Once, during my stint with McKinsey, an HR recruiter from the New York office once asked me if I could help shortlist a few resumes for interviews. The applicants were all from top B-Schools (Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Wharton, etc.) and every resume looked stellar. All...

Learning new skills is hard. Learning daily is hard. But you don't climb Mt. Everest by watching National Geographic. You get there by pushing yourself every day, for years. To do big things, we don't need one-day heroism -- we need to go through the daily grind, even...

As a kid, during our train travels, when we got close to the destination, I would be constantly pestering my parents, "When will the station arrive?" And in that process, I would totally miss out on the fun of the journey or the beautiful scenery outside the train....

There is no such thing as 'karma' - good deeds don't always generate tangible rewards. What goes around, need not come around. One might then ask: If good deeds don't create good karma, why should we do good things? Because they are 'good'; because we want to be...

When I first met my Inspector General of Police (IGP) after taking charge as Trivandrum Police Commissioner, he went on a rant. He said, "I don't know how the government posted you here and how you will handle such a tough assignment. This is really stupid. When I...

A few years ago, I was on a flight from Jaipur to Bangalore. As soon as the flight took off, the plane ran into the kind of turbulence I had never encountered before -- it was getting violently tossed up and down. Sometimes, it felt like the plane was in free fall for...

In the early 2000s, I got into the habit of regularly watching TV. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong per se with that, but at some point, I started feeling anxious that I would miss out on some new episode or some upcoming movie. In those days, I had not heard...

A few years ago, WhatsApp wanted to charge an annual subscription fee of $1 but later gave up on the plan. Why? Had they charged $1 a year, many would have stopped using the app. But let us do the following exercise: 1. Estimate the time we daily spend on WhatsApp. 2....

If we want employees to do great work, we have to stop expecting them to respond to every email or message instantly, for which they have to constantly interrupt themselves and check their phones/laptops. It is almost like having to open the door of your house every 5...

The best course I did at IIT was not from Electrical Engg but humanities. In those days, the humanities course allotment was done first-come-first-served. Hence, laggards like me who showed up just before the closing time would get the last available course. In the...

Sometimes, we are unhappy about being unhappy. Some of us might be thinking: "Everybody else looks so cheerful -- why do I go through these ups and downs? How can I always be smiling, self-assured, and fully in control?" You can't. Nobody can. The 'always unflappable...

When writing my MBA application essays, what annoyed me the most was ‘word-limit’. I would write a beautiful piece and then find it 300 words over the limit. I would now have to chop the extra words and slaughter its beauty. What travesty! Cursing the admissions...

Leadership carries a price-tag: When the first bullet is fired, you have to be willing to face it before putting others in the line. Also, you never get to say -- "It was not my fault." Whether you are an army general, a captain of a ship, a CEO, or the head of a...

Meditation is not an ATM, where you swipe your card (i.e., spend 20 min) and expect 'blissful calm' to come out gushing. This is one reason so many of us give up on meditation when we don't get instant 'outcomes.' Meditation is a long road to building mindfulness,...

In a 2014 study, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia left students in a room for 15 odd minutes with nothing to do (phones were taken away). But they could give themselves a painful electric shock.  Almost 67% of the men gave themselves electric shocks to...