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Embrace Mistakes, But Only Once
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." -- Mark Twain. We should learn from others' mistakes. So in theory, we should be making very few mistakes, if any. But humans are humans. Sometimes, the only way...
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Nothing wastes more time than random activity.
During a leadership training at McKinsey in Chicago, we were split into teams and given a task: From cardboard kits for building toy planes, we had...
An entrepreneur is a player – he can lose
Today, while talking to a friend at Juniper Networks, we got talking about the company's founder, an IIT Kanpur alumnus. His profile mentions that...
This game stops when we stop
Most small goals in life are like a football match -- you can win, but you can also lose. If you are looking to crack a job interview or clear a...
Sometimes luck comes well-disguised
While I was running near the Rajbhavan in Trivandrum, the streetlights went off at 6 am. It was still dark but I kept running, daydreaming in my...
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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 a relatively junior doctor had to attend to me. During the consultation, this junior doctor seemed...
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 rivers, mountains, and everything else. India felt so amazing. But sadly, in the last few decades,...
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 AK-47 will finish a full magazine of 30 bullets in 3 seconds, and they will almost all miss the...
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 guys had great career options lined up, including scholarships from some top US universities. I told...