The biggest killer of productivity is not laziness -- it is anxiety. You can have the greatest productivity software, but if you are anxious, you can't get anything done. Here is why. To do any thoughtful work, our brain's pre-frontal cortex (PFC) has to do the...

On the D-day of a consulting engagement at McKinsey, the team thrilled the client with a proposal to cut millions of dollars in cost. But the senior partner heading the engagement told the client, "What we are doing is polishing your furniture while your house is on...

We think we want money. But what we really want is for our days to be happy and joyful. We want to love the work we do. We want good relationships. We want the freedom to spend our time the way we like. We want good health and peace of mind. In short, we want a good...

Most professors teaching leadership in B-schools have never been in the hot seat or held leadership roles. Most consultants advising companies have never worked in business roles (I was one of them). Most people mentoring startups have never done startups. What does...

Years ago, I was involved in organizing the National Games in Trivandrum, where two people did a skydiving demo for the opening ceremony. In this insanely dangerous stunt, these parajumpers were to land in a stadium, inside a busy city. And once the parachutes opened,...

In 2008, I had a lunch-cum-job interview with a very successful New York-based fund manager, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars from investing. I asked him, "What has been the hardest part of your job?" He said, "There was a time when for two years, I had...

A friend of mine was once interning with a major Wall Street bank. One day, on a Friday evening, his boss asked him to make a presentation and share it by Sunday, ensuring that his weekend was ruined. My friend did not understand the urgency but there was little he...

Conventional wisdom says: Prioritize tasks that are urgent AND important. No -- this advice isn't good enough. If something is urgent and important, it is called 'firefighting.' And firefighting destroys peace of mind. So you should be asking: How did an important...

About 20 years back, I stopped watching TV. It all started with this addiction to TV I had started developing in the early 2000s, when I would mindlessly switch on the TV after a stressful day at work. Soon, I started worrying about missing this or that episode, or...

Long ago, a friend who took the NDA/military career route was telling me about the bayonet charge routine in the army. In a bayonet charge, you run towards and attack an enemy bunker typically defended by a machine gun firing 10 bullets per second. What are the odds...

Whenever consultants want to say something, they always have 'three things.' And we mock them for that 🙂 But if you want to communicate well, there is some real science here -- the science of working memory. It turns out that our working memory can hold about 7...

A former McKinsey colleague of mine from Australia once said that his father would claim insulin from the Australian Health System and give it to their dog. But how did the dog become diabetic? Aren't animals supposed to be naturally healthy? Actually, we are all...

A corporate executive I was recently talking to, said that on many days, he has meetings from morning to evening -- sometimes without even a break for lunch. So I asked him, 'When do you get to do your work?' I thought he would say, "I stay up late and do it."...

I hate cowardice. Yet, on a few occasions, I was a coward. When I launched my first startup, I built a product that found zero customers -- zero revenue. Something was wrong. Maybe the product was wrong. Maybe, I had no idea how to market. (Now I know that it was the...

To be fit, you don't need to run 100-mile ultramarathons or climb Mt. Everest. To build physical strength, you don't need to be a powerlifter. To build good focus, you don't need to meditate in the Himalayas for a year. When we seek inspiration for change, we...