Latest Post
Learned Helplessness: Why Good People Help Us Break Free
During my policing career, when interacting with very poor people, I would often notice an attitude of helplessness and resignation. Life had probably battered them so much that they felt that nothing they did mattered. Martin Seligman, a renowned...
Recent Posts
Rethinking Deadlines: Prioritize Quality, Not Urgency
A friend of mine was once interning with a major Wall Street bank. One day, on a Friday evening, his boss asked him to make a presentation and share...
Escape the Urgency Trap
Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important,...
Breaking Free from FOMO
About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would...
Don’t Freeze, Keep Moving
Long ago, a friend who took the NDA/military career route was telling me about the bayonet charge routine in the army. In a bayonet charge, you run...
More Articles
Why Consultants Always Have ‘Three Things’
Whenever consultants want to say something, they always have 'three things.' And we mock them for that 🙂 But if you want to communicate well, there is some real science here -- the science of working memory. It turns out that our working memory...
Simple Diet, Strong Health
A former McKinsey colleague of mine from Australia once said that his father would claim insulin from the Australian Health System and give it to their dog. But how did the dog become diabetic? Aren't animals supposed to be naturally healthy?...
First, Let People Work
A corporate executive I was recently talking to, said that on many days, he has meetings from morning to evening -- sometimes without even a break for lunch. So I asked him, 'When do you get to do your work?' I thought he would say, "I stay up late...
The Courage to Admit Mistakes
I hate cowardice. Yet, on a few occasions, I was a coward. When I launched my first startup, I built a product that found zero customers -- zero revenue. Something was wrong. Maybe the product was wrong. Maybe, I had no idea how to market. (Now I...