On Turning Sixty (And What One Does with a Decade)

I turn sixty this year.

Which raises a question that is both practical and philosophical:What does one do with a final decade of meaningful work?

Not in the sense of winding down. That framing has never felt quite right to me. If anything, the horizon sharpens the question. It demands a certain honesty about what is worth one’s time, attention, and energy.

For most of my professional life, I have worked at the intersection of education, technology, and social impact. I have built programs, led organizations, advised institutions, and spent a fair amount of time trying to scale ideas that promised to improve how people learn.

There is a particular satisfaction in scale. The sense that something you have designed travels beyond you, takes on a life of its own, reaches places you will never see.

But scale has its illusions.

Over time, I began to notice a dissonance between what systems claim to do and what actually happens within them. Between “learning” as it is described in strategy documents, and learning as it unfolds in the minds of real people.

It is one thing to design for scale.

It is another to encounter the lived reality of learning in all its complexity.

Over the past few years, I have been based in Auroville—an unusual, often contradictory, always thought-provoking international community in India. It is a place that resists easy categorisation, idealistic and pragmatic in uneven measure. At times deeply frustrating, at times unexpectedly generative.

For me, it offered something rare: proximity.

Proximity to classrooms.

Proximity to teachers and students.

Proximity to the daily, often invisible work of learning.

I found myself teaching—Global Citizenship, Physics, Chemistry. Working with school leaders navigating transitions. Engaging with questions that cannot be resolved through frameworks alone.

And in that proximity, something shifted.

I stopped asking, How do we scale this?

And began asking, What is actually happening here?

Auroville also gave me something else I had not had in a long time: time to write.

In that time, I published the book What Teaching Can Be, an attempt to articulate a view of teaching that moves beyond delivery and towards the cultivation of thinking and agency.

I also began work on two very different projects.

One, How Schools Can Change, continues my engagement with systems—how institutions might evolve to align more closely with how human beings actually learn.

The other, Briefly, Joy, is a novel. It moves in a different register altogether, exploring questions that resist abstraction—questions of identity, relationship, and the fragile, often contradictory nature of being human.

Writing, I have come to realise, is a way of thinking without shortcuts. It resists premature clarity. It asks you to stay with a question longer than is comfortable, and to discover what remains when familiar answers fall away.

This period has not felt like a departure from my earlier work. If anything, it has felt like a return to first principles—an opportunity to examine long-held assumptions against lived reality, and to give them more careful form.

And it has altered how I think about impact.

For me this is crucial because we are entering a moment of deep transition.

Education, work, and human capability are being reshaped—not just by technology, though that is the most visible force—but by shifting economic structures and more fundamental questions about meaning, agency, and what it means to be capable in the world.

Much of what we have built as “systems” remains poorly aligned with these realities. We continue to optimise for stability in a context defined by change. We prioritise coverage over understanding, efficiency over depth, compliance over agency.

The result is not simply inefficiency. It is a kind of miseducation.

Which brings me back to the question of the next decade.

If one has ten good years of active work left, what should they be spent on?

For me, the answer is becoming clearer.

Work that engages at the level of systems, not just programs.

Work that takes learning seriously—not as content delivery, but as the development of thinking, judgment, and agency.

Work that is ambitious in scope, but grounded in the realities of implementation.

And perhaps most importantly, work with people and institutions willing to engage with complexity rather than simplify it away.

I do not see the past as a sequence of roles, but as a set of lenses—each adding a layer of understanding.

The question now is where those lenses might be most usefully applied.

And with whom.