There is something I did for twenty years that I never wrote down, never put into a policy, and never once said out loud in a hiring meeting.
I am not certain I could have defended it if anyone had asked me to.
Sitting across the table from people I might hire or promote, I found myself drawn to a particular kind of person. Not the most polished. Not the smoothest start, the best-known college, the most confident handshake.
I was looking, almost without meaning to, for the distance travelled. For the person who had clearly come a long way to be sitting in that chair at all.
You can usually tell. It is rarely in anything they say about themselves, because they almost never say anything about it. It is in what they do not assume. The ones who came a long way tend not to assume the room is on their side. They have a different relationship with being underestimated. They expect it, and at some point they stopped needing to correct it.
I backed those people, repeatedly, over candidates who looked better on paper.
Here is what I told myself I knew about them, and I still think I was right.
They had already rebuilt themselves at least once, so I had some idea what they would do when something broke. Uncertainty did not frighten them the way it frightened people who had never been tested. When the inevitable bad season arrived, they did not fold, because they had survived considerably worse than a difficult quarter.
The polished candidate is often betting, without quite knowing it, that conditions stay good. The one who travelled a long way has already shown you what they do when conditions turn terrible. Across a long career, that second piece of information is worth more than almost anything on the page.
Now the part I have been turning over since I stopped doing the hiring.
I do not know whether that was judgement or bias.
Because the honest description of what I was doing is this. I was recognising myself. I was reaching across a table for a version of a boy who had failed a mathematics exam and been written off at sixteen, and I was giving him the job.
That is a lovely story when it works out, and it usually did. But a preference is still a preference, even a generous one.
There were certainly people I did not back because their path had been too straightforward for me to read anything into it. I never framed it that way at the time. I would have said they lacked hunger. I am no longer confident that is what I was actually seeing.
I never resolved this. I have still not resolved it.
What I would say now is narrower, and I think truer. Distance travelled tells you something real about a person that a CV is structurally incapable of telling you, and almost all hiring is built to ignore it completely. That is a genuine blind spot, and I was right to look there.
But it is one instrument, not the whole panel. And I read it as though it were the whole panel for a very long time.
The reason I am telling you this, rather than keeping it as a private uncertainty, is that most of the people reading this letter are sitting on the other side of that table.
If you are someone who started a long way back, and you walk into rooms quietly assuming everyone else began ahead of you, I want you to hear this from somebody who did the hiring for two decades.
The distance you travelled is not the thing to leave out.
In the rooms where it counts, it is already being read.
Not by everyone. Plenty of people genuinely only see the finishing position, and there is nothing you can do about them.
But there is often one person in that room who came the same way you did. And they are looking, quietly and without saying so, for exactly the thing you have spent years learning to hide.
Until next week,
Avinash
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The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, as told to Priya Kumar, is out now and went into reprint within ten days of release. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/author/avinashkaul
If the book has been useful to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you would think.
And if you have ever been backed by someone who saw the distance you had travelled, or passed over by someone who did not, reply and tell me. I read every one.