Rajan’s Linkedin posts

How to break phone addictions

Your smartphone is useful but dangerously addictive. And every day, we are sucked into it for hours on end not because we love it, but because we think we have no choice. We often assume that we only have two options: Give up our phones, OR Use the phone without any...

Humans value what they lose

A few years ago, I was visiting the Chittorgarh fort, which is extremely imposing, to say the least. But if you look at the quarters in which the king used to stay, you realize that a modern 3 BHK has a better finish and amenities. This is not to imply that the kings...

Don’t quit. Just restart

I suspect this post will save you from unnecessary failure. When you aim to build a good habit or achieve a long-term goal, what is the first advice you get? Consistency, consistency, consistency... Yes, that is true. But here is the thing nobody tells you -- you need...

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

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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Never blame yourself for past mistakes

When I was working as a consultant with McKinsey, one day, the client walked into our room and said, “Guys, I know you are doing cost-cutting and all. But I want to tell you a story.” He told us that when Sony acquired Columbia Pictures, a movie production company,...

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Stop multitasking

Every time we switch between tasks, it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task. On top of that, every time you switch tasks, the previous task leaves an attention residue in our brain. And if we keep switching, the attention residue adds up and...

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Two-Tab Policy

For long, I used to have so many windows open on my Chrome browser that I was unable to shut down my laptop at night, sometimes, for months on end. But why should that matter? It matters because when there are a zillion windows open, they tempt and distract us. In...

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The Road to Happiness

In my last project at McKinsey, I was so exhausted with the late nights that I felt like I was dying. One weekend, over dinner, I met this brilliant entrepreneur introduced to me by a Wharton classmate. This guy had founded a company and later hired his Harvard...

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Late Night Work

During my stint with McKinsey, whenever we did late nights (more like early mornings), it was rarely because the work per se was that heavy. It was almost always because we did not create clarity sufficiently early in the day about what was to be accomplished. In a...

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Passive income

There is a new fashion in town: bad-mouth 9-to-5 jobs and glorify passive income. It is as if we can all quit our jobs and just create an online course or something like that, and money will start rolling in. I think that is total nonsense. I am all for creating a...

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