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...

A few years ago, in my previous startup (ConceptOwl), at one point, our app was practically unusable – it was that slow! We did not have a proper CTO and no matter how hard the tech team tried, they couldn’t fix the problem. I then asked my co-founder to learn coding...

On day 1 of a project at McKinsey, during the kick-off team meeting, one guy said, “I will not touch my laptop on weekends.” He explained that he was divorced and got custody of his daughter only on weekends. So work was out of bounds as he wanted to fully spend that...

Here is an easy tip for building focus and reclaiming your time. Whenever you are working, keep your phone outside your arm’s reach. To grab your phone, you should have to get up. Here is why this works. We check our apps to escape boredom and frustration. And when we...

During my MBA, I saw some people who would go to any length to hide which companies they were interviewing with for a job. Their fear was that others would also apply for the same job and wreck their chances. Of course, one could probably argue that since the number...

Last year, during one of our bootcamps, a participant shared that her company had installed a software on the company laptop to track whether they were actively working or not. Apparently, if they did not move the mouse every few minutes, the software would assume...

During my training at the National Police Academy, I noticed these photos of National Security Guard commandos (‘black cat ’ commandos) shooting at small circular cardboard targets held by their colleagues. If they missed their aim even by a few inches, the bullet...

I joined my first job (Indian Police Service) in my early twenties and was among the younger officers. I joined my second job (McKinsey) in my mid-thirties and was among the older lot in my batch. Does it mean I was successful the first time and a failure the second...

A guest speaker at Wharton told us – ‘Every time you open your mouth, your earn or burn market share.’ In today’s world, articulation is like oxygen – you need it to survive. - Persuading your boss to give you a raise is articulation. - The debates and discussions at...