Anuradha Sridharan

The way we interact with the physical world and the digital world has a lot of similarities. Let me explain. Last weekend, I had been to a book store, which had a wide collection across various categories. How did I navigate this place? First, I went to the categories that I'm mostly interested in - psychology, business, marketing, spirituality. As I was walking through the different aisles, I picked up books to browse - those I have either heard of OR added to my Amazon wish list. Except for a few random books with an interesting title, I mostly stuck to books that I was familiar with. I wanted to take a look at this book "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky but couldn't find it under psychology. I asked an associate working there and he brought the book from the "Science" section. I also enquired about a few other books and also wanted to check if they are available in the used books collection. The associate answered all my questions patiently. I ended up buying t...

  Every year, I look forward to jotting down my year in review. It is such a powerful, reflective practice that I have incorporated into my life and it is fun to read reviews of previous years . As I reflected upon 2021, the immediate memories that came up were all the challenges life threw at me this year. It was like life telling me, "Oh, are you complaining about what I'm throwing at you in Jan? Wait till May, my dear." After going through multiple challenges, the ONE powerful lesson I have learned is this - " Never take anything or anyone for granted ". Most of them were related to health issues that cropped up one after another for EVERY SINGLE family member. These got nothing to do with the Covid virus, but the fact that these issues came up during the pandemic made it even more challenging for all of us. And the person who suffered the most is my dad, an active 71-year old man with no history of any major lifestyle disorders. He got diagnosed with a criti...

  1-2-6-5-3 That's how the cat population in our home changed this year. Our pet cat W adopted us in 2014. Since then, she has been living with us. She's an indoor cat for most of the day, loves to take long naps throughout the day and sometimes during her hunts, would bring home a mouse, a squirrel, or a pigeon as gifts for us🙂 This all changed in 2020 when a mom cat named Judy brought her 4 kittens to our apartment complex. Detailed story shared here . Consider this post as part 2. All of Judy's kittens became pregnant one after another. The last one to get pregnant was Scady, the grey fearless cat. Sometime in Jan this year, she started coming to our balcony often. We knew she was pregnant and was looking for a place to deliver. We didn't want her to deliver in our home, as we feared our pet cat W might harm the babies. But Scady was relentless and kept coming inside our home often. It was clear that she wanted to deliver in our home, as her three sisters had alread...

  I came across this insightful article  this morning  - How to know what you really want . It talks about  how our desires get formed. I could resonate with it so much. And at multiple points, I paused and reflected upon why a certain point makes so much sense. This post is just a collation of those reflections with examples. "Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you  perceive  to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting" Such an interesting take on connecting our desires to  Intellectual Appetite ! Someone desiring a high-end smartphone *intellectually* perceives that a superior configuration is better. "Desire is a social process - it is mimetic. Mimetic desires are the desires that we mimic from the people and culture around us. If I perceive some career or lifestyle or vacation as good, it’s because someone else has modeled it in such a way that it appears good to me." This is such a ...

I came across this book sometime in 2015. I quickly brushed through the soft copy from Safari and jotted down a few points that were relevant to my work then. As I kickstarted a new work engagement couple of weeks back, I knew I needed to revisit this book in much more depth and so ordered a hard copy. It might seem like a not-so-serious book, given the style of writing and the imagery. But amidst the fun narrative lies a lot more insightful and relevant pointers for product managers and UX designers. Kathy Sierra's Badass Making users awesome makes a compelling case of why it is important to enable users to become awesome in the compelling context for which they use our product/service. Most of the time, we market loudly on why our product is awesome with all the amazing, cool features. But the real success and meaning come when we help our users become awesome in a particular skill. Our product becomes an enabler towards this outcome. Instead of competing on the quality of our p...