Loved reading the book 'What The Hell Should I Do With My Life" by Ravi Venkatesan. Highly recommend it.

The book brings to bear some great perspectives on career and life, in an easy to understand manner.

Leadership is action and not a title. It is when an ordinary person showcases extraordinary grit to take charge of a situation and takes people along. It doesn't have to be in the workplace or a larger than life setting but even in the small daily things. In that sense everyone is capable of leadership in their own unique style for things they feel passionately for.

In the professional world there is an inordinate weightage given to a person's educational pedigree and title. The better the school and/or more lofty the title greater the respect he/she commands as we expect the person to be commensurately successful.

"Change a man's thoughts and the world around him changes.

There are times when we behave like an ostrich. When faced with a difficult problem, that has its bearings in harsh realities, we behave as if the problem doesn't exist. By closing our eyes we try to trick ourselves that the problem has vanished. This is called the ostrich syndrome.

Not all free time is equal.

Not every activity of play is playful.

Mindless play can often discharge our batteries more than recharging them. Often the our problem is not lack of play, but lack of deep play.

I remember this one day vividly in 2007.

The super boss at the firm had announced that he will be handing over key client accounts to some of us to manage. This was a coveted opportunity, and a thing of undeniable prestige for us as till that day the super boss had managed the accounts himself. On the D-day, all my peers got emails from the super boss allocating different accounts to them. I kept waiting and even by the end of the day, I didn't get any email. I was very disappointed and even partly angry. I felt I have been burning the midnight oil, having had my work appreciated for many months, yet no client account was allocated to me.

A lot of us, especially in the IT/ ITes industry start our careers working in a delivery set-up. As you do well, the scale of your responsibilities increases from managing your own work to that of a colleague, to a small team, and then a big team and then managing large client accounts. For a select few, excelling at delivery roles offers an opportunity to transition towards larger business centric roles. Yet not everyone is ready when they get this opportunity.

We are all so focused on the next milestone that once we have achieved something, the mind automatically gets consumed by the next milestone we seek or the one we narrowly missed.

"What makes a leader great is not that they have power, but that have the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely."

Many many years ago (when I was project manager) I had a stakeholder in the US in one of the Fortune 500 clients who had been in the same designation for the last 10 years. Let's call him M.

M was in his early 50s, worked 3 days a week. Almost all his managers over the years were younger than him. In fact some of his managers were trained by him. Over the years I got to know him well. During one of my trips I asked him, "M don't you feel like doing more. Isn't it frustrating to see your juniors outpace you consistently, especially as your are the one who grooms and trains them".

Great teams are not always those that deliver a great performance. Sometimes great performances can be like flash in a pan, or someone's individual brilliance.

Not all playing fields in life are fair, and that's ok. Sometimes the odds favour you and sometimes they may not.

Virat Kohli has been a phenomenal player. Some people absolutely adore him and others prefer him as a player to a captain.

As Virat stepped down from the captaincy of the India cricket team, my mind wandered to leadership lessons we could take from his time as the most successful (by # of wins) India Captain in history. Here are my 5 takeaways

Feeling of insecurity is a natural feeling, all of us have it about different aspects of life and career. It's neither good nor bad. How we choose to use that feeling determines how significant parts of our life play out. There are always 2 options

Feeling of insecurity is a natural feeling, all of us have it about different aspects of life and career. It's neither good nor bad. How we choose to use that feeling determines how significant parts of our life play out. There are always 2 options

"Questions are the the gateway to change"

Yet, even with the right intent, what questions we are ask is just as important as asking questions. I feel the answer varies depending on if we are asking the question to self or someone else.

For the longest time, my work has been my identity. Whenever someone asked me “What do you do” even socially, I would talk about my current role and company. It was an automatic answer that came without the need to think.

Over the last couple of years, as I saw close friends and family battle uncertainty and health concerns, I realized that we don’t have infinite time on our hands. If we want to do anything, now is the time. As I reflected on life, I tried to get clarity on what I value, and what I want to build on and leave as a legacy.