Thats my most favourite quote. By Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises
To me, his words aren’t just about money. They hold true for everything—careers, health, relationships, and even ambition. Because decline doesn’t happen in one dramatic collapse. It happens quietly, unnoticed, until the damage is done.
The slow erosion of standards isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself with alarms. It’s just small compromises made in moments of exhaustion—one deadline missed, one corner cut, one excuse justified. At first, they feel harmless. But over time, what was once non-negotiable becomes optional, and then, eventually, forgotten.
The quiet dulling of ambition doesn’t happen overnight. It starts with settling—choosing comfort over challenge, convenience over growth. The fire that once pushed you forward dims, not because you chose to give up, but because you stopped choosing to push. The hunger fades, replaced by a vague sense of inertia.
The steady lowering of expectations is the final piece. What you once aspired to feels distant, even unrealistic. You adjust—not because you believe less is enough, but because expecting more feels pointless. The extraordinary becomes unattainable, the average becomes acceptable, and before you know it, mediocrity becomes the norm.
Then, one day, you look around and wonder: How did things get here?
Not in a single moment. Not with a single decision. But with a thousand tiny ones.
Decline Creep is real. It thrives on neglect. It doesn’t need effort—it just needs you to stop paying attention. Many a time decline creep happens while you were busy with other things!
Progress, on the other hand, is different.
It doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intent. Effort. Discipline.
It’s never overnight. It’s never one sweeping transformation. It’s the small things, held steady. The right habits, practised consistently.
It starts with paying attention—continuously reflecting on what’s working and what isn’t. It requires taking corrective action before small missteps turn into major setbacks. A bit of optimism keeps you moving forward, but real progress demands a lot of focus.
Good things don’t come in sudden bursts. They come from the little things, done right, again and again.
Progress is built by design. Decline is powered by defaults.
Good things take time. So does decline.
The difference? One is a choice. The other is what happens when you stop choosing.
AI is breaking boundaries and dismantling old ways of thinking. It has made a rather impolite but firm introduction to irrelevance. Leaders today must prioritise unlearning for success in an AI-Driven world —or risk being left behind.
AI is rewriting the rules of work, creativity, and competition. Every day, new breakthroughs make yesterday’s expertise obsolete. The old playbooks? No longer enough. The rate of change is massive. And it’s not slowing down.
The real question is: How fast can you adapt?
I clicked the picture above somewhere in Ladakh, where our car had been halted by an avalanche. Workers were labouring to clear the road, knowing full well that another could strike at any moment. That’s the nature of avalanches—sudden, disruptive, and unforgiving.
AI is that avalanche. In the real world, avalanches block roads. In the metaphorical world of fast change, they bury careers, industries, and entire ways of working. The only way to survive? Move, adapt, and find your slope.
I have been thinking about it ever since. So, Indulge me for the next couple of minutes. Here we go.
Equation of a straight line: y = mx + c
m: The slope—indicating how fast you’re learning. c: The intercept—representing your starting point or existing knowledge.
Imagine three learners. Mr. Red starts ahead (high intercept) but learns slowly (low slope, small ‘m’). Mr. Purple starts lower (low intercept) and progresses steadily (moderate slope, medium ‘m’).
Ms. Blue starts behind (low intercept) but picks up new skills quickly (steep slope, large ‘m’), eventually overtaking both. Over time, Ms. Blue’s higher slope (greater ‘m’) allows her to progress faster, proving that the speed of learning (slope) matters more than where one begins (intercept).
That’s Prof. Sawhney’s point. In a world moving at breakneck speed, slope beats intercept every time.
It’s a neat explanation that accentuates the importance of learning and the role of past experience. Which is the point to this post. Past experience can interfere with future learning.
What gets in the way of learning and change? Three things stand out for me.
1. Past Success is a Sneaky Obstacle
What got you here won’t get you there. Yet, we cling to past knowledge like a badge of honour. The problem? Yesterday’s wins can become today’s blind spots.
The best learners stay humble. They don’t assume what worked before will work again. Instead, they ask, “What do I need to unlearn to make space for what’s next?”
Christensen showed how successful companies often fail when disruption hits. Why? Because their past success locks them into old ways of thinking. They keep optimising what worked before instead of adapting to what’s coming next. That’s how giants lose to scrappy newcomers unburdened by legacy thinking.
Exhibit A: BlackBerry
Once a leader in mobile technology, BlackBerry clung to its physical keyboard design, convinced loyal customers would never give it up. Meanwhile, Apple and Samsung bet on full-touchscreen smartphones. BlackBerry’s refusal to move beyond its own past success led to its decline.
Exhibit B: Zomato
Contrast that with Zomato. It started as a restaurant discovery platform but saw the market shifting. It let go of its original success model and pivoted to food delivery. Then to restaurant supplies. Then to quick commerce. By unlearning what had worked before, Zomato stayed ahead.
The same applies to individuals. If you define yourself by what has worked before, you risk missing what could work next. Adaptation isn’t about forgetting your strengths; it’s about not letting them become limitations.
2. Fear Kills Growth
New learning requires trying. Trying involves failing. And failure—especially when experience has given you relevance—can feel uncomfortable.
Many don’t fear learning itself; they fear looking foolish while learning. That’s why kids learn faster than adults. They don’t care if they fall; they just get up. Adults, on the other hand, hesitate. They protect their image, avoid risks, and stick to what keeps them looking competent.
This isn’t just instinct—it’s backed by research. In The Fear of Failure Effect (Clifford, 1984), researchers found that people with a high fear of failure avoid learning opportunities—not because they can’t learn, but because they don’t want to risk looking bad.
Think of it this way: If you’re only playing to avoid losing, you’re never really playing to win. The antidote? Make experimentation a habit. Small experiments create room for both success and failure—without the fear of high stakes. They provide just enough space to try, adapt, and grow.
Reflections on Rahul Dravid
Rahul Dravid’s career is an interesting study in adaptation. Once labelled a Test specialist, he gradually refined his game for ODIs, taking up wicketkeeping to stay relevant. Later, he experimented with T20 cricket and, post-retirement, started small in coaching—mentoring India A and U-19 teams before stepping into the senior coaching role. His evolution wasn’t overnight; it was a series of calculated experiments.
3. New Minds, New Paths
Left to ourselves, we reinforce what we already know, surrounding ourselves with the same familiar circles—colleagues, family, and close friends. That’s exactly why new perspectives matter. We don’t have enough of them. Our past experiences shape our networks, and over time, we rely on the same set of strong connections, limiting exposure to fresh ideas.
Sociologist Mark Granovetter’s research on The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) found that casual acquaintances (weak ties) expose us to new ideas and opportunities far more than close friends or colleagues (strong ties). Why? Because strong ties often operate in an echo chamber, reinforcing what we already believe. Weak ties, on the other hand, bring in fresh perspectives, unexpected insights, and access to new fields.
A few years ago, an MD I know took up cycling. What started as a fitness and lifstyle activity became something more. As he grew more integrated with his diverse cycling community, I saw firsthand how it influenced him—not just physically, but mentally. He hasn’t just learned new skills; he has unlearned old assumptions. His outlook, I realised, has changed simply by being around people who think and live differently.
He has transformed without realising it and is thriving professionally. I’ve been working on the sidelines with him and can see the transformation firsthand. I am not undermining his professional challenges and success, but I cannot help but see the changes his cycling community has brought to him.
The world is moving fast. The only way to keep up? Have more unexpected conversations, seek out people who challenge your views, and surround yourself with thinkers from different worlds.
Sometimes, seeing others take risks in adjacent spaces is all the permission we need to start experimenting ourselves.
Opportunity for Change
The ability to learn, unlearn, and adapt has never been more critical. In a world shaped by AI, rapid disruption, and shifting industries, clinging to past successes is the surest way to fall behind. The real competitive edge lies not in what you know today, but in how quickly you can evolve for tomorrow. Unlearning for success in an AI-driven world is mandatory.
So, ask yourself: What am I absolutely sure about? Because that’s often where the biggest opportunity for growth lies.
The world belongs to those who can learn fast, forget fast, and adapt even faster.
Travel is a pathway for growth and development. That’s why I say travel to grow. After years of conscious travel, I can say with emphasis that I have packed and unpacked disproportionately large self-awareness, new learnings and beliefs than I have of bags and suitcases. If there is one more thing that I can add with equal if not more emphasis, then it is this: Travel is hugely under rated as a catalyst for development.
My love for travel got accentuated after reading Pico Iyer’s famous ‘Why We Travel’ piece from March, 2000. It was comforting to realise that there was nothing wrong with me if I just didn’t want to go check places off a “must-see” list. For I was (and continue to be) slow in soaking up a place. In small conversations, observations and just hanging out!
There are four paragraphs from Pico Iyer’s post that have been my guideposts. They are here.
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
“Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.”
“Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.”
Shorncliff Pier, Brisbane
“So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.“
Every time I have stood in the queue of a land where I clearly am ‘foreign’ irrespective of the passport I hold, I learn something new. Especially so, when am not peering into my phone or consumed by the desire to see more. Just being present to all thats happening around me and reflecting on the experiences and thoughts those experiences brought alive for me have been life-altering in many ways. Because, even if I dont immediately change or do something different, I am very present to the fact there is a different way.
When I get back to where I start from, I rarely find that some pronounced changes have taken place since the time I set out. But to my eyes that sprout new lenses because they have absorbed different places, everything seems different. My mind colours old realities with new beliefs, ideas and hopes. Giving new energy for action and reflection.
If that is not a pathway to development and change, I don’t know what is.
To do nothing—how tough can it be? It sounds simple, yet it’s one of the hardest things to pull off.
Somewhere along the way, we started glorifying action. Movement. Hustle. Productivity. Not without reason. But the trouble begins when action takes over everything, leaving no space for stillness, reflection, or pause.
And that’s where the real wound forms—not from doing too little, but from never knowing the damage of doing too much.
Take a moment. Stand. Stare. Breathe. Watch the world go by. Because life isn’t just in the doing, but also in the being.
In their curiosity, in their seeking, in their unfiltered joy, they remind us of what we may have forgotten.
I watch them play—effortlessly, freely—with kids of different skin colours, with no hesitation, no barriers. They teach me that at our core, we are all just people reaching out to relate.
I hear their giddy excitement over the simplest things—“Yeahhh, the Sun is back!”—and it nudges me to wonder more, celebrate more, feel more.
And when they discard their shoes to walk barefoot on the sand, I see them connect with the earth, fully present in the moment. It reminds me of the beauty in staying grounded.
We sit in the balcony. Me, the missus and the little miss. I stare aimlessly into the sky and swishing the humid air around. She sits with a mild frown. A frown that announces her irritated wondering on why her mother is insistent on her finishing an odd part of a silly thing called ‘idly’. It is part of our routine. The acrobatics and drama that are required to feed her.
The missus’s unwavering resolve to feed her an extra piece of food than the previous time, whenever that was, stays on course. A morsel of rice more. Two pieces of ‘bhindi fry’. A silly portion of a small idly. Whatever. It just had to be more than the record before. Progress is painstakingly slow as you can imagine. Nevertheless, there is a score that is kept meticulously in her mind. A challenge that the missus has worked on with zeal. Like a cricket statistician who will announce in the middle of a dry game, ‘this is the first time two runs have been scored off the third ball, bowled by Mr.X, when the Sun is out and two pieces of cloud dot the sky’. Or something like that.
Today, the little miss is more than the handful that she is usually. With a couple of playful pirrouettes that permeate joy in their silly incoherence she tells the missus, ( in an exacting tone and intonation that I get spoken to several times), ‘Have some patience please’. She then pirrouettes one more time and smiles. That naughty smile that emerges from the corner of her lips give away the fact that it is a calculated strike. Our silence signals to her that her mission is accomplished.
The stunned silence is only interrupted by a muffled chuckle that I would have typed ‘ROTFL’ were I online! The silence returns. Sometimes the future arrives without telling. We always noticed the daughter imitate one of us. A small sigh here. Or a comment there. But this is impeccable.
It announces a few things. That she has a sense of humour. That she is awesome cool in soaking up something and redeploying it someplace else with a telling ease. A few more thoughts flow. It takes a minute more for me to accommodate the thought that she is growing. That she is changing. Change happens in small packages. And then these small packages coalesce like an irreverent assortment of patches of cloud that announce a coming together by thunder and rain! It puts me in a tetchy frame of mind. Growth pangs, if you will.
Like the other day.
We were busy shaping a very pliant assortment of play dough with all our might. Me and the little miss. As the play dough took shapes that an adult would describe as a useless lump of waste material, her imagination flew into another sphere. I tried clambering on to her flight, tossing pressing worries aside and co-navigating vast alleys of her imagination. After about two hours of intense work with the play dough, we had a few more lumps to show. And that was that. But to her, it was the world. Of particular interest to her was a sad red lump of what was intended to be a car. In a matter of minutes her tiny fingers messed around with it for some more time. Before she announced “Appa, look at the boat”.
The deformed tyres of the erstwhile car, she announced, were herself and me. With seamless ease she belted a story. “Once upon a time there was a boat”. Immaculate imitation of how I read her, her bedtime stories. I was, in more ways than one, listening to my own voice with the sing song intonation and all that. My ears perked waiting for the next few lines. By then, her mission stood accomplished. ‘That is the end of the story’.
That was two-three weeks ago.
Today, with the threat of the idly safely dispatched, we sit down and say goodbye to the moon. That too is part of our routine. She waves and says, ‘Goodbye moon’ as is our wont. Over the last three years and so many months.
Today, for the first time, she says, ‘Appa I dont like the moon. He is not waving back.’ Its a subtle shift. Or rather a significant subtle shift. That a response is sought from the likes of the moon and a disappointment pervades in the absence of a response.
I stare into the moon and its unblinking radiance, becoming ever so present to how fleeting time is. Change is inevitable. It signals progress. Growth is good. The slipping of time, like sand through the fingers, causes pangs.
