Years ago, I was involved in organizing the National Games in Trivandrum, where two people did a skydiving demo for the opening ceremony. In this insanely dangerous stunt, these parajumpers were to land in a stadium, inside a busy city. And once the parachutes opened,...

In 2008, I had a lunch-cum-job interview with a very successful New York-based fund manager, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars from investing. I asked him, "What has been the hardest part of your job?" He said, "There was a time when for two years, I had...

A friend of mine was once interning with a major Wall Street bank. One day, on a Friday evening, his boss asked him to make a presentation and share it by Sunday, ensuring that his weekend was ruined. My friend did not understand the urgency but there was little he...

Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important, it is called 'firefighting.' And firefighting destroys peace of mind. So you should be asking: How did an important...

About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would mindlessly switch on the TV after a stressful day at work. Soon, I started worrying about missing this or that episode, or...

Long ago, a friend who took the NDA/military career route was telling me about the bayonet charge routine in the army. In a bayonet charge, you run towards and attack an enemy bunker typically defended by a machine gun firing 10 bullets per second. What are the odds...

Whenever consultants want to say something, they always have 'three things.' And we mock them for that 🙂 But if you want to communicate well, there is some real science here -- the science of working memory. It turns out that our working memory can hold about 7...

A former McKinsey colleague of mine from Australia once said that his father would claim insulin from the Australian Health System and give it to their dog. But how did the dog become diabetic? Aren't animals supposed to be naturally healthy? Actually, we are all...

A corporate executive I was recently talking to, said that on many days, he has meetings from morning to evening -- sometimes without even a break for lunch. So I asked him, 'When do you get to do your work?' I thought he would say, "I stay up late and do it."...

I hate cowardice. Yet, on a few occasions, I was a coward. When I launched my first startup, I built a product that found zero customers -- zero revenue. Something was wrong. Maybe the product was wrong. Maybe, I had no idea how to market. (Now I know that it was the...

To be fit, you don't need to run 100-mile ultramarathons or climb Mt. Everest. To build physical strength, you don't need to be a powerlifter. To build good focus, you don't need to meditate in the Himalayas for a year. When we seek inspiration for change, we...

Yesterday, during my evening walk with a retired IAS officer, he said that many officers in his service are unhappy with their professional life. They feel stuck but somehow reconcile to it. And this is not just about IAS but it could happen in any job, especially the...

In 1994, when India's ex-PM Narasimha Rao addressed the US Congress, he told this story about Mahatma Gandhi: Once a lady came to Gandhiji and asked him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. Instead of doing what she asked, Gandhiji asked her to come after two weeks....

There is nothing you can't get better at. But conditions apply. For any kind of learning, be it a physical or a mental skill, our neurons have to rewire -- it is called neuroplasticity. Our neuroplasticity is extremely high in pre-teens and remains quite high till age...

The hardest thing in life is not clearing tough exams, getting big-brand jobs, making money, or earning fame. All these are hard but they aren't the hardest. The hardest is accepting your life 'as is' -- no preconditions, no changes -- just 'as is.' For the one who...