My book came out on Monday. It is called The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose.
Most people read a subtitle like that as a tagline. Three good words chosen to sell a leadership book. I want to tell you the truth about those three words, because they are not a tagline at all.
They are the three phases of my life, in order. And this week, with the book finally out in the world, the arc those three words describe quietly completed itself. That is not a coincidence I planned. It is simply how the timing fell, and I have been sitting with it all week.
Let me tell you what each word actually cost.
Resilience. 1990 to 2010.
The first twenty years were resilience, and I did not choose a single day of them.
In January 1990, at seventeen, I left Kashmir with my family, displaced, like thousands of Kashmiri Pandits, with very little and no idea what came next. For a while I studied in the tents of a refugee camp. From there, I began to climb. Engineering. An MBA. Learning English along the way. A career built far from home, brick by brick, with no map and no one ahead of me who had walked the same road.
It took twenty years. Twenty years from a refugee tent to the chief executive's chair. I became a CEO at thirty-six.
It did not feel like resilience while I was living it. It felt like survival, and then like striving, and most of the time like simply not being allowed to stop. You only get to call it resilience afterwards, when you turn around and see the distance.
Leadership. 2010 to 2026.
The next sixteen years were leadership.
Sixteen years as a CEO. And what those years taught me, the climb up never did. Leadership is not the title. The title is the least of it. Leadership is the weight. The decisions only you can make, the ones you carry home and tell no one about. Taking the hardest shift yourself so your people can survive the season. Building other people up until they no longer need you, which is the one act of leadership that feels like loss in the moment and turns out to be the whole point.
The climb to the top was about me. The years at the top were about everyone except me. That is the shift the second word demands, and most people who reach the summit never fully make it.
Purpose. Now.
And now it is time for the third word.
A few months ago I stepped away from the summit, on purpose, while it was still working. Not to retire. Not to rest. To begin the part of the climb the first two phases were quietly preparing me for all along.
Purpose is the return. It is taking everything the resilience years built and the leadership years proved, and giving it away. To the people who are now where I once was, climbing without a guide. Through advice. Through mentoring. And, since Monday, through this book, which is really just my whole climb, written down, so that someone else can use it for theirs.
Now the part I am keeping for this letter.
Of the three words, Purpose is by far the hardest to live, and almost no one warns you why.
The first two words come with scoreboards. Resilience has marks, salaries, rungs, a clear sense of climbing. You can measure it. Leadership has results, teams, titles, outcomes you can point to. You can measure that too. So for forty years you are trained, relentlessly, to know exactly where you stand, because there is always a number telling you.
Purpose has no scoreboard at all.
Nobody hands you a quarterly result for the person you quietly helped. There is no league table for the advice that changed a young executive's direction, no ranking for the book that found the one reader who needed it. You step into the purpose phase and the instruments you spent four decades trusting all go dark. For a man who measured his whole life by visible progress, that silence is genuinely disorienting. For the first months after I stepped down, I kept reaching for a scoreboard that was no longer there.
What I am slowly learning is that the absence of the scoreboard is the entire point. Purpose is the first phase you do purely because it is right, with no number watching. That is exactly why it is the one that finally fills you, and exactly why so many accomplished people never enter it. They cannot work without the score.
I will be honest with you, since this is the letter where I am honest. I am not living this well yet. I told you earlier this week that a number about the book had just started existing, and that I already knew I would check it. I have checked it. Repeatedly. A man writes to you about the freedom of having no scoreboard and then spends his week refreshing one. Both things are true, and I would rather show you the gap than pretend it is closed.
So the arc completes. Resilience built me. Leadership tested me. Purpose is what I do with whatever is left, and it is the first thing I have ever tried to do without checking the score.
Before I go, the question this whole book, and these three words, are really asking you:
You can probably name your own three words if you are honest. So which one are you living right now, and are you brave enough to move to the next one before life forces you to?
Write back and tell me. I read every reply.
Until next Sunday,
Avinash
The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, as told to Priya Kumar, is out now: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf
And when you have read it, if it has been useful to you, a short review on Amazon helps more than you'd think. It is the quietest way a reader can hand it to the next one.
Follow me on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/avinashkaul