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Attach your ego to the right thing
During my stint in the police, I was once overseeing a jampacked swearing-in ceremony for some new ministers at the Kerala Raj Bhavan (Governor’s official residence). The crowd was in a celebratory mood and hard to control. So when the Chief...
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Start small, iterate, and one day your progress will shock you.
Here is a two-step process for hitting even the hardest possible goals: 1. Get started 2. Iterate until success Here is the two-step process for...
HabitStrong Scaling
Our obsession with 'billion' has made us lose touch with reality. If you are building a startup, it HAS to be a unicorn. If you are an entrepreneur,...
Leadership takes the courage to be disliked
A leader who ONLY tells the crowd what they want to hear is not a leader -- he is just following the crowd from the front. Today, most political...
We all start from the same baseline — “Zero.”
I took up my last job at a private equity fund after quitting McKinsey. I soon found that I had no idea about the jargon they were using. I had not...
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When you take up something, do it like your life depends on it.
I would attribute half of my struggles and disappointments in my startup journey to just one factor: “Doing too many things.” This may seem weird – aren’t you supposed to do a lot of things in a startup? No, no, no. Don’t do that, please. And this...
Are 24 hours enough?
Last Friday, I figured that 24 hrs was not enough for me – there was way too much to do. So I ran this experiment: 1. I picked a priority task (something I absolutely had to get done). 2. I told myself, ‘Let everything else wait – let me just do...
When you are learning, there is no senior or junior.
I started my MBA 10 years after completing my B Tech. And since most of my classmates were much younger, I felt a bit like a dinosaur (in a not-so-cool way). If fact, I did derive some mischievous pleasure when I found classmates even more...
What is holding our country back?
At the private equity fund where I last worked, in about half the investments where we lost money, the culprit was fraud by the promoters (i.e., company owners). In some cases, the promoters blatantly stole more than a hundred crores, but...