We are all familiar with the struggles we face aligning our present selves and our priorities, with our future goals. Be it in investing, diet and exercise, career planning and so on. We often perceive our future selves as strangers, which makes it harder to make decisions today that benefit us tomorrow. To plan well for our future, it is important to establish an emotional connection with our future self. In this episode, I discuss my thoughts on this topic.

Most failures in teamwork are not due to lapses in performance, but breakdowns in coordination. In this episode, I talk about the idea of "atom of work", that reveals why collaboration breaks down not in tasks, but in the hand-offs between them. I talk about how effective work is less about doing and more about promising (clear requests), aligning (agreements), and closing loops (declarations of satisfaction).

In this episode, I share three stories based on problems I faced in my research career. For each of them, I had a different response - persist, adapt and give up. How do you decide which response is acceptable whenever you face a challenge?

What happens to performance when people create backup plans before tackling a task? Do backup plans make us stronger, or do they make us lazy? Do they increase our chances of success, or do they hurt us? Join me as I discuss my observations from various student projects that I have seen up close.

P.S. I mention EDL a lot in the episode. Read more about my experience with EDL here: https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~stallur/ee344/

In this episode, I will explore the concept of sense of purpose, in the context of university education. I will focus more on this thought from my personal point of view, as a professor at one of India’s leading engineering institutes, IIT Bombay, where I teach and mentor undergraduate and postgraduate students in electrical engineering, as a researcher where I carry out research and develop many cutting edge technologies in our labs, and as a new entrepreneur trying to take some of our innovations to market through our startup, Nirixense Technologies.

Welcome to Thinking in Loud. A space where we slow down, reflect, and dive deeper into our thoughts that shape us.