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Rational skepticism
No matter how intelligent you are, one thing can screw up your rationality -- ideology. Because ideology presupposes the right answers. And these right answers will pervade every aspect of your life, be it your political, economic, or social...
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Overcome envy
Envy is an amazing thing. I never envy the British Queen, who has inherited this massive fortune and privilege without having worked for it for even...
Freedom
When I left my last job to do a startup, a new reality hit me – no more Car Club pickups, business class flights, expensive hotels, or unlimited...
Conviction
In early 2009, I attended a townhall at McKinsey. This was just a few months after Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, and the US was still in the midst of...
Conventional Wisdom
In the 2nd year of my MBA at Wharton, I asked a finance professor for advice on landing a job with a private equity fund. When he learned that I had...
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Margin-free shop
Once, while driving in Trivandrum City, I saw a shop with a big banner: 'Margin-free shop’. Presumably, they don't keep any profit margin. On seeing that, you almost get the feeling that 'profit' is a dirty word. In fact, my daughter even asked,...
Straightforward path
Yesterday, I picked up a small rock lying on the road, and it is now sitting on my table. How much will you pay for it? Probably nothing. But what if you believed that someone else would pay 20 rupees for that rock? Now, you might happily shell out...
Opportunity for gaining experience
From the many 180 degree turns I have made in my career, the one big lesson I have learned is this: Life is to be experienced, not optimized. Life has no objective function to be maximized – it is not a calculus problem. It doesn’t have a...
Comparisons
You can’t lose a game you never played. Then why do we compare ourselves with others, whose lives we never lived? When we get caught up in the comparison game, we forget – everybody has different starting points, different life constraints, and...