Book Notes – The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger

Robert Iger, the 15-year veteran CEO of Disney wrote this book as leadership lessons from his golden days at ABC to one of the most tumultuous times at Disney. The entire book is a summary of Bob’s 45-year career at ABC, Capital Cities, and Dinsey. I had been to Disney once and couldn’t help but…

Differential Privacy

These days companies are using more and more customer data to improve their products and services. On October 2, 2006, Netflix announced the $1 Million Prize for improving their movie recommendation algorithm. Netflix released an anonymous dataset containing movie ratings by 500,000 subscribers containing 100M ratings for 17,000 movies. Netflix asserted that all personally identifiable…

Citizenship in a Republic

Everyone has heard or read Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the Arena’ speech, but few know that it’s not the entire speech. The often-quoted paragraph is a section of the complete speech called ‘Citizenship in a Republic‘ delivered on Apr 23, 1910, in Paris, France. ‘The Man in the Arena’: It is not the critic who…

The Rescue

Friday is the movie/documentary night for 2022. Wife and I watched ‘The Rescue‘ today. It is one of the most riveting documentaries I watched since Icarus. The movie had enthralling real footage from the rescue and some reenactments to fill the narrative gaps, but you won’t even recognize it until you watch the credits. The…

Motivation is overrated, Discipline is underrated

I read Atomic Habits sometime last year and developed the habit of running first thing in the morning with all the motivation I was driving from the book. I ran for a week and lapsed. After that, it has been an on-and-off habit of running. But over the last few weeks, I have realized that…

Principles of Work

Back in 2019, I was preparing my resume for a full-time job and was thinking of ways to stand out. I went through all the checklist items – good GPA, difficult courses, nice capstone project, good internships, a bunch of security certifications, etc. But something was amiss. So I decided to include a section called…

Stopping the mind to think

I read this excerpt in Awareness today: Thinking cannot be stopped – not that it does not stop – but it cannot be stopped. It stops of its own accord. As I think about this quote it dawned on me that we can’t really stop thinking. There is a paradox in this statement itself. When…

New Year Resolutions

I have been keeping new year’s resolutions since 2011. I achieved a few of them and some are still on the bucket list (Oh, those elusive abs!). This year, I have decided to not keep the new year resolutions but do something to progress on 4 key themes: Wisdom – read good books, listen with…

Year in Review – 2021

I remember watching this Ted talk first time in 2015. If you haven’t watched this video before, I highly recommend you watch this video before reading further. I don’t remember a lot from the video, but one line that has stuck with me over the years is ‘The days you remember are the days you…

I alone…

I alone am responsible for all outcomes of my life – good or bad. I alone am responsible for keeping my body fit, sharpening my mind, and enriching my soul. I alone am responsible for how I think, feel, and respond. I alone am responsible for the well-being of myself, my family, society, and country…