Only 1% of you may go on to fulfil your aspiration
of becoming a CEO of a large company or leading a successful startup! 90% of
you are not likely to get anywhere close to your aspirations and ambitions even
25 years from now!”
I was speaking to a packed hall of bright
youngsters from top Bschools. A pall of silence descended on the room. “You
worked very hard to get here. However, do you still have that passion, drive,
dreams, determination and a huge appetite to learn what brought you here? Or
did you dump it to focus instead on shortcuts like how to “network” and changed
your life goals to simply land the best job in campus?”
I could see some nods in the room. In my experience, only 1% of us are able to
realise our original dreams despite the rest being just as capable. To get to
your dreams you need to learn to create magic “outside the boundaries of logic
and reason” and not be trapped within. So how does one do that? Let me share
with you three ideas that have worked for me. The first is to embrace your
uniqueness. Think about it. What is that one thing which you have and which no
one else in the world has? I believe the answer is, “you”. So why try hard to
ape others and be like someone else? In that attitude alone we lose our
uniqueness and our ability to create magic. There was once a boy who was born
without a right arm. When he grew up he learnt karate and soon wanted to
compete in a tournament. His master said he could and taught the boy one single
move. The boy won the first round of the tournament and then the next round and
the one after that until he found himself winning the entire tournament.
Baffled, he asked his master how he did it. The master smiled and told the boy
there is only one defence against the move the boy learned and that defence
involves grabbing the attacker by the right arm!
There are 6 billion other humans on this planet.
However, there is only one you. There is a reason God made you unique, find it,
leverage it and you will win every time. The second is to look beyond distractions. Life is a box of unknown events that
appear at random times – some good and some not so good. I call them
‘distractions’. It’s your ability to stay focused through these distractions,
fixated on your long-term goal that will help you see beyond trappings like
salary, bonus, cars or notso-good ones like the wall of failure, rejection,
unfair assessment etc. Remember a magician systematically creates magic by
distracting his audience, yet remaining focused on the end game, undistracted.
Unless you train yourself to look beyond and outside the distraction box, how
will you even stand a chance of getting to your goals?
The third is having a deep-rooted conviction in
your goals. Once there were two trees in a village. One next to a river was
green and beautiful. The second stood in an arid patch of land. It was thin and
had few leaves and people ignored it. One night there was a storm and the
villagers woke up assuming the tree next to the river would have survived and
the other tree would have died. But the reverse happened. The reason was
simple. The tree next to the river used to get water easily. Therefore, its
roots were shallow and were not able to withstand the storm. The other tree had deep roots and survived. If you
do not have a deeprooted conviction, won’t you be blown away by the first
advent of adversity? So ask yourself again, what is it that you really stand
for? The list of what you can do to be in that 1% is long and it all
starts with you – actually your mind. The more you have it in your control, the
higher your chances of fulfilling your dreams and ambitions.
Source : Mr. Vineet Nayar – Economic Times – 10/12/2013
(The writer is founder, Sampark Foundation and
vice-chairman & CEO, HCL Technologies)
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