Sometimes people ask me for the secret of success. We live in a world of fantasy where people want magic formulae for everything. Let me tell you the good news. It is not a secret, but it is a magic formula. Focus + Investment + Consistency. Works every time.

I have given it the acronym, FIKR – K from the phonetic pronunciation of Consistency (Konsistency). As for R – well, we’ll get to it. Just remember FIKR

One

of the most famous cases is that of Dashrath Manjhi, a poor villager in Bihar,

who literally carved a road out of a mountain. When his wife died tragically

because he was unable to get her to a hospital in time thanks to the fact that

he had to go around a mountain to get to the main road, he decided to cut the

mountain and build a road. He carved a path 110 meters long, and 9.1 meters

wide to form a road through the rocks in Gehlour Hill so that nobody else would

need to suffer the same fate. It took him, working with a chisel and hammer, 22

years.

You

can read more about him here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

What was his secret? Focus + Investment + Consistency. Works every

time.

In

1983, I had just returned from Guyana and joined the tea planting industry in

the Anamallais. On my first annual vacation, I attended a two-week residential,

experiential learning workshop on Applied Behavioural Science by the Indian

Society of Applied Behavioural Science (ISABS), in Jaipur. I found it very

beneficial and was impressed by the potential to help people that lay in this

line of work. I was particularly impressed by Mr. Aroon Joshi whose

facilitation enabled me not only to understand myself better but to resolve

some issues which had been bothering me. Aroon has been my dear friend and

mentor ever since. The long and short of this was that I decided that I would

make training, my profession. I was a tea planter. And I wanted to make a career

in training. Sounds crazy. It was. How did I do it? That’s what I want to share

with you. I hope you will be able to benefit from the lessons I learnt in my

life.

Before

I go into the how, let me tell you what I did since then, so that you have a complete

picture in your mind. From the time you saw a young tea planter, sitting on the

floor in an ISABS Lab (that is how it worked), agonizing over his work

relationships, you would have seen him single-mindedly focused on learning how

to train, to taking some very hard decisions and risks which would have left

many, freaked out. You would have seen him speak to his first client and stake

his reputation in his pitch. You would have seen him succeed and fail but

succeed more and never fail at the same thing twice. In short, you would have

seen him learning. Learning all the time. Enjoying learning, which enabled him

to take ever higher risks. You would have seen him challenging himself and

doing things which most people in any line of work, never do i.e. write

thirty-six books. Today, I have trained over 200,000 people on three continents

from practically every nationality, race and walk of life.

From

where I started in training, I specialized in leadership development. That is

what excited me. To see people come in, looking like something off the clothesline

and walk out, straight and tall with a glint in their eye and to know that I’d

had something to do with that. Over the years, now almost 40, several times I

have had people come up to me in an airport or in a restaurant and say, “I