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Meditation: a great tool to rewire habits and traits
“Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.” ― Shunryu Suzuki This seemingly self-contradictory Zen quote summarizes how we should live life. While it could be interpreted in many ways, here is my take on it....
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Small steps for lasting change
When starting my MBA at Wharton, I kept telling myself, “Don’t ruin it again. This is the last chance.” Earlier, I had ruined my 4 years at IIT --...
Micromanagement
It was my most amazing project at McKinsey. And yet, just when things were looking great, they went downhill. Here is what happened. This was the...
Be your best
On the National Police Academy parade ground, our assistant drill instructor, head constable Ram Singh, would bark at us like he was General Patton....
Failure vs a life of regret
Five years into my first job with the Indian Police Service, I was unsure what to do next -- something had changed. In the beginning, everything was...
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Hard or easy is in our mind
Panwali was going to be our Waterloo, we were warned. This was a part of the 9-day trek during our Civil Services training that included a near-vertical climb of 2 km in the Panwali mountain range. In the words of our Physical Training Instructor,...
Change tomorrow’s story
In a semiconductor course tutorial at IIT Kanpur, Prof. Aloke Dutta pointed at me and said, “Please come and explain the functioning of an NPN transistor.” As I sprang to my feet and walked up to the blackboard, my friend Ashish Agrawal was gaping...
Value your time and attention
In one of my McKinsey projects, every Friday, sharp at 5:30 pm, our engagement manager would pack up and vanish while the rest of us kept slogging till late in the night. And for the next 24 hrs, he was unreachable even if the world melted down....
Meaning of life
There are two people I knew, who tragically died of cancer -- one somewhat recently. One was a professor and another was doing some research study. And in both cases, they kept working nearly till the end. Why did they do that instead of taking it...