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The Yerkes-Dodson Law
Why do deadlines improve performance? It makes no sense because deadlines create anxiety, which is the enemy of focus and productivity. For that, we need to understand Yerkes-Dodson law. When we have a deadline, our brain releases an alerting...
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Finding Satisfaction in Simple Things
The first time I did pistol shooting, in Mussoorie’s IAS training academy, our pistols all malfunctioned - or so it seemed. Five of us, barely 15 m...
Saving Childhoods
At a typical IITJEE coaching center in Andhra, a student wakes up at 6 am and studies till 10 pm. For 16 hours, 6 days a week, they slog, with a few...
Persistence Pays
Once I was talking to a friend whose extended family had built a pharma business from scratch to worth tens of thousands of crores. Now, here is the...
Beyond the Startup Drama
The startup world has today become a circus. Once, ‘startup’ meant innovation. Today it has become this drama of VC funding, valuation, unicorn,...
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The Power of Daily Meditation
I have been working out regularly for more than a decade but it took years of struggle to make meditation a daily habit. Without guidance, it was really hard - every time, I would try but give up after a few days. But once I started reading some of...
Handling difficult life-situations
In 2003, I was facing a potentially career-ending crisis. A group of tribals from northern Kerala landed in Trivandrum and started agitating. As the City Police chief, I had to ensure that there was no violence or obstruction. Since these were...
Happiness from Within
In investment banking and Wall Street jobs, the ‘bonus day’ is an interesting one -- everybody gets a cash windfall. Naturally, they should all be thrilled, right? Yet, NOT everyone is happy. Why? Did they not just get more money? Here are the two...
Life is unpredictable
When I joined the Indian Police Service, I was in for a big disappointment -- I was assigned to serve in the Kerala cadre for the rest of my life. Folklore says that for the Civil Services, the north Indian states are ‘good cadres’ -- good...