Spirit of true competition Federer and Nadal are fiercely competitive. However, Federer and Nadal are also good friends off-court. In a zero-sum game like tennis, such a relationship seems like a paradox. What makes it feasible is their spirit for true competition. They value the challenge from their opponent, which brings out their best effort …
Spirit of true competition | Pay it forward | Nurturing leaders Read More »
Create your situation You delivered a great presentation that wowed the client and you are now under tremendous pressure to repeat the same performance. The pressure to deliver brilliantly each time can be huge and overwhelming. One way to deal with it is to focus outward. Instead of attributing the outcome entirely to your abilities, …
Create your situation | Suffering in silence | Away from the rat race Read More »
Enjoyment as criteria More than half of our lives are filled with chasing goals. We usually make SMART goals and evaluate our activities against the performance criteria. We often ask ourselves ‘Did I give my best?’ for everything we do, without knowing what best means in some cases. Then one fine day we realize that …
Enjoyment as criteria | Midnight rule | On his blindness Read More »
Tribute to Daniel Kahneman Behavioral Science is no more about biases and nudges. It has evolved beyond these frames into the multi-disciplinary domain. The field got its prominence because of a few thought leaders like Daniel Kahneman who made behavioral science more visible to the larger world outside academics. Through his work, he proposed to …
Tribute to Daniel Kahneman | Beliefs about power | Contrast makes ordinary special Read More »
Hard thinking In my younger days, hard work was seen as a golden virtue. Many stories and narratives celebrated the hardworking chap who toiled to become successful. As I grew up I realized hard work was not the key to being successful. It was the hard thinking that gave people their edge. It is not …
Hard thinking | Challenging customs | Brain plasticity Read More »
Defining productivity Living on a farm can shift our perspectives about how we define work. As I watched the people carry about their work caring for their livestock, cleaning the pens, I wondered how they define their productivity. Working on the farm is hard work with a lot of uncertainties and constraints. Yet, Farmers seemed …
Defining productivity | Tribute to Wordsworth | Exhaustion and default Read More »
Making a new friend Someone told me that it is very hard to make new friends once you reach a certain age. I believed it to be true until recently I began to question it. I tried to test my assumption while I was on my travel by connecting with someone I knew only as …
Making a new friend | Proximity | Light pollution Read More »
Psychological independence Relationships are healthy when there is psychological independence. It involves not needing others, giving them space to be and to grow as people. However, our human societies insist on us being psychologically dependent on others and equate it to feelings of love, respect, and loyalty. It is not only prevalent in families but …
Psychological independence | Three-Legged rabbit | Limited time Read More »
Go slow to go fast While helping my niece with her math problems, I noticed a pattern where she made more mistakes when she hurried to solve the problems. She argued that she wouldn’t be able to complete her exam and hence would lose marks. She failed to see that in her hurry to solve …
Go slow to go fast | Phantom limb | Learning fearlessness Read More »
Breaking rules When I started my career, I was on the conventional bench for a couple of months. One day, I raised my concern in an open forum to the senior management much to the chagrin of my ‘mentor’ who felt annoyed that he would be blamed for not ‘teaching me’ anything. Two good things …
Breaking rules | Managing upwards | Lessons from a swami’s journey Read More »
