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The Myth of Perfection
In my last startup, ConceptOwl, a friend once told me about another learning startup that was growing like crazy by selling through schools. He asked, "Why don't you also do that?" When I heard that, my heart sank. We had tried the same approach...
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Excellence is not perfection
In 2009, when I moved back to India, the first thing I did was to buy a car. And in the very first week, in the parking area, a big coconut fell on...
The Lessons of Struggle
In 3rd grade, once our Social Studies teacher gave us a project to build a model of an object that helped humans survive. I built a really ugly...
Pushing Our Limits
About three times a week, I run 10 km in the morning. The distance feels just right to me -- long enough to give a huge endorphin rush, but not so...
Passion comes from mastery
Before my MBA program started, Wharton sent us a self-assessment test on business and finance to see if we needed some extra classes to handle the...
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Beliefs, Habits, Routines
Years ago, one Saturday evening, I went to Rockefeller University in New York City to witness a piano competition. To my untrained ears, each of the half-a-dozen performances I listened to, were equally mesmerizing. And yet, from all these...
Life is an adventure
When I and some of my friends got into the Civil Services, many of us said, "Now, our life is all set." But this was not the first time I was hearing this. Years earlier, when I got into IIT, my teachers also had said the same thing -- "Now your...
Overcoming Assumptions and Finding Our Limits
Right from 1st grade, I was the most non-athletic kid in my class. Thin and emaciated, I never participated in any athletic events or sports. In IIT, I flunked the first-year compulsory physical activity course because I hated the morning ‘walk and...
Being Comfortable in Misery
During my IPS training, one day, a fellow trainee who was also a college-mate, told me: “In my last job (before IPS), I once wrote a software simulator for Intel’s 386 processor. And now I am doing this stupidity.” He was a brilliant guy even by...