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How to Know If Your Idea Is Real
Early in my startup days, I used to sometimes wonder -- am I doing something real or am I just fiddling around, fooling myself? How do I know this is not all in my head? The ONLY real way of knowing whether you are doing something real (and...
Recent Posts
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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...
Cut Ruthlessly
One of the joys of working in government is the plethora of committees and meetings 🙂 But now even the private sector seems to be catching up on that. Like entropy, the number of committees (and their meetings) only goes up. Here is why. In...
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 deadline, I had to geo-map hundreds of branches of a bank (our client). But this lady got it done. So...
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 last startup, the first Covid lockdown forced us to shut shop. Within a week, we had no business, no...