Rajan’s Linkedin posts

User engagement

Here is an easy way to destroy your life. Start the day by checking WhatsApp, and then get sucked into a vortex of endlessly checking Facebook, Instagram, online news, Twitter, whatever... Keep repeating the cycle, and by evening, you will be a worn-out, empty shell....

Excitement is rare and overhyped

Very few professions that look glamorous or exciting, are actually that. During my MBA, I thought McKinsey would be very glamorous. Big clients, global travel and fancy hotels, advising CEOs, yada yada. So here is a reality check. At 11 pm one night, one of my buddies...

Five Keystone Habits

If you ever find yourself stuck in a rut of laziness, low energy, and lack of direction, these five keystone habits will help you smash through it: 1) Regular workout: More than for physical fitness, exercise is a great medicine for mental well-being. Study after...

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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you build better habits in yours.

Excitement is rare and overhyped

Very few professions that look glamorous or exciting, are actually that. During my MBA, I thought McKinsey would be very glamorous. Big clients, global travel and fancy hotels, advising CEOs, yada yada. So here is a reality check. At 11 pm one night, one of my buddies...

read more

Five Keystone Habits

If you ever find yourself stuck in a rut of laziness, low energy, and lack of direction, these five keystone habits will help you smash through it: 1) Regular workout: More than for physical fitness, exercise is a great medicine for mental well-being. Study after...

read more

Focus and intensity guarantee success

In 3 months, you can get ahead of almost everyone. Here is how: 1. Every day, for an hour, disconnect your phone from the internet. 2. Pick a learning goal or a task that requires focus. 3. For the next 50 minutes, keep a timer on. 4. While the timer ticks, work or...

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Home is Home

When I quit my job with McKinsey in New York, I moved back to India. And there were many reasons for the move – personal and family. But there was one more reason: Though I loved it in the US and people were exceptionally kind and polite, somehow, I could never feel...

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A Learning Hack

Here is a learning hack I have successfully tried, especially during my MBA exams. I would often wake up very early (e.g., 3 am), study for two hours or so, and then again sleep for an hour or two. I would then go write the exam, and invariably, those 2 hrs of early...

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Career and Contentment

At my last job with a PE fund, one of my bosses (Victor Menezes) joined Citibank as a fresher, later became its global CEO, and retired as the Senior Vice Chairman of Citigroup – a financial services conglomerate. He retired so successful and rich that he donated a...

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Glamour vs Substance

In 2009, when I had just joined a private equity fund, we were invited to the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai for a fancy presentation by a healthcare technology company (I am deliberately not naming it). The company tried to charm the investor community with its presentation...

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Every job deserves respect

Today, I lead a 10-member team at HabitStrong. Many years ago, I headed a team of 3,500 people when I was the Trivandrum City Police commissioner. So which responsibility was harder? Naturally, running the City Police, right? Nope. Even though I had a team of 3,500...

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The Value of Time

In the US, when I had to hire people to help with moving my house, I paid them $25 per hr for the manual work – the money value of time there was quite high. In contrast, physical goods in the US cost the same as in India, and sometimes, even less. I once bought...

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Focus on substance, not appearances

Many people find it quite jarring that I run HabitStrong out of Trivandrum. More than once, I have been advised to move my startup to Bangalore. Why? Because Bangalore just sounds a lot cooler and more ‘startup-like.’ This obsession with appearances is a bit baffling....

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Temptation Bundling

A colleague of mine has been working out for an hour a day on her gym’s elliptical machine – and yet, she hates it. How does she do it then? While working out, she watches episodes of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ on her Netflix app – that is how. Since she enjoy the show, it...

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The Job security

A big chunk of India’s youth is addicted to government jobs – and that has become our curse. It needs to stop. If you go to Patna, you will reportedly find tens of thousands of youngsters preparing for government job exams. And it is probably the same in many north...

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Pain of Regrets

One of the small regrets I have in life is that I never did a commando training course. When I finished my IPS training I was very fit and I thought about doing a commando course. And it was very easy for me to do that – I could literally have picked any course and...

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Don’t quit but Be flexible.

Two of my friends were doing a startup together – both exceptionally smart and good human beings. But unfortunately, their startup did not do well. One of them continued toiling, while the other one quit. Would you say that the guy who quit lacked perseverance? Now...

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Life is not about non-stop excitement

During my MBA at Wharton, people told me that consulting is really exciting – you get to solve the hardest business problems! So I joined McKinsey for my summer internship. And I was looking forward to all the excitement of problem-solving. But on my summer project,...

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Rajan shares insights from his own life journey to help you build better habits in yours.