Never Forget The Beginner’s Spirit

Most people do not lose their way in one dramatic decision. They lose it in small, acceptable shifts, until the original reason for starting becomes a story they tell rather than a standard they live by.

I was reminded of this recently in the middle of a speech, not in a meeting room. I heard Annamalai K IPS speak, and one line was delivered without ornamentation, as though it did not need to be performed to be true, and I found myself carrying it for days.

It pulled me back to a sentence I first read years ago and have kept close since, a line attributed to Lance Armstrong: “Never forget your beginner’s spirit.” It is a simple thought, but it has teeth, because it asks a question many of us would rather avoid: are we still anchored to why we began, or have we learned to call drift ‘growth’?

When you are new to something, you are often more sincere than you realise. You listen because you cannot afford to assume, you remember names because people are not a “network,” and you keep promises because you have not yet learned how to justify breaking them.

As success arrives, something subtle begins to shift. The distance is not always intentional, and it rarely announces itself as arrogance, but it shows up in small choices: in how quickly we move through conversations, in how easily we begin to substitute conviction with convenience, and in how readily we start calling the original purpose “idealistic” while treating the outcomes as “practical.”

I have watched this drift inside organisations for years, and I have also seen how easily it begins in oneself when one stops paying attention. In the early days, founders and the first few people around them operate with plain integrity because there are no layers to hide behind and no one else to outsource accountability to.

Over time, a different centre of gravity develops, and it is often profitability. Profit is essential to sustain a business and take care of its people, but it matters whether profit is the consequence of doing something well or the sole purpose.

When that happens, the texture of work changes. The language becomes smoother, the reasoning more rehearsed, and decisions arrive wrapped in justification rather than explanation. In financial services, you see how easily almost anything can be made to sound client-friendly even when the mechanics are tilted elsewhere, and the customer slowly becomes a metric.

During my years in banking, I had a conversation with Uday Kotak that stayed with me for exactly this reason. We were speaking in the practical language of business, but what he said had the clarity of a principle. He told me, “Chase excellence. Money will follow. Chase money, and you will end up mediocre.” I have returned to that line often, not because it sounds wise, but because it is inconvenient. It does not let you hide behind ambition. It asks a sharper question: are you still oriented towards excellence, or are you simply optimising for outcomes and calling it strategy.

When I founded Entrust Family Office, the genesis of the firm was rooted in something deliberately plain: client centrality. After years in financial services, I had seen how easily advice becomes distorted when compensation is coming from places the client never fully sees. You can dress it up, you can rename it, you can bury it in product language, but the distortion remains because the incentives remain. So we chose a fee-only model, being compensated by clients rather than commissions from products.

At the time, this was not the popular path, and it certainly was not the easiest one, but it mattered to me that the structure matched the intent, because intent without structure has a way of turning into performance.

In recent years, I have watched many professionals quit stable jobs to start businesses in financial services with very little differentiation. The branding is fresh, the language is modern, the social media looks confident, and the story can sound compelling at first glance. But when you listen closely, the centre is not always service or craft; it is often valuation, personal wealth, and speed. When purpose is absent, shortcuts arrive as small compromises that can be explained away, and over time the new firm becomes indistinguishable from the old one it claimed to escape.

That is what I think we lose when we forget the beginner’s spirit. The beginning is not pure because people are saints. It is pure because you are still close to the first promise you made to yourself, and you have not yet built enough distance to comfortably betray it. You are still driven by belief, curiosity, and a desire to create value that stands on its own.

Sustained success demands that we protect that spirit consciously, even as scale, complexity, and profitability become part of the picture. Excellence must remain the pursuit, because when excellence is the pursuit, money tends to behave like a by-product. When money becomes the pursuit, excellence becomes optional, and optional excellence is where mediocrity quietly finds a home.

With time and experience, I have come to believe endurance is not only about discipline, but about memory: returning to the earliest reason you started and checking whether your choices still honour it. In business, as in life, that is what keeps us honest and enduring.