Disagreement and challenge are healthy activities. Without them, teams are denied innovation and progress. We must learn the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking as these are the ones that gives us a fighting chance of bringing about a positive change.. Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about contentedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.
Willing for hard work, innovation, commitment, integrity ~ it will start making us. Nothing is more powerful than the power of words. Especially if the words come from someone we admire and look up to. We meet, watch, and hear many leaders every day. Some we agree with and some we don’t. But, there are those who leave a great impact on the lives of millions of people around them, they change the fate of the country and they bring a change which once looked like a dream. Yes, this is the power of words – when spoken, everyone listens.
Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. What is a value system? Maybe you have used these words or some like them yourself. It's the verbal equivalent of the pointed finger, and the effect is both powerful and destructive. We have developed bad habits that we have found hard to kick, so we haven't properly tried. And maybe it's easier to think "They're stupid, I'm clever!" and live with the frustration of friction. It is the protocol for behavior that enhances the trust, confidence and commitment of members of the community. It goes beyond the domain of legality - it is about decent and desirable behavior.
Further, it includes putting the community interests ahead of your own. Thus, our collective survival and progress is predicated on sound values. Man can live individually, but can survive only collectively. Hence, the challenge is to form a progressive community by balancing the interests of the individual and that of the society. To meet this, we need to develop a value system where people accept modest sacrifices for the common good.
Democracy and individual liberty provide the conditions in which knowledge progresses, science discovers, innovation occurs, enterprise thrives and ultimately people advance. As we rush toward that bigger house or faster car, we often forget to look at the people who are content with what they have.
It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
I often wondered what success means to me. To most, it means wealth or fame. To me, success lies in the way one goes about achieving goals. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light. I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.
Success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts. Success is so much more than money, so much more than achieving goals - it's the way a person goes through the journey. It's the grace, integrity, poise and passion that makes them successful and places them in my personal collection.
Most of our behavior comes from greed, lack of self-confidence, lack of confidence in the nation, and lack of respect for the society. To borrow Gandhi’s words: "There is enough in this world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed".
Let us work towards a society where we would do unto others what we would have others do unto us. Let us all be responsible citizens who make our country a great place to live.