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The Hidden Cost of Recurring Meetings
My last project at McKinsey was a very high-profile one -- the client was a vertical CXO at a large global bank. The goal was to flesh out their overall corporate strategy. So naturally, many bigwigs were involved and because of our collective...
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Prioritize substance over hype
When I launched my current startup, HabitStrong, I decided to not go the conventional route of painting a growth story and trying to impress the...
Focus
If you keep hearing that startup life is about non-stop hustle and working 16 hours a day, rarely sleeping before 2 am, let me assure you – that is...
Lessons from Policing
One fine morning in 2001, when I was heading the Trivandrum City Police, students from a particular political union in Trivandrum’s University...
Acknowledge your mistakes
During my stint with a private equity firm, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of a simple reason: We could not accept the truth when...
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Recipe for simplifying life
Over the years, I have discovered this recipe for simplifying life and getting rid of melodrama. Allow me to share it: 1. Don't chase goals at the cost of 'peace of mind.' 2. Your health comes first – mental and physical. Everything else comes...
Living without regrets
After serving a few years in the Indian Police Service (IPS), I felt like a (very comfortable) frog in a well, missing out on so many experiences the world has to offer. So instead of living with regret, I quit IPS. What followed was a long...
Specialization
I would attribute half of my struggles and disappointments in my startup journey to just one factor: "Doing too many things." This may seem weird – aren’t you supposed to do a lot of things in a startup? No, no, no. Don’t do that, please. And this...
Focused Work
Last Friday, I figured that 24 hrs was not enough for me – there was way too much to do. So I ran this experiment: 1. I picked a priority task (something I absolutely had to get done). 2. I told myself, ‘Let everything else wait – let me just do...