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The Power of Small Actions
Every time you innocuously glance at your WhatsApp or Instagram, you are building a habit. Every gratifying action builds a habit -- no exceptions. I had already known this from psychology. But the Buddhist meditation master (Nyanaponika Thera)...
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Beyond Exam Charades
During the compulsory military training in Taiwan, recruits are seemingly trained with a singular objective – to pass the exams. When practicing the...
Simplest hack to grow in life
When I was leaving my last job to do a startup, my family asked me to reconsider because ‘doing business is not in our genes.’ Do genes predispose...
Do the right thing
To put it politely – the startup world is messed up. Big time. And we need to fix it. In my last startup, when we were fundraising, we met a...
Mastery Demands Commitment
In 1998, we went for our first counter-insurgency patrol in Nagaland very excitedly. We were a bunch of IPS trainees attached to an army unit...
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Meaningful Work
Years ago, during my first startup, I took a shared office space in Bandra (Mumbai). Every morning, on the way to work, I would see a retired-looking person (in his early sixties) idly sitting in his house by the window, with some jazz music...
Showing outcomes is hard
I knew an IPS officer who had cultivated the reputation of being a ‘crime fighter.’ And he did that by chasing petty criminals at night. But alas, all he was doing was the job of a head constable. Admittedly, he was good at it but that is not what...
Just do it
During my childhood, since my father was in the armed forces, I ended up moving cities and schools a few times. And whenever I started a new school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. In the first few days of a class, if I raised my hand to...
You are capable of more
You need a non-zero failure rate. And here is an experience of mine to prove that. In the second year of my MBA, as I was selecting my courses, I was faced with two options: Option A: Take a quant course that I could easily ace. Option B: Take up a...