Category: Life System

I walked up to the stage to give my talk on why the gathered assembly of hundreds of students should vote for me as their “school captain.” I was in grade 9. I had written out a 3-page speech and memorised it. It was a close election, and I knew the speech could tilt the election in my favour. I started off well – and then I froze. My mind went blank. I forgot what I had to say. At that moment, the election was lost.

That summer, I decided to learn how to speak in public. I enrolled for a course at the “Indo American Society.” I was by far the youngest in the class of 15. Each of us had to speak in each session. The first few sessions, I stumbled. A very helpful instructor and a friendly audience helped me get better. I learnt how to stand and speak in front of others. When the final session came, I spoke on “Circles” – and I was awarded the “Best Speaker.” I still remember holding that trophy. It was like I had climbed a mountain. The course changed me; it gave me confidence to speak in public. And never again have I faltered.

An upgrade to my abilities came in 2006 when I was to present my idea for a $100 computer at PC Forum in their annual conference which was held that year near San Diego. I had a 2-minute speaking slot. The organisers had brought in a coach (Jezra Kaye) to help each of the presenters prepare. I thought I was a good speaker and didn’t need any help. I was wrong. In the couple hours that Jezra spent with me, she transformed my delivery. I realised then that it was not just the content that mattered but also how it was spoken. Which words to emphasise, the voice modulation, the pauses – all of these have to come together to create a memorable oration. I will forever be grateful to Jezra for that session.

Over the years, I have spoken many times in public – besides the 1:1 interviews, presentations to small groups, and panels at various events. The one thing I do is to prepare and practice. To quote Churchill: “If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation. If you want me to speak for thirty minutes, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.” I have read from written speeches, I have used outlines, and I have used Powerpoint slides. They are all useful props. What matters most is the content and the delivery – the passion and emotion that one can bring into the words. Public Speaking is about persuasion and changing minds; the best teachers are politicians.

Public speaking is something we must all invest time in learning. It is not just about standing up and letting the words flow; there is much more to it. It is a skill that can take one much further in life.

In life and in business, there are times when we feel we aren’t moving. Things have somehow come to a halt even as days pass by. It could be in a relationship or a project we are working on. When things stagnate, it is possible to get into a downward spiral. We feel the world is conspiring against us. It can make us angry and inward focused. It can have a negative effect on those around us – at home and the workplace.

A 2008 HBR article discusses stall points in business: “[Stall points is] our term for the start of secular reversals in company growth fortunes, as opposed to quarterly stumbles or temporary corrections… Growth stalls can have dire consequences: They bring down even the most admired companies; they exact a sizable financial and human toll; and their impact may be permanent. After a stall sets in, the odds against recovery rise dramatically with the passage of time.” The authors identify four reasons: “premium position captivity, innovation management breakdown, premature core abandonment, and talent shortfall.”

Something similar can play out in our personal lives also. We may be working hard, but find that we are not making progress – for various reasons. In personal relationships, we may find that we are not communicating enough with those closest to us. We withdraw into a shell. A darkness envelopes us. Everything around us seems to be going wrong.

I went through such a phase in 1994. My entrepreneurial venture was not working out. I was in denial that I had failed. I had just got married. It was an arranged marriage and Bhavana and I barely knew each other. I would come back home late at night and just not talk to my parents or Bhavana. I would get angry at small things. I had reached what I can now think of as a “stall point.” I was in a secular decline. It took me time to come out of it. I had to first recognise that my project was a failure and not me; I still had it in me to do something different and succeed. I could not blame or take out my frustration at those around me; the fault lay squarely with me. I had to stay positive. I decided to go to the US for a long visit (a couple months) to figure out the way forward. And it was on that trip that the business plan for what became IndiaWorld came together.

Each one of us will face stall points at some time or another in our lives. We need to recognise them, and then work to get out of the negative zone. It is at times like these that we need family and friends around us. Each of us can do much more that we imagine; our attitude towards stall points will determine the heights we can climb.

A friend I met recently asked me a question, “Rajesh, you are one of the few people I know who has made a lot of money (a reference to my IndiaWorld deal in 1999) and remained the same. Wealth changes people. How have you managed it?” He pointed me to some tweets written by Chris Sacca, which are encapsulated in this article:

One of the inevitable troubles of being a person with immense wealth and power is that you often find yourself surrounded by people who won’t call you out on a bad idea.

Venture capitalist and early Twitter investor Chris Sacca warned Elon Musk that he is completely alone and is surrounding himself with people who won’t challenge his nonconformist ideas to transform Twitter into his vision of a free-speech social media haven.

“One of the biggest risks of wealth/power is no longer having anyone around you who can push back, give candid feedback, suggest alternatives, or just simply let you know you’re wrong,” Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital and a friend of Elon Musk, wrote in a Twitter thread.

Musk needs people around him who are willing to “speak some truth to power and complement his bold and ambitious instincts with desperately needed nuance,” Sacca argues, because many of Twitter’s problems are too complex to solve on his own.

My friend’s point was that with wealth and power comes loneliness. The feedback loop goes away since one is surrounded by people who do not speak truth to power. How does one stay away from this trap?

My immediate reply to him was what I had written earlier [LINK]: “I still remember the gist of what Bhavana told me the day after I sold IndiaWorld: “We have got a lot of money at an early age. If you keep thinking about it, you will not do anything productive in your future life. Think of us as custodians of God’s money on earth. There is a purpose for the money. Figure it out.””

My friend encouraged me to think deeper and write about it. As I thought more, I realised that there are three things that have come together to ensure that I do not cut off my feedback loops. First, I have not let the money go to my head. This has happened because I have failed many times in my life – and more importantly, I had multiple serial failures before I succeeded with IndiaWorld. So, the realisation was there that while I did not let failure put me down, I should not let success go to my head. Both of these are part of the terrain for an entrepreneur.

Second, I have (thanks to Bhavana) retained my humility. I work with the belief that we are all “work in progress” and need to become better. To do this, we have to take in feedback from others. This means having the humility to ask and openness to learn from what others tell us. Wealth can disappear through our mistakes; good character stays forever.

Third, I have not adopted a lifestyle which has taken me away from my roots, family and friends. A new lifestyle means a new set of people around – and they would be attracted by the money and power, rather than the person. One needs to stay true to oneself. While smarts are important, luck too plays an important factor in life. I do not think of myself as invincible or having any special superpowers. I have failed many times in my life. If my needs are simple, I will not create a situation where I put myself on a high pedestal from which it becomes difficult and painful to climb down from. I am always wanting to learn. In every meeting, what is that one key takeaway? What is that one thing that can make me improve? And this can only happen if we stay grounded.

Getting plenty of sleep is very important for a healthy life.

Writes Matthew Walker in “Why We Sleep”:

I doubt you are surprised by this fact, but you may be surprised by the consequences. Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.”

Perhaps you have also noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired? This is no coincidence. Too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction. Despite being full, you still want to eat more. It’s a proven recipe for weight gain in sleep-deficient adults and children alike. Worse, should you attempt to diet but don’t get enough sleep while doing so, it is futile, since most of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass, not fat.

Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.

Adds Russell Foster in “Life Time”: “In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of thrilling new discoveries in and around the science of the body clock and the 24-hour biological cycles that dominate our lives. The most obvious of these cycles is the daily pattern of sleep and wake. Surprisingly, most books discuss the body clock and sleep separately. However, new research tells us that such a disconnected approach tells only part of the story. You cannot properly understand sleep without understanding the body clock, and sleep in turn regulates the clock…[T]he body clock and sleep [need to] be considered together as two intimately linked and intertwined areas of biology that define and dominate our health. In so many cases, your ability to succeed or fail, from driving home safely after work or dieting to achieve weight loss, will depend upon whether you are working with or against these 24-hour cycles…If you want to embrace life, be creative, make sensible decisions, enjoy the company of others, and view the world and all that it has to offer with a positive outlook, then embracing biological time will help you do this.”

As I wrote earlier: “I wake up daily by 4:30 am. I set two alarms: 4:24 am and 4:27 am. To ensure that I still don’t oversleep, I have made a habit of listening to the BBC World News 5-minute bulletin (via their app) at 4:30 am. There is no exception on weekends – my waking up time daily is the same… To wake up on time, one has to sleep on time. I normally sleep by 9:45/10 pm. This gets me about 6.5 hours daily. On some days, I will take a short nap during the day – when I wake up, I feel fresh and it is almost like having a second morning.”

To do this, it is important to recognise the 24-hour body clock. It means making sure there is a daily discipline. I try and ensure that I don’t change my waking up time irrespective of what time I sleep. (There are a few occasions when I cannot sleep by 10 pm, but I still ensure I wake up by 4:30 am. On these days, I will take a short nap during the day.)

I am very much a morning person. I like the silence of the dark early mornings. I do my writing and thinking in these hours, so I don’t like to delay my waking up time. Which also ensures an on-time sleep the previous night.

I tend to sleep in the afternoons on weekends – without an alarm. I will typically go to sleep thinking about an idea or a problem to solve. And many a time, I will wake up with some direction on the way forward.

The idea of a “second morning” came from something I had read about Jim Collins. Here is August Birch: “Collins’s favorite sleep schedule is unconventional, but he says, gives you the power of dual mornings. Since mornings are our most-productive time for our brains, this dual morning secret is worth a try. Collins takes a nap in the afternoon and goes to bed from 10PM to 3AM. He then performs his deep work from 3AM to 7AM. He works until he’s tired and goes back to sleep from 7AM to 10AM. Giving him eight hours of sleep total, but with two mornings. At 10AM he starts his second day. Collins says the second sleep session feels like “general anesthesia.” The second cycle appears to send him straight into deep sleep without cycling through the early phases.”

So, for a productive day and life, do not compromise on your sleep. Work out your cycle (wake up with alarm or without, sleep during the day or not, awaken early or late) and stick with it. A very good tip from Matthew Walker: “Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep.”

Every year on Abhishek’s birthday (he will turn 18 in April), I leave a letter for him to read when he wakes up. It is about 2500-3000 words long and has my memories and impressions of the year gone by. I have done this every year since he was born. I published some of the early letters on the blog, but then I decided what I write to him should remain private.

I don’t know how I got the idea of these letters. But as I scanned through my blog archives, I saw that I had started with a “Letter to a 2005 Baby” which I had written a few months after Abhishek was born. The first letter was more about me than him! Here is how I had begun that letter:

On April 19, I become a father. 37 years separate Abhishek and me. We are products of two different worlds. As I thought about the world Abhishek will grow up in, I started thinking about the world I grew up in. And out of all this thinking emerged this letter.

Dear Abhishek,

Welcome to the World. As I hold you in my arms, I am thinking of the world around you that you will make your own in the years to come. It will be some time before you begin to understand the world around you. Hopefully, when that times, this letter will help you make some sense of where we once were and where we are going.

… Through this letter, I want to share some of my thoughts on this changing world. Hopefully, by understanding where we came from, you will also be able to make this world better. Because there is still a lot to be done. From tackling poverty to searching for sources of alternative energy, the world needs even more innovation and entrepreneurship. There are so many elements in today’s world that are unrecognisable from the world in which I was born. For example, desktop computers, mobiles and the Internet didn’t exist when I was born and already today, I cannot imagine a day in my life without any of them). I wonder what the equivalent innovations and advances will be in your life. Nanotech? Intelligent Machines? Quantum computing? Or something we cannot even imagine today? Whatever it is, you are going to grow up in amazingly interesting times. Because the only constant in this world is Change. And you are going to get plenty of it even as you grow up.

This is how I began the letter when he turned one: “It is hard to imagine you are one. (There are also times when it is hard to imagine that you are only one!) You’ll be much older by the time you can read these letters, but I thought I’d still continue the series so you have a little written record of your life and the world around.”

And that’s how it has continued. Each year, in April, I sit for a few hours and write out my letter to him. It is only read by him and Bhavana. He expectantly looks forward to it. (All his old letters are in a single Word document.) The letters have grown much more personal and less about the world around him. It is my take on the past year and our experiences together. A few years ago, I figured that even my memory of the full year fades with passing time so I now make notes through the year.

There are times when I will read old letters to see how he and our relationship has grown and changed through the years. While photos and videos have a place of their own, few things can capture emotions better than written words.

For me, the annual letter has become the best gift that I can give Abhishek. And I think he also knows that!

I learnt driving when I was working in the US. While I had a licence from India acquired just before I left for my Masters, I had done no driving. When working at NYNEX in White Plains, I found that travelling around by public transport was quite limiting. And so, I took some driving lessons and got myself a licence. The licence gave me freedom, and I fell in love with driving around in the US. In the two years before returning to India, I must have driven about 10,000 miles. I was stopped only once for speeding. This was in California and when the traffic cop realised I was from out-of-state, he let me go with a warning.

I have some very good memories of driving in the US – mainly the New York area and then California where I had lived for six months. I owned an old Buick when I was in New York – because I knew I had to return to India soon and didn’t want to invest in an expensive car.

I continued driving in Mumbai after I moved back in 1992. The car was a Maruti Suzuki 800. I drove a lot during my early years as an entrepreneur. Traffic was not bad in Mumbai and finding parking was not difficult. And then one night, I had an accident.

I had gone to attend a wedding near Dadar. As I was driving back, I hit a lamp post in the middle of the road. I was momentarily blinded by the sharp headlights of an oncoming vehicle and I didn’t see the pole in the middle of the dimly lit road. The top of the lamp post crashed through my windscreen and shattered it. The broken glass was all over the front seat. Luckily, I was unscathed. After that day, I decided to keep a driver. I realised my mind was constantly whirring and even though driving is mostly reflexive, it was not worth risking one’s life on Mumbai roads. It has now been more than 25 years since that incident. I haven’t driven on my own after that, even though I am confident that I will still be able to drive – it’s not something one ever forgets.

I do miss driving at times, especially when I am travelling with Bhavana and Abhishek on vacations. Not driving limits the number of places one can visit, especially in the US. Of course, there is now Uber but that’s more for short distances. One cannot think of taking an Uber on California’s coastal highway 1 from San Francisco to San Diego!

India’s roads infrastructure has improved dramatically over the past decade. At times, I do think I should start driving again. But then, I also know that road discipline is not as great as in the US and a single mistake by me or by someone else could be quite costly. The memory of my collision with the lamp post is still quite fresh in my mind. And so, I guess driving my own vehicle is not something I will probably ever do. But I am glad for the few years that I did.

When I was young (in my teens), I liked listening to Hindi songs. The only options then were an LP player and radio. We had many records at home. I would also record songs from the radio so I could listen to them whenever I want. My years at IIT expanded my repertoire to English language songs – the likes of Simon and Garfunkel. I had a 2-in-1 radio and cassette player in my room at IIT. Sometime after that as I started working and then became an entrepreneur, my interest waned.

Now, nearly 30 years later, music has come back in my life thanks to the Amazon Music app on my mobile and the Bose QC45 headset. It was last April when I upgraded my mobile phone so I wouldn’t have to worry about storage space. I had also bought the headset, ahead of a US visit. My main purpose was to have a few songs downloaded which I could listen to offline during the flights. I ended up downloading a couple hundred Hindi songs – mostly from the 1970s and later. Many of the songs have associated memories of my growing up years.

With the noise cancellation headset, I realised the songs playing at low volume in my ears helped me switch off from the surrounding sounds and concentrate better. The technology is now so good that even the engine noise in flights is almost cancelled. I could now create my own private space wherever I wanted. This was for me a new experience – and one that I began to like.

I have since expanded the songs in the app. I downloaded all the songs from “Hamilton” and then added many more English language songs. Of late, I have also added some musical soundtracks. My favourite is from “Lord of the Rings.” Although I have watched the movies multiple times, I had not paid as much attention to the musical score in the background. A few chords had stuck with me. I now realise how good the compositions are.

In the app, I use the “Random” mode – so there is always a surprise coming up next, rather than the same sequence. At home, I sit in my chair with my writing notebook, put on the headset, switch on the Music, and commence my thinking and writing. For the time I am listening, I am switched off from the street noise and all other distractions.

Music playing softly in my ears helps me relax and think better – and I wish I had not let my childhood interest disappear. Next, I want to explore classical music, symphonies and even music from other countries. I don’t have a natural ear for music, but I guess it’s never too late in life to explore new horizons!

I wrote earlier about punctuality, but there is a broader theme to be addressed: time management.  Many people I meet are complaining about lack of time to do many things in their life, and forever scrambling from one activity to another. So, what are my views on time management?

At any point, it is important to know what one’s top three priorities are. These are the important themes – and not just the most immediate to-dos. These priorities move us forward in the direction which we want to do. For me, my top three priorities (and these have generally remained unchanged for the past few years are): making Netcore into an enduring, great company, putting India on an irreversible path to freedom and prosperity, and creating institutions for generations to come as part of philanthropy. These are my BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals). They anchor my life. I know I cannot work on all of them – the immediate focus is Netcore. But these are three things that I think about and want to accomplish in life – have some successes in all three areas in my obituary.

The key to time management is controlling who can take away your time. I do not have an assistant to allocate my time; I do it myself. I make the decision of who needs to be given time. I maintain a Word doc as my Calendar. It makes me do annotations, move things around easily, keep a running list of future meetings I need to schedule – all in an easy low-tech way. I do not rely on Google Calendar or any other calendaring system. This has worked well. In the past two-and-a-half years, I have missed one meeting and been late for another meeting. That is 2 out of probably 2,000 engagements. The past two years were easier because most of these meetings happened on Zoom; with the world having opened, more in-person meetings happen now, and thus travel times will reduce efficiency of time even as the in-person meetings will improve the quality of outcomes.

It is important to decide whom to meet and whom to avoid. One cannot say Yes to every meeting request. I like to keep some free time daily so I can read and think. Like, the other day, I kept a few hours of contiguous time so I could dig deep into the world of Web3 and think how it can be applied to solving problems in adtech and martech. While conversations with others are important, some contiguous time to reflect on the inputs and connect the dots is important – this cannot be delegated.

One has about 10-12 hours a day. It is very difficult to maintain 100% performance throughout the day. One has to decide which are the times one can be most productive and block off that time. For me, the early mornings are the “me-time”. Do not let any person, message, device or app intrude into that.

To summarise: time management is thus another word for prioritisation. Know the tasks and the people that are important to you. Build your life around them. The rest are like interrupts which will come and have to be handled. Don’t let them define the day. Controlling how and to whom you allocate your time is critical. Ensuring plenty of white spaces in the calendar for the writing, daydreaming and mindwandering is essential.

I like science fiction. It is perhaps because I am forever trying to imagine the near future – the long future is an extension! I like the world creation of Tolkien and Asimov. More recently, I discovered “The Expanse” (TV series). It is even better than the Foundation series on Apple TV a few months ago. The Expanse imagines a future far out – planets in the solar system have been colonised, and the beyond beckons. Another good series is Andor, part of the Star Wars stories.

There is something magical about good science fiction – it lets the imagination roam free far away from the present. Eventually, all good science fiction is about people and their stories and relationships. My earliest memory of science fiction is of listening to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on BBC World Service. The humour brought to life by voices over the airwaves left a dent, er, mark. (For those who didn’t get it, Arthur Dent is one of the key characters.) Like many of my generation, I grew up watching “Star Trek” and being fascinated with space. I would listen to the live broadcasts of space shuttle take-offs and landings on either BBC or Voice of America. Then of course, there were the timeless Star Wars movies. (I watched all of them again a year ago with Abhishek.) And of course, the space-themed rides in the theme parks!

Maybe it was the pandemic, but over the past two years, I have started reading more science fiction – old and new. I read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) and 1984 (George Orwell). I watched Dune, and bought the book (haven’t started reading it as yet). I read Andy Weir’s books – The Martian and Project Hail Mary. I know there’s so much more to read and wonder.

With commercial space travel a reality, space will no longer be just something in the sky for our children (or perhaps their children). And so it is with technology – that which was once impossible is becoming available, first to a few, then to many, and finally to all. Sci-fi shows us glimpses of a future that we will not live to see, but one which is within the realm of possibility.

I recommend reading science fiction to let our imagination roam free and let authors take our minds to new worlds – either the microscopic or the telescopic!

Isn’t it a wonderful word? Mindwandering. I came across this word recently as part of a title of a book by Moshe Bar that showed up when I was searching (textwandering?!) for something. I realised that there is a lot of “mind wandering” that I do – just like everyone. While at a meeting, suddenly I am transported to a different place and time, triggered by something I heard or felt. And then abruptly, I am back to the present. I always keep my notebook or small paper and pen handy so I can write thoughts as they buzz by. This isn’t planned daydreaming; it is leaving the busy present in a way no one else around notices.

So, I decided to explore the topic when the book was published recently. Here is an excerpt:

So much attention has been paid to ways to unplug from the bustle, and that’s absolutely to be commended. I’ll share my own positive experiences with doing so in silent meditation retreats. But as a series of discoveries in neuroscience over the past several decades have revealed, the greater challenge is freeing ourselves from the distractions within, which disrupt our attention and intrude on the quality of our experience even when we are in a perfectly quiet place. In fact, they may do so even more in times of quiet.

Research has revealed that our brains are inherently active. A number of brain regions connected in what’s dubbed the default mode network (DMN) are always grinding away, engaged in a number of different involuntary activities that neuroscientists collectively call mindwandering: from daydreaming to the incessant self-chatter and from ruminating about the past to worrying about the future. The brain regions most often identified as being part of the DMN include the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the angular gyrus, but there are several more that come and go as part of this massive, large-scale network. Not only does all of this inner commotion tug our attention away from the present moment, but it can dampen the quality of our experience, lowering our mood and potentially contributing to anxiety and depression. Yet there’s a method to this apparent madness. Evolution has clearly taught our minds to wander. According to various studies, they’re caught up in mindwandering between 30 and 47 percent of our waking time, gobbling up a great deal of energy.

…Our sense of self, research has shown, is largely a form of prediction about who we are, about how we will think, feel, and behave in different situations, associating how we’ve thought, felt, and behaved in similar situations in the past with how we will do so now and in the future. The same is true for how we develop our assessments of others. Associations are the building blocks of most mental operations.

This is, essentially, why so much of the DMN’s mindwandering activity is concerned with thinking about the past and the future, taking us away from the now. We’re searching memory for associations to help us interpret what’s happening in our lives and what might be coming. We’re intently making all manner of predictions. Indeed, as I continued researching what people were thinking about when their DMN was active, I found that they’re often creating elaborate scenarios of future events, like little movies about how situations in their lives are going to play out. No wonder so much of our mental energy is hogged by the DMN. After all, knowing how to interpret situations, establishing a sense of who we are, understanding others as best we can, and anticipating what turn of events we might need to be prepared for are all crucial to making our way through life.

Such a wonderful explanation for what we all do! Mindwandering happens a lot when I am reading. Even as I make notes of the interesting ideas, I also add to my notes my own pointers – a stream of consciousness about what thoughts have been triggered. This is the way ideas come. Mindwandering (and I didn’t really have a name till I came across this book) is a great way to think and imagine, both precursors of creation.