After graduation in 2006 I began preparing for the UPSC civil services examinations. For a young man from a village near Midnapore, this was the respectable ambition — the path that meant your family would never again have to explain what you did.
I did not make it. Within two years I had moved to Kolkata and entered business through the gold and spice trades, and for a long time I described the UPSC years as a detour. They were not.
How to read a system
Civil services preparation is, at bottom, training in how a very large system actually works — where its incentives lie, how decisions travel through it, why sensible policies fail on contact with the ground. I have used that training in every market I have entered since. Understanding why an import regulation exists is worth more than knowing its clauses.
How to think in decades
Administrators are taught to think about consequences that will outlast their posting. Most businesses are not. The habit of asking what a decision looks like in ten years is one of the reasons the Principle Ledger exists.
How to sit still with difficulty
Two years of reading dense material for ten hours a day, with no guarantee of reward, is not glamorous. It is, however, exactly what building a business through its first unprofitable years feels like.
I did not get the post. I got the preparation, and it turned out the preparation was the useful part.
I still believe public service is one of the finest things a person can do with a life. I simply found a different way to do it.