Rajan’s Linkedin posts

When Constraints Fuel Strength

During my consulting days in New York, three of us were walking to our client's office for a meeting. One of my colleagues was an Indian-American while the other was Jewish. The Indian-American asked, "Why are so many consultants, lawyers, and bankers Jewish?" The...

Real Secret to Success: Keep Restarting

One year back, I received an email from a young lady who was torturing herself for not qualifying the NEET exam. And I receive loads of emails like this. Why do we needlessly torture ourselves for our past failures? Because we don't realize this one secret to...

Mindset: The Ultimate Edge in Life

If every investor (including an amateur) has access to the same information, tools, and technology, why isn't everybody an equally good investor? To paraphrase Joel Greenblatt, a renowned investor, "If you are investing in the market, patience will be the last man...

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

Home is Home

When I quit my job with McKinsey in New York, I moved back to India. And there were many reasons for the move – personal and family. But there was one more reason: Though I loved it in the US and people were exceptionally kind and polite, somehow, I could never feel...

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A Learning Hack

Here is a learning hack I have successfully tried, especially during my MBA exams. I would often wake up very early (e.g., 3 am), study for two hours or so, and then again sleep for an hour or two. I would then go write the exam, and invariably, those 2 hrs of early...

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Career and Contentment

At my last job with a PE fund, one of my bosses (Victor Menezes) joined Citibank as a fresher, later became its global CEO, and retired as the Senior Vice Chairman of Citigroup – a financial services conglomerate. He retired so successful and rich that he donated a...

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