The Friend Who Told Me a Hard Truth and Changed My Direction

Sandeep and I had been close since our undergraduate days in Raipur - a friendship that had survived the different cities and professional directions our late twenties had taken us in, maintained through calls and occasional visits that had the ease of people who do not need to re-establish rapport every time they meet.

He knew me in the specific way of someone who had known me before I had developed the professional persona that most other people encountered, and his knowledge of me preceded most of the stories I had been telling about myself for the previous five years.

At 27 I was visiting him for a long weekend and we had, over two evenings, the kind of extended conversation that the distance between our cities usually prevented.

By the second evening I had described my professional situation in enough detail for him to have a fuller picture than most people in my life had access to.

He listened carefully and then said something that he prefaced by saying he was going to say it because he thought I needed to hear it rather than because it would be pleasant to say.

He told me he thought I had been coasting for two years - that the capability I had was significantly larger than the work I was applying it to and that the stories I had been telling about why the larger work was not yet available were, in his opinion, stories I had constructed to make the coasting feel like waiting.

The specific word - coasting - landed with a precision I could feel physically. I did not agree immediately. I agreed by the following morning. What I had been doing for two years was managing a comfortable situation rather than building from it, and I had been maintaining a narrative about external constraints that Sandeep, from the outside and with the particular clarity of someone who knew me before the narrative existed, could see did not hold.

I made a significant career move within three months of that conversation that I had been deferring for two years. The move was the right one. The deferral had cost me time I did not get back. The conversation cost Sandeep nothing and gave me two years of trajectory I would not otherwise have had.