If you’re determined to achieve something, there’s no looking back
Ships are safe in the harbour, but ships are not profitable if they stay in the harbour! Likewise, your personality is only important because it gives you a head start. Eventually, the ideas in your head and feelings in your heart will take you ahead in life. For this, keep your mental screen turned on: That is Focus.
Most of us don’t focus! We want to squeeze in too many things and end up confused! Success comes when we prioritise every night before we go to sleep. That way, from the moment we get up in the morning, we are already goal-oriented and are all set to optimise our working hours. A true entrepreneur uses not just five senses; he uses the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth too.
When the bug of entrepreneurship bites an entrepreneur he becomes ‘passionate’. He has limited resources and has to think of creative and easy ways to scrape together enough money to put up as seed capital. S/he is a person who has passion, determination and persistence to take calculated risks. All these values may seem theoretical, but the blending of these values, which give the final results. They are successful because their passion leads them to organise available resources in new and more valuable ways.
One such person is Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, a practicing Hindu. She attended a Catholic School in Chennai, was an avid debater, played cricket and the guitar, and was an active member of a rock band! Her grandfather and her parents gave her the values and ethics by examples. She worked in Boston Consulting, Motorola and Asia Brown Bowery and joined Pepsi in 1994. As CEO of Pepsi, number 63 on the Fortune list of top 500 companies, she earned $7 million in 2006!
Her biggest and most unusual strength is that CEOs before her — all white men — were good friends and good consultants to her. She says, “After Pepsi, I do want to go to Washington, I want to give back — to work for no money for four or five years.” If she has achieved all this at 52, imagine what she can do by 60, once she makes up her mind. Her journey started when she was a little girl who used to wake up at 5am to fill two buckets of water before going to school, just so she could help out around the house.
“Instead of worrying about my losses, I started to count all the things I still had, and it was a revelation,” says Alexis Leon a software engineer with Tata Consultancy Services who met with a road accident, which left him paralysed waist down. Post accident he went through agonies associated with such an accident. But when you prepare yourself to think about how to overcome the challenges, you are able to endure the unendurable, accept the unacceptable, and move on to do the best with what you have. Leon prepared his mind to overcome the challenge and has done very well and went on to author over forty books on computing.
Most of us are healthy and have not experienced any of the challenges that people like Alexis Leon have endured, yet we are not living as vibrantly as we can. It is also important to realise that the likes of Alexis are as human as any one of us. Read more about people who live vibrantly, instead of reading about criminals in the newspapers. Better still, whenever you read about an achiever cut it out and paste it in your scrapbook for later reference.
“Victory belongs to the most persevering. Think of life as a win-win situation. Always attack a problem from all sides not just one,” says GM Rao, the founder of the GMR group. Rao was conferred the Entrepreneur of the Year award 2007.
Rao’s family was involved in trading jute and grain. All his family members had the most basic education. He was the first one to become an engineer in his family. After his education, Rao also started with trading in agriculture products, but later went on to become a force to reckon with in the infrastructure industry. GMR currently is building the airport in Delhi and also owns the IPL team the Delhi Daredevils.
“Effective entrepreneurship is not making speeches or being liked; entrepreneurship is defined by results, not attributes.” — Peter F Drucker
Article by: Vijay Batra (wellness guru)
