Law 25 from the 48 Laws of Power, as lived through 25 years in engineering leadership
Robert Greene’s Law 25 begins with a deceptively simple provocation: “Do not accept the roles that society foists on you.”
Simple to read. Terrifying to live.
Because the roles society foists on you rarely arrive with violence. They arrive with warmth: as expectations, as family logic, as the default path that someone you admire has already walked. You don’t resist them because they don’t feel like cages. They feel like choices.
It took me the better part of two decades to understand that re-creating yourself is not a rejection of your past. It is an integration of it. Every previous self becomes a sedimentary layer that holds the new one up.
I Wanted to Be a Doctor
My sister was brilliant at biology. She could memorise the Latin taxonomy of a genus the way I later memorised design patterns: with facility, with pleasure. I followed her because following her made sense. She set the pace and I kept up.
But somewhere around the point where biological nomenclature demanded pure rote memory, my grip loosened. Not dramatically. Not with a declaration. Just quietly, the way a boy realises he is running a race he didn’t enter.
So I turned toward engineering. And even that choice wasn’t entirely mine: a family friend I deeply revered was a mechanical engineer, an executive of standing and dignity. When the time came to pick a stream, his life was a kind of argument I couldn’t counter. Mechanical engineering it was.
But India was changing. By the time I graduated, software was not just a career path, it was a current. Salaries that seemed improbable. Opportunities that seemed to multiply weekly. And I needed a job. So I learned to code.
I walked into the IT industry in 2000, the year many were walking out. Y2K had just exhaled, taking jobs with it, and I stepped into a US healthcare IT company called Sunquest, which later became Misys. I was a developer. And for the first time in my career, I had chosen something not because of family logic or economic gravity, but because of what it made me feel.
Creation. The pure, animal pleasure of building something that works.
The Ashrama System Was Never About Retirement
Hindu philosophy describes life in four stages: Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (the one who withdraws toward the forest), and Sannyasa (the renunciant). Western readings of this framework tend to focus on the final stage, the monk, the withdrawal from the world. They miss the radical instruction embedded in the whole system.
Every ashrama requires the conscious death of the previous identity.
You cannot be a proper Grihastha while clinging to the freedoms of Brahmacharya. You cannot enter Vanaprastha while still building your worldly empire as a Grihastha. Each transition is a small ending, a small grief, and a small resurrection. The framework doesn’t promise that the transition will be comfortable. It only insists that growth without transition is stagnation wearing the costume of stability.
The Puranas push this further: Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains, Shiva destroys, and the cycle restarts. The entire cosmos is one continuous act of self-recreation. Nothing, not even a universe, holds its form forever.
And then there is Narasimha, perhaps the most striking image of transformation in Indian mythology. When the demon Hiranyakashipu obtained a boon that made him immune to death by man or animal, by day or night, inside or outside, on earth or in the sky, Brahman responded by becoming something that no existing category could contain. Neither man nor beast. Neither at noon nor at midnight. Neither inside the palace nor outside it. A form that emerged precisely because the moment required something no previous form could serve.
That story is not about mythology. It is about what genuine reinvention looks like. It does not fit the categories that existed before.
What Leadership Actually Taught Me About Identity
I enjoyed coding. Genuinely. The feedback loop is intoxicating: you write, the machine responds, the thing works or it doesn’t, and you know immediately. There is a clarity to it that most human endeavours lack.
But leadership offered something different. It offered scale. The ability to build not just a feature, but a culture. Not just a system, but a team of passionate, talented individuals who could build systems I could never build alone. Conflict resolution, culture architecture, the slow, unglamorous work of making a distributed group of people into something that functions with coherence: I discovered I had an appetite for this.
That shift, from developer to leader, was my first real ashrama transition in professional life. And like all transitions, it required a small grief. I had to let go of the identity of the person who builds things with their hands and pick up the identity of the person who builds through others.
It felt like loss before it felt like expansion.
Then came subsequent reinventions. The RTE role in a SAFe Agile framework, where I learned to think at the train level, across products, across geographies, across the India-US cultural divide that requires a different kind of fluency than technical skill. The executive MBA at IIM Bangalore, where I learned that what I had been doing intuitively had names and frameworks and decades of research behind it. The Toastmasters arc, culminating in the presidency of IIMB Orators, where I discovered that I could use words in real time the way I had once used code: to build something that works.
The book. The blog. The Substack. The fiction manuscript sitting in a drawer, waiting for me to become the writer who can finish it.
Each of these was a new ashrama. Each required me to release something.
The Return of the Builder
And now, in what I can only call a beautiful irony, I find myself being pulled back toward the ground-level work of building.
AI changed the equation. The hours it once took to move from idea to prototype have collapsed. If you can think clearly and communicate with precision, you can build almost anything, for roughly the cost of a dinner out each month. The ideation that was always the interesting part is now the bottleneck again. The execution, once the expensive part, is no longer the constraint.
So I am, in a strange way, back to the person who found joy in creation. But the creation is different now. I am not writing code for a single feature in a single product. I am orchestrating multi-agent AI systems, building tools that help engineering teams plan at scale, designing workflows where a NOVA and an ARIA and an AXEL each carry a piece of the cognitive load that once fell entirely on human shoulders.
The ashrama model would call this Vanaprastha: not withdrawal from the world, but a step back from the ego of accumulation, toward something more interested in contribution and in transmitting what has been learned.
Narasimha again. A form that existing categories cannot fully describe.
The Inversion Worth Holding
Greene’s law is often read as permission for radical reinvention: burn the old self, build a new one.
But the Vedic reading is more precise, and I think more honest.
Reinvention for its own sake is restlessness, not growth. The ashrama system does not say change constantly. It says change in service of your soul’s deepening. The transitions are not arbitrary. They are demanded by the stage of life, by the dharma of the moment, by the gap between who you are and what the moment requires.
A person who changes identity every two years because they are bored is not re-creating themselves. They are evading themselves. The restlessness that looks like dynamism from the outside is often, from the inside, the sound of someone running from the work of going deep.
The question I keep returning to is not who do I want to become but what does this moment in my life actually require of me.
Sometimes those questions have the same answer. When they do, the transition feels like relief.
Writing the Next Identity Statement
Greene ends this law with a practical instruction: write the character you are becoming, not just the role title.
Role titles are descriptions of what others see. Character is what you are when no one is watching.
I am becoming a person who builds at the intersection of depth and breadth: deep enough to understand the technical architecture, broad enough to hold the human one. A writer who writes with the rigour of an engineer. An engineer who leads with the attentiveness of a writer. Someone for whom the Bhagavad Gita is not background reading but a living operating system.
That is not a job description. It is a direction.
And perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say about re-creating yourself: you rarely know the full shape of what you are becoming until you have arrived there. The transition always feels more uncertain than the destination looks, in retrospect, from the other side.
But Shiva does not wait until he knows what Brahma will create next before he destroys what has become obsolete.
He destroys because it is time.
Sakti Bagchi writes at saktibagchi.in on engineering leadership, AI adoption, and the inner game of building things that matter. He is a Release Train Engineer and Senior Development Manager at Altera Digital Health, and the author of How to Manage Your Manager (2018).