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Why We Remember Challenges More Than Comfort in Life
Whenever I ask people about the best time in their lives, they rarely reminisce about fun stuff (e.g., exotic vacations). More often, I find people reminiscing about the times when they immersed themselves into a hard challenge. For some, it might...
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Why Great Leaders Know When to Stay Out of the Way
A friend, who used to be a partner at McKinsey, occasionally conducts a training exercise for team effectiveness in which one person has to perform...
How Framing Shapes Our Happiness and Decisions
I was once listening to a meditation audiobook by Joseph Goldstein, in which he recounted the story of a guy who had moved into a new house where he...
Why Company Values Often Fail
During my MBA, an investment bank was visiting the campus for a pre-placement talk. After the talk, students were mobbing the visiting bankers,...
Guiding vs Letting Go
To be a good manager, you need to do two seemingly contradictory things: 1. Hand-hold people, guide them, and occasionally, even show them how to do...
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Why Meaningful Work Matters More Than Comfort
Can you guess what terrifies Indian civil servants the most? Getting a posting with no work to do. And sadly, a lot of these positions do exist. But why would people want to work more for the same salary? Partly, it could be the sense of importance...
Why Life Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
I was once talking to a public market investor who seemed very hesitant to reveal the stocks he had invested in, as if he was holding some trade secret or I could somehow derail his investments. On the other hand, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala used to...
Don’t Let One Critic Stop You from Playing the Game
You give a talk and the auditorium claps, but one guy boos you loudly. Or you write a LinkedIn post and get 99 positive comments, but one guy calls you scum. Will you feel 99% positive, and 1% negative? No. You will be 100% infuriated -- that one...
Staying Calm Under Pressure
My best managers -- be it in the Indian Police Service or at McKinsey -- were not the charismatic ones with swagger or bravado. Instead their biggest quality was this: In a crisis, when things became rough, they remained calm -- no freaking out, no...