Rajan’s Linkedin posts

Why Less is More

In my previous EdTech startup, ConceptOwl, I found one day that new videos were not showing up on our app even though we were recording dozens of them every week. Why? Manpower problem. We had too many people! I found that there were too many steps in the video...

Why We Need Clear Priorities

Your mind CANNOT focus on a task if it subliminally fears that you are missing out on something more pressing. When you have that fear or anxiety, it does the following: You multitask or leave a task incomplete (e.g., a half-written email) and jump to some other task....

Life Takes Time

In 2010, at an investor event at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, I was dazzled by a company called Opto Circuits. Their polished presentation, storytelling, and impressive product display left no doubt that a medical device giant was emerging from India. The founder won...

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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you build better habits in yours.

Pain of Regrets

One of the small regrets I have in life is that I never did a commando training course. When I finished my IPS training I was very fit and I thought about doing a commando course. And it was very easy for me to do that – I could literally have picked any course and...

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Don’t quit but Be flexible.

Two of my friends were doing a startup together – both exceptionally smart and good human beings. But unfortunately, their startup did not do well. One of them continued toiling, while the other one quit. Would you say that the guy who quit lacked perseverance? Now...

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Life is not about non-stop excitement

During my MBA at Wharton, people told me that consulting is really exciting – you get to solve the hardest business problems! So I joined McKinsey for my summer internship. And I was looking forward to all the excitement of problem-solving. But on my summer project,...

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Never blame yourself for past mistakes

When I was working as a consultant with McKinsey, one day, the client walked into our room and said, “Guys, I know you are doing cost-cutting and all. But I want to tell you a story.” He told us that when Sony acquired Columbia Pictures, a movie production company,...

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Stop multitasking

Every time we switch between tasks, it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task. On top of that, every time you switch tasks, the previous task leaves an attention residue in our brain. And if we keep switching, the attention residue adds up and...

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Two-Tab Policy

For long, I used to have so many windows open on my Chrome browser that I was unable to shut down my laptop at night, sometimes, for months on end. But why should that matter? It matters because when there are a zillion windows open, they tempt and distract us. In...

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The Road to Happiness

In my last project at McKinsey, I was so exhausted with the late nights that I felt like I was dying. One weekend, over dinner, I met this brilliant entrepreneur introduced to me by a Wharton classmate. This guy had founded a company and later hired his Harvard...

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Late Night Work

During my stint with McKinsey, whenever we did late nights (more like early mornings), it was rarely because the work per se was that heavy. It was almost always because we did not create clarity sufficiently early in the day about what was to be accomplished. In a...

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Passive income

There is a new fashion in town: bad-mouth 9-to-5 jobs and glorify passive income. It is as if we can all quit our jobs and just create an online course or something like that, and money will start rolling in. I think that is total nonsense. I am all for creating a...

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Surround yourself with good people

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...

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Monotasking

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...

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Career Growth Hack

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...

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The Biggest Reward

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...

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Beyond the Hype

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...

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Distraction = Death

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...

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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you build better habits in yours.