Columbus missed India by a few thousand miles and landed in the Caribbean. But we don't call him a 'failed explorer.' Then why do we call people failed entrepreneurs? Or failed in their careers? Even if you did not get to your original destination, did you still get...

"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 severe back pain, sleep issues, and so on. Musk says -- the pain he has gone through in the last few months, he would not...

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 visit my village during summer vacations, almost nobody appeared overweight. And yet, there was no gym in the village. Nor...

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 out the server capacity sufficient to handle the email volume. So they looked at all the communication happening through...

"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 theory, we should be making very few mistakes, if any. But humans are humans. Sometimes, the only way to learn things is...

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 much time to finish a...

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 no excuses we can...

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 ‘death contemplation’,...

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 government, whenever there...

At McKinsey, when I was once in a really tight spot, a young woman at one of the Firm's specialist groups came to my rescue. Under an impossible deadline, I had to geo-map hundreds of branches of a bank (our client). But this lady got it done. So while thanking her, I...

Can losing a job be an opportunity? I don't want to sugarcoat or give a feel-good answer. But let me share a few experiences. When I was running my last startup, the first Covid lockdown forced us to shut shop. Within a week, we had no business, no revenue, nothing....

During the compulsory military training in Taiwan, recruits are seemingly trained with a singular objective – to pass the exams. When practicing the bayonet drill, you practice a chant for each movement, which is what they will test for in the exam. But unfortunately,...

When I was leaving my last job to do a startup, my family asked me to reconsider because ‘doing business is not in our genes.’ Do genes predispose us toward some professions? At first blush, this hypothesis seems fairly tenable. In the US, I saw that a lot of motels...

To put it politely – the startup world is messed up. Big time. And we need to fix it. In my last startup, when we were fundraising, we met a particularly aggressive (‘sharky’) investor. During our discussions, they constantly told us to follow the model of an investee...

In 1998, we went for our first counter-insurgency patrol in Nagaland very excitedly. We were a bunch of IPS trainees attached to an army unit fighting militancy. Unlike in the Police Academy, the dangers here were very real. So we put on heavy bulletproof vests and...