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In my earlier post, I had written about seeking advice and this post is about the other side - offering one. A couple of myths on offering and seeking advice -

An effective strategy to deal with any problem is to find the root cause of the problem and try to fix it with simple and easy solutions. In the book Speaking up ...

The Inca trail is a popular trek in Peru, South America. The trail starts from KM 82 and ends in Machu Picchu. The trail is 26 miles long (42 km), has an elevatio...

The journey of learning a new skill is an interesting one. There’s a lot of similarity in all our journeys and understanding that is helpful in overcoming the cha...

How should we spend our time?

Over the last few years, I’ve asked myself the question “Should I buy this stock/ETF/Index Fund?” many a times. It’s not easy making such decisions and you’d prob...

Why Should we choose our Values?

What do you want out of life?

In the book Algorithms To Live By, Christian and Griffiths show how much we can learn from Computer Algorithms. The book goes over many algorithms like Optimal St...

We all have been in situations where we chose to lie and in some of those situations we might have even felt that it was the right thing to do. While I do agree t...

In 1953, two scientists at McGill University in Montreal were puzzled by the behavior of a rat in one of their lab experiments. In this experiment, they had place...

A couple of years ago, I had dislocated my toe. I was in a considerable amount of pain and hence I went to the doctor. The entire treatment was a three stage proc...

During the Holocaust in the 1940s, Viktor Frankl spent 3 years as a prisoner at the Nazi Concentration Camps. Viktor lost his wife, father, mother and brother in ...

If you look at the lives of everyone around you, you’ll notice that life is a sine wave. On the positive side - you might be successful in your job and get to spe...

Shoe Dog is a very candid memoir written by the founder and CEO of Nike - Phil Knight. If you’re listening to this in Audible, the narration by Norbert Leo Butz m...

In his book Originals : How Non-Conformists Move The World, Adam Grant talks about how everyone could be an original - how they can generate new ideas, how they c...

In his book Originals, Adam Grant talks about the 4 choices people have when handling a dissatisfying situation (think boring job, failing marriage or even as sim...

The book Founders At Work is a collection of interviews by Jessica Livingston with various startup founders. The book captures the founding and early moments from...

This is the first post in a series of blog posts on Shame based on the book The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown. If you haven’t listened to it already, I hi...

In the book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson discusses the 7 common themes around innovation and creativity. Most of the examples in the book are center...

Imagine that you are skiing down a mountain trail at Aspen Snowmass Colorado — one of the expert diamond slopes, with the beautiful, awe-inspiring Rockies in your...

I started reading this book expecting a startup story - business decisions, growth strategies, hiring decisions, the business ideas that worked and more important...

There are 2 kinds of people based on the way they plan their events or tasks - the simplifiers and the optimizers. A simplifier is one who will prefer the easy wa...

This book was written after the financial meltdown in 2009 and as a result provides a realistic view on what to expect from investments. This book is highly recom...

This book is targeted towards people who are starting their careers in the United States. This book has a good breadth on financial topics but doesn’t go into dep...

In the book How to fail at almost everything and still win big, Scott Adams talks about why Systems are better than Goals. Consider the example of losing weight, ...

The book talks about 11 personality traits that could derail an executive/CEO’s career. They’re -

In 1983, William Smithburg, the CEO of Quaker, made a bold decision to acquire the parent company of Gatorade for $220 million. According to various reports, Will...

A checklist on what to carry -

In decision-making, we usually make a decision based on certain facts and assumptions and go about executing the decision on auto-pilot mode. Tripwire is a proces...

In the 1970s, Intel was one of the main manufacturers of the memory. However, by the end of the 1970s a couple of Japanese competitors had emerged and by the earl...

This is the second post in a series of blogposts on Design Patterns. You can read about The Strategy Pattern here.

One question that I always ask in a lunch interview is “What are you looking for in your next role?”. While most candidates strictly talk about factors that could...

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing about how people learn a new skill or technique. Learning is one way to make sure you continuously grow and ...

Ingredients

Ingredients

This is the second blog post on lessons from Poker - you can find the first post here.

There are many ways in which people around you can influence you. On the positive side, there are mentors (people who guide you to be the best version of what you...

We all lose things and we all have different ways of dealing with it. This blog post is how I deal with it (a little exaggerated for fun) -

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine recommended me the Coursera course on Learning How To Learn. The course was very light (an hour a week for the material a...

I’ve been using the HBO app on my iPhone a lot recently and this blogpost is about my thoughts on what could be done to improve the user experience.

About a year ago, Jeff Weiner wrote a blog post about building great products and he called out Waze as an app that is simple, intuitive and easy to use. I wanted...

A little over 7 months ago, a friend of mine recommended me this meditation app. I had given it a try once before but kept falling asleep. I decided to try this o...

This blog post is a cynical take on various stages of a large project. The list was first published in the 1970s with respect to Computer Science projects but has...

We associate love with a lot of things - with activities (I love to ski), with objects (I love my new shoes) and also with people (friends and family). Our use of...

A common strategy in business dealings, negotiations and even in relationships is play hard to get. It is not hard to see why - by playing hard to get, you increa...

Friendship means a lot to me. As I was growing up, I spent a lot of my time with my friends and they have played a huge role in getting me to where I’m today. It ...

In the book The Power of Vulnerability, Brene Brown talks about cultivating intuition and why this is important for happiness and whole-hearted living. Here’s how...

I was driving and having a conversation with a friend of mine and after a few seconds, I zoned out. I was preoccupied with another issue and my mind got distracte...

Trust is often the core of any relationship, personal or professional, and the only way to establish trust is to be consistent between what you say and what you d...

Three years ago, I went on a 7 day trip with my school friends. It was a long trip and on the last day as we were driving to the airport, my friend asked us a sim...

I was in Chicago last year and I was looking for ways to spend the day just by myself. So, I called my friend and asked for recommendations (the old-fashioned way...

We all have to make tough decisions in our life - whether it is as complicated as deciding what to do when we’ve lost your job or as simple as whether to buy this...

A friend of mine shared this video uploaded by RSA on the difference between sympathy and empathy. This video is one of the best explanations of empathy I’ve seen...

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people promptly announces she never did care for pie — Tenneva Jordan.

One of the disadvantages of being a professional sports player is that you constantly have to face failures publicly. And to make it worse, you’d have to explain,...

The excuse I use most often to convince myself for not doing an activity is “I am not good at it”. However, this has become a default excuse for a lot of things -...

A common advice to college students or someone starting their career is to follow their passion. While I’ve always believed in this, this blog post is an effort t...

In my first job, I joined an experienced team that had been working on the product for about 3-4 years. The product was already mature and they already had a larg...

Before the social media (about 15 years ago), I saw peer pressure as a good thing. The only source of peer pressure came from my friends - who were mostly like me...

We’re all unique and that’s awesome!

If your friend fails, you feel bad. But if your friend succeeds (and you haven’t), you feel worse.

The 4 words we dread hearing and yet we have the habit of using this phrase every now and then, usually with a smug look on our face. Here are 3 reasons why we mu...

Technology has helped us in a lot of ways. It has helped us find the right information with a click of a button, connect and stay in touch with friends across the...

There’s a scene in Game of Thrones Season 1 Episode 4 between Ned and Arya Stark -

Ingredients

Ingredients

Earlier this year, I found out that I’ve a meniscus tear in my right knee. This blog post is an information dump - from talking to friends and reading articles/fo...

After a long time, I got to watch an entire Tennis match. I guess I’m still trying to cope up with the absence of Roger Federer in the tour. Stan Wawrinka played ...

A few months ago, I was playing in a badminton tournament and someone in the top-ranked group didn’t make it that day and hence I, an amateur, was asked to take h...

A few months ago, I was playing in a badminton tournament and someone in the top-ranked group didn’t make it that day and hence I, an amateur, was asked to take h...

I was learning the techniques of a drop shot in Badminton and the coach had spotted a flaw in the way I hit this shot - I bend my arm while playing the shot and h...

I’ve been wanting to improve my Badminton skills for a while now and I finally decided to take private lessons. I was really excited about this and had prepared a...

There are many reasons that are attributed to Federer’s success - his talent, the ability to stay calm on the court and also his fitness. However, one reason that...

Sometimes in life, we don’t end up getting what we deserve (or what we think we deserve). We try to blame it on external factors - the conditions, the opportuniti...

Today (July 03 2015) is an important day in the history of Tennis - it marks the end of Nadal’s domination at Roland Garros. Don’t get me wrong here - I’m not say...

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos Inc. - the online shoe and clothing company that was bought by Amazon in 2009. This blog post is about my learnings from him on In...

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were part of the YCombinator program in 2009 with a crazy idea of renting out the apartment to strangers. They hadn’t done well until ...

Imagine a future where there is a right amount of consumption for the technical products we use. Just like a doctor would prescribe you to take Paracetamol twice ...

Andy Murray might have played his last match against Roberto Bautista Agut at the Australian Open. He lost the match in 5 sets. I’ll remember him charging towards...

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people promptly announces she never did care for pie — Tenneva Jordan.

My wife and I celebrated our first anniversary trip in French Polynesia (a group of islands south of Hawaii with Bora Bora being the most popular amongst them) af...

Havasupai means people of the blue-green water and the name doesn’t disappoint. When you add the red color backdrop of the Grand Canyon, this is a paradise for ph...

When I was really young, my parents used to wake me up early in the morning (around 4 am) and take me to the Hindu Temple in Tirupathi. We used to drive for a few...

When a friend comes and asks you for information, how you’d respond most of the time determines your reciprocity style -

In Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi shared a secret with us after winning his first Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 1992.