Prioritizing meaning over pleasure

When I decided to write the Civil Services, I uncomplainingly slogged for 7 months. It was certainly not pleasurable in the normal sense and yet I was super-motivated. We often hear that humans are ONLY motivated to do pleasurable things — it is plain wrong....

Experience is just an opportunity to learn

A few years ago, in my startup, we were building a tech platform that was performing horribly. The screens would take forever to load — clearly, the algorithms were poorly written. Though we had experienced engineers, we did not have the funding to hire very...

Pleasure of life

During the time we spent in terrorism-affected North-East (as part of the IPS training), you couldn’t step out without at least three machine-gun mounted vehicles, and everyone was armed with AK-47 rifles — such was the security threat. After that, when I landed...