It Matters A Lot

When did life become a checklist?

Degree. Career. Money. Love. Marriage. House. Children. Success.

We spend years ticking boxes, comparing timelines, and trying not to fall behind. We move towards the next milestone, believing that somewhere along the way, life will begin to feel complete.

And sometimes it does.

But sometimes, even when everything seems to be going according to plan, a quieter question appears:

Is this it?

Why does other people’s approval matter so much? How much of who we become was decided before we were old enough to choose? Why do some patterns follow us despite our best intentions? And whose idea of a good life are we living anyway?

These are questions Shubhra Saxena has encountered in her own life too.

In It Matters A Lot, she follows them through the different stages of a life—from the identities we inherit in childhood to the choices we make in love, ambition, and success; from what failure does to us to what happiness, loss and growing older eventually teaches us.

This book isn’t a manual for living. Life is too complicated for that. It asks something simpler, and perhaps more difficult: to look at the life you are living and ask how much of it is actually yours.

Because you can tick every box and still miss your own life.

You can tick every box and still feel like something is missing.

Degree. Career. Money. Love. Marriage. Success. We spend years chasing milestones, comparing timelines, and trying to build the life we are told we should want. But what happens when everything looks right—and still doesn’t feel enough?

In It Matters A Lot, Shubhra Saxena explores the questions we often avoid: Why do we seek approval? Why do we repeat old patterns? What are we really looking for in love, ambition, happiness, and success?

Moving through childhood, identity, relationships, failure, loss, and growing older, this is not arulebook for life. It is an invitation to look inward, question inherited expectations, and ask what truly matters to you.

Because a life that looks complete from the outside can still feel unfinished within.

Shubhra Saxena is an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, a writer and an inveterate student of human nature, with a long-standing curiosity about what makes us who we are.

A graduate of IIT Roorkee, she secured All India Rank 1 in the Civil Services Examination before embarking on a career in public service that now spans more than fifteen years.

Her work has brought her into contact with people from vastly different walks of life—each carrying their own ambitions and doubts, struggles and sorrows, and their own ways of finding strength. These encounters have only deepened a curiosity she has carried since childhood—who we are, why we’re here, and what’s the point of it all.

Beyond her work, Shubhra enjoys reading, writing, travel and the kind of conversations that let her borrow another person’s perspective. She believes in questioning what she has been told, having the humility to change her mind and holding on to empathy in a world that can make it difficult to keep it.

It Matters A Lot grew out of years spent watching, questioning, living and, now and then, unlearning.

For Shubhra, writing has never been about arriving at answers. It has been about asking the kind of questions that make us look at our own lives a little differently.

‘I congratulate her on writing on what I believe readers will find a useful and stimulating guide towards a meaningful life of compassion and respect for others.’
—His Holiness The Dalai Lama