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Small, intermediate wins can keep you going
Over the last year, after my parents moved in with us, I have been hounding my mother to go for a daily walk. She has put on a fair bit of weight, possibly due to her slowing metabolism. But despite my pestering, my mother was very reluctant....
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Do the right thing
To put it politely – the startup world is messed up. Big time. And we need to fix it. In my last startup, when we were fundraising, we met a...
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...
Meaningful Work
Years ago, during my first startup, I took a shared office space in Bandra (Mumbai). Every morning, on the way to work, I would see a...
Showing outcomes is hard
I knew an IPS officer who had cultivated the reputation of being a ‘crime fighter.’ And he did that by chasing petty criminals at night. But alas,...
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Just do it
During my childhood, since my father was in the armed forces, I ended up moving cities and schools a few times. And whenever I started a new school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. In the first few days of a class, if I raised my hand to...
You are capable of more
You need a non-zero failure rate. And here is an experience of mine to prove that. In the second year of my MBA, as I was selecting my courses, I was faced with two options: Option A: Take a quant course that I could easily ace. Option B: Take up a...
Live on your own terms
During my MBA, a college classmate visited us in Philadelphia. He seemed happily settled in the US, doing a conventional tech job at a bank, drawing a $90k salary. His was a predictable job, with no growth prospects. Every year, his salary would go...
Brain needs a break
Years ago, we visited my wife’s aunt in California. When we opened her fridge door, it felt like the whole world came tumbling out – it was so jampacked. And that was not it – they had another industrial-scale freezer in their garage which was just...