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The Hidden Power of Inexperience
When you are young and inexperienced, you don't know what is possible or what your limits are. You don't understand how the world works. So you try crazy things. Often, it is a disaster. But once in a while, you succeed. And when you do succeed,...
Recent Posts
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...
Don’t Wait for the Lottery
We think we want money. But what we really want is for our days to be happy and joyful. We want to love the work we do. We want good relationships....
Doing vs. Telling
Most professors teaching leadership in B-schools have never been in the hot seat or held leadership roles. Most consultants advising companies have...
Expertise Behind the Ease
Years ago, I was involved in organizing the National Games in Trivandrum, where two people did a skydiving demo for the opening ceremony. In this...
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Patience and Readiness
In 2008, I had a lunch-cum-job interview with a very successful New York-based fund manager, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars from investing. I asked him, "What has been the hardest part of your job?" He said, "There was a time when for...
Rethinking Deadlines: Prioritize Quality, Not Urgency
A friend of mine was once interning with a major Wall Street bank. One day, on a Friday evening, his boss asked him to make a presentation and share it by Sunday, ensuring that his weekend was ruined. My friend did not understand the urgency but...
Escape the Urgency Trap
Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important, it is called 'firefighting.' And firefighting destroys peace of mind. So you should be asking: How...
Breaking Free from FOMO
About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would mindlessly switch on the TV after a stressful day at work. Soon, I started worrying about missing this or...