The Unpredictable Ripple of New Technology

In a book I was reading, Cal Newport shared this interesting story: When IBM first set up an email system for their employees, they had to figure out the server capacity sufficient to handle the email volume. So they looked at all the communication happening through...

Embrace Mistakes, But Only Once

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” — Mark Twain. We should learn from others’ mistakes. So in theory, we should be making very few mistakes, if any. But humans are humans. Sometimes, the only...

Parkinson’s law

I had to give a TEDx talk at IIM Ranchi but did not start working on the script until I had three days left. And I was not procrastinating. I was testing a new productivity idea — ‘doing things at the last responsible moment.’ When we have too much...

Change Yourself First

We all want to change the world, which is really hard. But we don’t want to change ourselves, which should be pretty easy. Why? Because changing the world is a fantasy. And fantasies feel good. On the other hand, for changing ourselves, there are no excuses we...