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Don’t stay busy to escape reality
Believe it or not, hard work can be counterproductive. And staying busy can be like morphine -- it numbs the pain of not knowing what to do in life or career. When we want to escape that pain of feeling lost, doing inconsequential things is very...
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Are we stealing our children’s joy?
I recently heard that 17 kids got 100 percentile in IITJEE Mains. I wasn’t sure if we should celebrate or feel sad. Here is why. About half of these...
Prioritizing health and well-being
Day 1 of IPS training. When the whistle went off at around 5 am, we ran down the stairs of the IPS Mess for the morning PT, terrified of being even...
Responsibility is the price of freedom
After my father dropped me off at the IIT Kanpur hostel, for the next 4 years, my parents did not even once ask about my grades. Nor did they bother...
Stop wasting your life being busy
Early in my tenure at McKinsey, I once committed a terrifying blunder. In those days, every BlackBerry notification would make us stop all work and...
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Success is the result of consistent hard work, not just luck
I was racing a 2:30 am deadline to submit my Wharton MBA application in Round 1. Post midnight, in the frantic rush, as I was giving the final touches to my application, the Microsoft Word document crashed. When I tried recovering the changes, I...
Breaking the limits
On the top floor of my building, lived my friend and junior from IPS and IIT - Sunil Asnani. In the evenings, we would often hang out on the rooftop, talking about his plan to quit the IPS and do an MBA from a US business school. The plan sounded...
Overcoming language barriers
For most of my life, I went to English-medium schools where nobody spoke English. However, from grades 1-4, I attended a government school in Bangalore where kids used English even for social conversations. That is the only real exposure I had to...
The key to success lies in focus
In the first semester at IIT Kanpur, I noticed this guy whose class notes would just be half a page of tiny scrawl, scribbled with a ball-point refill. In the hostel, he would usually be playing cricket or doing bull sessions with friends. Clearly,...