LinkedIn is ablaze with posts that tell you, “Never quit.” But the biggest mistake I have made as an entrepreneur is not quitting when I should have. Let me share this story which started in 2012 when I quit my job and launched CourseBrew, my first startup. I built a...

Every leadership training I have been through, be it for the Indian Police Service or at McKinsey, was missing a critical element -- training people how to dissent. Without the ability to dissent, you only have yes-men (or yes-women), not leaders. In the uniformed...

We love rags-to-riches stories. That is why every social platform is full of them. And they make us wonder -- how come everybody gets lucky except me? The reason is that stories other than rags-to-riches are not considered stories! They don't motivate anyone -- so...

About a year ago during lunch, my colleague Ayisha said, "Whenever I want to learn something, I search online and find so many books that I get overwhelmed and never start." To escape this trap of plenty, become aware of the following fallacies: Fallacy 1: We need to...

Overcoming digital addictions is NOT about giving up your phone. If it were, the solution would be straightforward -- throw away your smartphone and buy a feature phone. But that totally misses the point. Our smartphone is an essential part of our life. However,...

During my consulting days, while working for a healthcare client, we made a beautiful PowerPoint deck -- what else would a consultant do? 😊 But the client asked us to get the presentation jazzed up by their favorite visual graphics company. Naturally, we complied, and...

Your life = Your time. We know it, but we still don't "get it." Wasting our time somehow seems ok. But wasting our life feels criminal. And yet, they are exactly the same. As an example, nobody says, "I will waste 20% of my life meaninglessly scrolling my phone or...

If every Sunday evening fills you with dread, you probably need to rethink your job. If you somehow survive the weekdays only to live on the weekend, you can calculate what % of your life you are living (the math is pretty easy). Is that a good deal? I don't know --...

We love to start new things every New Year because, in our mind, it gives us a fresh start. Yet, isn't every morning an equally good fresh start opportunity? I find that no matter how good or disappointing the previous day was, when I wake up every morning, my mind is...

From 1998 - 2000, the internet promised to change the world. Then in Mar 2000, it all crashed -- we thought, the internet was all hype. Turns out, both points of view were wrong. The Internet did change the world, but not the way we had imagined. Just having a website...

Do psychiatrists also get depressed or anxious? The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. Just because you know how your brain works doesn't change its working one bit. So when a psychiatrist hears some bad news, his body activates the fight or flight system just like...

Back in the days when I headed a police organization, we had 1,200 armed policemen in our reserves for handling contingencies. These policemen were supposed to frequently undergo a 2-week intensive training in batches of 100. But for decades, this had not been done....

A TikToker Canadian mom got hospitalized after drinking too much water as part of a '75-Hard' challenge. Another influencer died of starvation after eating only uncooked vegan meals for 10 years -- you might have seen that news. What is going on folks? Life is not a...

Many professional thieves exhibit a curious behavior pattern -- they follow the exact same methodology and rituals (modus operandi) every time they commit a theft. In fact, policemen even call them Modus Operandi (MO) criminals. But this phenomenon is not limited to...

Why do we do social comparison even though we know it is toxic? Why do we seek external validation knowing that it ruins our happiness? Turns out, this is an outcome of evolution. Humans evolved in small tribes and groups, and in the wild, if someone was not liked by...