There is a hole in what I think about being promoted too early, and I would rather point at it myself than have you find it.
What I think is this. Being carried up fast does something to a person that nobody names at the time, and when the failure comes it never looks like incompetence. It looks like brittleness.
I was fast. I was a CEO at thirty six.
So the obvious question is whether I was ready, and the honest answer is that I have no idea. Nobody can audit that from the inside. You cannot separate what you were capable of from what you got away with, because the outcome came out fine and the outcome is the only evidence you are ever shown.
Here is what I can point at, and you can decide what it is worth.
The first half of my career I knocked on doors like everyone else. I showed up at open interviews. I took whatever foothold was available and I was not choosy about it. I was not being strategic. I did not have the standing to be.
The second half was different. For roughly two decades the roles found me rather than the other way round, and they came off the reputation the work had accumulated, not off a resume. I have not applied for a job in a very long time.
My instinct is that the first half is what made the second half survivable. That the door-knocking years put something in me that the fast years then spent.
But I notice how badly I want that to be true.
It is a flattering story. It makes my speed into something earned rather than something that happened. And I have read enough writing by people in my position to know exactly what that story is for, because we all tell some version of it, and it is always shaped so that the luck ends up looking like character.
So the version I am less comfortable with is this one. Maybe I was carried too. Maybe the difference between me and the person I have just described is not preparation. Maybe it is that the room I was carried into happened to have the kind of problems I could already solve, and if it had had a different set of problems, I would have come apart in exactly the way I described, and someone would now be writing an essay about me.
I cannot rule that out. I have tried.
What I keep coming back to is that the question does not close. It comes back every time I am about to move on something now.
Which brings me to where I actually am.
I am not moving fast at the moment, and I want to be precise about what that is and is not. It is not rest. It is not a gap between things. I am studying which face to climb from and in which season, which is slower work than it sounds and mostly consists of ruling things out. I am taking things out of the haversack that the next climb will not need, and there is more in there than I expected, most of it other people's. And I am training, physically and otherwise, for a climb I have not started.
The horizon I am working to is thirty years. That is the honest span of what I am laying the foundation for, and it is the first time in my life I have thought about anything on that scale.
At thirty six I would have found this pace unbearable. I would have read a description of it and assumed the man writing it had run out of things to do.
And I cannot tell you, with any confidence, whether the patience I have now is wisdom or just what becomes available to a man who no longer has to prove anything by Friday. Both explanations fit. I have not found a test that separates them.
That is the part I keep out of anything public, because a public piece wants a floor under it and this does not have one.
If you have the time, I would like to hear from you on one of two things.
If you were moved up before you were ready: what actually cost you? Not the story you tell about it now. The specific thing that went wrong that nobody could explain at the time, including you.
Or the opposite, if that is your side of it: did the slow years genuinely build something, or is that just the story we construct once the climb has gone well enough to look deliberate?
Reply to this. I read them.
Avinash
The chapter this comes out of is 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