Some mornings I pick up a book knowing it will make me feel behind.
I read it anyway.
Let me tell you something I did not put in the public essay this week. Over there I wrote to the reader my book may have made feel worse, and I told them that feeling worse is a form of seeing. I stand by every word.
What I did not say is that I am still that reader.
This stage of my life has a shape most people cannot see from outside. I call it the standing rest. Not sitting down after the first mountain. Standing, breath steadying, studying the next face before the climb.
And the honest part of studying a new mountain is that you spend most of your time looking at people who are already on it.
I have spent this year putting myself in rooms where I am the beginner again. Talking to people years ahead of me on the mountain I am only now approaching. Reading work by people who have already built what I am still sketching. Learning tools from scratch, badly at first, the way everyone learns anything from scratch.
I would love to tell you it all feels like growth. Wisdom in motion. The lifelong learner, glowing.
The truth is that some of it just stings.
There are days when a conversation with someone a decade younger and five years further ahead leaves me quiet for the rest of the evening. Days when I close a book not enriched but measured. It is the same feeling I had in that MBA classroom, rehearsing English sentences in my head before I dared say them out loud.
You would think a whole career and a CEO title would have retired that feeling.
They did not. It only went quiet for a while, because I had arranged my life so nothing could make me feel like a beginner.
That is the part nobody tells you about seniority. Somewhere along the way, without deciding to, you stop entering rooms where you can feel behind. Your calendar fills with places where you are the most experienced person present. It feels like arrival.
It is the fog from the essay, in its most comfortable form. Nobody measures you, because you have quietly stopped standing near the ruler.
So this year I have made feeling behind a practice. Not a pleasant one. A deliberate one.
I pick the book that is ahead of me over the one that agrees with me. I ask the questions that show what I don't know, in rooms where I used to only answer. I let the sting land, because the sting is the reading, and the reading is the only place the next climb can start from.
It looks unremarkable from outside. A man at a desk with a book too advanced for him, going slowly. A beginner's question asked in a voice that used to give the answers.
The old version of me would have nodded along and looked it up later, privately, where the not-knowing could not be seen. The nod was armour. I wore it for years and called it seniority.
Here is the unresolved part, and I owe you the unresolved part, because that is what this letter is for.
Some days the sting produces nothing. No insight, no growth, no neat conversion of discomfort into progress. Just an evening of feeling smaller, and a quiet voice asking why a man my age is volunteering for this at all.
I do not have a tidy answer for that voice yet. The best I have is this: every time I have felt that sting and stayed, something eventually grew there. Not on my schedule. But it grew.
The fog never grew anything. I know, because I lived in it comfortably for years and called it confidence.
There is one more reason I keep choosing the sting, and I hesitate to write it because it sounds larger than I mean it. The next mountain I am preparing for is meant to carry me for decades. A climb that long cannot be built on a flattering picture of where I stand today. Get the foundation wrong by a few degrees and the years multiply the error.
So the measurements have to be true now, at the bottom, while truth is still cheap. Later it gets expensive.
I will leave you with the question I asked on LinkedIn, in its more personal form.
When did you last let yourself be a beginner at something that mattered? Not a hobby. Something that touches who you think you are.
Reply and tell me. I read every reply, and the replies have quietly become my favourite part of writing this letter.
Avinash
My book, The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, as told to Priya Kumar, is out now: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf. If it has been useful to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you'd think. You can follow me on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/author/avinashkaul