The Bhagwad Gita’s principal message can be very confusing. It exhorts, "Do your duty, but do not concern yourself with the results." So we are asked to not desire the end outcome. But how can we pursue goals without that? In fact, the Buddha also echoed a similar...
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India deserves decent winners and decent losers, not conmen
Two years ago, a dotcom investor funded a serial entrepreneur to the tune of more than 200 cr and lost it promptly in less than a year. That begs the question -- what did the investor see in the entrepreneur? A great idea? A track record of solid value creation? Nah....
Meditation: a great tool to rewire habits and traits
“Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.” ― Shunryu Suzuki This seemingly self-contradictory Zen quote summarizes how we should live life. While it could be interpreted in many ways, here is my take on it. Each of us is a...
Why we suffer pain twice
I was listening to meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg's audiobook 'Breath by breath', in which he relates this story. He was attending a 3-month Zen meditation retreat in Asia. After 45 days, the Zen master running the retreat made a surprise announcement --...
The only life is now
I once went to University of Pennsylvania's medical school, one of the world’s best, with severe chronic back pain. Years ago, I had injured my back. It was a payback for all the long hours of working while ignoring my fitness. The MRI clearly showed the damage to...
Calm productivity
Productivity is not (and should not be) about extracting the most out of your life. We are not toothpaste tubes to be squeezed till the last drop. Joyful, calm productivity is about three things: A deliberate life: Working on things that matter -- the things you chose...
Experiences add value to life
CNN's founder, Ted Turner, owns millions of acres of land and forests. Naturally, the idea of owning all that property seems quite exciting. But hypothetically, what if you owned the Himalayas? What would you do with the ownership? Go for treks? You can do that even...
Embrace the journey
Columbus missed India by a few thousand miles and landed in the Caribbean. But we don't call him a 'failed explorer.' Then why do we call people failed entrepreneurs? Or failed in their careers? Even if you did not get to your original destination, did you still get...
Success Doesn’t Guarantee Fulfillment
"I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week." These are Elon Musk's words. He has been suffering from severe back pain, sleep issues, and so on. Musk says -- the pain he has gone through in the last few months, he would not...
Will AI Make Us Intellectually Obese?
Maybe I am paranoid but will AI make us dumber? Let me share an analogy. As a kid, I don’t remember seeing too many obese people. When I used to visit my village during summer vacations, almost nobody appeared overweight. And yet, there was no gym in the village. Nor...
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 way to learn things is...
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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you build better habits in yours.