Nice guys do finish first and if you know of any who don’t, this is for them! — Some basic definitions of Adam Grant’s framing of “givers”, “takers”, and “matchers” to align with… Givers give more than what they take. They are other-focussed and help without expecting anything in return. They share their time, energy, knowledge, skills, ideas and connections with others who can benefit from them.

“You have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth and you should use them accordingly” — People often ask us to embrace cultural differences without telling us how to navigate such differences, let alone embrace them. This book is an incredible attempt to help one systematically navigate cultural differences so that one can actually begin embracing them. The first step in the process is understanding the…

Writing out a plan for your life is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. My top-3 learnings: Doubt your methods, not yourself. Confidence in ourselves is reasonable and, in fact, necessary…

Prepare for the future, don’t try predicting it! My top-3 learnings: “Don’t try and predict the future.” More often than not, we treat our hypotheses as predictions and start blindly believing them without questioning. Soon, the prediction becomes propaganda. Start treating your predictions as hypotheses instead — prepare for the…

There is no master key to unlock all doors! My top-3 learnings from this book: Specialize. But not so fast. Experimentation is by no means sexy — it’s a painful, long drawn process — but the chances of a supernova success is higher (assuming you are in pursuit of one)…

Not with What, Not with How, But with WHY… — My top-3 learnings from the book: Why to start with WHY? For the first few pages of the book, I was not yet fully convinced on why to start with why — WHY seemed a bit too fuzzy and “good-to-have” for me until this happened…

Does he deliver on his promises? — I won’t call myself a very keen follower of politics — let alone of US politics. Nor do I have any significant ideological synergies with the author. The very fact that someone who doesn’t hail from a political or influential family had the “audacity of hope” to become the first…

Can there really be an equation for happiness? — Mo Gawdat is an instructor of mine at ThePowerMBA — he has an instantly likeable demeanor and in that one hour session that I attended, I got the feeling that the man is at absolute peace with himself. He is blessed with this amazing voice that epitomizes peace and it…

Should we install a dozen traffic lights to manage the traffic at L’Arc de Triomphe? — For the longest time, I never really understood the whole conversation around company “culture”. An excellent definition of culture that comes in handy is “culture is just behavior” and “culture should inform how employees should behave” as Tim Brady puts it in this YC lesson. …