The performance reviews are done. And you get an email announcing a big fat bonus. Yay! Then you hear the news – your colleague got 30% more! Now you hate the very idea of a bonus. Nay, you hate the whole world. Ah, life is so complicated! 🙂 - Rajan

While you ruminate about your past mistakes and worry about the troubles likely to befall you, the tea in front of you is getting cold. Drink that tea. And when you drink it, just drink tea -- don't do anything else. Savor it fully. Ultimately, that is what meditation...

Once when I was returning home after a long trip, to surprise my daughter, I bought her a Nintendo game console (it used to be quite popular then). Also, I bought a bunch of other stuff. So when I reached home and showed her the Nintendo game, she was ecstatic. But as...

In my last startup, after a marketing campaign, we were speculating about how many users we would acquire. Our guess waned between 2,000 and 4,000 users. Do you know how many we actually got? One. Yes -- one, not 1,000. And this was not a random marketing campaign --...

When Byju's acquired White Hat Jr for $300 million, folks on LinkedIn went crazy. "Good Lord -- how could someone create so much value in just 18 months?" Today, the company is losing more than Rs 1,000 crores a year. And I won't even get into the other controversies...

Do you know that even the world's top footballers have their superstitions? Superstitions are psychological defense mechanisms that give a sense of safety (albeit a misplaced one). Let us say a footballer plays a wonderful match, where he scores goal after goal. But...

Before I first landed on the IIT campus, I thought it would have a really glitzy atmosphere. After all, most professors had PhDs from US universities and would have seen a good life. But instead, I saw them all moving on bicycles, wearing shabby clothes and chappals....

This might surprise you. Do you know the one productivity hack that lowers our productivity and overwhelms us? Packing your calendar back-to-back with tasks and to-dos. I know it sounds quite ironic but let me explain using an analogy. Imagine that you want to...

Why should we meditate? If it was truly beneficial, would evolution have not predisposed us to do that? After all, our ancestors in Savannah surely never meditated and they did just fine. Then why should we? The problem with this logic is that evolution optimizes for...

The Bhagwad Gita’s principal message can be very confusing. It exhorts, "Do your duty, but do not concern yourself with the results." So we are asked to not desire the end outcome. But how can we pursue goals without that? In fact, the Buddha also echoed a similar...

Two years ago, a dotcom investor funded a serial entrepreneur to the tune of more than 200 cr and lost it promptly in less than a year. That begs the question -- what did the investor see in the entrepreneur? A great idea? A track record of solid value creation? Nah....

“Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.” ― Shunryu Suzuki This seemingly self-contradictory Zen quote summarizes how we should live life. While it could be interpreted in many ways, here is my take on it. Each of us is a...

I was listening to meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg's audiobook 'Breath by breath', in which he relates this story. He was attending a 3-month Zen meditation retreat in Asia. After 45 days, the Zen master running the retreat made a surprise announcement --...

I once went to University of Pennsylvania's medical school, one of the world’s best, with severe chronic back pain. Years ago, I had injured my back. It was a payback for all the long hours of working while ignoring my fitness. The MRI clearly showed the damage to...

Productivity is not (and should not be) about extracting the most out of your life. We are not toothpaste tubes to be squeezed till the last drop. Joyful, calm productivity is about three things: A deliberate life: Working on things that matter -- the things you chose...