- Age 0-5 -> My grandfather turns to be the only person who influenced me into learning Sanskrit shlokas,some of which I can recollect and recall and bring myself to the awesome days.
- Age 5-18 -> My father for bringing the concept of Positive thinking,Goal and Planning in life.I am not sure ,how much of it I have executed,but this was by far the single most differentiator for me from the rest of my peer group.
- At KNIT Sultanpur,probably no single individual.But the students in general,who helped me enjoy the small things in life in difficult circumstances.There was also this book "The Magic of Thinking Big" that led me to create some real super goals in life and motivated me to reach them.
- At Infosys, my mentor Pinaki who told me the golden rule "You do 100 good things,people don't remember you.You do 1 wrong thing and people remember you forever".Murphy's law was another of his favourite rule to use.
- At IIM Lucknow, I was deeply influenced by Dr. Himanshu Rai. He has created such a strong framework about life ,that it seems difficult not to retrofit human beings into it.Some of his ideas that are also part of his blog,my blog and advices he gives to the aam aadmi are :-
- You must learn to love yourself for what you are. Do not seek love or approbation from outside; seek it from within.
- Next, you need to tell yourself that you have choices in life. What makes you different from other species is “free will”. Tell yourself that you have it. It is okay if you are confused right now over your future course of action. Very few of us, if any, know what we really want to do with our lives! So welcome to the world! Reflect on your achievements in the past and correlate them to the effort you made to get them. Auto suggestion is a powerful tool when used wisely.
- Eat healthy, sleep well and counter negative thoughts
- The concept of detachment as propounded by Vedic scriptures relates to living one’s life and doing one’s Karma while not attaching oneself to the fruits of the effort (Nishkaam karma). Fear is a consequence of attachment. When we are attached to someone or something, we are afraid of losing them, and it manifests itself as fear of failure, fear of success, fear of unknown and so on.
- Other thoughts are already part of the "Leadership through Literature" posts.
6. How people remember things or become leaders can be through simple aspects like "Reading","Writing","Listening" or even "Talking" .This was part of "Managing oneself" series I was reading last year in my free time.
7. Find your zones or spheres of control.List them and change only those that you can control first.Something that I learnt while interacting with my team in Kolkata.
