A few years into running TPC, I found myself back in a classroom. Not as the person leading the session, but as a student in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women programme, sitting alongside founders half my age, taking notes like it was my first job all over again.

Part of me resisted it at first. I’d already built a company, already had two decades of HR experience behind me, already knew how to run a business meeting. There was a small, stubborn voice asking why I needed to sit through modules on things I felt I already understood.

That voice was wrong, and I’m glad I didn’t listen to it.

Some of the most useful things I picked up in that programme weren’t new information at all. They were old truths I already knew, said in a way that finally made me actually apply them. I’d read about financial planning before. I’d heard about pitching before. But something about sitting in that room, being challenged by a professor, an investor, and other women building their own companies, made the learning land differently than it ever had from a book or an article.

That’s the part about learning that I think we get wrong as we get more experienced. We assume learning is only useful when the content is new. So the more we know, the less reason we think we have to keep showing up as students. But the real value of continuing to learn, at any stage, has less to do with the material and everything to do with staying in the habit of not knowing everything.

The moment you decide you’ve learned enough in your field is usually the moment you stop noticing how much the field has already moved on without you. I see this constantly in executive search. A leader who was brilliant a decade ago can become the wrong hire for a company today, not because they got worse at their job, but because they quietly stopped updating how they think. The world changed its questions, and they kept polishing old answers.

I try to catch myself doing this too. When I sat down to prepare for the Eureka! competition at IIT Bombay, I was in a room full of young founders building things I barely understood on a technical level. It would have been easy to feel out of place and stay quiet. Instead, I asked more questions in that room than I had in a long time, and I walked out having rethought parts of my own business I hadn’t questioned in years.

I think the discomfort of not knowing is actually a good sign, not a bad one. If everything in a room makes complete sense to you, you’re probably not going to leave any different than you walked in. The rooms that change you are usually the ones where you feel slightly behind, slightly unsure, maybe even a little embarrassed to ask the basic question. I’ve learned to sit with that feeling instead of avoiding it, because on the other side of it is almost always something worth knowing.

Even writing my own book, something I assumed I’d feel confident about given how much I read and how many years I’d spent communicating professionally, turned out to be its own classroom. I learned more about discipline, patience, and honestly about myself, from finishing that book than I expected to learn from an entire year of running my business.

I don’t think learning ever really has a finish line, and I’ve stopped waiting to arrive at a point where I know enough. The people I admire most, the mentors, the founders, the women who started their careers late and built something anyway, all share one thing in common. They stayed students long after they had every reason to call themselves experts.

That’s probably the real skill worth building. Not any particular subject. Just the willingness to keep raising your hand.