The right moment never comes

I have told this story to about fifty people in the last year, always in one sentence, always the same one. The firm I was at got acquired by Roland Berger, and that's when I left.

It is true, and it is not what happened.

What the one-sentence version leaves out

I had already decided to go.

I had been thinking about leaving consulting for a while — not idly, but as something I intended to do. I had a horizon on it: the next six to twelve months.

And it was not an abstract plan, because the fund was not a plan. It was live. Callapina launched in January 2023, and I went on being a Principal at a consulting firm for another thirteen months.

I should be precise about what that did and did not give me, because it is the crux of this. The fund was not income. We drew no fee from it, so there was no salary in it and there was not going to be one for years. What it gave me was direction, not a floor. Hold that thought; it matters at the end.

Then, in February 2024, Amane was acquired. It came as a surprise. I was gone by the end of that same month.

The part worth noticing

Here is what I did not expect to find when I looked back at it.

It was not a difficult decision.

Staying would have been genuinely interesting — working inside a much larger organization is its own education and there would have been things to learn. But it would have been more of the same. The fund was what I intended to spend the rest of my working life doing, and it offered more room to grow than another turn of a job I already knew how to do well. Those paths had diverged, and once they had, choosing between them took no courage at all.

That is the uncomfortable bit. It was an easy call.

And I had been intending to make that same easy call for thirteen months, while running the fund I was supposedly leaving to run. Nothing about it became clearer when the ground moved. The arguments available to me in February 2024 were the arguments I had in January 2023. What changed was not the decision but its deadline.

The decision was never hard. It was just never urgent.

That distinction is, I think, the whole thing. We tend to explain our own delays as difficulty — I am weighing it, it is complicated, there is a lot to consider — when most of the time the reasoning finished long ago and what is missing is a reason to act this week rather than next. A bad situation ejects you. A comfortable one simply keeps offering you another perfectly reasonable quarter, and every one of those quarters is defensible.

I was waiting for the right moment. The right moment never comes, because the conditions for a change do not improve on their own while you are still inside the thing you are changing from.

Why I already knew this

The irritating part is that I had learned this before and did not recognize it.

In 2009 I left Bangalore for Germany, to do an MBA. New country, new culture, a language I did not speak. Nothing about it was comfortable, and it is the period I grew the most in — not because I handled it especially well, but because there was no version of it where I could stay as I was. Discomfort was simply the environment, rather than something I had selected for its character-building properties.

That one I chose.

There is a third, and it is the least flattering of the set. Between the mining firm and Amane I took several months out. That was not a planned sabbatical either. I had spent seven years traveling more or less continuously — mines are not situated near anywhere, which is rather the point of them — and with a second child at home I had arrived somewhere I could not keep going from. So I stopped.

I did not stop when stopping became sensible. I stopped when continuing stopped being possible. Which is the same sentence as the one about February 2024, in a different register: the case for a break had been obvious for a long time and what was missing was not the argument but the compulsion.

Three transitions, then. One I chose. Two were made for me — once by exhaustion, once by an acquisition — and in both of those the reasoning had been sitting there, fully assembled, long before the event that finally moved me. I could not tell you which route is better. Only that I have never once grown from the comfortable option, and that on the current evidence I do not take the uncomfortable one until something removes the alternative.

What I would actually take from this

Not "quit your job". I did not leap into nothing, and if I had, this would be a different and much worse essay. There was a structure underneath me. The useful part is what it was, because it is not what I would have pointed at.

Two things.

A plan with a horizon and no forcing function is a preference, not a plan. Six to twelve months is not a decision. It is a way of feeling decided while remaining exactly where you are. If you cannot name what will make the date real, the date is not real.

The preparation that saves you is usually not the preparation you are doing. This is the one I would most like to have understood earlier.

For thirteen months I had a live fund and no intention of staying, which sounds like a man getting his affairs in order. But the fund paid nothing and was not going to for years. As a floor it was worthless. It was the thing I was consciously preparing, and it is not what carried me.

What carried me was a habit I had never once thought of as preparation.

I have never wanted a single source of income. For most people that single source is their job, and I had spent years deliberately not being in that position — property, investments, freelance work, various other things. None of it was a strategy for leaving consulting. It was just how I preferred to arrange my life, and I had been arranging it that way long before there was anything to leave.

So when I went, I turned to my network and put together freelance projects and advisory work — helping companies with business development, and with entering the US market. Income appeared quickly, because producing income from several places at once was not a new skill I had to acquire under pressure. It was the thing I had been doing all along.

That is the part worth taking. The specific preparation aimed at the specific jump — the fund, in my case — is usually the thing you want, and wanting it is why you are preparing it. The thing that actually catches you is the general robustness you built for no particular occasion, which does not feel like readiness at the time because it is not pointed at anything.

You cannot know which exit you will need to take. So build the kind of position that survives several of them, and stop waiting to feel ready for the one you have in mind. You do not get to choose the moment. You only get to have already decided what your answer is.