Beginner's mind at forty-one.
I joined Motilal Oswal as SVP — Digital Products in October. After 15 years across AMCs, fintechs and depositories. And on day one, I knew nothing.
That isn't false modesty. It's a thing about institutional knowledge. The systems are different here. The vocabulary inside Motilal Oswal isn't the vocabulary inside NDML or Aditya Birla Capital. RIISE has its own product history. The sales team has its own internal logic. The trades desk has views about latency that I'd never had to hold before.
And the hard part isn't being new — that's actually fine. The hard part is resisting the urge to perform expertise. After 15 years you have a script. You can sound like you know things by the end of week two even when you don't. People want you to. Walking into rooms and saying "I don't yet understand why we do it this way — can you walk me through it?" feels like a downgrade.
It isn't. It's the only thing that lets the real work start.
My one rule for the first six months: ask the question even if I think I know the answer. I've broken it about 30% of the time. Catching myself is the practice.
The other thing I'm trying to do is keep beginner's mind from ossifying into beginner's habits. Senior leaders new to an org often build a six-month moat of asking questions, and then quietly switch to performing certainty for the next decade. The transition is gradual. You don't notice.
So I keep a list — written, not memorised — of things I assumed I understood and was wrong about. Every Friday I look at it. It's the cheapest accountability mechanism I've found.
If you've recently joined somewhere new at a senior level: the urge to demonstrate competence is the thing to fight. Demonstrate curiosity instead. The competence catches up. It's the curiosity that ages.