Hi, I'm Nikhil. Thank you for reading my blog. I have spent more than a decade working in the digital advertising industry. I have worked with all the top...
Being competitive has its advantages. You always fight hard, you never give up, and you always give more than you think you are capable of. But competitiveness is useful when the battle is on equal ground. Like in sport, where you know the other player is equally capable, so the only difference you can bring is your intensity. That sometimes creates the difference. The same competitiveness becomes…
What you choose to react to says a lot about you. If you train yourself to observe what people choose to react to, you will learn a lot about them. The intensity of their reaction is proportional to how much something bothered them. There’s always more than meets the eye. Someone’s harsh reaction, harsher than the situation demanded, is never just about that incident. It is a trigger. That…
It’s nearly impossible to do everything at once. We know this truth, yet every time, we make the same mistake of thinking we can actually handle more things at once. We don’t want to leave anything aside, not even for a few months. Our mind is designed for focused work. There are studies and literature on the effectiveness of focused work, and we know that intuitively too. We have experienced the…
AI has turned everyone into a product manager. You can think of an idea and bring it to life at a speed that was unheard of in the past. Never before in the entire history of human beings have we been able to manifest what we imagined and desired with such immediacy. This is a tremendous leap that we have taken, yet we have collectively gone numb to the scale of our own achievement. We are more…
Many a times you are fighting with demons in your mind that only exists in your mind and nowhere else. You are fighting against the perceived slights, against people who were indifferent to you, who didn’t support you, who belittled you, who underestimated you. Your mind relives all those sessions again and again until you haven’t settled score with every one of those people. But here’s the…
There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never goes away. Maybe I love feeling inferior, or maybe it’s impostor syndrome that makes me feel that I am not good enough. No matter how much I create, I feel I haven’t done enough. This is specific to…
Young men these days are so disheartened by the world that they have given up all hope. Every time you talk to them, they cite economic statistics, their struggles, their traumas, and how they have been systematically exploited. Of course, there is truth to that. But what do you expect from the world, an apology? The only way they have chosen to respond is by drowning themselves in addiction and…
There are days when getting out of bed feels harder. Every step feels like too much. There is an ache in the body that cannot be explained away as mere exhaustion because it is too much, everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time. There is an ache, but there is no single source. There is a profound dullness within you that you do not know how to shake. Melancholy is a prolonged sadness. A kind…
What a pathetic state to be in, to want someone. To need someone. To need warmth. To need love. I write love as though I am writing a foreign word, a foreign curse, like a language I am trying to learn while knowing I can never become fluent in it. To constantly need someone to understand you is its own kind of prison, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. We all want someone to dig deeper…
As I began understanding myself better, I realised that my understanding of the world is inverted. I understand almost everything through its absence rather than its presence. If you ask me what kind of furniture you should buy for your house, my mind doesn't imagine the perfect piece of furniture. Instead, it imagines a house without any furniture and concludes that anything would be better than…