An 11 PM conversation with my son led me to something I hadn’t quite articulated before — the only toolkit that truly matters now.
It was 11 PM on a weeknight. My son — buried under the weight of 12th Board examinations and competitive entrance tests — walked out of his room. He didn’t look exhausted. He looked curious. He saw me reading and simply sat down beside me, and within minutes, we were deep in conversation: geopolitics, philosophy, the latest discoveries in science, a film he had watched.
These late-night exchanges are the best part of my day. No agenda, no performance — just a father and a son thinking out loud together. I often remember how I used to do the same with my own father, pulling him into conversation regardless of whether he was tired or busy, and how he always made space to answer. My daughter, a wonderful listener, absorbs everything quietly. My son turns everything into a dialogue. Both are gifts.
That night, the conversation drifted toward something I had been turning over in my mind for weeks: the question of what it actually takes to survive and thrive in the decade ahead. Not just in IT — though that’s the industry that occupies most of my waking hours — but in any profession, any life.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna stands paralysed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra — not because he lacks skill, but because he cannot see clearly. The field is familiar; the enemies are his own kinsmen. What he needs is not a new weapon. He needs wisdom, clarity, and the courage to act from it.
We in the IT industry stand at a similar Kurukshetra today. AI is reshaping everything we thought we understood about our work. The old maps no longer match the territory. And unlike television serials — where you can miss a week and catch up easily — this is a high-speed film. One distraction, and you have lost the thread.
That night, I shared with my son the four skills I believe will separate those who thrive from those who merely survive. I want to share them with you too.
“This is not like a TV serial where you can miss a week and return to find the story unchanged. This is a film at full speed — and a moment’s absence costs more than ever before.”
Skill One
Curiosity
Everything begins here. Not the passive curiosity of someone who occasionally reads an interesting article — but an active, restless, almost hungry curiosity. The kind that makes you stay up past midnight exploring a concept, that makes you ask a second and third question when a first answer almost satisfies you.
Think of how Feynman described his relationship with physics — not as a professional obligation, but as a lifelong love affair where every answer opened ten more questions. Or closer to home, think of any person you know who seems to always be ahead of the curve. They are rarely the most formally educated. They are almost always the most relentlessly curious.
“Curiosity is not a personality trait. It is a daily practice. You either feed it or you starve it.”
In the age of AI, the half-life of specific technical knowledge is shortening dramatically. A skill you mastered in 2022 may be automated by 2026. What cannot be automated is the drive to learn the next thing before you are forced to. Curiosity is the engine of perpetual relevance.
My son, preparing for some of the toughest examinations in the country, already understands this intuitively. He doesn’t study topics — he inhabits them, pulling threads until the whole picture emerges. That is the habit to cultivate, whatever your age, whatever your field.
Skill Two
Awareness
Years ago, I heard the actor R. Madhavan speak about what he considers the defining quality of truly sharp, successful people. His answer surprised the audience — it wasn’t ambition, talent, or discipline. It was situational awareness. The ability to read a room, a moment, a shifting landscape — before others even notice it has shifted.
Curiosity without awareness is like having a powerful engine with no steering. You may go very fast in entirely the wrong direction.
Awareness means knowing where the conversations that matter are happening — and joining them. It means reading widely, yes, but also choosing your sources carefully in an era of algorithmic noise. It means cultivating a circle of people who challenge and inform you, not just comfort you.
“The most important awareness is knowing what not to follow — which groups to leave, which voices to mute, which rabbit holes lead nowhere.”
I have found, personally, that Twitter — when curated ruthlessly — is one of the most potent real-time intelligence tools available. The same feed that can waste three hours can, if managed well, keep you updated on what the sharpest minds in your field are thinking and doing right now. The tool is neutral; the curation is everything.
Awareness also means inner awareness — knowing your own biases, your blind spots, your tendency to dismiss the unfamiliar. Self-knowledge is situational awareness turned inward.
Skill Three
Empathy
Every conversation about AI disruption eventually arrives at the same question: what can humans do that machines cannot? The answer, consistently, is this — we can genuinely care about another human being’s experience. We can sit with someone in uncertainty. We can read the unspoken grief in a colleague’s silence. We can inspire trust not through logic alone, but through presence.
Empathy is not softness. It is one of the most strategically powerful skills a person can possess.
Consider the most influential leaders you have encountered in your career. Technical brilliance may have put them in the room. But it was empathy — the ability to understand what their teams needed, what their clients feared, what their stakeholders truly wanted beneath the stated requirements — that kept them there and elevated them.
“In a world of accelerating automation, the person who makes others feel seen will always have a seat at the table.”
The Upanishads speak of Tat tvam asi — “That thou art.” The recognition of yourself in the other. Empathy, at its deepest, is not a technique. It is an orientation toward the world: the understanding that the person across from you carries a universe as complex as your own.
In practical terms: listen more than you speak. Ask how people are — and wait for the real answer. When you lead a team, remember that behind every deadline and deliverable is a human being navigating their own Kurukshetra.
Skill Four
Communication
I have saved what I believe is the most underestimated skill for last and perhaps the one where the gap between what is needed and what most professionals can deliver is widest.
You can be the most curious, most aware, most empathetic person in the organisation. If you cannot communicate that value in writing, in speech, in documentation, in the quiet craft of setting context — you will be overlooked. Not unfairly. Simply invisibly.
We have, over the last decade or so, quietly surrendered our communication skills. We stopped writing long-form. We replaced memos with bullets, paragraphs with emojis, nuance with a brevity that mistakes itself for clarity. Our documentation became sparse. Our presentations became slides stripped of narrative. We delegated the craft of language to templates and abbreviations.
“Your identity, in the professional world, is shaped almost entirely by how you communicate. Everything else is background.”
And now, with AI tools enabling everyone to generate text at scale, the bar for excellent communication has paradoxically risen. Because when anyone can produce passable prose, what distinguishes you is not the words — it is the thinking behind them. Clear writing is clear thinking made visible.
This includes the new skill of prompting — the art of communicating precisely with AI systems to get meaningful output. It is the same underlying discipline as all good communication: know what you want, understand your audience, provide context, be specific. The medium changes. The craft does not.
Write more. Document diligently. Speak with intention. Blog, even if no one reads it at first. The practice compounds. One year from now, the person who has been writing regularly will think and communicate in ways that simply were not available to them before they started.
“Curiosity to know. Awareness to navigate. Empathy to connect. Communication to matter. The four are not separate skills — they are a single, unfolding practice.”
That 11 PM conversation with my son ended, as these conversations often do, without a tidy conclusion. He went back to his room. I returned to my book. But somewhere in the exchange, something got clarified — both for him and for me.
The decade ahead will be defined not by the specific tools we master — those will change faster than we can track — but by the qualities we cultivate as thinking, feeling, communicating human beings. The four skills above are not new. Philosophers and teachers have pointed toward them for centuries. What is new is the urgency.
Arjuna, in the end, did not win at Kurukshetra because he had the best bow. He won because Krishna helped him see clearly, act with integrity, and engage fully — even in the middle of profound uncertainty.
That is still, I believe, the only game worth playing.
— Sakti Bagchi
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