For more than ten years, the same four words sat on my WhatsApp status. Seekhna Band Toh Jeetna Band. Stop learning, stop winning.
I didn't put them there as a slogan. I put them there as a warning to myself, because I've watched capable, senior people slowly go stale without ever noticing it happen.
So this is really a post about how to stay relevant in your career, and about why the danger gets bigger, not smaller, the more senior you become.
Key takeaways
- The risk grows with seniority. The more people treat you as the expert, the easier it is to quietly stop learning and not feel a thing.
- Staying relevant isn't about collecting certificates. It's about being willing to be a beginner at one new thing while everyone in the room treats you as the authority.
- The learning that keeps you relevant almost never feels urgent. By the time it does, you're already behind.
Fourteen years, and the ground kept moving
I spent about fourteen years at IndiaMART, from an assistant product manager in 2010 to CIO by the time I left in 2024. And here's the thing nobody warns you about a long run in technology: the skill that got you promoted keeps expiring.
The specifics changed every couple of years. The platform I was proud of building would become the old way of doing things. A tool my team swore by would get replaced by something a fresher had picked up over a weekend. I'm being honest that this is the pattern rather than one dramatic day, because that's exactly how it felt: quiet, gradual, and very easy to ignore if you wanted to.
Twice, in 2022 and 2023, that work was recognised with a CIO100 award. And awards are lovely. But an award is a photograph of the past. It tells you what you were good at, not whether you're still learning.
That's why those four words lived on my status for a decade before they ever became a book. It wasn't advice for other people. It was the thing I said to myself every time I caught myself getting comfortable. It eventually became the title of my second book, but it started as a private rule.
When I left corporate in 2024 to coach full time, the ground moved again. I now spend part of my week running AI training for companies, teaching tools that didn't exist in their current form when I was still a CIO. So I'm a student all over again. Are you comfortable being the least knowledgeable person in the room? Because that feeling is the tax you pay to stay relevant.
How to stay relevant in your career: stay a beginner
Here's the uncomfortable bit. Staying relevant has almost nothing to do with how hard you work or how much you already know. It has everything to do with whether you're willing to be bad at something new, on purpose, again and again.
Senior people are rewarded for having answers. So the higher you climb, the fewer situations you're in where you genuinely don't know, and the rarer that beginner feeling becomes. That's the trap. You can go years feeling competent and current, right up until the day you find out the world moved and nobody wanted to be the one to tell you.
So I try to keep one thing going at all times where I'm clearly a beginner. Some years it's a technology. Some years it's a coaching skill. Right now it's how far AI can genuinely go. The subject matters far less than the posture.
The trap is comfort, not age
We love to blame age for this. "I'm too old to pick up that new tool." I don't buy it, and I've got the opposite evidence in my own life.
When I trained as a coach in my forties, I was the beginner in a room full of people who had been doing it far longer than me. It had nothing to do with age and everything to do with being willing to start again from zero.
The people who go stale aren't the oldest ones. They're the most comfortable ones. Comfort is the real risk, and comfort turns up with success, not with grey hair. So ask yourself honestly: when did you last learn something that made you feel a bit stupid for a week?
Put the boring, non-urgent learning on the calendar
The learning that keeps you relevant is almost never on fire. Nobody's chasing you for it. There's no deadline. And that's precisely why it never happens.
Urgent things win every single day, so the important-but-not-urgent things, the new skill, the unfamiliar field, keep getting pushed to "later". Later doesn't arrive on its own. You have to give it a slot, the same way you'd protect a meeting with your most important client.
I block time for this deliberately. It isn't much. But it's regular, and regular beats intense. You can't cram relevance in the week you realise you've lost it.
Let someone junior teach you
One of the fastest ways to stay current is to let the youngest person on your team teach you something, and to actually mean it.
It's humbling, which is the whole point. When I coach senior leaders, the ones who stay sharp are almost always the ones who've made it safe for juniors to say "actually, there's a better way to do this now". The ones who've made that unsafe are usually the ones quietly falling behind, and they're often the last to know.
So just ask. What are you using that I've never heard of? You'll learn something real, and you'll signal that in your team, learning still runs in both directions.
What to do on Monday
- Name one thing you're currently a beginner at. If you can't name a single one, that's your answer, and it's your starting point.
- Block 30 minutes this week for learning nobody asked you to do. Then the same slot next week. Protect it like a client meeting.
- Ask the youngest person on your team what they're using that you don't understand. Then sit down and let them show you.
- Notice where you feel most comfortable, and treat it as a warning light. Comfort is usually where relevance quietly leaks out.
Frequently asked questions
Am I too old to stay relevant in my career?
No, and I say that as someone who started a whole new craft, coaching, in my forties. Age isn't what makes people stale. Comfort does. If you're still willing to be a beginner, you're not too old. If you've stopped, thirty is old enough to start falling behind.
Do I need more certifications to keep up?
Certificates signal to other people that you learned something once. They don't keep you relevant by themselves. I'd rather you spend those same hours actually using the new skill than collecting another line for your CV. What keeps you relevant is the doing, not the document.