Beyond the Business Card

If you throw away your business card, whatever you have left, is truly yours, because nobody can take it away. We all derive identity and pride from our jobs, and it is perfectly logical. But it is worth remembering that our worth as a professional is derived from two...

Rewiring Fear

If you have had a toxic boss, their mere presence will make you anxious even after you have left that job. Why is that? It turns out that this anxiety is triggered by an unconscious process, which you can’t control intellectually. When you go through trauma,...

There Are No Shortcuts in Life

Almost every startup (including unicorns) staring at ‘death-by-cash-burn’ did not start off this way. Most startups were based on solid ideas and were addressing real need gaps. Even the startups that went down in flames (e.g., GoMechanic) were addressing...

Do One Thing, Do It Fully

Multitasking doesn’t work. But if you are hell-bent on it, there is ONLY one scenario in which it (sort of) works. You can multitask two actions simultaneously if one of them has become an ingrained habit. E.g., if you are a good driver, you can listen to a...

Moderate Daily Effort

During one particular year in school, I became very complacent and whiled away my time. Suddenly, one day, I woke up realizing that I had only a few months left for the exams. So I calculated the hours required to finish the syllabus and came up with a hefty target,...