Rockefeller’s advice – 5

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the Prophets and Messengers, Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and upon his family, and peace and blessings be upon him and upon his family, and upon his many, many, many. What is next? Principle number five. Rockefeller says, excuses are mental illness. Excuses are mental illness. My quote on excuses, I say excuses don't change reality. Think about it like this. Say you had your wallet in your back pocket, in your hip pocket, which is probably the worst place to keep a wallet. But most people do. So you had the wallet in your hip pocket. People also keep the wallet on the dashboard of their car, right up in front and under the windscreen, where it's visible to everybody, and then they have their window down, and somebody obviously, you know, puts his hand in, grabs the wallet and is gone. And you have lost all your, whatever was in the wallet, your ID, your credit card, your money. So say, for example, you had your wallet in your back pocket, and you were, you know, you were going to a railway station or a fair or some crowded place and your wallet, your pocket is picked. Your wallet is gone. So now if you come and explain to me and give me this whole story of how it was so, normal, natural, you did take precautions, but however, you know, these people are so bad and the world is so bad, and therefore your wallet got stolen, and you give me all these excuses and I say, absolutely, I agree with you. You know, it's not your fault, right? It is not your fault. Will your wallet come back in your pocket? It won't, because loss is loss, gain is gain. Loss does not change to gain just because you have an excuse. So excuses don't change reality. Rockefeller puts it another way, more powerful. He says excuses are mental illness. Then he says three excuses that kill success. I'm not healthy enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not lucky enough. I'm not healthy enough, I'm not smart enough, and I'm not lucky enough. All of these are excuses. Paul Coelho says, if you want to succeed, you must never lie to yourself. And those are excuses. Lying to yourself is excuses. I don't have enough time. I'm so busy. The person who is accomplishing huge things is somebody who also has the same 24 hours. So I ask people sometimes this question. I say, what's your dream? So they tell me, my dream is this. Okay, fantastic. What's your life goal? They have not heard about that. They don't have that life goal. So if it's not a life goal, why don't you have this dream written down as a life goal? Okay, so I write it down. How does it become a goal? It becomes a goal when you put a timeline on it. So I will achieve this dream by this date. It doesn't matter if the date is sketchy. Put a date. Once you do that, then I ask people, how much of screen time do you have? How much of time do you spend on screens? And it's very easy. Your phone has an app which tracks that. So enable that app and it will track the amount of time you will spend on the screen. Average screen time for most people is between 4 to 6 hours. Six hours is a working day. What you are doing for six hours is called a job. And jobs have salaries. So my question is, if you are spending six hours on a screen in social media, what are you getting paid for it? Who's paying your salary for it? If nobody's paying your salary, and of course we know that nobody's paying your salary, then why are you there on that screen for six hours? As simple as that. Now if you are there on the screen for six hours, how on earth are you going to achieve your dream, which I'm assuming is not being on a screen for six hours? So your dream is something else. So if your dream is something else, how is that dream going to be achieved when six hours a day, eight hours a day, your face is in your phone, and you are spending that time there? You are spending that time there doing worthless things, completely useless things, and getting nothing for it, while somebody else is buying another super yacht, because you and people like you are giving him that time. Free, right? Your life, you're giving it away to whoever owns that social media. And as they say, the rest is history, right? Whether it's Zuckerberg or whoever, the point is to understand yourself that there are only 24 hours. Everybody has 24 hours. Now what you do with that 24 hours is in your head. If you don't do that, and you blame somebody else, it doesn't work. In 83, I decided that I wanted to be a leadership development consultant. A leadership development consultant. I wanted to spend my life, helping people become leaders. So leadership development consultant, with an international clientele, international practice. This is something that I wrote down in 1983. From 83 to 94, I didn't take a single day's leave. Not one single day. Every weekend, and all my annual leave, I spent in reading, in writing, learning how to train, and learning how to design courses. To make matters more interesting and complicated, I lived in the anomalies and in tea gardens, which meant that a beautiful place to live in, but if you have to travel, it means adding a full 24 hours to your travel schedule. Anything I wanted to learn was not happening in the tea gardens. It was happening, as we say, in tea language, we say, down in the plains. So it was happening in some city or the other. Most of those cities were not close to the tea gardens, which means that I had to take a bus down to Coimbatore from Hanamalese, catch a train, go to Chennai, and if the thing was in Chennai, I was lucky if the thing was not in Chennai, then I would have to take a flight from Coimbatore or from Chennai to whichever city it was, Mumbai or Delhi or wherever. And then I had to attend that training course, which whichever consultant permitted me to come there. So it is their course. They were kind enough to allow me to sit there in their course to watch them train and then to debrief them at the end of it and try to understand why they did what they did and so on and so forth. They were not paying for my food. They were not paying for my hotels. So I stayed in, literally in some places I stayed in hotel rooms which had bed bugs, which had mosquitoes. I was sharing a bathroom with whoever else was there in the hotel, so stinking bathrooms. You know, a place you wouldn't kennel your dog in, I stayed there because that's all I could afford. I had no money. In other places where I had friends, I tested their friendship. You know, I parked myself in their homes somewhere on some carpet or the living room or something and just to stay. And I don't even know what I ate. I ate something off the street, some street vendor. Now the point is I did all this because I was absolutely clear in my mind that I needed to acquire the knowledge to become a leadership consultant. That was not going to happen where I was. So no excuses. I have to go where I have to go. Well, that means that I cannot take time off. Yes, that means that I cannot take a vacation with my wife. I just got married in 84. This happened in 83. I mean, the goal I made in 83. I got married in 85. 94 is when I launched my business, Yahudi Associates in Bangalore. An entire period, my wife and I did not take a vacation together. She would go off to her parents. I had 35 days annual vacation from my company. I negotiated to get another 15 days of leave without pay. So I'm losing pay for that. And I spent all this in learning how to train for 12 years. And my wife spent all those 12 years with her parents. And we didn't take a single vacation together. Weekends I didn't go to this party, that party. The plantation was famous for all these things. There was no other entertainment. So we kind of enjoyed ourselves in different ways. I could not take part in that because I was not there. I had to go and study. Everyone in the plantation had a TV. Color TVs came in 85 in India after the, I think it was the Asian Games, something like that. And color TVs were allowed. So they got important. Everyone had a color TV. These were the days of the VCPs and the VCRs, the video recording and video players. Everyone had a VCP, VCR. We did not have a TV and we did not have a VCP, VCR. Not because we were such great morally upright individuals, but because we had no money. And the reason we had no money was not because I wasn't earning, but I was spending all of that in learning how to train. Right? Now all of this, today when I take a class and people, by the grace of Allah, people are very complimentary. And they say, oh, fantastic. And I come back, people come back to me. I just had most recently, somebody sent me a picture of the manual that I used to give. This was in 85. This was before even 486 computers, or at least we had no access to them. So it was all typed and photocopied material, articles which I had written, articles which I had collected, spiral bound and given to my course participants. This friend of mine who is now a CEO, he sent me a picture of that. He said, I just found this when I was rearranging my library and it's still as inspiring as it was at that time. Now imagine, I feel so good about that. Somebody who remembers a course that I taught 45 years ago. Right? Now the point is, all of that ability didn't come out of the blue. It was not luck. It was very, very hard work for an insanely long period of time, for 12 years. And the important thing to understand here is that when I was in that, I didn't know it was going to be 12 years. I was not doing a 12-year course. Nobody does a 12-year course anyway. But I wasn't even doing that. I was doing what I needed to do to learn. And it took me 12 years. It's not because I'm stupid, but just because that was, I was doing a full-time job as well. And in that full-time job,