Freedom begins with naming things. Humanity itself, is preserved by it. When we name something — a thought, emotion, phenomena, practice — we acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else; it is an act of conferring dignity and autonomy. Animals become pets when we name them; couples give each other private nicknames to embellish intimacy. Emotions are experienced fully and even discharged when given a name. Think about it. What would we be without language? Our entire understanding of the universe is predicated on attributing meaning to sounds that emanate by combining letters of the alphabet in ever different […]

Have you ever paused to wonder what would it mean to not have the faculty of memory? What would it mean to be able to experience everything we want but not be able to recall or remember later..? Sights. sounds. smells. Old negatives of photographs. Entering the streets and back alleys of childhood. Songs of a certain vintage. Remnants and residue of childhood and adolescence. Perhaps the only substitute for love is memory. Every once in a while, without having to invoke the feeling consciously or even wish for it, I find myself pining for simpler times. Occassionally, the unexpected […]

Q: How to discover your true passion? A: Our first set of motivations in learning a skill or picking a profession or participating in an activity are often extrinsic. As a kid or an adolescent, you may have wanted to become an actor in a play because of the attention that it would accrue from the opposite gender; maybe you wanted to become an athlete because of the glory and glamour that accompanies sportsmen and women or you wanted to become an investment banker because of the cousin who migrated to manhattan and commanded a telephone number salary in his […]

One of surest ways to improve your thinking is to expand awareness and unearth the scaffolding of your internal reasoning process. Achieving a higher level of self awareness of your thinking process is easy once you understand the idea of mental models in general and gain an insight into your own mental models in particular. Learning about mental models can help interpret reality more accurately, understand life situations, help make fundamentally better decisions and improve problem solving chops. In the last three years, I have invested a significant amount of time exploring and experimenting with cognitive biases and mental models. […]

There are fundamentally two ways of trusting people in general. One is to begin at 0%. You wait and watch, often with scepticism, occasionally even cynicism. Trust here is something you earn and the other person must or must not do a set of things to deserve every incremental unit of it. Every thing done in line with the implicit expectations of the relationship earns the other party a brownie point. An occasional slip may be accommodated but the piggy bank never really has enough inside to be fully realized. There is of course, good reason for us to operate […]

‘How do I get past my sense of over familiarity and operate from a place of not knowing?’ Framed differently, ‘How does what I know get in the way of what I don’t know but maybe need to learn? Because one of our biggest challenges- in the face of virtually unlimited information and frighteningly low attention spans – is our over familiarity. Indeed, asking this one question consciously, repeatedly and sincerely is helping one of our clients – a large telecom player – address several people and communication related issues in a meaningful and sustainable manner. This most widely prevalent […]