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Don’t quit. Just restart
I suspect this post will save you from unnecessary failure. When you aim to build a good habit or achieve a long-term goal, what is the first advice you get? Consistency, consistency, consistency... Yes, that is true. But here is the thing nobody...
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Career and Contentment
At my last job with a PE fund, one of my bosses (Victor Menezes) joined Citibank as a fresher, later became its global CEO, and retired as the...
Glamour vs Substance
In 2009, when I had just joined a private equity fund, we were invited to the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai for a fancy presentation by a healthcare...
Every job deserves respect
Today, I lead a 10-member team at HabitStrong. Many years ago, I headed a team of 3,500 people when I was the Trivandrum City Police commissioner....
The Value of Time
In the US, when I had to hire people to help with moving my house, I paid them $25 per hr for the manual work – the money value of time there was...
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Focus on substance, not appearances
Many people find it quite jarring that I run HabitStrong out of Trivandrum. More than once, I have been advised to move my startup to Bangalore. Why? Because Bangalore just sounds a lot cooler and more ‘startup-like.’ This obsession with...
Temptation Bundling
A colleague of mine has been working out for an hour a day on her gym’s elliptical machine – and yet, she hates it. How does she do it then? While working out, she watches episodes of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ on her Netflix app – that is how. Since she...
The Job security
A big chunk of India’s youth is addicted to government jobs – and that has become our curse. It needs to stop. If you go to Patna, you will reportedly find tens of thousands of youngsters preparing for government job exams. And it is probably the...
Pain of Regrets
One of the small regrets I have in life is that I never did a commando training course. When I finished my IPS training I was very fit and I thought about doing a commando course. And it was very easy for me to do that – I could literally have...