The Silent Failure of Success

Hello!

It’s Thursday, 23^rd October 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts, where we explore what it really means to build a life and career that last.

We all know about a gifted chef who ran a small restaurant in a quiet neighborhood in our city. We can recall that people lined up every evening for his food. He knew every customer by name, bought his produce himself, and found joy in the rhythm of the kitchen. One day, an investor came along and convinced him to open three more locations. Within a year, he spent more time in meetings than by the stove. He hired managers, wrote manuals, reviewed invoices, and lost the very thing that made his food special. The restaurants grew, but the magic disappeared. He stopped cooking. He stopped smiling. Success had quietly turned into failure.

That story is more common than we like to admit. It happens to chefs in restaurants, entrepreneurs with products, marketers with agencies etc. The teacher who becomes a principal and never teaches again. The designer who moves into management and forgets what it felt like to create. The founder who goes from building things to managing people and investors. The athlete who goes from performing great individually to being a sub-par captain. We see these as signs of progress, yet so many of them are quiet demotions disguised as promotions.

At some point, doing well pushes us into roles that demand what we no longer enjoy or excel at. It’s a strange form of failure because it wears the mask of success. You don’t fall because you failed. You fall because you kept winning at the wrong game.

There’s a name for this cycle. Half a century ago, a Canadian scholar observed that in every hierarchy, people tend to rise until they reach their level of incompetence. He called it the Peter Principle. But his insight was deeper than it sounds. It wasn’t just about people failing at higher jobs. It was about how systems, driven by endless promotion and prestige, pull us away from the work that once made us come alive.

Every step upward can be a step away from meaning. The higher we climb, the further we drift from the craft, the customers, and the satisfaction that once defined our competence. We start to trade depth for recognition, substance for symbolism. Eventually, we become strangers to our own strengths.

The modern world has made this trap even harder to escape. Everywhere you look, there’s pressure to scale. Grow your team. Grow your business. Grow your audience. Continuous growth is the oxygen of capitalism. It keeps the machine running, but it also feeds an endless sense of inadequacy. Hustle culture has turned this pressure into a lifestyle, romanticizing exhaustion and dressing up burnout as ambition. What we call productivity is often just motion without meaning.

But not everything is meant to scale. Some of the best work stays small, focused, and personal. The world’s obsession with growth has turned mastery into management and curiosity into KPI. The more we chase the illusion of progress, the further we drift from the work that fulfills us.

What if the point isn’t to rise, but to stay rooted? What if competence isn’t a ladder, but a landscape you can explore for a lifetime? The higher we climb, the narrower the view becomes. The deeper we go, the more we see.

We also mistake leadership for height. We think the people above us lead better than the ones beside us. But real leadership isn’t about being in charge. It’s about making the work, and the people around you, better. The quiet mentor who helps you see your blind spots. The colleague who steadies the team during chaos. They rarely get titles, but they make everything work.

True growth often looks like stillness. It’s knowing when not to say yes, when to protect what you’ve built, when to stop climbing because higher isn’t always better. It takes humility to recognize that you’ve found your place, and even more courage to stay there while the world keeps shouting for more.

We live in a time that worships motion. But progress isn’t always movement. Sometimes, the most radical act of success is to pause, look around, and ask yourself a simple question: what if I’m already where I’m supposed to be?

Peter took his principle a step further. He argued that over time, at a collective level, every position ends up being filled by someone who isn’t fully competent to perform its duties. It sounds absurd until you look around. Organizations built on endless advancement eventually run out of truly fit people for every role. The result is not chaos but mediocrity disguised as order. The system keeps moving, but not necessarily forward. The same pattern that traps individuals ends up trapping institutions. We celebrate progress, yet quietly drift toward a world where no one is quite doing what they’re best at. And that’s the real danger of mistaking movement for progress.

I hope this gave you something worth thinking about. Thank you for reading.

Best,
Kartik

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Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

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