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Pause before you respond

I once had this habit of responding to any question a nanosecond after the person stopped speaking (or sometimes, even before that). Maybe, I was afraid of a pause between the question and my answer. Yet, there is nothing more pleasing to our ears...

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Recent Posts

Focus on Today

In my previous startup, we once reached a point where only had cash left to survive three months. Even worse, we had huge expenses coming up over...

The Realities of Careers

Job loss is not a blot on your career. It is an unfortunate feature of the free market economy. Gaps in your resume are also not a blot on your...

Life is an opportunity

When I was leaving my job at McKinsey after a relatively short stint of 18 months, a classmate remarked that I was being hasty – in the initial few...

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Attach your ego to the right thing

During my stint in the police, I was once overseeing a jampacked swearing-in ceremony for some new ministers at the Kerala Raj Bhavan (Governor’s official residence). The crowd was in a celebratory mood and hard to control. So when the Chief...

Prioritization

Most of us suck at managing our time. And here is the biggest mistake we make — we try really hard to finish our to-do list. When that does not happen, we get frustrated and blame ourselves for being lazy. In fact, we feel absolutely certain that...

How to NOT quit

You can’t sustain a habit unless you learn how to NOT quit. We rarely quit because we decided to. Instead, this is what happens: 1. After sticking to a habit for a few days or weeks, for whatever reason, the streak breaks. For a few days or weeks,...

Micromanaging

In a project at McKinsey, I was loving it totally until I started hating it. At that time, I had joined the Firm just a few months ago. And when the project started, there was so much to do that my manager gave everybody full autonomy. I did my own...

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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you
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