It was a Sunday afternoon, the last day of 2023, and I was not at home.
I was 200 km away from my home with one of my colleagues from the office. We were going to the temple after parking the car, and a call came in.
The name on the screen was my junior from the office, and that was unusual. He didn’t call on Sundays, and he certainly didn’t call on the last evening of the year. I picked up expecting a question about a file or a payment.
“Sir,” he said, “is there anything in hand?” “Haath mai kuch hai kya”
I did not understand and asked, “Means?”
He said, “means job,” “matlab job”
Then, almost hesitantly, he said it. “Buaji keh rahe thee Juneja ji kahiyega kal se nahi aayenge”
“The owner is saying, tell Juneja ji that from tomorrow, do not come.”
That was the whole call. It lasted perhaps two minutes.
There was no meeting, no letter, no conversation about notice, no discussion about what the next month would look like. I had joined that company only a few months earlier, in August.
It was a shift from academics to a different kind of work, and I took it partly because it kept me closer to home. It was a one-man company, the kind of setup where one person’s mood is the entire governance structure. In a place like that, the day the owner decides your time is over, it is over. Nobody votes. Nobody is consulted.
I have thought about my junior many times since. He had been with that company for eighteen years and stood close to the owner. That Sunday, he was handed the worst task in the building: telling a senior colleague, by phone, on New Year’s Eve, not to turn up on the first of January. I do not hold the call against him. A man who has spent eighteen years in a one-man company knows exactly how little room he has to refuse.
The second call
About two hours later, my phone rang again.
This time it was someone from the coaching and training world. “Ashish, are you available?” the voice asked. “We have some assignments.”
I would love to tell you this was luck, or the universe, or a reward for good karma. It was none of those. It was a relationship. Since 2017, I had been moving in and out of the coaching and training space. I had been involved in training assignments even inside that same company, and in academics before it. The person who called me wasn’t a stranger. He called someone he already knew could deliver.
I did not understand at the time how much that call mattered, or why it had come at all. That is the subject of a later chapter. For now, hold on to one thing: on the worst afternoon of that year, the only reason there was a second call is that I had once, years earlier, made myself useful to someone outside my employer.
That assignment continued until 30 September 2025. Twenty-one months. Almost like a full-time job, with steady monthly income.
I will come back to how it ended. It matters more than how it began.
Eighteen days
Here is the part I have not often told in full.
The second call did not settle my mind. In my head, a client engagement was not a job. A job had a title, a salary slip, a desk. A job was what normal people had. So from 1st January I did what every professional in my position does: I went looking for another one.
I applied on every portal I could find. I reached out to every contact I could think of: former colleagues, former students, people I had not messaged in years. I bought paid subscriptions on Monster and on Naukri, and I put them on my credit card.
I want you to see how odd that was. I had spent years on the other side of the hiring table. I had screened candidates. I knew how resumes got read, and how quickly. And yet there I was, a man who knew how the machine worked, paying the machine a fee to be looked at.
Nothing clicked. Days passed. I refreshed the inbox in the morning and again at night. The silence of a job portal is a particular kind of silence. Every unread notification is a small verdict.
On 18 January 2024, I said to myself: enough.
I want to be careful about what I mean by that, because it is easy to turn this moment into something grander than it was. I did not decide to become an entrepreneur. I did not have a plan. I did not wake up with a vision of a coaching business or a community.
What I decided was narrower. I decided to stop searching for a job as my only plan.
And I will be honest about something else. It was easier to say enough because I already had a client. If the second call had never come, I might have kept paying for portals for another month, and another. Part of that decision was courage. Part of it was that I had somewhere to stand while I made it. I tell you this not to dilute the moment, but because you deserve the version you can actually use. Courage is cheaper when you have a floor under you. Most of this book is about how to build that floor before you need it.
A few days later, on the day of the consecration of the temple in Ayodhya on 22nd Jan 2024, I was standing on my terrace. I was thinking: what if I focus only on my work and stop searching for jobs?
I remember making a request. It was not a polite one. In plain terms, I said: let it be that, from today, nobody can ever fire me again.
Just after the ceremony, the thoughts from inside were “ye bhi baith gaye hai ab tu bhi baith ja.” “Lord Rama has sat; now you also sit.”
No one can give you a career that cannot end. Not a talented professional, a founder, a doctor, or a consultant. Everyone depends on someone: a boss, a board, a client, a market. What you can build is a life in which an ending is an event you survive, not a collapse. The difference between those two ideas, between I can never be fired and I can afford to be, is the whole subject of this book.
The pattern I had missed
On the night of 31 December 2023, it felt like a single, isolated blow. It was nothing of the kind. If I had sat down that night and drawn the whole timeline, I would have seen that I had been here before more than once.
Let me walk you through it, the way I should have that evening.
2014. The first ending, which I chose, though not quite.
I was working at a management institute. Almost three months of salary were pending. If you have ever waited for money you had already earned, you know what that does to your head. By half past three each day the campus emptied out, and the long, quiet hours between 3:30 and 5:00 were the worst part of my day.
I would sit and think: when will the salary come? What can I do? I spent so much mental energy analyzing my employer’s every move, trying to guess what he was planning, that I barely had any left for anything useful.
At one point I even suggested to a colleague that we buy shoes in Roorkee and sell them on campus. Nothing came of it. That is what desperation looks like when you are still holding a job: you start to think creatively about anything except the thing that is actually wrong.
Around then I was sent to Patna on institute work, to meet consultants who sent students our way. In one meeting, I asked the owner of another institute what he taught. He said, “I don’t teach. I get it taught.”
It struck me like a bulb switching on. A man could run an institute without standing in front of a classroom. By the time I was on the train home, I had registered a small company, Topaz Consulting, and a colleague had helped me draft the idea on a Google Doc. We printed a few visiting cards. That was all. But a seed had been planted.
A friend in Ludhiana was running a coaching institute and was looking to sell franchises of a well-known banking-and-training brand from Jalandhar. I told him it would be tough to sell two franchises, and then I thought: what if I take one myself? I did the numbers. I had some savings and some investments in stocks. I took the franchise, with my colleague as my business partner
I did not resign. I was setting it up as a part-time project, something to run after college hours. But within a week, my employer called me in. The way he spoke felt like it came straight out of the film Guru, which I may have watched around that time. He said I was a good employee. He said that if I was with them, I should be fully with them. “We don’t want halves.”
I was wearing a tie. I remember actually taking it off. I said, “Sir, then we’ll go there now.”
That was how I lost my first job, and I use the word lost on purpose, even though the exit looks voluntary. I did not walk out confident. Things at the institute were not going well. If they had been going well, I probably would have stayed and never taken the leap. The leap happened because the ground under me was already giving way.
From 2014 to 2020, I gave the institute everything I had. Then COVID arrived, and I had to close it down.
I want you to notice something here. I had left an employer to escape dependence, and I had walked straight into a different one: a classroom business whose entire income depended on students being physically present in a room. When the rooms closed, so did I. Starting your own venture is not the same as ending your dependence. Chapter 15 returns to this, because it is the mistake I see most often among people who think the answer to a bad employer is “just quit and start something.”
2021- The second ending, which was not my choice.
After 2020, I moved to Gujarat and took an HR role at the state’s largest mobile retailer. I had completed my PGDBM and other qualifications, and it was a premium organization. Then COVID sent us home, and we continued working remotely. For four or five months, everything was smooth.
Then one month the salary was delayed. It normally went out between the 8th and the 10th. That month it slipped to the 12th. Some data sheets didn’t match, and just like that, I was fired about five months in.
Since then I have given that word a new meaning: fired can also mean your inner fire should rise. I know how that sounds, and I did not feel it that day.
I lost that job in July, just after my birthday. By October, I was back at a university. Those few months between were not wasted. I used them to work deeply on myself.
31 December 2023. The third ending.
You already know this one.
Here is the four-line summary of the pattern, the way I wish I had drawn it for myself on that Sunday evening:
| Year | What ended | Who decided | How much warning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | A job at a management institute | Partly me, partly circumstances | A few months of unpaid salary, then one week |
| 2021 | An HR role in Gujarat | The employer | None that I recall |
| 31 Dec 2023 | An HR role at a one-man company | The owner | One phone call, the evening before |
| 30 Sep 2025 | A 21-month client engagement | The client’s arrangement ended | 30 days in advance I was aware of it |
Look at the fourth row. It is the one I did not see coming that Sunday.
The assignment that rescued me on 31 December 2023 ran for twenty-one months. It paid steadily. It gave me stability and, more importantly, confidence. And then it ended too.
That ending is the reason I am confident about what I am about to say. If the lesson were to find a better employer, the second call would have fixed it. It did not. The call that saved me was itself a single source, from a single relationship, controlled by a single decision-maker. A better one, a kinder one, but still one. It lasted two years. Then it did not.
Four different endings. A college, a retailer, a one-man company, a client. Different industries, different reasons, different amounts of warning. But strip away the details, and the structure is the same every time:
- One source of income.
- One person (or one small group) who could end it.
- Me, with very little say in the matter.
The first time, I called it bad luck. The second time, I called it an unfair employer. The third time, I called it a one-man company, the kind of place where this was always going to happen. Every explanation was true, and every explanation was a way to avoid seeing the pattern.
The call on 31 December 2023 did not create my dependence. It revealed it.
Why I am telling you this
You might be reading this as a senior professional, at a large company, with a good title and a stable record. You might be thinking: that was a one-man company. That could never happen where I work.
I understand that thought. I had it myself, about other people.
Let me be careful. I am not telling you that your employer is about to let you go. I am not telling you that employers are bad, or that loyalty is a mistake, or that you should quit. I do not believe any of those things. I have worked for good people. I was grateful for the salary every month it arrived, and I still am.
What I am telling you is narrower, and I think harder to argue with. In each of my four endings, the structure was identical: everything depended on one source. And the structure does not care how good the employer is. A wonderful company with a kind manager is still one source, one decision-maker, one set of circumstances that can change without your consent. A merger, a restructuring, a new boss, a budget cycle, a quiet Sunday afternoon.
The people I now work with are mostly not in a one-man company. They are directors and senior managers in large IT, consulting, and financial firms. They have fifteen, eighteen, twenty years behind them. Their situation looks nothing like mine. And yet, when I ask them the simple question, if your salary stopped on the first of next month, what would you do?, the pause that follows is familiar.
I am not writing this book because I have worked out how to be safe. I am writing it because I had to learn, three times over and then a fourth, that I was not. And I want to hand you what I wish someone had handed me in 2014, while I was waiting for my own salary: a way of seeing the structure before the call comes.
The next chapter begins there, with the thing that hides the structure so well. It arrives on the same date every month, and it feels like safety.
Reader exercise: your one-page timeline
Do this before you read Chapter 2. It will take about twenty minutes, and it is the single most useful thing you can do with this book.
Take a blank page. List every source of income you have had, in order, since you started working. For each one, write down only facts:
- What it was (job, business, client, side project).
- How and why it ended, or whether it is still running.
- Who made the decision.
- How much notice you had, in days.
- What you had in the bank when it happened.
- Who called you first, or who you called first.
Leave out the story. No adjectives, no explanations, no if only. Just the facts, the way you would write them for a stranger.
When you finish, read down the third column. If it says someone else more often than it says me, that is not a verdict on you. It is simply the first honest picture of where your dependence sits. We will use this page again.