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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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How to break out of a stable equilibrium
If you practice anything for, say 10,000 hrs, you will become world-class. Right? Wrong. You probably already know people who have been playing...
Life is complicated
The performance reviews are done. And you get an email announcing a big fat bonus. Yay! Then you hear the news – your colleague got 30% more! Now...
Meditation is being fully present
While you ruminate about your past mistakes and worry about the troubles likely to befall you, the tea in front of you is getting cold. Drink that...
Happiness fuels productivity
Once when I was returning home after a long trip, to surprise my daughter, I bought her a Nintendo game console (it used to be quite popular then)....
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The only real failure is arrogance
In my last startup, after a marketing campaign, we were speculating about how many users we would acquire. Our guess waned between 2,000 and 4,000 users. Do you know how many we actually got? One. Yes -- one, not 1,000. And this was not a random...
Never jump the gun
When Byju's acquired White Hat Jr for $300 million, folks on LinkedIn went crazy. "Good Lord -- how could someone create so much value in just 18 months?" Today, the company is losing more than Rs 1,000 crores a year. And I won't even get into the...
Break free from superstitions
Do you know that even the world's top footballers have their superstitions? Superstitions are psychological defense mechanisms that give a sense of safety (albeit a misplaced one). Let us say a footballer plays a wonderful match, where he scores...
We all have currencies we obsess over
Before I first landed on the IIT campus, I thought it would have a really glitzy atmosphere. After all, most professors had PhDs from US universities and would have seen a good life. But instead, I saw them all moving on bicycles, wearing shabby...