Am I moving fast or am I moving right?
Lately, I find myself asking this question over and over. With my life as much as with my business.
For a long time, I believed that doing well – at work, in life, in the choices that mattered – meant keeping pace.
Not recklessly, but responsively. Staying relevant. Adapting quickly. Watching the landscape and making sure I wasn’t left behind.
In fast-moving environments, speed feels like accomplishment while hesitation feels like failure. And yet, some of the hardest leadership – and life – lessons I’ve learned didn’t come from moving too slowly.
They came from moving too fast — without enough conviction about where I was actually going.
Running a company that sits at the intersection of education, technology, and global mobility has a way of constantly testing your sense of direction. The ground shifts constantly. New tools emerge daily. New players appear overnight. Someone, somewhere, always seems to be doing something that looks more impressive, more visible, more celebrated.
Social media amplifies this pressure in more corrosive ways than we often admit. Not just because it is selective — but because it is performative. You see outcomes without context, yes. But you also see confidence without competence. Announcements without accountability. Humble brags masquerading as insight. Stories polished for applause, stripped of uncertainty, friction, or failure.
Success is presented as linear. Leadership as instinctive. Strategy as obvious in hindsight. Entire narratives are constructed without mentioning the abandoned paths, the wrong calls, the capital burned, the people lost, or the years of doubt that actually shaped the outcome — if the outcome is even real.
And somewhere in that constant stream of curated certainty, it becomes dangerously easy to mistake volume for validity and visibility for truth.
It’s easy, in that environment, to mistake motion for momentum.
I’ve done it.
There were moments when I chased ideas not because they were right for where we were going, but because they looked like where the world was heading. Moments when I questioned our direction not because it was wrong, but because others seemed to be moving faster in a different one. Moments when I conflated visibility with validity.
None of that made me a bad leader.
But it did make me a distracted one. And distraction, sustained long enough, comes with a cost. And some costs don’t show up as failure, but as paths quietly closed without us noticing.
What I’ve learned — often the hard way — is that leadership is less about responsiveness and more about resolve.
Leadership is not caution disguised as neutrality.
Leadership is not waiting to see where the wind blows.
Leadership is choosing direction when direction is not obvious.
Leadership is saying this is where I, or we, must go, even if it is harder.
Direction is not a one-time decision. It’s a commitment you have to renew every time something shinier appears.
And something shinier always appears.
That’s why speed is so seductive. Speed gives you cover. It allows you to say you’re acting, experimenting, evolving. Direction, by contrast, demands explanation. It forces you to articulate why this and not that. It exposes you to disagreement, doubt, and the uncomfortable possibility that you might be wrong — and have to live with the consequences long enough to find out.
This is where leadership stops being performative and becomes personal.
Because this tension doesn’t only show up in boardrooms or strategy sessions. It shows up in ordinary lives every day.
In careers chosen because they were available, not aligned.
In relationships accelerated because slowing down might reveal misalignment.
In moves, pivots, commitments, and exits made quickly, not because they were right, but because standing still felt intolerable.
Speed, in life, often masquerades as progress. But more often, it’s avoidance – of responsibility, of authorship, of having to own where your choices actually lead.
Direction, by contrast, is quiet. It rarely announces itself. It asks questions before it offers answers. And it demands a kind of honesty most of us are trained to outrun.
Many of us are not lost. We’re just moving too fast to notice that we never chose a direction in the first place.
Because choosing direction means disappointing people. It means saying no to opportunities that look good on paper. It means resisting the gravitational pull of trends that don’t align with your core purpose. It means being misunderstood — sometimes for a long time — before coherence reveals itself.
That kind of decision-making doesn’t photograph well.
It doesn’t generate applause in the moment.
It doesn’t fit neatly into LinkedIn posts or Instagram reels.
And it rarely feels efficient.
But it compounds.
I was reminded of this recently at our Junction91 gathering. Not by anything dramatic that was said, but by the conversations I overheard after sessions ended. The shared recognition that international education, like so many sectors, has become very good at movement — and less good at meaning.
Everyone senses that the world is changing faster than our models. That students are asking better questions than our systems are prepared to answer. That technology, geopolitics, and economics are reshaping assumptions we once treated as stable.
And yet, the temptation is always the same – to move faster.
More partnerships.
More initiatives.
More visibility.
But faster toward what?
Direction is the harder question.
Last week, when I wrote about moral outsourcing, I was trying to recognize a pattern — how leaders, often unintentionally, delegate conscience to systems and processes in moments that demand clarity. Strategic leadership suffers from a similar abdication. We outsource judgment to trends. We defer conviction to consensus. We let the market, the algorithm, or the loudest voices decide what matters.
Speed makes that abdication easier.
Direction makes it impossible.
Because once you choose a direction, you’re accountable not just for progress, but for coherence. For staying with decisions after the excitement fades. For executing when the work becomes repetitive, exhausting, and uncertain.
Execution is where leadership earns its credibility.
Not in vision boards.
Not in PowerPoint presentations.
But in the unglamorous discipline of follow-through.
Because leadership, in the end, is just agency that other people feel. This is something I continue to learn — and relearn — as a founder and as a human. The courage to slow down when everyone else seems to be accelerating. The humility to admit when an idea doesn’t belong on my path, even if it’s working well for someone else. The patience to build things that take longer to explain, longer to sell, and longer to validate — but actually matter.
Direction doesn’t eliminate doubt but rather gives doubt a place to rest without letting it drive.
Speed, on the other hand, often masks doubt as decisiveness.
In a world increasingly shaped by noise, comparison, and performative success, the most countercultural act of decision-making may be choosing a direction — and enduring.
Enduring the discomfort.
Enduring the second-guessing.
Enduring the periods where progress is invisible and validation is absent.
Not because it’s easy.
Not because it’s fashionable.
But because decisions were never meant to be efficient.
They were meant to be responsible.
Direction > speed.
Not once.
But again and again — especially when the temptation to do otherwise is strongest
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
