Forget everything you’ve been told about the soul-crushing sacrifices you need to make to achieve corporate success.
THE ZEN HUSTLE CODE:
Life-changing Strategies for Unstoppable Career Growth
by Bhasker Jaiswal
with Anupam Mukherji
HarperCollins India, March 2026
Whether you’re a twenty-five-year-old facing corporate dread, a thirties-something climbing the professional ranks or a forty-plus executive wondering why you spent your youth perfecting PowerPoint fonts, THE ZEN HUSTLE CODE shows you how to excel in both your career and in your life.
C-level advertising veteran Bhasker Jaiswal tells you how to crack the code to becoming a top performer, create long-lasting legacies — all while having time for your hobbies, holidays and the things that truly matter in life. Co-authored with Anupam Mukerji, better known as the once-anonymous blogger Fake IPL Player, this radical guide transforms complex career strategies into practical insights that actually stick.
Through this book, you’ll learn the sure-shot way to:
– get your promotion
– understand the dynamics of your office – red and green flags
– get to CXO while still owning your weekends, and much more.
Using brilliant analogies and real-world examples, Bhasker and Anupam deliver the blueprint for an impressive career while keeping your peace of mind intact. Because life’s too short to spend pretending conference rooms are living rooms!
BHASKER JAISWAL is ex COO of the media business at Dentsu India—the fifth largest advertising network in the world. Over a twenty-five-year career, Bhasker has worked with advertising giants like Omnicom and Publicis across India and SEA. He has handled some of their largest clients including Apple, Pepsi, P&G, Coca-Cola, Danone, Intel, Visa, Johnson & Johnson, etc.
Jonathan McNeill had already founded and sold six startups when Sheryl Sandberg introduced him to Elon Musk, who was looking for help at Tesla. McNeill was steeped in the lean principles that had made Toyota a global powerhouse—principles focused on achieving efficiency and optimization by incrementally improving existing systems and processes. What he learned from Elon at Tesla was its antithesis, an approach that required radical rethinking to explode the status quo, attack complexity, and set seemingly unrealistic goals. 
Today, Shazam is one of the most iconic and widely used apps in the world, with a brand name so recognizable that it has become a verb. But what few people know is that it was invented before smartphones existed. Chris dreamed up Shazam in 1999, when people were still buying CDs and carrying around portable CD players with wired headsets. There was no Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and certainly no App Store. The closest thing to streaming music was the illegal sharing of digital files on platforms like Napster. There was no Facebook, Instagram, or even Myspace. Chris’s idea, that anyone, anywhere, could use their phone to identify a song playing in the background, sounded like science fiction. More than 100 experts told him it couldn’t be done, but Chris refused to give up. Instead, he assembled a dream team of brilliant minds—engineers, scientists, and business thinkers—who shared his vision (after some persuasion). United by a shared sense of purpose and determination, they set out to build the impossible from scratch. Together, they would develop the technology that would power the world’s first AI-driven consumer tool, years before anyone had even heard the word “app.” What followed was an eighteen-year odyssey marked by near-bankruptcy, groundbreaking innovation, sabotage, fierce competition with behemoths like Google and Sony, and bitter internal battles among team members. Through every setback and betrayal, Chris never gave up on his vision, and he continued to fight to keep Shazam on course. In the end, the idea that no one thought could work became a global phenomenon. This is more than a tech success story. It’s a deeply human, often emotional narrative about vision, grit, and the power of believing in the impossible.
Whether you’re dealing with constant demands, the pressure to perform, or the stress of adapting to rapid changes, the workplace is often where you’re tested the most mentally and emotionally. As psychotherapist, speaker, and podcast host Amy Morin discovered, sharpening your mental strength is the key to not only tackling workplace challenges but taking your performance to the next level. The Mental Strength Playbook is specifically designed to help you thrive professionally, with 50 scientifically proven plays you can use right now.