Late Night Work

During my stint with McKinsey, whenever we did late nights (more like early mornings), it was rarely because the work per se was that heavy. It was almost always because we did not create clarity sufficiently early in the day about what was to be accomplished. In a...

Passive income

There is a new fashion in town: bad-mouth 9-to-5 jobs and glorify passive income. It is as if we can all quit our jobs and just create an online course or something like that, and money will start rolling in. I think that is total nonsense. I am all for creating a...

Surround yourself with good people

Burnout rarely happens because of sheer hard work. Almost always, it happens due to exhaustion – emotional, mental, and physical. Almost all of us are capable of working hard. In fact, many of us become uncomfortable if we don’t have work to do. What drains us is a...

Monotasking

Here is a guaranteed way to overwhelm your brain and stress yourself out – keep switching rapidly between tasks without completing any of them. Every time we switch from task A to B, we incur a cost. Our brain doesn’t fully let go of task A even though we have moved...

Career Growth Hack

The first time I did a course on valuation at Wharton, I did not learn much – it was way too technical and conveyed little intuition. So I ‘illegally’ gatecrashed an undergraduate class on valuation by Prof. David Wessels – I and a few other MBAs would often sit on...