Right Attitudes

To Be Lost is Simply to Be Becoming

June 26, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Jerry Colonna, often called the “CEO Whisperer,” is a former venture capitalist who helped shape the early development of Silicon Valley and went on to mentor many of its entrepreneurs. His book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up (2019) challenges the myth that success is about control and certainty. Instead, he invites us to see leadership—and life itself—as a process of becoming, where doubt and disorientation aren’t failures but essential teachers:

What if being lost is part of the path? What if we are supposed to tack across the surface of the lake, sailing into the wind instead of wishing it was only at our backs? What if feeling lost, directionless, and uncertain of the progress is an indicator of growth? What if it means you’re exactly where you need to be, on the pathless path?

Being lost isn’t failure; it’s part of the journey itself. When we feel uncertain or directionless, it’s often a sign that we’re moving beyond the familiar, stretching into new territory. The discomfort of not knowing is less a mistake than a marker of growth.

The obstacle isn’t only something to overcome; it’s the guide that shapes us. Headwinds force us to adjust, to tack differently, to discover resilience we might never have found in calm waters. Ease comforts, but resistance transforms.

Idea for Impact: To be lost isn’t to lose—it’s to become.

Task-Driven Living Is a Form of Self-Deception

June 24, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Task-Driven Living is a Form of Self-Deception Your to-do list isn’t a productivity tool. It’s a leash—and the cruelest part is that you put it on yourself every morning and call it discipline.

Busyness doesn’t just fill time. It supplies identity. The list tells you who you are: someone with obligations, a place in the machinery. That’s not a side effect of productivity culture. That’s the product. So putting the list down doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like freefall.

Chronic busyness isn’t a style. It’s a defense mechanism, and what it’s defending against isn’t inefficiency. It’s self-knowledge—the kind that would require actually changing something. The gap between the work being done and the work that matters. The slow suspicion that the life being built isn’t quite the one that would be chosen.

The productivity industry exists to help manage that feeling without resolving it. The apps, the frameworks, the morning routines—all of it is in the business of making avoidance feel like progress. It’s part of the problem it claims to solve. And this essay, read between tasks on a phone, is complicit in that too.

Idea for Impact: The to-do list will never be finished—that was always the point. An endless supply of small completions, standing in for the larger one that keeps getting deferred.

Putting the list down long enough to answer what you’d pick up without it isn’t a productivity hack. It’s the whole thing.

The Akbar-Birbal Parable of the Pulling of the Emperor’s Beard Is a Master Class in Critical Thinking

June 22, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

There’s a genre of world literature built around quick-witted figures who outsmart the powerful and leave everyone else in the room looking slow. India has Birbal and, in the south, Tenali Ramakrishna. The Middle East has Mullah Nasruddin. West Africa has Anansi. Different characters, different traditions, but one shared quality: they solve problems by refusing to accept the problem as it was handed to them.

Birbal was born Mahesh Das in 1528, a Brahmin poet with a sharper gift for reading people than for verse. When Emperor Akbar—the great Mughal ruler who built one of the most powerful empires in history, reigning 1556–05—recognized what he was dealing with, he gave the young scholar a title: Birbal, meaning “the quick thinker.” He became one of Akbar’s Navaratnas, the inner circle of nine jewels, earning his place not through flattery or lineage but through the quality of his thinking. In a court full of advisors with rank, religious standing, and long memories, Birbal had clarity.

The folk tales that grew around him, passed down through generations and embellished in the telling, share a consistent quality. Birbal never answers the question everyone else is answering. He thrived by refusing to accept the frame that came with the problem.

One story in particular has been told to children across India for generations. It’s short, it’s funny, and it contains a lesson that most adults in positions of authority never quite learn.

Sometimes the Deepest Wisdom Is Found by Stepping Outside the Obvious Frame

The Akbar-Birbal Parable of the Pulling of the Emperor's Beard: A Master Class in Critical Thinking One morning, Emperor Akbar enters his court in a foul mood. He announces to his courtiers: someone dared to pull his beard. What punishment should be given to such a person?

The courtiers compete to demonstrate their loyalty. Beheading. Life imprisonment. Banishment from the kingdom. Each suggestion more severe than the last, each one a direct answer to the question exactly as asked.

Birbal says nothing.

Akbar notices. He asks Birbal directly: what punishment do you suggest for this grave offense?

Birbal replies, calmly, that the person who pulled the emperor’s beard should be given a box of sweets.

The court erupts. The other courtiers assume Birbal has either lost his mind or lost his nerve. Akbar asks him to explain.

Birbal smiles. No one in this court or kingdom would dare pull Your Majesty’s beard knowing the consequences, he says. The only person who could do it playfully, without fear of your wrath, is your own beloved grandson.

Akbar’s expression softens. Birbal was right. It had been his young grandson, playing on his lap that morning, who’d innocently tugged at the great emperor’s beard.

The other courtiers, so eager to suggest harsh penalties, are left with nothing to say. They’d answered the wrong question with tremendous conviction.

One of the Best Ways to Solve a Problem Is to Change the Question

What Birbal did wasn’t magic and it wasn’t instinct. It was a method, one that anyone can learn and most people never bother to use.

Every other courtier accepted the premise: someone pulled the emperor’s beard, therefore someone must be punished, therefore the only question is how severely. They moved immediately to answering without pausing to ask whether the question itself was correctly formed.

The Akbar-Birbal Parable of the Pulling of the Emperor's Beard: A Master Class in Critical Thinking Birbal stopped at the premise. What he did next has a name in lateral thinking: deconstruction, sometimes called fractionation. Rather than treating the situation as a single unified assertion, he broke it into its smallest component parts and examined each one independently. Who has physical access to the emperor’s beard? Who could pull it without being immediately seized? Who would do something that disrespectful without understanding it was disrespectful? He didn’t judge the list. He worked through each element separately, freeing each piece from the meaning imposed by the whole.

This is the analytical phase that precedes the leap. Edward de Bono, who championed lateral thinking, argued that the mind gets trapped by the fixed meaning of a complete assertion. You see “the emperor’s beard was pulled” and immediately load it with context: offense, perpetrator, punishment. Deconstruction breaks that fixedness. By investigating each component independently, you find what de Bono called the point of entry, the specific element where an assumption everyone is making turns out not to hold.

For Birbal, the point of entry was access. The assumption of a malicious adult perpetrator collapsed the moment he asked who could actually get close enough. By the time he’d worked through the list, there was only one possible answer, and it made the original question absurd.

This is what people mean when they talk about thinking outside the box, though they rarely explain it this honestly. The phrase gets repeated in corporate settings as though naming the thing is sufficient, as though the box will obligingly dissolve if you wish at it hard enough. It won’t. The box is made of assumptions. The way out is to name them one by one, lay them flat, and find the one that doesn’t hold. That’s the unglamorous reality behind what sounds thrilling on a motivational poster.

Deconstruction In Lateral Thinking: Breaking Assumptions To Unlock Hidden Possibilities Here’s what never makes it onto the poster: this is genuinely hard to do under pressure. The courtiers weren’t stupid. They were experienced advisors to one of the most powerful rulers in the world. What stopped them wasn’t lack of intelligence. It was the situation itself. Under pressure, the mind defaults to answering the question as given, because questioning the question feels like stalling, like weakness. The court was competing to respond faster and more dramatically because that’s what the moment rewarded. Birbal resisted that pull. He let the silence sit. He took the time the situation was pressuring him not to take, and used it to deconstruct the problem while everyone else was busy solving the wrong one.

That required courage as much as cleverness. Suggesting sweets as punishment in a room full of people competing to recommend execution wasn’t just an intellectual move. It was a risk. Birbal knew his emperor well enough to know that Akbar would ask for the explanation rather than react to the surface of the answer. Most environments don’t offer that luxury. Most organizations reward the person who answers quickly and confidently, not the one who says the question needs rethinking. Birbal’s method works best when the person asking the original question is willing to hear that they may have asked the wrong one. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Idea for Impact: Next time you feel pressure to answer a question quickly, try Birbal’s method first. Write down what the question is assuming to be true, every component, every piece of context embedded in it. Then look for the element where the assumption has shifted or where the context doesn’t actually hold. That’s your point of entry. Birbal’s genius wasn’t that he knew more than the other courtiers. It was that he questioned what they’d already decided they knew, piece by piece, while the room waited—and had the nerve to say what he found.

Inspirational Quotations #1159

June 21, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi

Like everybody else, when I don’t know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.
—George Jean Nathan (American Critic, Editor)

Being realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity.
—Will Smith (American Actor)

All musical people seem to be happy; it is to them the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.
—Sydney Smith (English Preacher)

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
—Salman Rushdie (Indian-born British Novelist)

Opportunities are always everywhere, learn to see and create them.
—Jacob Gelt Dekker (Dutch Businessman)

Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can say that it doesn’t hold water.
—Thomas Lansing Masson (American Anthropologist)

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.
—Oriana Fallaci (Italian Journalist)

Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.
—Walter Raleigh (English Explorer, Courtier)

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.
—Lewis H. Lapham (American Journalist)

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.
—Peter Marshall (Scottish-American Preacher)

Man is always waiting for something that never quite arrives.
—Alejo Carpentier (Cuban Novelist)

Far more has been accomplished for the welfare and progress of mankind by preventing bad actions than by doing good ones.
—William Lyon Mackenzie King (Canadian Statesman)

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
—Rita Mae Brown (American Writer, Feminist)

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.
—Denis Diderot (French Philosopher, Writer)

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.
—Bill Richardson (American Politician)

Shed Your Past

June 19, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Shedding Yesterday's Skin: Embrace Today, Release Regret, And Grow Into Your Stronger Self Life doesn’t always go to plan. Some days will frustrate you, disappoint you, or wear you down. You can’t change where you started—but you always have agency over your next step.

The Aṅguttara Nikāya—a major collection of early Buddhist discourses attributed to the Buddha—offers you a vivid image (AN 5.161): “Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.” Shedding skin isn’t easy or comfortable—it makes you vulnerable. But it’s the only way you can make room for the bigger version of yourself that’s waiting to emerge.

Notice that a snake doesn’t drag its old skin behind it. It discards the skin to grow. You can do the same with your mistakes, regrets, and setbacks. They don’t have to define you.

Treat your past as useful only insofar as it teaches you not to repeat it. When you cling to yesterday, you deny the only reality you possess: today. Starting over isn’t about erasing your history—it’s about refusing to let history trap you.

You don’t need to reinvent yourself to renew yourself. Start as small as you need: reframe a problem, take one baby step forward, or forgive yourself. You build progress through steady, practical choices. Change isn’t a leap; it’s a pivot.

Like the snake, shed yesterday and step into today.

Your Brain Is Lying to You. Here’s How to Catch It.

June 17, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Learn To Spot Your Brains Distortions So Momentary Thoughts Stop Becoming Long Term Decisions You didn’t fail because you’re weak.

You failed because your brain told you a story—and you believed it.

Psychologists call it cognitive distortion. The rest of us call it Tuesday.

It sounds like this: I missed one gym session, so fitness is hopeless. I sent one awkward email, so my colleagues think I’m an idiot. I ate one cookie, so the diet is dead.

One crack in the pavement. And you decide to lie down forever.

The brain does this quietly, convincingly, and often. It doesn’t announce itself. It just rewrites what happened into something catastrophic, wraps it in emotion, and hands it to you as fact.

It isn’t fact.

Cognitive restructuring is a method therapists use to help people challenge their thoughts. The practice is simple: catch the lie mid-sentence, spot the distortion—black-and-white thinking, catastrophising, or drama—and ask one blunt question:

Is there actual evidence for this?

Usually, there isn’t.

One bad morning isn’t a pattern. One slip isn’t a collapse. One awkward moment isn’t a verdict on your character.

The goal isn’t relentless optimism. It isn’t a growth mindset poster on your wall.

It’s just this: stop letting a thought that took three seconds to form make decisions that last three months.

Your brain is not always on your side. But you can be.

How to Ask for a Raise—and Negotiate in a Way That Commands Respect

June 15, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Ask for a Raise---and Negotiate in a Way That Commands Respect Asking for a raise is a professional negotiation, not a personal plea.

The moment you frame it as “I need more money” rather than “Here is why I’m worth more to this organization,” you’ve already lost ground. Leave your mortgage, your tuition bills, and your cost of living out of it entirely. They’re irrelevant to what the market pays for your skills and what value you deliver. Keep the conversation squarely there.

Before you request a meeting, do real research. Use the Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook and cross-reference with Glassdoor, Payscale, Salary.com, and LinkedIn Salary Insights, filtered to your specific role, industry, and region. National averages can be misleading. Then build a written record of your contributions since your last review. Be specific: revenue increased, clients won, costs reduced, people developed.”I increased regional sales by 17%” carries weight.”I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility” carries almost none. Quantify everything you can.

Understand your total compensation picture before you walk in. Salary, bonus, equity, and flexibility all factor into whether you’re genuinely underpaid or simply underpaid on one dimension. Know the difference before you make an argument based on the wrong one.

Timing matters more than most people realize. Ask after a visible win, not before one. Ask during your company’s budget planning season, not after budgets are locked. Don’t ask when your manager is firefighting or when the company just closed a difficult quarter. The same request lands very differently depending on when it arrives, and arriving at the wrong moment can set your case back by months.

Request a dedicated meeting. Don’t ambush your manager at the end of a performance review or raise it casually in the hallway. Say: “I’d like to schedule some time to discuss my compensation and where I’m headed here. Could we find 30 minutes in the next couple of weeks?” This gives them time to prepare and signals that you’re approaching it seriously.

One thing most employees don’t account for: your manager is often not the final decision-maker. Raises frequently require approval from HR or a director, meaning your manager may genuinely want to help you but needs material to make the case in a room you won’t be in. Make it easy for them. Bring a one-page written summary of your market research and key contributions that they can circulate. You’re not just persuading your manager; you’re equipping them to persuade others.

Lead with Evidence, Not Feeling

In the meeting, open by anchoring on contribution, not need: “I’ve really valued the work I’ve been doing here, and I want to make sure my compensation reflects what I’ve been contributing. I’ve put together some notes on the market data and on what I’ve delivered, and I’d like to walk you through them.” Present your numbers, then let them respond first if you can. If they name a figure first, that sets the floor. If you name 6% first and they had planned 8%, you’ve cost yourself 2% with no way to recover it. If pressed to go first, anchor high. If your target is $72,000, open at $77,000. Negotiation tends to move toward the middle, so where you start matters.

If the answer is no, stay calm. A composed response carries more weight than an emotional one. Say: “I understand. Can I ask what would need to be true, in my performance or in the company’s situation, for us to revisit this?” Then stop talking. What they say next tells you whether a raise is genuinely possible here or whether you’re being managed toward complacency. If they give you specific, measurable criteria, write them down and confirm them in a follow-up email. A commitment that lives only in conversation is easy to forget, or to reinterpret later.

If they stall, give it one week. Then come back with: “I wanted to follow up. It seemed like you may have felt my request was off base, and I’d like to understand if there’s something I’m missing about how this gets decided.” That’s not confrontational, but it signals you’re not going to let it disappear quietly.

If the answer is “not now due to budget,” lock in a specific date to revisit. A commitment to “come back to this later” without a date attached isn’t a commitment. If salary is genuinely off the table for now, shift to non-cash compensation and think carefully about what actually has lasting value. A title change compounds over time: it raises your market rate in every future negotiation, at this company and elsewhere. A professional development budget benefits your employer as much as it benefits you, and framing it that way makes it an easier yes. An accelerated review cycle, moving your next formal review from twelve months to three, is an underused option that most employees never think to ask for.

More Than a Number: Recognition and What It Signals

If you get a raise but it’s smaller than you hoped, accept it graciously in the moment. Thank your manager, then establish the next milestone: “I really appreciate this. I’d like to make sure I’m on track to get to where I’m aiming. Can we agree on what that path looks like and check in at my next review?” You’re not conceding; you’re keeping the conversation alive with a specific next step attached.

It’s worth naming something that doesn’t get said enough. Many people, particularly women and those from cultures where direct self-advocacy is less normalized, feel genuine anxiety about these conversations, not just discomfort but a real fear of being seen as ungrateful or overreaching. That fear is understandable. Research also shows that women who negotiate assertively are penalized more often than men for identical behavior, while those who don’t negotiate leave significant money on the table over the course of a career. Knowing this doesn’t make the conversation easy, but it does reframe the stakes. The risk of asking is real but manageable. The cost of never asking compounds quietly for years.

If you have reason to believe a colleague in the same role is being paid significantly more, especially along gender or racial lines, that’s a different conversation with different stakes and potentially different legal protections. It warrants a separate discussion, and possibly a direct conversation with HR, rather than folding it into a general raise negotiation.

My most durable piece of advice here isn’t about what to say in the room. It’s about what you do in the months and years before you ever sit down. Managers who are easiest to persuade are the ones who already know, in specific detail, what you contribute. Build that record continuously. Send a brief monthly note to your manager summarizing your wins, not a formal document, just a few sentences in an email. Have conversations, well before you need a raise, about what raise-worthy performance looks like in their eyes. Invest in relationships with people beyond your direct manager who influence how compensation decisions get made. When you finally make the ask, it should feel like the natural conclusion of a story that’s already been told.

Inspirational Quotations #1158

June 14, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi

How you make sense of your childhood experiences has a profound effect on how you parent your own children.
—Dan Siegel (American Psychiatrist)

We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice—however much we might desire it.
—Hubert Humphrey (American Head of State)

Every person has some splendid traits and if we confine our contacts so as to bring those traits into action, there is no need of ever being bored or irritated or indignant.
—Gelett Burgess (American Humorist)

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
—Georges Braque (French Painter)

Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.
—W. Clement Stone (American Self-help Guru)

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A father can only ride beside the bicycle or stand yelling directions while the child falls. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom.
—Sloan Wilson (American Author)

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (Spanish Philosopher)

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.
—Nelson DeMille (American Author)

Life is a constant negotiation between what one wants to be and what circumstances allow.
—Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemalan Poet)

Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
—Kevin Kelly (American Editor)

No one is more unhappy than a peeping tom in a nudist camp.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)

There’s a Time for Everything

June 12, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Life Unfolds When You Stop Forcing Answers And Simply Meet Each Day With Steady Presence

You don’t have to figure everything out today. You don’t have to deal with life’s trials and tribulations by trying to take over and get a grip overnight. And you don’t have to tackle everything at once. You just have to show up and try. Life will catch up to you.

Just focus on the most immediate thing in front of you. Make the most of today—and deal with tomorrow, next week, or next year when it gets here. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1996,)

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

Let go of what’s gone, appreciate what remains, and look forward to what’s coming. Just trust that you’ll figure out the rest along the way. You’ll adapt to circumstances without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to your wishes.

Idea for Impact: Live a better life, day to day, without wishing to solve life’s problems all at once. Make your actions deliberate. Enjoy what’s beautiful and believe in goodness.

The Boss’s Balancing Act: Too Close vs. Too Distant

June 10, 2026 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As a boss, you’ll often find yourself balancing between being “too close” and “too distant” with your team.

Being too close blurs professional boundaries, making it difficult to give constructive feedback, stay objective, or prevent dependency. It stifles individual growth and can leave some team members feeling excluded.

On the other hand, being too distant leaves your team unsupported, unheard, and unmotivated. It kills communication, hinders collaboration, and delays problem-solving.

Go too far in either direction, and things can fall apart fast. Get it right, and you’ll build trust, deliver results, and have a team that respects your authority. Get it wrong, and you’ll face decreased productivity, damaged morale, and a tarnished reputation.

Here’s how to tread the fine line: Focus on results, not likeability. Set clear boundaries. No one wants a manager who’s either too hands-off or too hand-holding, but be approachable and available for discussions. The most effective managers have learned to read the moment, adapt to individual needs, and treat management as a situational discipline, not a fixed formula.

Idea for Impact: Being a manager involves a dynamic act of boundary maintenance rather than a fixed personality trait. Don’t lean too far into closeness or retreat into distance. Holding the line means being “near” enough to provide support and “far” enough to provide perspective.

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Sometimes the Deepest Wisdom Is Found by Stepping Outside the Obvious Frame

One of the Best Ways to Solve a Problem Is to Change the Question

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Lead with Evidence, Not Feeling

More Than a Number: Recognition and What It Signals

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