Q&A with Sonny Garg

  

 

 

Sonny Garg is the author of the new memoir Desi 2.0: My Family's American Dream and the Cost of Never Being Enough. He lives in Chicago.

 

Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?

 

A: I began writing because I was trying to understand how I could have achieved almost everything I had been taught to want and still feel that I was not enough.

 

I went to Harvard, served as a White House Fellow, reached the executive committee of a Fortune 125 company, and became deeply involved in the civic life of Chicago. From the outside, the American Dream had worked beautifully. Yet shortly after receiving one of the biggest promotions of my career, I found myself telling a friend, “My life sucks.”

 

Eventually, I understood that achievement had become more than something I pursued. It had become the way I tried to prove that I was worthy of approval, belonging, and love.

 

But no accomplishment could settle that question for very long. There was always another title to earn, another room to enter, and another person whose validation I wanted. That contradiction became the starting point for the book. I wanted to understand what I had been chasing, why I had been chasing it, and what it had cost me.

 

Over time, I realized this was not simply a story about ambition or immigrant expectations. It was a story about not having to earn the right to be loved, and that our worth is not something we have to prove.

 

Q: The author Sudhir Venkatesh said of the book, “With wit and courage, Garg offers a portrait—echoing Terkel, Algren, and Bellow—of the trials, contradictions, and quiet triumphs of finding one’s way on American soil.” What do you think of that assessment, and those comparisons?

 

A: I found it incredibly generous and, honestly, a little much. I would never compare myself to Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, or Saul Bellow as a writer. But I understand what Sudhir was recognizing. Each of them used lives rooted in Chicago to explore larger questions about America: belonging, ambition, reinvention, struggle, and the complicated ways people try to make a life for themselves.

 

Chicago plays a similar role in my story. It was the place where I built the life I thought I wanted. It gave me opportunity, status, community, and a sense that I had arrived. It was also where I eventually had to confront the difference between being successful and believing I was worthy.

 

What I especially appreciate about Sudhir’s assessment is the phrase “trials, contradictions, and quiet triumphs.” The book is full of contradictions. It is possible to be grateful for what your parents gave you while recognizing the costs of what you inherited. It is possible to appear extraordinarily successful while privately feeling inadequate. It is possible to receive admiration from the world and still believe that love must be continually earned.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: “Desi” is a term commonly used by people of South Asian heritage to describe ourselves and our shared cultural identity. In the book, “Desi 1.0” represents the operating system many of us inherited: work hard, achieve more, make the family proud, and look to accomplishment and external validation as evidence of your worth.

 

That operating system contained many strengths. It carried ambition, resilience, sacrifice, and an extraordinary belief in what was possible in America.

 

But it could also blur the distinction between achievement and worth. Love, approval, and belonging could begin to feel conditional, something secured through good grades, prestigious schools, impressive careers, and continued success. Because there was always another rung to climb, it was almost impossible to feel that you had finally done enough or become enough.

 

“Desi 2.0” is not a rejection of that inheritance. It is an effort to update it. It means retaining the determination and aspiration while letting go of the belief that our worth depends on what we accomplish. It asks whether we can honor our parents’ sacrifices while also exercising the agency they worked so hard to give us.

 

For me, Desi 2.0 signifies a fundamental shift: from trying to earn love through achievement to understanding that we are worthy of love simply because we are, and from inheriting a definition of success to consciously choosing one.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Writing the book helped me understand how deeply I had confused achievement with worth. For much of my life, I believed that if I worked hard enough, accomplished enough, and made enough people proud, I would finally feel secure in who I was. But achievement could only provide temporary relief. It could never answer the deeper question of whether I was worthy of love.

 

Writing also gave me a deeper understanding of my family. It helped me see that many of the behaviors I had judged harshly, in my father and in myself, began as strategies for survival. My father’s drive helped carry him from poverty and limited opportunity in India to a new life in America.

 

I inherited that drive, but I also inherited the fear underneath it: the belief that without continued achievement, I might somehow become less worthy.

 

Seeing that connection gave me more compassion for him and for myself. It also helped me understand that examining an inheritance is not the same as rejecting it. We can decide which parts we want to carry forward, which we need to rewrite, and which we are ready to put down.

 

The book is a memoir, not a manual. I hope it prompts them to ask their own questions: What am I chasing, and why? Whose definition of success am I living by? What am I asking for achievement to prove? What is it costing me? If I truly embraced my own agency, what would I choose?

 

Most of all, I hope readers take away the lesson I spent much of my life resisting: You do not have to earn the right to be loved. You do not have to accomplish something extraordinary to become worthy. You are already enough.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am continuing to explore the questions that emerged from the book through essays, conversations, and my work with students and leaders.

 

As a Distinguished Executive in Residence at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, I spend time with students in Chicago, London, and Hong Kong who are often wrestling with their own versions of these questions: What are they building toward? What are they optimizing for? How much of the life they are pursuing have they consciously chosen? And how much of their identity and self-worth have they placed in the hands of achievement?

 

I also lead the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity, or CELO. Our work focuses on understanding how young people and emerging leaders develop not only the capacities and durable skills to succeed, but also the integrity and judgment to use those abilities for the good of society.

 

These may sound like different strands of work, but to me they are closely connected. Both are ultimately concerned with human development and agency: helping people recognize that their worth is not determined by a scorecard, become more intentional authors of their lives, and use their abilities in service of something larger than themselves.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I wrote the book as a fellow traveler, not as someone standing at the end of the road with all the answers. But I now understand something I wish I had known much earlier: Our worth is not the prize waiting for us at the end of a lifetime of achievement. We begin with it. We are already loved.

 

We are already enough.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb