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When we ask someone what their passion is, we will either get an answer or we will get a blank look. The blank look does not mean they don’t have one. It just means they have either not thought about it or it has been a very long time since they thought about it. And…
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In a TEDX talk by In Eduardo Briceño he talks about the Learning Zone and Performance zone. We might be under the impression that we are learning new things regularly in our life and work, but the concept of having a Learning Zone and Performance zone kind of makes us think about it. We all…
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Nothing matters if you can’t deliver results. It might sound ruthless; but that is the only business truth. And No sob story (however convincing) can replace actual results. You either did it or you did not….. period!! The ‘I Tried.. but..’ argument is the result of not asking help on time. Knowing when to ask…
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If you are not aware… I have made my paid Agile Scrum course free on my YouTube Channel.. And so I thought I will write about how I became a Scrum Master. The course is 6 part and here is Part 1.. You can watch all of them on the Penpositive YouTube channel I wanted…
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In 1991 there was an essay in ‘The Atlantic’ by Dana Gioia titled ‘Can Poetry Matter? It points out that Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more This and a few other essays were then published as…
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As a child I used to have conjunctivitis quiet often… it is also called pink eye… You get it in one eye and you know you will get it next in the other eye. So when you get it what you do is just sit home… No TV.. No books… Nothing… and wait for it…
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In Plato’s Protagoras there is an incident where one of Socrates’s young friend Hippocrates (not the Hippocrates of medicine) comes knocking at his door early morning and tells him with so much excitement that Protagoras is in town…. Socrates then asks him “What is the matter? Has Protagoras robbed you of anything? For which Hippocrates…
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When you set out to do something right, you need to accept that a few things could happen There will be people who are not ready to Change Some who will tell you it is not worth it Some who would outright reject you, And You might be termed a pain in the butt It…
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We do spend our time telling people what is important; we also tell people on what is not important. But it is important that on a personal level we find what is unimportant in our life and remove that from our life Irrespective of what scenario we choose; stakeholder discussions, career aspirations, our next job,…
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We have all chased something or the other in our life. Sometimes we get it… Sometimes we don’t.. and at other times we leave one thing and focus on chasing something else… just like puppies chasing balls. Getting what we chase and not getting it depend on a lot of factors including our ability, situation…
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I believe that we are always a work in progress. It is funny when I look back and see how my thoughts have changed. Not just in one area but across every important and even mundane aspects of life. I am just not the person I was. Did I change for the better.. I would…
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You are not told.. you just sense it… I don’t know about you, but I have sensed many a times when I was unwelcome in a place. I don’t want to play the victim card here so let me be open that in some cases I would have done the same because how else could…
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I don’t mean to say when you are in a party.. I mean to say everyday get up in the morning and Dance. I assure you it feels good but there are some challenges. First let me tell you how I arrived at that idea. I walk regularly and that has been my form of…
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I saw a dead body for the first time when I was in High School… If I remember correct it was when my Father’s younger brother passed away. But I never touched the body. I watched from a distance. It was probably also the first time I saw people gather when someone died. The sorrow..…
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At the onset let me tell you that I have been way lucky to have bosses who I did not have any problem with. While there were people I really loved working for and had utmost respect for there were some who were not that great.. but still I will never say they were bad.…
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I had created a one page resume immediately after college.. when I had gone to Bangalore in search of a job in 1993. Since I thought I was more a sales kind of person that is what I looked forward with the resume… I did not even use the word resume… We used CV.. Curriculum…
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I started smoking when I was 18 years old. During my college days. Before that I had tried it a few times. Even as young as 6th grade. While I was in school in my 10th grade.. there were a few of my batch mates who regularly smoked. There was this Juice shop outside the…
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Though I have binge watched a few of the web series on the streaming platform, I have two issues when I watch them.. I think I can finally say I got over it. One is that I have to force myself to get hooked on to it. Someone recommends me a series and then I…
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Start to learn; New Skills, New Perspectives and New Prospects. Today’s preparation defines our tomorrow. Whether it is about your passion or your profession it is important that you prepare yourself. The internet and tools available enable you to embark on various levels of training and certifications. It is more than ever cheap to acquire…
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Many of you might have probably read about The 10,000 Hour Rule that is closely associated with writer Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. The principle says that 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” is needed to become world-class in any field. To give you a sense of the actual passing time. If you spend 2 hours a day you hit this in close…
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Is there one such profession where you keep getting better. I think every profession that we see gives us the opportunities to be better. The question is how we define better. And the fact is that we don’t get better in any profession unless we start doing something about it. It is not always about…
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About 20+ years ago as a 20 something young entrepreneur in Bangalore, India; I attended a year long program by Crestcom International (I only did 6 months). It was two full day sessions every month that cost us almost 16000 Indian Rupees for the entire Year. And 16K was a lot of money in India…
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It is said that memory fades when people age. As human beings we have a unique ability to forget even without age. As life takes us through the circumference of the globe some of us tend to forget people and events. Sometimes these are the same people and events that made us who we are, things…
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Breaking big items into small chunks might be part of our DNA but yet we find it extremely difficult at times. If you are at the dinner table I am sure that is not a problem. But dinner table is not the only place where life asks you to break things down. It can be…
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I was watching an interview with Philip Levine as he remembers his life in the Ford’s River Rouge Plant. As he talks about his life there; a time when his young self never knew if he would ever have a way out of there and not even in his wildest dreams did he think it…
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There are many people among us who work more than 40 hours a week. And I am not talking of like 41 or 42 hours, but way over that. You might also have read Melinda Gates recently say about the problems of the workaholic culture and the impacts it might have had on diversity. Well…
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“You need to work in order to get into their Good Books” we have all heard that a few times. It sounds as if people are walking around with two books in their hand. One to write the names of the Good people and one to note the names of bad people. My theory is…
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‘Thinking’ or may be the time to ‘THINK’ is getting scarce now. Are people stressed and overworked because they don’t have enough time to ‘THINK’? Our little handheld devices take such a lot of our time. Distractions, incomplete work and jumping from one priority to other, all leave people stressed and overworked. I am just…
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Education in the new age is Free for those who are ready to be self driven. I am not talking about Training. Training and Education both have a significant difference according to me. Training helps you being equipped to perform a job better, or may be even landing on a job. Education helps you build your…
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How many of us start a day with the plan and goal to complete our work in 8 hours. Don’t you think that there is a higher chance that we will finish it on time than when we just get to work without that thought. This is a concept from agile and Scrum. If you…
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Daniel Kahneman, in the introduction to his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow” says why we should be concerned of Gossip. “Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistake of others than to recognize one’s own” Gossip is dark inside but extremely illuminating outside and with excellent…
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At work we all sit in meetings most of the days. We sit in both effective meetings and ineffective meetings. We sit in well planned and totally unplanned chaotic ones. We sit in meetings that have a clear outcome and we sit in those that just act as a primer for another longer one with…
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“Your Reputation defines who you are and it is your responsibility to protect and manage it” Your Reputation has become more important than it has been ever before, not because you have just become a celebrity. But because now there are so many ways in which it can be damaged. Without you knowing your name…
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Technology can help solve the education problem to a great extend. The reach of online training has opened new avenues to both teach and learn, changing the education landscape tremendously… But that is not enough how do we ensure that there is an ongoing process to make everyone educated in the future. Something beyond the…
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Yesterday we spoke of Transparency and Visibility, but let us look at Transparency in the light of Mistakes, Ignorance and Ethics.. These are just starters for you to think more… Transparency and Mistakes Mistakes happen, and it is also true that based on the severity of the impact the mistake has on the organization, your…
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Visibility is the catch word very often used in the workplace. Often when related to career advancements, appreciations, recognition and promotions. And there are cases where the pursuit for visibility impacts performance of individual team members. These are primarily people whose effort is more on visibility than on performance. There are three aspects I want…
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I had started reading memoirs very actively sometime last year and I might have mentioned that here as well. I found that to be a good blend of both non fiction and story… A mix of both worlds… Recently I read this interesting book by Nadia Wassef – Shelf life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller…
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Can we think of life without thinking of death..? Or is that what we should do…? People often don’t want to think of death.. or speak of it and yet it is something that is for sure to happen.. whether you had a great life or not… We have a life means we will have…
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Today is the 264th episode on the podcast but it also marks the 200 continuous days that I have been writing or blogging… As some of you might know this is part of my 365 days writing project… Well that demands a dedicated Double Century Celebration.. The phrase double century is something I have heard…
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There is no question that we live in an interconnected world, but when it comes to change we always think of it happening to us. But in an interconnected world there is no Us as in ‘I’ or ‘me’. There is only us as in ‘WE’. Let me explain that a bit. When we talk…
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Before the start of this week, On last Sunday evening I took sometime to send message to some of my old business acquaintances, colleagues turned friends and old business connections and then sat down to list a few things, that I look forward to for a Monday at work. I have mentioned before that I…
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When a company looks for a new hire they put in a job description…. The first problem is they put everything in it that it makes so difficult to find a person… Next even if they get people to apply, they want a perfect person…. It is like they want some one who has been…
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If someone asks us ‘What do you want?…’ the question can come out as quite rude based on the situation. But it is one of the most important questions both for an individual and for the team we work in and with the people we work with… On an individual level we should as often…
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Today we lost Reyna… I have never had a pet as a kid… And then when my kids insisted… I mean when they kept begging for it for a very long time… we got her…. and now she is gone and it leaves such a big vacuum in our lives…. I was not afraid of…
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Sometimes we all get inspired and that inspiration takes us change things.. Do things like they were never done before. I should say some people get inspired…. because I don’t think I have been inspired to change things… may be in smaller ways but not that makes significant changes… A few years back I heard…
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Minnal means lighting in Malayalam language…. My Mother Tongue… So it is lighting speed and the wait for a Malayali Super Hero ended towards the end of 2021 with the releasing of Basil Joseph’s entertainer Minnal Murali on Netflix I have another reason I liked that movie… My first and only appearance in a role…
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My earliest memories was that of spider man that I used to watch in black and white… not even sure if it was english or farsi… because I watched them while living in Iran in the seventies. Then I remember when the Christopher Reeves starer Superman was released… And also the TV shows that used…
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The ability to listen is our biggest strength especially at work. It does not matter what stage in the career we are, listening can be our one big asset. And in my years working I have found interesting concepts on the ‘art of listening’ Listening is a waste of time: There is an interesting notion among some that…
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Planning is what helps us to do more in the available time we have and save us from surprises that peep from the corner. But there is also a certain adventure with not planning things. A certain love affair with the unknown surprise that makes its way to our life. When I started writing this…
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How does someone feel complete? On December 31st one more day and you step into a new year. Your one year is complete and you used up another year of your life. Do you feel complete? what does complete mean? Does it mean different things for different people? Over the years I have heard people…
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We went through 5 things to think and do yesterday.. there is 5 more in my mind.. After this don’t ask me if you do all these… not daily but very frequently I keep doing these… But I wanted to capture these here… Don’t have to feel stressed and overwhelmed.. but there might be one…
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Life is like playing cards, we have no choice on the hand being dealt, but we are in control of putting up the best game we can. If I was to put down 10 things to think and do that can fit into an everyday routine… what would they be….? I will do 5 things…
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Here is a message I got from a fortune cookie during my Lunch a while back… This Fortune Cookie message is a Japanese Proverb Nanakorobi yaoki which literally means, “Fall seven times and stand up eight”…. But I have no clue what the 7 times signifies, I have heard about the seven deadly sins, so…
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A person leaving your team is something we all have faced in our work life. Many times we have been able to negotiate them back. Yet we all have worked in teams where people leave. It is a fact of work life. Every team loses some people over a period of time. The question is…
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Transparency can be a very useful tool.. especially when you work in teams. It helps us in building a connection between team members. Transparency will also bring the abilities and inabilities or the team to light. But if the team has been formed with a common goal in mind then team members help each other…
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I think we all know that ‘Finding Fault’ is not a much appreciated trait but knowingly or unknowingly many do get quite good at it over time. To be honest we all might have sometime or other fallen into that trap of blaming someone else. Sometimes we genuinely believe that the other person is at fault,…
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Can someone copy your resume..? Can that resume end up in your hand… less possible…. Can you end up interviewing that person.. No.. Way… But it happened… to yours truly a few years back…. You might think that it is impossible. You will agree the possibility that someone can copy your resume and you will also…
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There is a quote by the scientist and 11th President of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.. “Dream is not that which you see while sleeping it is something that does not let you sleep.” True in all sense. But the thought I want to put before you today the need to make a hole in your dream.…
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Processes are put in place so things could run smoothly and by running smoothly it also means that someone has a way to control and predict the outcome or delays. All said and done processes also have bottlenecks that make it difficult for some things to function smoothly. One would say that the process is…
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Is it even possible to do only what we love to do…. We always hear people say this.. And I have my doubts because to make a machinery run… there are so many things that we have to get done… It is priorities and not just love of doing something.. Haven’t you heard people say…
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It is important that we stand up every time we fall because falls are inevitable in life and for life to move on we need to be in a standing position. To avoid a fall we should always be lying down and we do that only when we are dead There is another reason why…
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I can remember much of my failures… much more than my successes and if I take a tab the side of failures will far outweigh successes. Is that bad? I don’t think so. It is just that our failures are much more louder than our successes. May be our failures will be more remembered and…
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One of the troubling tasks in life is to find ways to avoid stress and do something regularly that makes us happy. The catch is that some of these items in life that make us happy have an expiry date. One such item which has an expiry date is the time we spend with kids…
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When I started my professional career, one of my customers once mentioned to me the definition for being a professional. He aid it was someone who does their work as their life depended on it. Though over my career I have done several things both as if life depended on it and otherwise there was…
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When I graduated I don’t remember thinking of a resume building process that is tightly coupled with one’s career. You finish education, get on the first job that comes and then retire from that same job years later. It happens even now but quite less I guess… Working for the Government or the private company…
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I am sure you might have heard Jim Carrey’s commencement speech ob pursuing your dream… It had gone viral sometime back…. or back then it was all over my News feeds. His closing statement is what struck me “You can fail at what you don’t want; so you might as well take a chance on…
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I think Work-Life balance would be different with a freedom to call quits. I don’t think I have that freedom but I think those who have that might have better work life balance… if we take opportunities and our chances to get another job… I think the important aspect is checking if we can work…
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For me Work-life balance is not a mathematical problem that you solve in equal percentages, or any percentage for that matter. It has to do with being contented. Knowing what you want out of work and what you want out of Life. If you do not know that or at least check your level of…
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One of the most commonly used phrases. I heard it first a few years into starting to work and I laughed at it because for me there was no much difference between the two. Work and Life were more or less the same. My friends were those with whom I worked and we worked on weekends…
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Desires; who does not have any, it is what fuel people in their life. The desire to own something, the desire to have someone in your life, the desire to be famous, they come in all colors and flavors to direct our life. We reach a point when we are defined by our desires. Religious…
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You meet a friend and tell him that a book is so boring and atrociously bad. I am sure next time he is in a library or bookstore and sees the book he will surely stop and pick it up. He will spend more time than ever browsing just to see how bad it is. He does not have…
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There might be more that three ways to react to a change; but I like focusing on Three because it is less and who has the time to count beyond Three. Change is inevitable, it does not matter who you are, if you like it or not, it is there and will come to you. We…
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I think I have spoken about success before… if not I will speak sometime… but most people do… But may be I have always spoken more about failures than about success I guess.. What else can you do if you have to reflect on your own experiences.. I had even written a poetry about success…
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On Friday I had to take someone to the emergency… This is not the first time I have gone to an emergency…. Though I don’t think I have been taken to emergency before… I have accompanied people… friends.. family… neighbors… Most times I have been just the help driving them there… As I sit there…
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Some time in early Nineties I had read that Money is the worst Motivator, yet businesses all over have been providing monetary incentives to their employees to get work done. Even today salary and perks are the main reason most people people go to work… What would you do if you had all the money…
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When we hear contracts we think about things that are binding.. written signed.. locked…. but there are many other places we need a contract… many of these contracts are never written.. they are just understood and agreed upon my people… they exist because we all need to be able to take care of our responsibilities……
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I got my booster shot on Dec 1st… Previously I had received Moderna and so that is what I get as Booster as well…. When I got my Moderna shots people had said that many people felt shivers and were not feeling well… Luckily I did not feel anything much… just a soreness on my…
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This whole idea of being correct kind of confuses me at times. The first question is do we have to be correct always… or just the never ending search for being correct in itself is fine… or just forget about all this and go forward and live your life as you wish…. I mean what…
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As things open up and companies ask people to come back to work.. or if I decide to take up a role that might demand the same.. how will I feel after spending almost two years working from home… Thinking about it now it will be exciting… When I say exciting I am in no…
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Let me be very honest… today I really felt like quitting this project… I had a pretty low day when everything I do was staring back at me and asking me for a reason. I think it is not just this one thing… I feel like quitting every thing that I am doing and focussing…
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Wealth. made.. inherited… acquired.. lost… House of Gucci takes you through the twists and turns in the family business empire.. based on a book by Sara Gay Forden a true story about the Gucci family…. What money does to people and what lack of it does… I did not have a lot of expectations going…
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Last week I saw the new Will Smith movie… King Richard which tells you the story of Venus and Serena Williams… their family.. Will Smith plays the dad… Planning, preparation and relationships…. that is how I will sum it… A must watch for those who love movies I have always been skeptical about missing life…
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If not people.. which I mentioned in my last post.. What matters to you most at work….? if we had to choose something else… other than people what would that be… I have been thinking about it and lot of things came to my mine… title… power.. money…. purpose….. and so on… I think money…
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Work can be enjoyable but work can also be a drudgery… and the fact is that not everyone in this world is privileged to enjoy their work… Some jobs are not humanely enjoyable… So if we need to talk about what makes work enjoyable then we can only do it by acknowledging our privilege to…
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How committed are we in our job? How committed should we be? How can we ensure we are committed.. What do you think employers or our team mates or manager thinks of commitment… Are our managers more committed than us because they have a fancier title or higher salaries and have more power in the…
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You are going for an interview and they ask you why do you want this job? What will your answer be… I am sure we all will have our own answers…. And based on our situation our real answer can be different… I say real answer because not everyone will give the real answer.. they…
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I have often wondered if the real intention of learning history was met in my case… Well what is the real intention..? I have learned history as a subject throughout my school…. I did not hate it in anyway.. but the way it was taught and what was expected of us was to write exams…
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What do you get when a Philosopher, a Technologist and a Public Policy expert come together? You get ‘System Error’… Just wrapped up this interesting book about ‘where big tech went wrong and how we can reboot’ It is an interesting read written by Stanford Professors Rob Reich, a philosopher, Mehran Sahami, a Technologist and…
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We all can fall into this trap of not able to start on something. Sometimes it is because we are planning for everything to be perfect before we can start. I believe in starting crappy and then becoming consistent. Consistency is a path to improvement… I am not saying consistently be crappy… What I mean…
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When pandemic hit we were all in a position of uncertainty and the immediate goal was to ensure how we can make things better for ourselves… what many of us… or at least I did not think was of many other people who were less privileged than me…. I have spoken and written about how…
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So change is always an interesting aspect and being an Agile professional… day in and day out we talk of change…. I think that is one area we keep talking… one thing that has not changed in last few years for me…. this talking about change…. managing change to leading change and so on… but…
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I know it is a cliche… you might have heard it many times over and over that a kind gesture from a total stranger can make your day… But what the heck… if it happens to you, you need to talk about it.. loud.. let people know… the world needs such news… more than ever.…
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It has been 147 days since I started this project and today is one such day when my mind is blank…. It is not that there is nothing to write.. it is that nothing seems important enough to write… The Journal looks back at me… “should I stay or should I go” it asks me……
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Dune… I have not read any of the books.. I have never been a great SciFi reader…. So the fact that Dune was releasing did not really excite me… I have to let you know that I have not watched any of Star Wars completely…. I know that some you might not like me for…
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Last weekend I saw two movies and I am going to dedicate this and the next episode to those movies. I am not sure if I can call these reviews but more of my experience watching and thoughts that went through my mind watching them. I watched both the movies in the theaters. Today let’s…
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Is dying the same…. before and in this digital age…. When we die we don’t exist in the physical world… but digitally our presence is felt… one does not need to pull the album and flip through it to see our pictures… They don’t need to do anything to watch our videos… We are there…
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If we live up to 80 years we would have lived around four thousand weeks. That is true… but I did not think about it till I read Oliver Burkeman’s book ‘Four Thousand Weeks’…. Time Management for mortals…. The book reminds us about both time and our mortality. The first thing I did as soon…
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Can we ‘Think Uninfluenced’…? what does that even mean…? before you jump into any conclusions… I need to tell you that whether we agree or not, it is very much possible that we are all influenced by many things… I am.. and the funny part is most of the influence I myself am not aware……
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Whether we like it being done to us or not.. we will do it to others… judge other people… Even subconsciously…. Sometimes I feel that this is our way of interacting… We see someone or hear someone and then make a mental picture and start working on that…. then it is all upon them to…
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