50 Quotes that will make you think hard

Here’re the select quotes from my latest book, Design You Career, published by Penguin in June 2024.

On living

• Life is long, pace it well.
• You may die accidentally, but you can’t afford to live accidentally.
• Life doesn’t always offer you what you ask for, but certainly gives you what you need.
• Be a lamp that glows well into the dark of the night than the spark that burns quickly and bright.
• ‘It doesn’t matter’ means you surrender to the will of nature. You surrender after you have done your part and not before.
• Meditation is the gateway to being present in the moment, instead of regretting the past or contemplating the future.
• If you are adventurous enough to explore things in life, be humble enough to also forgive yourself and courageous enough to move to the next expedition.
• If you have a stable family and peace at home, you can conquer the world.
• The ability to radically cut down the chatter outside and within your head is the hallmark of disciplined living.
• Stop taking yourself too seriously (because nobody takes you seriously!).
• The biggest lesson the pandemic taught us is that life goes on with you or without you.

On thinking

• The evolution of your thinking is not a natural consequence of your career progression.
• Learn to ignore profusely, tolerate comfortably, and confront selectively.
• Keep a clear head to prioritize, a deep heart to empathize, and a thick skin to materialize.
• When you are not controlling your mind but rather are under complete control of your mind, it’s a travesty.
• Fear not being alone with your thoughts, to synthesize, to conceptualize, to actualize, for in solitude you are least alone.

On working

• Financial freedom keeps you intellectually honest.
• Don’t confuse being busy with being meaningful.
• You are not a resource to be consumed but rather an asset to be preserved.
• Seek love as a driver amid your fears, longings and responsibilities.
• Excellence is about doing the boring stuff well.
• Where you learn from needn’t be where you earn from.
• There must be a better reason for your personal sacrifice than your professional growth.
• Passion is blind.
• Think of your career as actions to be taken rather than identities to be claimed.
• You are not your job; you are always more. Always.

On problem-solving

• Every problem is a symptom.
• A problem fully understood is half solved.
• If empathy is about understanding problems, creativity is about solving problems.
• You haven’t learnt it unless it’s in your veins.

On creativity and innovation

• Innovation calls for personal risk-taking. (PS: The key operative here is not risk).
• You won’t be remembered for what you managed, but for what you created.
• Innovation is a political process. It’s not the best idea that wins, but the most ‘acceptable’ one that does.
• If you are risking attempting even a slight amount of creativity, be ready to be ridiculed.
• Not experimenting is costly, and not experimenting, per say.
• Creativity is the yin and yang of order and chaos. Without chaos nothing evolves, and without order nothing stays.
• Let ‘sorry’ come rather easily than ‘please’.

On Strategy

• Own the outcome, not the plan.
• Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
• You must plan but you can’t be enslaved by the plan.
• Most firms don’t go bust for a lack of operational efficiency but because of a want of directional clarity.
• Those who conserve and converge their attention on to significant issues get their names etched in the annals of time.
• The higher you go the broader you must look; else your elevation has little significance to self, or even to those around you.

On leadership

• Leaders fuel risk, managers contain risk.
• Leadership is not a popularity contest. It’s about getting the extraordinary done through ordinary talent.
• If money can’t motivate somebody and if the nature of the work can’t motivate that person, then even you can’t.
• A leader must be vulnerable by choice and shouldn’t come across as somebody who knows it all.
• You don’t change once you become a leader. The causality is, in fact, the exact reverse.

On technology

• Whenever machines get stronger, we humans get weaker.
• Technology is an obedient slave, but a tyrant master.
• Each new technology pushes you up the value chain.
• In the pursuit of making machines more like humans, we humans are becoming more like machines.

Hope you get to read the book soon.