The people who took the shortcut are fine.
I want to start there, because most writing on this subject quietly promises they will not be, and I have watched long enough to know that promise is not kept.
Some of them are doing very well. They have the house and the board seat and the invitations. If you were waiting for the part where the story turns and they are undone, I do not have it. That is not a thing I have witnessed at any useful frequency.
So the honest version is not that integrity pays. Sometimes it costs, and the bill arrives without a receipt.
There were years where what should have come to me went somewhere else, and I knew exactly why, and there was nothing to be done that I was willing to do. There were people I had rated highly, whose judgment I had trusted in difficult rooms, who turned out to have a version of themselves I had not met. That is a specific kind of disappointment. It is not anger. It is the quiet recalibration of what you thought you knew about someone, done privately, while you carry on working with them.
I never asked to be rescued from any of it. I do not say that as a virtue. I say it because it did not occur to me that there was anyone to ask.
What I did instead was take longer. That is the whole of it. The route I was on had fewer shortcuts available and I walked it, and it added years.
For a while I looked for something that would settle the question. A number, an outcome, some point at which the ledger balances and you can see that the slow route was correct.
There is nothing like that. There never was.
What I found instead is much smaller, and I have come to trust it completely.
I sleep well.
That is the test. Not a figure of speech, not a way of saying I feel good about myself. Take a decision, go home, put your head down, and see what happens. Everything you actually know about that decision is in the room with you at that hour, including the parts you have been careful not to look at directly, and none of it is interested in your account of events.
Your conscience is the only body that gets a vote, and it sits every night. There is no appeal and no adjournment.
I have never found a way to argue with mine, and I stopped trying a long time ago.
The peg held. It held in the worst weather I saw, and it holds now.
Here is the part I want to say to you specifically, because I would not put it as plainly in public.
Some people disagree with my account of certain things. Not vaguely. Specifically, and for years.
I am at peace with that, and it took me longer than it should have to get there.
They are disagreeing with a version of events they believe they know, assembled from what they saw and what they were told, and it is sincerely held. I was in the room. I know what actually happened and what I decided and what it cost. That is not a debate that can be won, because the two of us are not looking at the same object.
So I do not explain myself. Not out of pride, and not because I think I am beyond question. Because explaining does not work, and because the only account that has any standing is the one I already carry.
I am not looking for everyone to come round to my view. They cannot, and there is nothing wrong with them for that. They are not yet at the top of the mountain, and from where they stand the shape of the thing is genuinely different. They will get there. When they do, they may understand it, and they may not, and either way it will not change what I did or how I sleep.
That is not resignation. It is closer to relief.
What I still cannot do is make any of this transferable.
If someone in their thirties asked me whether holding the line will make them more successful, I could not say yes. I could not point at anything. I could only tell them what I know, which is that I have never had to manage a version of events, and that everything I have is mine without an asterisk, and that I sleep.
Whether that is worth what it costs is not a question I can answer for anyone else.
Two things I would like to hear from you on.
If you have watched someone take the shorter route and do well, and it changed how you think about your own choices, I would like to know what it changed. Not whether you approve. What it actually changed.
And if there is a decision you are still explaining to people, years later, I would like to know why you are still explaining it.
Reply to this. I read them.
Avinash
This comes out of chapter thirteen of The Next Mountain, written with Priya Kumar: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf
If the book has been useful to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you would think. You can also follow me on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/avinashkaul