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LinkedIn Posts

Patience and Readiness

In 2008, I had a lunch-cum-job interview with a very successful New York-based fund manager, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars from investing. I asked him, "What has been the hardest part of your job?" He said, "There was a time when for two years, I had...

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Escape the Urgency Trap

Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important, it is called 'firefighting.' And firefighting destroys peace of mind. So you should be asking: How did an important...

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Breaking Free from FOMO

About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would mindlessly switch on the TV after a stressful day at work. Soon, I started worrying about missing this or that episode, or...

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Don’t Freeze, Keep Moving

Long ago, a friend who took the NDA/military career route was telling me about the bayonet charge routine in the army. In a bayonet charge, you run towards and attack an enemy bunker typically defended by a machine gun firing 10 bullets per second. What are the odds...

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Simple Diet, Strong Health

A former McKinsey colleague of mine from Australia once said that his father would claim insulin from the Australian Health System and give it to their dog. But how did the dog become diabetic? Aren't animals supposed to be naturally healthy? Actually, we are all...

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First, Let People Work

A corporate executive I was recently talking to, said that on many days, he has meetings from morning to evening -- sometimes without even a break for lunch. So I asked him, 'When do you get to do your work?' I thought he would say, "I stay up late and do it."...

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The Courage to Admit Mistakes

I hate cowardice. Yet, on a few occasions, I was a coward. When I launched my first startup, I built a product that found zero customers -- zero revenue. Something was wrong. Maybe the product was wrong. Maybe, I had no idea how to market. (Now I know that it was the...

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Small Steps, Big Results

To be fit, you don't need to run 100-mile ultramarathons or climb Mt. Everest. To build physical strength, you don't need to be a powerlifter. To build good focus, you don't need to meditate in the Himalayas for a year. When we seek inspiration for change, we...

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Living Beyond Fear

Yesterday, during my evening walk with a retired IAS officer, he said that many officers in his service are unhappy with their professional life. They feel stuck but somehow reconcile to it. And this is not just about IAS but it could happen in any job, especially the...

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Earn the Right to Advise

In 1994, when India's ex-PM Narasimha Rao addressed the US Congress, he told this story about Mahatma Gandhi: Once a lady came to Gandhiji and asked him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. Instead of doing what she asked, Gandhiji asked her to come after two weeks....

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