Numbercaste

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

But the tongue, like a sharp knife, kills without drawing blood,

MBAs call this stuff 'pain points' and talk about how companies address them, but that's not really the trick. The real trick is not solving a pain point, but creating one, and then figuring out the reward cycle. The rest is just execution.

Success is a strange thing. It involves years of bending yourself to one single task, even at the expense of all others. Hobbies. Relationships. Side jobs. Friends. Most people just give up halfway. Those of us who do make it through to the end, by grit or by simple bull-headed stupidity, do it by losing ourselves in that tunnel, by wrapping our lives around a few things that really, really matter. And then, one day, you stand up to all the awards and the accolades and realize it was all worth it.

Here were people who lived as humans should - free, happy, slightly worried, and terribly drunk.

The London Eye hung gently in the background, lit up by the soft gold of the sunrise against the gray emptiness of London fog.