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Almost every communication tutorial will tell you to speak less, and listen more. Be a good listener, they say. So you try shutting up. And try to listen. You try to be a good listener. Only to be distracted by your brain that starts fidgeting, trying to instantly judge every sentence, trying to form responses to every argument made, waiting impatiently for its turn to finally speak; to finally tell the other speaker how she’s wrong, how you don’t agree to her opinions/observations, or how you agree completely to her perspective but have a few more intelligent points to add to her statements. ...

How do you judge a person you’re meeting for the first time? Non-verbal cues, body language, dressing sense, social manners, behaviour, mobile phone(!) or something else? While some of these are legit ways of forming a first impression, personally I follow just one principle: punctuality. Punctuality means being on-time. And being on-time means being 15 minutes early. Being 15 minutes early shows that you respect and value the time of the person you’re meeting. It also give you the opportunity to: ...

Every successful _________ in the world is good at communication. You may fill up the blank with any job title, position, career choice, occupation and still the statement will stand. Because to be successful at something, one not only needs a canvas to draw their ideas on, they also need to sell it. By selling, I don’t mean the usual exchange of money against goods/services. A piece of art won’t gather an audience by itself. It needs a story. A new reform bill won’t pass by itself. It needs persuasion. A LinkedIn profile won’t get you a job by itself. It needs an interview. ...

Jio recently announced new postpaid plans with three major OTT providers bundled with it viz. Netflix (single-device, mobile plan), Amazon Prime and Disney+ Hotstar. Bundling OTT providers with postpaid plan isn’t a new concept. Airtel and Vodafone Idea (recently co-branded as Vi) had been offering such plans for quite some time now. While bundled OTTs is a no-brainer strategy for Jio (it gets new postpaid users, who are highly valued in telecom), if you’re wondering how will it benefit Netflix, Prime and Disney+, it’s not that complex either. ...

One of the fondest memories from my childhood is when my cousin, Mausum and I learnt to ride a bicycle within a day. It was the first bicycle of my life, and it didn’t come with a user manual. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ From morning till the sun went down, we tried to master it; we fell, got scratches all over our limbs. But we returned home victorious, finally getting the art of pedalling while maintaining our balance. What a jubilant feeling that was! ...

Parkinson’s law states that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” It basically means that when we have more than enough time to complete a task, we almost always end up making the work ‘stretch’. E.g. if we need to prepare a presentation and have a month to do it, we will somehow make the task more complex, procrastinate, work at a slower pace than usual, have more ’let me first have a cup of coffee’ breaks, watch 3 seasons of an obscure crime series on Netflix and finally complete the task on the penultimate evening. ...

You must have experienced a variation of the following situation: While travelling home, you notice a billboard of a brand (say, Toyota’s latest car); you make a passing remark about it to your partner. “Toyota Glanza looks eerily similar to Baleno, isn’t it?” “They are basically the same car.”, replies your partner. The next day at office, Toyota Glanza ads are all over your Facebook, Twitter, Google, Gmail etc. You don’t believe it! ...

There are two major ways to truly soak in the knowledge present in good books viz. Write book summaries Discuss/teach it with/to someone who can comprehend Finding someone who’s really interested in the same topic, share the same mental wavelength, have the intellectual prowess to comprehend/question/add their own independent thinking to the discussion is not always possible. Thankfully, you don’t need another person to write book summaries. And even if you find someone to discuss, book summaries are so powerful that you can’t possibly not write them. ...

One of my favourite quotes is by James Clear and it sums up life goals perfectly in just 6 powerful words: https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1297189305023107072?s=20 While the first two are relatively easier to understand, how does one decipher an artist’s soul? In my humble observation, there’s one clear difference between an artist and (say) a business person/logical thinker/normal practical everyday person- the soul of a great artist will often defy logic. Let me explain. ...

“Why are millennials so lazy?” “Have you stopped hitting your pet?” “Will you still vote for this stupid politician?” These are few examples of a loaded question. Such questions are ’loaded’ with an unjustified presupposition and it tricks you into answering in favour of the person questioning. The above questions assume that millennials are lazy, you hit your pet and the politician (in question) is stupid. And that’s the trap to avoid. ...