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Mastery Demands Commitment
In 1998, we went for our first counter-insurgency patrol in Nagaland very excitedly. We were a bunch of IPS trainees attached to an army unit fighting militancy. Unlike in the Police Academy, the dangers here were very real. So we put on heavy...
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Embracing Accountability
During my days as a private equity investor, I saw people making two kinds of mistakes: Type 1 mistake: You make a bad investment, but when you...
Minor tasks vs deep work
When I walked into a shopping mall, they gave me 10 plastic tokens. And they said, “Each token buys one item -- anything you want, whether a 10...
We all get the jitters
A few months after I moved out of the US, just near my erstwhile apartment building, a plane landed in the Hudson River, near New York City. The US...
Where You Start Does Not Matter
In 1995, during my final year B.Tech placement season, everybody was obsessed with salaries -- companies like Cadence, offering Rs 10,000 per month...
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Learn Like an Intern
Quitting the Indian Police Service allowed me to restart my journey, like a fresh intern trying to make sense of the world. I totally loved the first 5-6 years in the Civil Services -- every day was a new learning. But gradually, it became more of...
These are Your Key Assets
When I quit my job to become an entrepreneur, it felt a bit weird, but not for the first time. Years earlier, to do my GMAT and MBA prep, when I took a transfer from the post of Trivandrum Police Commissioner to a low-key role in Kerala police, I...
The role of struggle in achieving success
During my days working in private equity, I once met an entrepreneur who manufactured orthopedic implants (typically used in surgery for fracture victims). His company was worth about Rs 100 crores, and he had built it single-handedly from scratch,...
Consistency is the key
Starting in 2018, I have been writing nearly every day, for almost 1,000 days (on Linkedin, Quora, HabitStrong blog). Writing per se was not the hard part. The challenge was to keep writing DESPITE the ups and downs, and the thousand different...