The Strange Problem With Successful People
People do not always get stuck because they lack talent, experience, contacts, money or motivation. Quite often, they have enough of all five.
The problem is that they have less idea where to apply them.
They have experience, but three possible career directions. They have money, but seven people advising them where to invest it. They have ambition, but every new podcast, LinkedIn post and airport bestseller adds another item to the list of things they must apparently achieve before turning forty-five.
So they remain busy.
They attend meetings, answer emails, make presentations, join courses, update their résumés, create business plans and occasionally announce a new beginning on social media. There is a great deal of movement, but very little progress.
That is the trouble with a lack of clarity. It rarely looks like laziness. It often looks impressively productive.
In the Emerging Leaders Mentoring Program, this is where the leadership journey begins — not with tools, techniques, or frameworks, but with clarity. Because before a leader can manage time, take ownership, influence stakeholders, or lead others, they must first learn to see clearly.
Clarity is not just a nice idea. It is the foundation for better decisions, sharper priorities, stronger leadership, higher productivity, and greater peace of mind.
When your thoughts become clear, your priorities become sharper. Decisions become easier. Actions become more focused. And when actions become focused, life starts moving.
For an emerging leader, this becomes particularly dangerous. Until a certain stage, being hardworking and dependable can carry you forward. But leadership eventually demands something more uncomfortable: the ability to decide what deserves attention, what can wait, what must stop, and where the team should go next.
You cannot lead people confidently while privately travelling in six directions.
My belief is simple: if you learn how to get clarity and practise it consistently, you will never remain stuck for too long. You may still face confusion. You may still face difficult situations. You may still face uncertainty. But you will always know how to find the next step.
The Country Head Who Could Not Answer One Question
I did not arrive at clarity quickly.
I started as a fresher at TCS. Twenty years later, I had reached a position that would look like a perfectly respectable destination on any corporate career map. In 2010, at the age of forty-four, I became the Country Head of a fintech multinational.
There was responsibility, recognition, growth and a designation that did not require further explanation at family gatherings.
Yet one question refused to leave me alone:
What do I want to become next?
It was not a crisis visible from the outside. There was no dramatic resignation letter, no cinematic walk into the sunset and no sudden desire to open a café in the mountains. It was simply a persistent restlessness… the sense that there was something more meaningful I could do, without knowing what that something was.
Like most intelligent professionals, I initially assumed that the answer could be found by collecting more information.
First, I joined an executive MBA program at IIFT. I thought more knowledge would give me clarity. It gave me knowledge of international business, but it did not answer my real question.
Then I started reading motivational books, watching videos, and attending TiE, NASSCOM, and TEDx events. These experiences gave me motivation. They made me believe I could achieve whatever I wanted.
Unfortunately, that was precisely the problem.
The question was not, What am I capable of doing? Instead the question was, What do I genuinely want to do?
Between 2013 and 2015, I tried many things.
I explored angel investing for nine months and gave it up. I thought of becoming a professor and then dropped the idea. I considered starting an NGO, became an advisory board member, and then moved away from it. I even thought of starting a startup, built a business model, and then gave that up too.
None of these were foolish ideas. In fact, each one made perfect sense on paper.
But clarity is not the same as finding an option that sounds sensible. It is finding the direction that feels aligned enough to sustain your energy after the initial excitement has disappeared.
I had options. What I did not yet have was an answer.
Sometimes Clarity Arrives Disguised as a Casual Conversation
Then in 2015, something began to shift.
I started connecting more with young and ambitious people. I enjoyed those conversations. I could see that I was able to add value. I realised that I liked helping people think better, see clearer, and move forward.
Around the same time, I worked with an executive coach. That experience helped me become a better leader and more self-aware. It also helped me see my own potential differently.
It felt like discovering that I was a diamond inside a box — and that the box had finally opened.
Some people are like that. They have a diamond inside, but they are not able to see it clearly.
My Clarity Moment
In 2017, I was introduced more deeply to coaching. That became a turning point.
One afternoon, I was taking a stroll outside our office after lunch when I met an old friend. I casually asked him, “What’s going on?”
He told me he was joining a coaching course.
I got curious.
I had experienced coaching as a coachee and had seen its impact, but I had no real understanding of what coaching actually was. After reflecting on it seriously, I decided to register for the course.
On the first day, around 21 professionals were sitting in the room. That day, three questions stayed with me — thanks to my coach, Gaurav Arora, MCC (ICF)
- What is coaching?
- What do you really want to become?
- Who are you?
When I understood what coaching was and how it worked, I fell in love with it.
Coaching is a way of partnering with someone in a thought-provoking and creative process – not by giving advice, but by asking powerful questions, giving space, listening deeply, and helping them discover their own clarity, choices, and potential.
That started moving me closer to the answer to the second question.
What do I really want to become?
I asked myself “Do I really want to become a coach?
The more I reflected, the more I realised that many traits of a coach matched who I was – the ability to listen, pause, ask deeper questions, contribute to someone else’s life, and stay with another person’s thinking without rushing to give advice.
And yes, perhaps the grey hair made the role look more convincing.
But the third question — who are you? — left me deeply unsettled.
I was around 50 years of age and realised that I did not really know who I was beyond my designation, role, position, and achievements.
That question disturbed me.
But it also opened something.
Later, I moved out of my corporate job and took the step of becoming a full-time coach.
The Positioning Problem
Fast forward to 2018.
I had been coaching young entrepreneurs and positioning myself as a Business Transformation Coach. But somewhere, I could sense that the positioning was not landing well.
So I met my strategic networking coach, Paritosh Pathak h Pathak, at India Accelerator, a co-working space in Gurgaon.
The question I had for him was simple.
How should I position myself?
He asked me, “Amit, what do your clients tell you after a coaching session?”
I replied casually, “They usually say they get clarity on the next steps and know what they have to do to get out of their current situation.”
Paritosh paused in his characteristic style and said, “Hmm. So they get clarity, haan?”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “So you help them get clarity. That sounds interesting. Have you explored clarity coach?”
I said, “No. This is the first time I am hearing it too.”
He asked me to explore clarity coaching.
That moment, something shifted in me.
For the next two to three weeks, I looked back at my life, my work, my conversations, and my natural way of being. One word kept coming back again and again.
Clarity.
It felt deeply relatable.
But then the first question was: what is clarity?
I started researching the word. Most explanations I found were not very useful. Many referred to the quality of transparency, the clarity of a diamond, or even software-related meanings.
Then I came across a video by Sadhguru where he explained the term beautifully.
But What Exactly Is Clarity?
Clarity simply means seeing things as they are.
It means looking at things with no judgement whatsoever.
And when you see things as they are, many aspects of life start opening up.
That definition stayed with me.
Over time, I started seeing clarity through a few simple images.
Clarity Is the Natural State of Mind
The Muddy Glass
How does muddy water become clear?
You don’t have to beat the water. You don’t have to shout at it. You don’t have to keep stirring it. In fact, the more you disturb it, the muddier it becomes.
The only way is to let it settle.
When the mud settles, the water becomes clear.
But why does the water become clear?
Because clarity is its natural state.
In the same way, clarity is the natural state of the mind. Just like peace and resilience, clarity is already present within us. It is our default setting.
But then we contaminate the mind with too many opinions, fears, borrowed beliefs, comparisons, judgments, and assumptions. These thoughts become the mud. Slowly, we lose touch with our natural clarity.
Confusion Is Not the Opposite of Clarity
We treat confusion like an embarrassing weakness, particularly in leadership roles.
A manager believes that saying I am not clear yet will make the team doubt their competence. So they manufacture certainty, announce a direction and hope clarity will arrive before the consequences do.
I don’t see it that way.
Confusion is not the opposite of clarity. Confusion is often the first step towards clarity.
Imagine you are walking in a forest while listening to music on your headphones. Suddenly, you hit a rock. You stop. You feel confused. You look around. You remove your headphones. You observe the path. You find a better way.
That confusion helped you wake up.
Now imagine another situation.
You keep walking without noticing anything. You don’t pause. You don’t observe. You don’t question.
And then you are suddenly eaten by a tiger.
The real danger is not confusion.
The danger is pretending to be clear when we are not.
Confusion, when observed properly, is useful. It tells you that something is not clear. It invites you to pause, look deeper, and ask better questions.
The real problem is not being confused.
The real problem is pretending to be clear when you are not.
An emerging leader does not need to have an instant answer to every question. Leadership is not a rapid-fire quiz show. What matters is the ability to identify what is unclear, ask better questions, gather the right information and create direction without creating unnecessary drama.
I don’t know can be a perfectly responsible leadership response when followed by, Let us find out.
The Confidence Trap
Corporate culture celebrates confidence. We admire people who speak decisively, present without hesitation and enter meeting rooms as though the building belongs to their grandfather.
But confidence without clarity can be dangerous.
Imagine two friends go to a bar. One of them has had a lot of drinks. The other has not. When they come out, one of them has to drive the car.
The chances are that the person who is most drunk is also the most confident person at that moment.
He may take the steering wheel and insist on driving because he feels confident.
But isn’t that dangerous?
A drunk driver may be very confident, but he has no clarity. That can be dangerous for him and for everyone else on the road.
That is why confidence alone is not enough.
Clarity is internal. Confidence is external. When you have clarity inside, confidence shows naturally outside. You don’t have to perform confidence or prove it loudly.
When confidence exists without clarity, it is often powered by ego, insecurity or the fear of appearing indecisive.
I see many people confuse confidence with clarity. They speak strongly. They decide quickly. They move aggressively. But if they are not seeing things clearly, their confidence can take them in the wrong direction faster.
A confused person may still pause. An overconfident person often does not.
That is why clarity must come before confidence.
The journey is simple.
The healthier sequence is:
Confusion creates inquiry. Inquiry creates clarity. Clarity creates confidence. Confidence creates focused action.
Skipping the middle steps may look impressive, but it frequently creates expensive mistakes.
This is true in careers. It is true in business. It is true in leadership. It is true in relationships. It is true in life.
For emerging leaders, this distinction is critical. Many people try to appear confident because they believe leadership means always knowing. But real leadership begins when confidence is built on clarity, not on noise, pressure, or ego.
From a personal search to my book: The Clarity First
In 2019, I wrote my book, The Clarity First. The book documented my own journey and the framework I developed for gaining clarity.
I wrote it because I kept meeting people with immense potential, experience, knowledge, creativity, and energy — but without clarity on where to use it.
And this pains me.
Because many people do not need more potential.
They need clarity first.
And that is why the name of my book became The Clarity First.
In the book I introduced tools such as the Clarity Wheel, which helps people identify the precise area in which they are unclear, and ME Time, which is intentional time spent thinking, reflecting and reconnecting with oneself.
Neither tool promises to solve life before breakfast.
Their purpose is more practical: to slow the mental traffic, organise the questions and reveal the next step.
That next step may not be dramatic. It may be a conversation, a decision, a refusal, a change in priority or an acknowledgement that the current direction is no longer working.
But movement created by clarity is usually more valuable than excitement created by impulse.
For those who want to go deeper, the book is available on Amazon: https://amzn.in/d/0M3DPuo
You can also download the details of the Clarity Wheel from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oXCRMDKtslcVn85lzy4WobOUSHMxvI0X/view?usp=sharing
You Do Not Need the Entire Map
When you have clarity, you don’t remain stuck for too long.
Your thoughts become clearer. Your priorities become sharper. Your decision fatigue reduces. You stop wasting energy on ten directions and start moving in the direction that matters most.
For leaders, clarity improves team productivity. A confused leader creates a confused team. A clear leader creates alignment, ownership, and momentum.
For entrepreneurs, clarity helps in deciding where to focus, what to build, whom to hire, what to say no to, and where to invest time and money.
For professionals, clarity helps in career decisions, stakeholder management, skill development, and leadership growth.
For emerging leaders, clarity helps them move from being dependable performers to becoming thoughtful leaders. It helps them understand what matters, where to take ownership, how to communicate better, and how to create progress without waiting for constant direction.
For individuals, clarity gives peace of mind and balance in life.
Clarity does not mean you will know everything.
It means you will know the next important thing.
And sometimes, that is enough.
The Question That Changes the Conversation
Clarity is not about having all the answers.
Clarity is about knowing what you are not clear about.
That itself is a powerful beginning.
Once you know what you are not clear about, you can ask better questions. Once you ask better questions, you can see better options. Once you see better options, you can make better decisions. Once you make better decisions, you can take better action.
And action taken with clarity creates confidence.
So the next time you feel stuck, don’t judge yourself.
Pause and ask:
What exactly am I not clear about?
That question can change everything.
And perhaps that is the first leadership muscle every emerging leader must develop; the ability to pause before performing confidence, separate facts from noise, and help both oneself and others see the next important step.
Because most of the time, clarity is not absent… the water has simply not been allowed to settle.
Until next, Keep Smiling.
