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The Hidden Joy of Having a Compelling Goal
I know many people who miss the days when they prepared for IITJEE or some major exam. Why? 1. A singular, compelling goal like a big exam overrides most distractions and helps you focus, often creating a pleasurable flow-like state. 2. In exam...
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Life is full of opportunities
At McKinsey, when I was once in a really tight spot, a young woman at one of the Firm's specialist groups came to my rescue. Under an impossible...
Can losing a job be an opportunity?
Can losing a job be an opportunity? I don't want to sugarcoat or give a feel-good answer. But let me share a few experiences. When I was running my...
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...
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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 particularly aggressive (‘sharky’) investor. During our discussions, they constantly told us to follow the...
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 fighting militancy. Unlike in the Police Academy, the dangers here were very real. So we put on heavy...
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...