"CEOs can't wait to read Sunny Bindra's articles every week."

Do you find it hard to say no? You’re not alone. We are conditioned to say yes to things. We find ourselves bounced into socials, meetups, one-on-ones and the like all the time. Many of those time-sinks we had no desire to say yes to, but social and peer pressures won the day. Professionally, there’s […]

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool seemed to be an unstoppable football club, clinching trophy after trophy and blowing other teams away season after season. But that era came to an end in 1990, and the club didn’t win a league title for the next thirty years. Enter Manchester United. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, they […]

Recently, I was gazing across Mombasa’s Tudor Creek at twilight. Nyali Bridge was there in the distance, a perfect picture of twinkling lights. From here, the vehicles crossing the bridge were a pretty series of coloured beams, moving silently, like a movie watched on mute. I had crossed that bridge earlier that day, and it […]

While travelling in Italy last year, I came across an interesting juxtaposition. In a small, rustic village, there was a modest, very charming chapel. Right next to it was the village tavern. I paused to reflect. The human being truly has a need for escape from life’s myriad difficulties. Our lives are full of challenges […]

Most of the people reading this column right now are billionaires. Don’t believe me? That’s because you naturally assumed “billions” are about money. Jade Bonacolta, a writer on personal growth and productivity, has a different way of looking at it. One billion seconds equals 30 or so years. If you have that much time available […]

Today I want to share a magic number, a target that you should aim for: 60 per cent. School plants strong ideas about what a winning grade is in all of us. The way we get marked tells us that 80 and 90 per cent are the great numbers, the ones that give you ‘A’ […]

Let’s talk about the letter ‘S’ today. Picture it lying on its side. That’s a curve you should be paying attention to—the S-curve. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s high time you did, because once you see the S-curve, you start seeing it everywhere—in business, education, social movements, and even biology. So, what is […]

Would you seek life advice from a money-man? Not as a rule. Those fixated on the accumulation of wealth tend not to have too much general wisdom to impart. There are some exceptions, though. Jim Simons passed away recently. He’s not the best-known name, but he probably made more money than virtually anyone else on […]

The sage Nanak was travelling across the northern Indian subcontinent and beyond. His fame as a wise observer and enlightened teacher had grown, and crowds would flock to see him and hear his discourses, wherever he visited. He arrived in a town dominated by a very wealthy man. When the rich personage heard Nanak was […]

For a while it looked like this year’s Paris Olympics were going to be painfully disappointing for Kenya, but in the end our women athletes came through. Two women brought us three of our final tally of four gold medals. Beatrice Chebet pulled off the remarkable feat of double gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 […]

Last week I highlighted the three waves of computing tech that we have gone through over the past four decades or so: the personal computer, the internet, and the cloud-connected, multi-featured smartphone. Wave four is now well and truly upon us. Artificial Intelligence. The world as we know it is being rewritten—not by quill and […]

Paul Auster passed away recently, and I went back to his breakout book, The New York Trilogy, as a form of homage. The first novella begins with Daniel Quinn, a writer. Quinn uses a pseudonym, William Wilson, to write detective novels. The investigator in these novels is called Max Work. Quinn reflects that in this […]

Zarina Patel is no more; Kenya’s activist of renown passed away recently. She hit our headlines when she led the protests against the grabbing of Nairobi’s historic Jeevanjee Gardens in 1991. Since then she found a whole range of worthy causes to be involved in. If action was needed against a social injustice or human-rights […]

Fish & chips. Is there a dish more quintessentially British? It seems to shout out its patriotism. When I first rocked up in the British isles for my studies, a naïve lad from Kenya, I made sure I sought out a fish and chips eatery. I found there was one around every corner, and that […]

“I will miss him a lot. (He) has been a really important part of my life. He brought me to another level as a manager. I think we respect each other incredibly. He helps me so many times.” The person who said that was Pep Guardiola, manager of Manchester City Football Club, soon after winning […]

I am Gaia, your Mother Earth, and today I speak to you humans with a heavy heart. I have nurtured and nourished you for millennia, and given you a great bounty teeming with everything you need to thrive. Sadly, you have abused me incessantly, and you have worsened the mistreatment over the past century. You […]

I watched a television programme recently which highlighted the work of a Japanese cooper—a maker of wooden barrels, casks, and tubs. A simple enough task, you might think—but you stand to be re-educated, as I was. The choice of wood, how to treat it, how to shape it into staves, how to create a curved […]

Asma Khan is quite a phenomenon. A Bengali Muslim immigrant in the UK, she is a trained lawyer with a PhD in constitutional law. Yet her accomplishment is not in the field of her training. Asma is famous simply for cooking the dishes of her childhood. She had never learned to cook when she got […]

What keeps us going? What makes us keep striving to be more, do more, have more? Is it a necessary human trait, to hanker and to grow? We could call it ambition or aspiration. But I also have other words to for you to consider: greed, obsession, and sickness. The need to have and be […]

A few years ago I was having a chat with a Japanese female executive in Nairobi. She worked for a large multinational organization headquartered in Tokyo. The Kenya operation was undergoing restructuring, and her job was one of those affected. “I guess you’ll go back to HQ in Japan,” I asked? “No,” she said with […]

The renowned actor Michael Caine was once rehearsing a play scene as a young, aspiring thespian. In the middle of the rehearsal, a chair unexpectedly got stuck in the door of the set, blocking his path. Young Michael froze and didn’t know what to do. He told his fellow, more seasoned actor he couldn’t get […]

What would you say about a land of just 5 million people that has produced four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker Prize winners? This year’s Booker longlist had no fewer than four finalists from this country. I refer to Ireland, a country that routinely punches above its weight in the realm of literature. So […]

Picture yourself on a dark stage, delivering the central performance of the day. A spotlight is shining right on you, staying with you as you move. All else is dark. There are hundreds of people in the audience, but you can barely make them out. All their attention is on you: how you look, and […]

There are so many arrogant people running around. Full of themselves, cocksure, always right, always certain of their positions, usually dismissive of others. Why, though? What is there to be arrogant about, for any human being? You are arrogant because you are rich, perhaps? But how fickle is material wealth? It can be obtained through […]

Sometimes a thought just catches your eye and makes you think. James Clear, he of Atomic Habits fame, sent this out in a recent newsletter: “Don’t worry about being the most interesting person in the room, just try to be the most interested person in the room.” There is such pressure these days to be […]

Pick a side. You have to be on one side, or the other. If you’re not for us, you’re against us. If you’re not with us, you’re with them. Pick a side, and stick to it all your life. That message is drummed into us soon after we are born, and then reinforced for all […]

As the year draws to a close, let’s learn some Latin. I want to dust off three two-letter phrases that are profound meditations on having a meaningful life. They express timeless philosophies, rooted in many ancient spiritual and contemplative traditions. The first phrase is AMOR FATI. This means simply to love one’s fate. It is […]

I was once walking through the older parts of Reading, a town in the United Kingdom. I came upon a lovely old church hidden behind the town centre, and in it a cemetery. There I found this gem: a large wooden grave marker, with an inscription in memory of Henry West. Who was Henry West? […]