I still remember that day. It was early 1994 Kavitha and I were at a Mall in Petaling Jaya in Malaysia. Newly married. New to the country. New role – I was managing a tiny startup under a group that had seven other companies. Everything was new. A really unassuming (but brilliant salesperson) engaged us… Continue reading
The Second Best Way to Getting Even
Getting even is a funny thing. Someone handed you the short end of the stick. You paid a price. You want to get even. In other words, you want to pay a price for having paid a price. It’s like wanting to pay more taxes because you are paying taxes. Be that as it may,… Continue reading
Not Every Failure Gets You a Brownie Point…
They say, “failure is the stepping stone of success.” Nice saying. Makes sense – most of the time. Not always. If you are running a marathon and you give up after running hundred meters and say that you were a failure, you don’t get a brownie point for trying. Heck, you don’t even get sympathy… Continue reading
How to Turn a One-Time Gift Into an Ongoing Gift Subscription
If you are reasonably successful in the world of business, you get a lot of demands on your time and mindshare. One category of these requests are from people who have hit a roadblock in their startup. At the risk of over-simplifying, their earlier assumptions about how the market reacts to their idea did not… Continue reading
How to Manage Internal Conversations
Do you have internal conversations? Silly question. All of us do. The real question should be: Do you have internal conversations that are helping you or hurting you? Raising Your Awareness Just raising your awareness about the power of internal conversations, to help you or hurt you already has set you on a good path… Continue reading
Are you Capitalizing on Inspiration Arbitrage?
Inspiration Arbitrage is the art of drawing inspiration from masters in other fields to raise your game in your own field. Note: “Inspiration Arbitrage” is a term I coined a while ago. The good thing about coining a new term is that you can make up your own meanings 🙂 Because of my varied interests that… Continue reading
The Power of the Right Public Promise
You might have heard this before If you make a public promise about your goals, you increase the odds of achieving them. You might have tried that too. The last six months I experimented this with more than a dozen people on various goals and the results were mixed. I analyzed the patterns and drew… Continue reading
Every email is an investment pitch
When you make a presentation to secure an investment, you put a lot of thought into what you say, how you will say it and when you will say it. There are many reasons for this. That investor is being pitched by many people like you. That investor has to pick you and your project… Continue reading
How to Pick the Right Projects to Work
When you are smart, you rarely have a problem of having no project to work on. You have a different problem. You may be confused or conflicted on which among the available projects should you pick to participate in. Good problem to have. Keyword here is not good. It is still a “problem” you need… Continue reading
Three Reasons Letting Go is Not Easy
Let Go! This advice falls into the popular category – “easy to understand, (very) hard to implement.” The fact is: you DO want to let go of some things, but you feel totally helpless. Can you relate to that feeling? If yes, here are three things to reflect upon. 1. Second Nature If you are… Continue reading
