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...

There are three kinds of jobs: The 'flatline' jobs: Here you do the same thing for the same inflation-adjusted salary, all your life. E.g., a mailman sorting parcels. The 'linear growth' jobs: Here, you grow at a steady pace. E.g., start as a junior accountant, become...

At the beginning of the Ukraine war, Russians were abandoning their tanks at an alarming rate due to breakdowns and technical glitches. On CNN, one American general was asked why. He said that whenever an American tank convoy rests, the crew immediately starts doing...

Stress spreads like a contagion. Just one person needs to have it -- especially the boss -- and soon, everybody around will feel it. Once the boss is snappy and angry, team members get scared and are on the defensive. Everybody's fight-or-flight system kicks in, which...

Focus is binary. When a sharpshooter goes from 100% focus to 50% focus, his score does not decline by 50% but it goes to zero. He misses every target. 50% focus is as good as no focus. And yet, when it comes to our work, we believe that we can make do with half-focus....

You feel you don't have a story to tell because your life is not exciting? Let me then tell you about Neman Ashraf, a police constable in Pakistan. A few years ago, I came across Neman's posts on Quora, where he used to write stories about his life, his family, and...