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The Pursuit of Mastery
When building a habit we sometimes get bored in a few weeks. But a pianist may practice 20,000 hours for over a decade to qualify for an orchestra. To be a meditation master, you need 10,000 to 20,000 hours of practice. In fact, Mingyur Rinpoche...
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Learning is the antidote to aging
A few years ago, I had to visit a hospital because of a persistent chest infection. It so happened that the senior doctor was unavailable and hence...
The best is already here
When I was a kid, our family train travel was rarely in the AC compartment. Therefore, we kids were always sitting near the windows staring at the...
Take your time, focus hard, and get it done
In movies, you see heroes spraying light weapons in automatic mode, killing dozens of 'bad guys.' In real life, you never do that. Here is why. An...
Face your fears
I spent my 4 years at IIT mostly lazing around, wasting my time. But I had other classmates who slogged hard. In the final year, most hard-working...
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Let us allow people to enjoy their work
In my very first engagement as a McKinsey consultant, we were trying to schedule a meeting with a senior leader at a pharma client. She literally threw up her hands, saying, "I am back to back with meetings the whole day." I was sorely tempted to...
Start small, iterate, and one day your progress will shock you.
Here is a two-step process for hitting even the hardest possible goals: 1. Get started 2. Iterate until success Here is the two-step process for NEVER getting started: 1. Figure out everything 2. Then start Getting started seems daunting because we...
HabitStrong Scaling
Our obsession with 'billion' has made us lose touch with reality. If you are building a startup, it HAS to be a unicorn. If you are an entrepreneur, you have to be a billionaire. Gentle reminder: A billion dollars is more than Rs 7,000 crores. The...
Leadership takes the courage to be disliked
A leader who ONLY tells the crowd what they want to hear is not a leader -- he is just following the crowd from the front. Today, most political leaders across the globe are 'followers from the front.' Leadership takes the courage to be disliked....