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When a Blunder Turns Out to Be a Blessing
When writing my Wharton MBA application, I was working right until the 2:30 am deadline. I was frantically working on my application essays in a Word document, saving the edits every few minutes. But in a last-minute panic, I mistakenly overwrote a...
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Work Behind the Glamour
At the beginning of the Ukraine war, Russians were abandoning their tanks at an alarming rate due to breakdowns and technical glitches. On CNN, one...
Leadership is Hard
Stress spreads like a contagion. Just one person needs to have it -- especially the boss -- and soon, everybody around will feel it. Once the boss...
Focus Is Binary
Focus is binary. When a sharpshooter goes from 100% focus to 50% focus, his score does not decline by 50% but it goes to zero. He misses every...
The Beauty in the Ordinary
You feel you don't have a story to tell because your life is not exciting? Let me then tell you about Neman Ashraf, a police constable in Pakistan....
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Don’t Quit While on the Uphill
For the last 15 odd years, every day I go to the gym, I see the exact same cast of people working out -- feels like seeing the same play in the same theater 🙂 Given their clockwork-like consistency, you would imagine that sticking to a workout...
Find a Singular Goal
The best periods of my life were the ones in which I had one overriding life goal -- be it cracking a big exam or building a new product for HabitStrong (my startup). A singular goal that you really, badly, desperately want to accomplish, gives you...
One Small Action at a Time
Nobody gets up one day and says, "Let me become a drug addict." Nobody decides one day, "Let me start eating junk food, and become obese and unhealthy." Nor does anyone decide to become a chronic procrastinator, Netflix binge-watcher, or a...
The Myth of Perfection
In my last startup, ConceptOwl, a friend once told me about another learning startup that was growing like crazy by selling through schools. He asked, "Why don't you also do that?" When I heard that, my heart sank. We had tried the same approach...