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Make New Mistakes, Not Old Ones
In my previous job, a team member was making an investment proposal that my boss thought was quite disastrous. So my boss said, "Why do you want to make the same mistake we made last time? There are so many mistakes one can make -- why don't you...
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Success Doesn’t Guarantee Fulfillment
"I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week." These are Elon Musk's words. He has been suffering from...
Will AI Make Us Intellectually Obese?
Maybe I am paranoid but will AI make us dumber? Let me share an analogy. As a kid, I don’t remember seeing too many obese people. When I used to...
The Unpredictable Ripple of New Technology
In a book I was reading, Cal Newport shared this interesting story: When IBM first set up an email system for their employees, they had to figure...
Embrace Mistakes, But Only Once
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." -- Mark Twain. We should learn from others' mistakes. So in...
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Parkinson’s law
I had to give a TEDx talk at IIM Ranchi but did not start working on the script until I had three days left. And I was not procrastinating. I was testing a new productivity idea -- 'doing things at the last responsible moment.' When we have too...
Change Yourself First
We all want to change the world, which is really hard. But we don't want to change ourselves, which should be pretty easy. Why? Because changing the world is a fantasy. And fantasies feel good. On the other hand, for changing ourselves, there are...
Time on Earth is limited
When I was learning meditation, I was utterly confused by all the contradictory information out there on blogs, YouTube, etc. So I tried reading the original text on Buddhist meditation (Satipatthana sutta). And the one thing that shocked me was...
Cut Ruthlessly
One of the joys of working in government is the plethora of committees and meetings 🙂 But now even the private sector seems to be catching up on that. Like entropy, the number of committees (and their meetings) only goes up. Here is why. In...