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The Art of Hard Choices: Building a Life Worth Living

We live in a world optimized for comfort. Every app, every algorithm, every convenience is designed to make life easier in the moment. But here's the paradox: the easiest choices rarely lead to the most meaningful lives. This truth hit me recently while watching a cricket match. Sanju Samson was struggling at the crease while Ishan Kishan was in extraordinary form. The question seemed obvious: why not swap them? Kishan felt right in the moment. But as I thought deeper, I realized the team management was playing a different game - one focused on long-term strategy, squad balance, and building trust. Sometimes the hard choice (backing Samson despite his struggles) serves the bigger picture better than the easy one. This cricket dilemma mirrors the choices we face every single day. The Moment vs. The Marathon Every day presents us with a fundamental choice: optimize for how we feel right now, or optimize for who we want to become. The easy choice always feels better in the moment: Scr...

HARD CHOICES, SELF AWARENESS, PROCESS

Alright, so today we are going to talk about easy and hard choices. How important it is for all of us to take the hard choices in life which might not feel that good in the moment but will pay off in the long run. So let's start our conversation about the same. The thought about this came in when I was watching Sanju Samson bat and I realised that he is not doing justice to the role. Meanwhile, Ishan Kishan was playing wonderfully well at the moment. It was a natural question that once Tilak Verma comes in the side, who gives the place to that talented batter once he is back. It was a question that pondered in my mind. Just before the World Cup Ishan Kishan played wonderfully well against the NZ series, however, and in the moment, I felt like Ishan Kishan should be playing in place of Sanju Samson. Interesting thought. However, as I pondered over the thought, I realised that Ishan Kishan is someone who has done well in the recent series, has been in extraordinary form, and in the m...

The Cost of Comfort

I've been thinking about why we suffer more than we need to. Not the unavoidable pain of loss or failure, but the prolonged suffering that comes from refusing to face what hurts. The kind that stretches on because we keep looking away. We've built an entire infrastructure around avoiding discomfort. Infinite scrolling. Autoplay. One more episode. One more drink. One more distraction. We've become experts at numbing ourselves, at filling every quiet moment with noise. And we're miserable for it. What We're Actually Running From The discomfort we avoid isn't usually catastrophic. It's often just... uncomfortable. The awkwardness of sitting with your own thoughts. The sting of rejection. The frustration of not being good at something yet. The hollow feeling of a Sunday evening. The weight of knowing you're not living the way you want to. These feelings won't kill you. But avoiding them might kill the person you could become. Because here's what I...

Self-Control: The Foundation of a Meaningful Life

Today was one of those days where clarity emerged from chaos. Between overworking, endless meetings, and the constant pull of Instagram, I realized something fundamental: I've been losing the battle for self-control, and with it, the structure that makes life work. The Chaos I Created Looking back, I can see how I introduced chaos into my own life. Adhoc meetings. Jumping between tasks. Checking Instagram every few minutes. Opening new tabs without finishing what I started. Each context switch felt minor in the moment, but together they created a frenzy that left me depleted and distracted. I noticed something else too: in team dynamics, some people want all the credit but only half the work. When you're caught in chaos, you don't have the clarity to see these patterns. You just react, respond, and rush through everything without thinking. The solution isn't to move faster. It's to slow down deliberately. What Self-Control Really Means Self-control isn't about w...

Reactivity to intention

As I take on more interesting challenges, I’ve noticed something about myself. When structure breaks, I become reactive. That happened yesterday. And that’s okay. It’s actually good, it showed me where I drift when routine loosens and entertainment creeps in. I went a little right, a little left. Lost silence. Lost context. Lost intention. No need to ruin the mood. This happens to everyone. We get caught in the daily grind and momentarily forget who we are. The important thing is this: we can always come back . This time, the trigger was entertainment, specifically, the Kapil Sharma Show. It gave me free dopamine: stimulation without effort, comfort without depth. Slowly, it broke my rhythm. Even basic things like eating went off. So instead of overthinking, I return to a principle I deeply believe in: Don’t remove. Replace. The Core Problem Problem: Free dopamine Effect: Loss of structure, reactivity, shallow days Solution: Meaningful replacement I want a deeper life....

The Lifelong Journey of Learning: Why We Must Never Stop Growing

Yesterday, I lost several games of ping pong to a friend badly. It was frustrating, honestly nerve-wracking, to keep losing despite my best efforts to concentrate. But somewhere in that frustration, I realized something important: the problem wasn't my effort or focus. It was my fundamentals. My positioning was off, my technique flawed. This moment became a powerful reminder of a truth I keep relearning: when we're struggling, we don't need to try harder. We need to learn better. Learning Through Defeat When I lost at ping pong yesterday, it was emotionally difficult. The losses were hard to digest, but giving up would mean never coming back stronger. This time, instead of just grinding through more games, I need to step back, learn the correct stance, practice the proper shots, and truly master the technical skills. Simply playing more won't fix what's broken. The flaw is in my technique, not my competitive spirit. The same principle applies everywhere. In software...

Why Successful People Never Watch TV (And What They Do Instead)

Today was off. Nothing catastrophic, just... off. Back-to-back meetings, a restless mind, and when I finally got home, I did what I always do when I'm avoiding myself: I turned on the TV. The noise filled the room. Not just sound, but the specific kind of noise that masquerades as relaxation while actually preventing rest. I sat there, eating dinner in front of the screen, and realized something I'd been avoiding for months: I wasn't watching TV because I enjoyed it. I was watching it because I couldn't sit with myself. That's when I remembered my one-hour test. The Test That Changed Everything I measure my success by a simple metric: can I sit in one place, doing one meaningful thing, for one hour? Not scrolling. Not multitasking. Not half-present while my mind runs elsewhere. Just one hour of complete focus on something that matters, writing, reading, thinking, creating. It sounds absurdly simple. It's brutally hard. When you're not used to it, sitting sti...