Creativity - Abhishek Chakraborty

How to Fight Like Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi pushed the Brits out of India with some unorthodox methods that we often take for granted. There’s a lot we can learn from this stubborn and scrawny man among men who knew how to fight for his principles—on his own terms—and win!

Listen to the Suck with Curiosity

Using two stories (one long and one short) I’ll introduce you to a framework that explains the relationship between persistence and stubbornness, and the difference between false fails and true fails.

The Problem is Not the Problem

A lot of us waste our time worrying about specific problems — how to deliver a project, how to get funding, how to crack an interview — whereas the real problem is we don’t know how to think about the problem correctly.

The Slow Hunch: Why All Eureka Moments Are Lies

Snap discoveries based on intuition—as dramatic as they sound—are rarities. All hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames.

The Perks of Being a Late Bloomer

Most of us aren’t very good at what we do because we settle too early. And once we settle, we don’t switch. That’s not really a smart way to make a career, or in better words, find your calling.

Metalearning: The Essential First Step of Learning That Nobody Taught You

Metalearning is the process of figuring out how to learn a particular subject based on how knowledge is structured and organised. If learning was a building, metalearning helps you figure out how to reach the top floor—whether to take the stairs, or the elevator, or scale the walls like Spider-Man.

The Adjacent Possible: When Innovation is Just Waiting to Happen

Had Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim started YouTube in 1995 instead of 2005, would it have been equally successful? Why did Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine prove to be such a short-term dead end, whereas his Difference Engine went into mass production only a couple of decades later?

Make Your Failures Insignificant

Most of us aren’t willing to fail. We may understand intellectually that we’ll fail once in a while if we are trying something new, but most of us aren’t ready to take that punch to the gut. The paradox of success is that everybody wants to be successful, but nobody wants to fail to get there.