Mithun Ekbote

I spent almost two decades in marketing and behavioral science, trying to understand not just why people buy things, but why they hope, fear, trust, hesitate, and make the choices they do. That curiosity eventually turned into a book.

The starting question was simple, why do intelligent, well-intentioned people keep making the same avoidable mistakes? Not because they lack information. Most of us know health needs attention and still neglect it for years. We know relationships need care and still let distance accumulate through small, repeated inactions. The knowledge is there. The behavior it should produce often isn't. That gap is what the book is actually about.

It's called How to Stay Two Steps Ahead in Life, and it's 11 essays rather than a step-by-step framework, closer to reflective nonfiction than prescriptive self-help. Some of the threads it pulls on:

* Why we let temporary emotions make permanent decisions, and what it actually looks like to build a gap between what we feel and what we do next

* What intuition really is beneath the mysticism, and why it uses the same channel as fear, so the two are easy to confuse

* Why we so often misjudge the people we love, expecting them to experience the world the way we do

* Why some of the costliest choices in a life are the quiet, undramatic ones repeated for years, not the dramatic ones

* The old idea that we don't have to personally make every mistake to learn from it, borrowed experience as a genuine shortcut, not a cop-out

No promises of a transformed life. If anything, the book argues against that kind of promise, life is too specific and contingent for formulas. What it aims for instead is legibility, patterns that, once seen, are hard to unsee.