The dots will connect themselves

There is a piece of advice we keep giving young professionals in India that I no longer believe in.

We tell them: pick a hot domain. Optimise your CV for keywords. Plan three years ahead. Choose your next role based on where the industry is going.

I have spent twenty years in supply chain, e-commerce and operations — at ITC, Flipkart, Myntra, and now Om Logistics. I have hired people, mentored people, watched careers unfold. And I can tell you, hand on heart, that this advice does not match how the most interesting careers actually get built.

The careers that go somewhere meaningful tend to look messy from the outside. They look like a series of detours. They look like the person was wandering. And then, ten years later, you look back and realise the wandering was the whole point.

A small story

In 2003, I was a student at IIPS in Indore. I needed to choose a topic for a major academic project. E-commerce was barely a thing in India at the time — it was a fringe academic subject, not a career path. There was no Flipkart yet. There was no Amazon India. There was no Indian e-commerce industry to speak of.

I picked it anyway. Not because it was strategic. Not because I had a five-year plan. I picked it because it interested me. Because the idea of buying and selling things across the internet, in a country that didn't yet trust the internet, felt like a question worth thinking about.

I did the project. Got my marks. Moved on. Joined ITC as a store-incharge in Bhopal in 2006, running a Choupal Sagar. Spent four years learning how a heritage Indian business actually works — the rigour, the hierarchy, the discipline of doing one thing properly for a very long time. The e-commerce project was an old college memory by then. It had nothing to do with my life.

Then in 2010, a small startup called Flipkart was looking for someone to set up their procurement and supply chain operations in North India. They asked me to come in for a conversation. And in that conversation, I mentioned — almost as a passing remark — that I had once done an academic project on e-commerce, way back in college.

That detail mattered. I joined.

What followed was fourteen years of building, scaling, and watching Indian e-commerce go from a strange idea to the backbone of how the country shops. I had the privilege of being inside it from very early days. None of that would have happened if, in 2003, I had picked a "safer" project topic.

The dots connected. But — and this is the part I want you to hear — they connected only because I had spent seven years not trying to connect them.

Why this matters more now than ever

Some of you reading this are twenty-two. Some are thirty-five and feeling stuck. Some are choosing what to do next. And the world is telling you that AI is going to change everything, that you need to "skill up," that you should be strategic about it.

You should engage with AI. But not for the reasons people are telling you.

Don't engage with AI because it is the hot trend. Engage with it because it is genuinely interesting, and because the people who are figuring out how to use it well in their own work — not the people building the models, but the practitioners using the tools to think more clearly, decide faster, and be more accurate — those people are quietly compounding an advantage.

This is what I have learned over the last two years, especially in my current role. AI tools have changed how I do my own work. I draft proposals faster. I analyse data I would not have had time to analyse before. I catch errors in my own thinking that I would have missed. The processing time savings are real. But what surprised me is that the accuracy of my decision-making has gone up, not just the speed.

AI is the new arena where the old principle — follow what genuinely interests you and pursue it without worrying about the outcome — applies most strongly. The people who treat AI as one more thing to learn for their CV will get a thin layer of skill out of it. The people who treat it as a thing to genuinely play with, get curious about, break, fix, and integrate into their actual work — those are the people who are going to walk into rooms in 2030 and 2035 with a kind of ease that nobody around them quite understands.

It will look like luck. It will not be luck.

What I want you to do instead of planning

Here is the simpler version of all of this.

Keep your why clear. Why did you get into this work? What are you actually curious about? What problem do you want to spend a decade chasing?

Keep your why simple. Pursue it.

The how and the what will surface on their own. Not all at once. Not in a way that feels strategic. But in twenty years, when you are sitting in a chair like mine, you will look back and the dots will have connected themselves.

In the meantime, do good work. Pay attention to detail. Be decent to people. Be the person colleagues want to call when something goes wrong, and be the person whose name people remember when they are hiring for something interesting. These things matter more than the LinkedIn-friendly version of strategy.

And every now and then, take on a project that has no obvious career payoff. A topic that is too early. A skill that doesn't seem useful yet. A tool you are curious about for reasons you cannot quite explain.

Trust that.

The rest is just walking.