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When Focus Feels Like a Battle, Step Back
Yesterday, when I was doing some focused work, after some time, I felt so agitated and restless that I desperately wanted an escape -- check the news, open LinkedIn, do anything. When the task is hard or tedious, this 'escape impulse' comes to me...
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Embrace the journey
Columbus missed India by a few thousand miles and landed in the Caribbean. But we don't call him a 'failed explorer.' Then why do we call people...
Success Doesn’t Guarantee Fulfillment
"I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week." These are Elon Musk's words. He has been suffering from...
Will AI Make Us Intellectually Obese?
Maybe I am paranoid but will AI make us dumber? Let me share an analogy. As a kid, I don’t remember seeing too many obese people. When I used to...
The Unpredictable Ripple of New Technology
In a book I was reading, Cal Newport shared this interesting story: When IBM first set up an email system for their employees, they had to figure...
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Embrace Mistakes, But Only Once
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." -- Mark Twain. We should learn from others' mistakes. So in theory, we should be making very few mistakes, if any. But humans are humans. Sometimes, the only way...
Parkinson’s law
I had to give a TEDx talk at IIM Ranchi but did not start working on the script until I had three days left. And I was not procrastinating. I was testing a new productivity idea -- 'doing things at the last responsible moment.' When we have too...
Change Yourself First
We all want to change the world, which is really hard. But we don't want to change ourselves, which should be pretty easy. Why? Because changing the world is a fantasy. And fantasies feel good. On the other hand, for changing ourselves, there are...
Time on Earth is limited
When I was learning meditation, I was utterly confused by all the contradictory information out there on blogs, YouTube, etc. So I tried reading the original text on Buddhist meditation (Satipatthana sutta). And the one thing that shocked me was...