Burnout rarely happens because of sheer hard work. Almost always, it happens due to exhaustion – emotional, mental, and physical. Almost all of us are capable of working hard. In fact, many of us become uncomfortable if we don’t have work to do. What drains us is a...

Here is a guaranteed way to overwhelm your brain and stress yourself out – keep switching rapidly between tasks without completing any of them. Every time we switch from task A to B, we incur a cost. Our brain doesn’t fully let go of task A even though we have moved...

The first time I did a course on valuation at Wharton, I did not learn much – it was way too technical and conveyed little intuition. So I ‘illegally’ gatecrashed an undergraduate class on valuation by Prof. David Wessels – I and a few other MBAs would often sit on...

In Dec 2014, I got an award that I didn’t quite deserve. That year, the TiE Kerala chapter gave me their annual ‘Startup Entrepreneur of the Year Award’ for outstanding contribution to entrepreneurship. To be honest, I had made no such contribution – at least, not in...

When I was running my previous startup, ConceptOwl, I heard of another EdTech startup that was growing rapidly using strategies that were not working for us. People would ask us -- 'Hey, that startup is making it work. Why can't you do that?' We had no answer, and I...

I once thought that the biggest harm from digital distraction (e.g., WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.) was the wastage of time. It is like saying that drugs are harmful because they cost money. But if someone gave them free, would they be ok? Time-wastage is the smallest of...

An investment banker friend of mine working with Goldman Sachs in New York once told me that in their office gym, you would find people running on the treadmill even past midnight. Being an investment banker is a grueling job – people often work more than 100 hrs a...

One way to run 20 km is to just run the first 1 km without worrying about the remaining 19. And then repeat that 19 times. That is how I often run long distances, and I believe, so do a lot of people. What is true for running, is just as true for any challenging goal...

One of my past bosses had a very clear metric to evaluate your commitment – how long you sat in the office at night. In fact, he himself used to sit till 9 pm every day. A very hard-working guy he was. Except that when he was transferred out, his successor found that...

When I graduated from IIT in 1995, I was expecting to soon figure out my life and my career, and quickly 'settle down'. I then joined the Indian Police Service, the ultimate platform for 'settling down'. It was such a stable and predictable job that I knew the exact...

I often feel that I wasted my four years at IIT. But I sometimes wonder if it was not a total waste. In many of the courses I did, the math was so dense that you had no idea what was going on. For 90% of the semester, I would just be going through the motions like a...

Recently, I was talking to a friend in the gym, who looks fabulously fit, having shed 12 kgs of flab. And here is what he said: ‘Earlier, I really struggled to eat healthy. But now that I have started working out, I automatically eat healthier and drink more water –...

I had a boss in the Indian Police Service, who played safe all his life – he never took a bold stand, nor did he ever uphold any principles. His only goal was to please his bosses and take the easy way out. Nobody respected him – I certainly did not. Years ago, when I...

Everywhere in life, you will come across these negative people – the excuse-makers, the fault finders, the folks who see something bad in everyone/everything and pick up fights. They believe that everything wrong in their life is someone else’s fault. So how do you...

There is a lot of nonsense out there about self-improvement. You will hear pseudo-scientific things like ‘manifestation’, ‘law of attraction’, and stuff like that. Just a reminder – we don’t need any pseudo-science when we can just as easily change our life the normal...