The two numbers

There is a particular silence that happens when someone is offered exactly what they said they wanted and does not take it.

I watched it across a table in Koramangala, over coffee that went cold while we talked. Call him Rohit. Forty-one, sixteen years in, running a platform team of about ninety people at a company you would recognise. For two years he had told anyone who asked, including me, that what he really wanted was to build something. Not manage the building of it. Build it.

Then someone offered him that. A smaller company, a real product, a role that was unmistakably the thing he had been describing. Around thirty percent less money, with equity that might be worth something and might be worth nothing.

He turned it down inside four days.

What interested me was not the decision. Plenty of good reasons exist to turn down a job. What interested me was that he could not tell me why. He tried. Timing was wrong. Company was risky. Daughter had just started at a new school. All of it true and none of it the answer, and both of us knew it, and the coffee went cold while we circled the thing neither of us said.

So I asked him something I had started asking people around then.

How long could you go without a salary?

He did what everybody does. Looked up and to the left and started counting, and I could see him counting the wrong things: the provident fund, the equity that had not vested, the flat that would sell eventually. Then he stopped, because he had understood what I was actually asking.

"Properly? Without touching anything I would have to explain to my wife?"

"Properly."

"Two months. Maybe ten weeks."

Sixteen years. A package north of a crore. Ten weeks.

There it was, the entire reason he could not take the job he wanted, sitting in plain view where it had always been, in a number he had never once calculated in a career built on calculating things.

Two numbers, and we only ever count one

Every working professional carries two numbers.

The first one you know. To the rupee. You know what it was last year, you know roughly what the person one level above you carries, and you have a fair guess about your closest peer. Call it earning power. It is what the market will pay you for the person you currently are, and it is the number your entire professional life is organised around raising.

The second one you almost certainly do not know.

Exit power is how long you could decline income and still be yourself, and how many acceptable options exist if the income stops. It is not net worth. Net worth includes the flat you live in and the provident fund you cannot touch and the equity that vests in 2029. Exit power is only the part that is available, liquid and yours, measured against what your life actually costs each month.

Earning power tells you how well the last ten years went. Exit power tells you what you can do on Monday.

Rohit's earning power was in the top fraction of one percent of this country. His exit power was ten weeks. Those two facts lived in the same man and had never been introduced to each other.

The direction of travel

Here is the part that should bother you.

Almost every career moves you up. Very few move you right. A career is a machine for raising earning power and it is extremely good at it. Fifteen years in, most competent people have multiplied theirs several times over.

Ask the same people what happened to their exit power across the same fifteen years and you get a silence, then a guess, then usually a discovery that it went down.

That is not bad luck and it is not weak discipline. It is structural. Sixteen years of promotions, each one entirely reasonable, each one bringing a bigger number, a bigger commitment, more unvested equity, a narrower speciality, and a stronger identification with a company that would replace him in a quarter.

The line went up. The room shrank.

Ninety seconds

You do not need a spreadsheet for the rough version.

Take what your household spends in a month. Not what you think it spends. What it spends. If you do not know, you are in extremely good company, and you should notice that you do not know.

Now take what you could get your hands on in a fortnight without selling the house, breaking a lock-in, borrowing, or having a conversation you would find humiliating.

Divide the second by the first. That is your runway in months.

I would guess a number of you will get a result under six. Some of you, at incomes that would astonish your parents, will get a result under three.

That is not a failure. It is the most useful thing you will learn about yourself this year, and the only real failure would be deciding not to look.

Rohit has fourteen months now. He is still at the same company. He did not leave and as far as I know has no plans to.

But he took a different offer last year, one with less money and more of the work he wanted, and he told me the deciding conversation lasted about an hour instead of four days, and that his wife's first question was about the work rather than the money.

Nothing about his job changed in the year before that. Only the second number did.