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Focus on What Matters: Don’t Just Polish Furniture
On the D-day of a consulting engagement at McKinsey, the team thrilled the client with a proposal to cut millions of dollars in cost. But the senior partner heading the engagement told the client, "What we are doing is polishing your furniture...
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Optionality Hinders Action
I write nearly every day. And I have done it for years. Because in my mind, writing is not optional. It is something I do on good days and bad, on...
Hardship Fuels Change
Had it been left to me, I suspect I would probably still be sitting on my 1st-year electrical engineering courses without completing them. Ok, I am...
Use things without giving them power over you
I went to IIT for the brand and the academics, but what I loved the most about the place was its simplicity. On campus, there was no show-off, no...
Rational skepticism
No matter how intelligent you are, one thing can screw up your rationality -- ideology. Because ideology presupposes the right answers. And these...
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Life does not offer risk-free upside
When the UPSC Civil Services results came out last year, somebody apparently commented that if Sundar Pichai had cleared the exam, he would today be the collector of Greater Noida. So is Civil Services the right choice? Or is it Google, Microsoft,...
Focus is the most non-linear productivity tool
"I have too little time" -- almost always, this is a lie. I have found that when I work for 5-6 hrs with intense focus, I have no more cognitive capacity left. And this is not an isolated fact. A study of elite musicians (e.g., violinists) revealed...
Dig deep and take your own decisions
During my MBA, like in many other B-schools, you couldn't just register for any course you wanted at Wharton -- you had to win them in an auction. And naturally, everybody wanted the most sought-after courses from star professors, which cost nearly...
Resume can’t substitute for competence
In my consulting days, one of my managers had built a unique personal brand -- he loved all-nighters and had an aversion to sleep. He was known as an 'intense' person but I soon found that his intensity boiled down to only one thing -- staying late...