirt combination a lucky one? What was I wearing the last time a demo went well?
I caught myself mid-thought. Where did that come from?
We had prepared thoroughly. We had tested the devices, rehearsed the flow, and planned for the questions we expected. Yet something still felt outside my control. And somewhere in my head, a quiet voice suggested that the right shirt might pull that uncontrollable part back into line.
“You’ve wasted your education,” I told myself.
I think of myself as a rational person. I run a deep-tech company. I make decisions on data, test results and engineering logic. I don’t believe in lucky shirts.
And yet, there I was, trying to remember what I wore the last time things went right.
That moment stayed with me, and I want to understand it rather than just laugh it off. Because I don’t think it was a failure of intelligence. I think it was something more interesting.
Superstition lives where control ends
The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski noticed something revealing while studying fishing communities in the Trobriand Islands a century ago. When the fishermen fished in the calm inner lagoon, where the catch was predictable and the risk was low, they relied purely on skill and technique. But when they went out into the open sea, where weather could turn and lives could be lost, they performed elaborate rituals.
Same people. Same intelligence. Same knowledge. The only thing that changed was the level of uncertainty.
That is exactly what happened to me that morning. In the lagoon of our daily engineering work, I don’t think about luck. I think about test cases and tolerances. But an external evaluation, with years of work and crores of rupees riding on it, is the open sea. The outcome depends not only on our device, but on the evaluator’s mindset, the site conditions, a network hiccup, a battery that behaves differently in the heat, a question we didn’t anticipate.
When the part we control has been exhausted, the mind goes looking for more levers. If it can’t find a real one, it invents one.
Why smart people are not immune
It’s tempting to think superstition belongs to the uneducated. But look around. Cricketers wear the same pads through a winning streak.
Pilots have pre-flight rituals that go beyond the checklist. Founders keep the pen they signed their first big deal with. Surgeons, traders, actors, all rational people, carry some quiet ritual into their high-stakes moments.
Education doesn’t remove the instinct. It only makes us embarrassed about it.
In fact, the more you have invested, the stronger the pull. When you’ve given six years of your life to something, the idea that the outcome could hinge on factors you can’t touch is uncomfortable. It feels unfair. A ritual, even a silly one, offers a small sense of agency in the face of that discomfort.
That’s the honest truth of what I felt. It wasn’t that I believed the shirt would change the evaluator’s opinion. It was that I wanted to feel I had done everything, and when there was nothing left to do, choosing the “right” shirt felt like one more thing.
The danger and the harmless version
So is this harmless? Mostly, yes. Wearing a particular shirt costs nothing. Some people even argue that small rituals calm the nerves, and a calmer presenter does a better demo. There is some research on this, though the evidence is mixed, and I wouldn’t bet a product evaluation on it.
The danger is somewhere else. Superstition becomes harmful when it starts substituting for work instead of accompanying it.
For a founder, this can take quieter forms than a lucky shirt. It’s the belief that “last time we didn’t test that edge case and it was fine,” so we skip it again. It’s repeating a sales pitch exactly because it once closed a deal, without asking why it worked. It’s attributing a failed demo to “bad luck” instead of a root cause. That is superstition wearing the clothes of experience.
In hardware, this is especially risky. Devices don’t care about our rituals. A sensor either reads correctly or it doesn’t. A battery either lasts the shift or it doesn’t. A climber at height either gets the alert in time or he doesn’t. There’s no shirt that fixes a firmware bug.
Where I’ve landed
Here is the argument I’ve come to, standing in front of that mirror and thinking about it since.
Superstition is not the opposite of rationality. It is a signal. It shows up exactly at the boundary where our control ends and uncertainty begins. When I feel the pull of a ritual, it’s telling me something useful: “You are now in the open sea.”
The rational response is not to feel ashamed of that signal, and not to obey it either. It’s to use it as a checkpoint:
• Have I done everything that is actually within my control? Tested, rehearsed, prepared for failure modes, briefed the team.
• Have I accepted what isn’t? The evaluator’s judgement, the conditions on the day, the things we’ll only learn by going through it.
• Am I using the ritual to calm myself, or to excuse myself? The first is human. The second is dangerous.
If the answer to the first two is yes, then wear the lucky shirt if you like. It won’t hurt. It just won’t help as much as the six years of work behind you.
Back to the mirror
So what did I wear that day?
Honestly, it doesn’t matter, and that’s the point. What mattered was everything that happened before that morning: the testing, the rebuilds, the late nights, the team that refused to cut corners. That was our real preparation, and no piece of clothing could add to it or take away from it.
Innovation is, by nature, a journey into uncertainty. If you are building something that has never been built, you will spend a lot of time in the open sea. The instinct to reach for a lucky charm will come. It came to me, and I suspect it comes to every founder who pretends otherwise.
The trick is not to eliminate that instinct. It’s to recognise it, smile at it, and then go back and check the batteries one more time.
