Winning is a Personal Choice

Winning is a personal choice. Now you may well ask, then why aren't there more winners are winners all around? After all, everyone wants to win.

And I will say, I said that winning is a personal choice, not a wish. And there lies the secret to winning and losing the difference between wishing and choosing. One is passive, the other is active. One needs no effort, the other needs sweat and tears, and maybe even a little blood. One, you look back upon in your twilight years and say to yourself in the midst of your tales,

the most tragic words in any language. If only

if only

and the other. You look back upon in your twilight years and you say I'm so happy that I shed my tears way back then.

Now, you're perhaps saying that is hard. But welcome. Welcome to another great secret life is hard.

I want you to stand in front of the mirror, look at yourself in the eyes and repeat that 1000 times life is hard.

let me reword that.

A winner's life is hard. And that is why it is a choice. Because while it is hard, it is also immensely satisfying and exciting and energizing and productive and beneficial for you and others

and leaves you with memories.

How does one word

that different all their

life is hard for losers too much harder, really because it comes without any rewards. So choose wisely? Because it is your life.

Now, why aren't there more winners because one other fact, people forget that we are free to choose. But every choice has a price tag.

It's like walking into any superstore. It's full of beautiful things. You're free to browse and look at whatever you like, but you can only take home what you pay for.

It truly is as simple as that.

wieners love this early and then they prepare themselves to pay for their choices and they walk away with their bites. I say early because depending on the choice, it may take a long time to prepare. Ask any world class tennis player or golfer At what age they held the first tennis racquet or Golf Club in the hat.

Ask Andrea gassy. Ask Tiger Woods, ask anybody.

You can extend that example to practically any sport or anything we're doing.

Start early and stay focused, start early and stay focused. You will say Well, I agree but I'm not seven years old anymore. No, you're not. So some choices are not open to you any longer. And that's a very reason to choose early. However, what you can do at any age is to choose something else that is open to you today and go for it.

Just because you wasted your life until now doesn't mean that you must continue to waste it. Sorry to be brutal. Life is brutal. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you will start winning.

Start early and stay focused. Do you know what you need to stay focused? attention span attention span. Focus is all about staying on one thing for a long time. How long is long enough? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish. There is no

magic number but believe me, it is not measured in seconds. The time is not measured in seconds or minutes. But in hours, days and sometimes years.

Focus is the difference between ordinary light and laser one at best illuminates the other cuts through steel, USA then you are happy with simply eliminating all party. But if you are interested in leaving a legacy in creating memories and doing things that will continue to benefit others long after you're gone,

then focus is critical.

If you don't believe me, tell me how many goldfish or monkeys do you know who left behind legacies.

Likewise for people with the attention span of these

To lovely creatures.

Now, do we need goldfish or monkeys? Of course we do.

The question is not that. The question is, do you want to be a goldfish or a monkey? And that is what you must decide.

Sometimes, well, many people wonder why I don't do shorts.

For YouTube protector to reach the youth

who they claim have

very short attention spans,

and looks like they never saw a child or adolescent buried in his phone.

My response is, it is winners, not goldfish or monkeys.

Having said that, I have several students who are dedicated enough to stay engaged and participate and contribute to their own and my learning.

That's all I need.

The problem is that today, some teachers and scholars seem to have confused their roles with that, and entertainers. Believe me, it is not the job of the teacher or scholar to attract the masses. It is their job to provide the best possible learning experience for serious students who come to them.

Teachers are like a crystal clear river gushing out of a glacier. With ice cold pure water is there for anyone to drink from and use as they wish as much as they wish. But the one who is thirsty must go to the river

or vice versa.

The one who was thirsty, will find the river, he will search and you will find the real. The one who's not just he doesn't need to take the river to him is to insert the river.

Knowledge is for those who are thirsty for it, not for the disinterested, who have no time for it. The key to developing leaders is the same as the key to doing anything that stands out. You pick the best suited material, it begins with that

you can get a great harvest from trash seed. You can make a great Katana with scrap steel. No matter how skilled a swordsman, swordsman or sausage maker you may be. It's a mark of skill of your skill as a Sword Maker, and a sign of your expertise that you start with selecting the best steel.

You cannot make winners out of losers. winners have huge attention spans. Losers watch shorts on tick tock.

We must all suffer from one of two things. The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

We must choose. And remember, not choosing is also a choice. I use the word pain for a reason. All choices are painful by definition. In some, the pain comes first. In others, the pain comes later. The pain that comes first is voluntary. It is temporary, and it enhances that award.

The pain that comes later is in a matter of speaking. It's only what and it lasts until your last day. That is the difference between the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. Good winning choices are almost always tough and painful. But losing choices are far more painful. Though they seem easy to make. Once again, your car because it's your life.

I want to share with you some choices I made so that you can hear it straight from the horse's mouth me.

I graduated high school from the Hyderabad public school, one of the best schools in India.

But I did not make a tough choice.

I chose the easy route to follow some friends.

I lost one year. In that process.

I learned my lesson very painfully and never made that mistake again.

In 1979, I left the comfort of home and family and friends and social circle in Hyderabad and went to Ghana, South America across the world.

I read the book about that called from India to the Indies.

I lived alone in Cocconi little mining town carved out of the Amazonian rainforest, clinging to the bank of the Berbice river where I was a total stranger

And I lived there for five years.

Nobody spoke my mother tongue will do. I was the only Muslim, the only foreigner, the food the language, Guyanese or Creole, the culture, West Indian, the people, majority of them have African origin. Some have mixed Chinese, Amerindian, Africa, Indian stock, Indian River raiders were all totally alien to me.

When I learned the language, I made friends, who I love very much, and who loved me and took me into their homes and lives. I'm in touch with many today 44 years later,

I tried to do my work as the Assistant Administrator, manager

at age 24, with subordinates as old as my father,

learning to lead in a very hard, unionized militant labor environment.

I learned about life and had a very successful career.

All of that is is that book from India to the Indies.

I was lonely, sometimes very lonely, missing my family and life back home and

lonely enough sometimes to weep. As I would sit on the veranda of my house, looking out across the orange orchard, and the dark, ominous wall of the forest that bordered our officers colony.

The darkness in my heart was much more than the darkness I was looking out at.

I could have packed my bags and left at any time, but I didn't. I stayed and very stubborn. I don't like to lose, to leave, because I couldn't take the pressure would be to lose. I was not going to do that. But I was also not going to be miserable.

So I would go fishing and hunting.

Almost every weekend. With my friend and colleague, Peter Ramsay. There's a unique thing about the pleasure of brotherhood, male companionship where you have each other's back. There is no pretense, nothing to prove to the other, no secrets, you traveled together, you know each other's thoughts. You share your life with complete trust, that each will gladly give his life for the other if need be. And consider that in honor.

I had the singular privilege of having had three such friends. Peter was one to go to Ghana was a tough choice to stay was even tougher. After five years, I decided to return home because thanks to Chinese politics of the time as a foreigner, I didn't seem to have a great future in my career in that company.

In India, I entered the plantation industry in South India in the anomalies in 1983.

And in the same year, I decided to make a career as a leadership consultant.

I wrote my goal, as I will be a leadership consultant with a global practice and clients for whom I will be the natural and only choice. Let me repeat that. I will be a leadership consultant, with a global practice with clients for whom I will be the natural and only choice.

Writing this was easy.

Achieving the first days of it

by launching my consulting practice took me 12 years of working every weekend, every vacation and spending every penny on learning consulting skills.

Remember, at the time I started, I didn't know I didn't know that would that it would take me 12 years. Maybe that was a good thing in a way because I'm not sure if I would have had the courage to take the first step.

During this period, I earned an executive MBA, the MEP, from ima from the premier business school in India, the Indian Institute of Management and

this happened in the year I got married 1985 One month after our wedding.

tough choice

to take the course or to wait another year, two years, 10 years never.

I took the tough choice. My wife and I bought to the top choice and we said we will do the course.

My wife

spent that time with her parents in the UK. And I didn't see her or speak to her until I completed my course.

There was not because I didn't want to but because I didn't have the money to travel or to make an international telephone call 1985 Long before WhatsApp and whatnot.

took my life savings until that time, plus a loan plus the time as lived without pay to pay the fees for the course.

None of this was a surprise. My wife and I spoke about this and decided that I needed to do this. If I wanted to be a consultant, and I wanted to be a consultant, in this case, a tough choice, and the cost of it was bore was for both of us to bear. We did.

When I launched my consulting practice in Bangalore in 1994, we faced choices of a different guy. I was a total stranger in the training consulting environment.

I had no network, no linkages, no track record as a trainer or consultant. I had been a line manager, and my experience was in bauxite mining, mining, manufacturing, plantation management and unionized labor relations. I had never been a training or an HR manager, but I had chosen leadership consulting and training as my career. At that time, major multinational companies had come to India and recruitment was the name of the game. Many people told me to become a recruiter, I studied the market and found that recruiters were essential to everyone. But were the least trusted of all service providers because of their tendency to pick a person from one company and place him in

another at a higher salary. Now since their earnings are a factor of that, it benefited them but the but employers who lost people to recruiters naturally didn't trust them. I chose not to be a recruiter because as a leadership consultant, I needed to be trusted as a friend and confidant.

I needed money very badly. Because we had just started a new life I knew I was passing by easy money by not becoming a recruiter, but I was not after easy money. I was after establishing a clientele, which trusted me, Indian business has had and continue to have a very loose and cavalier attitude about respecting copyright and using proprietary material without permission.

And this is almost a norm in most companies. I refused to do this. And I paid the price in one instance of losing a very lucrative and critical contract at a very critical time, in a company that likes to suffer from the rooftops about their commitment to integrity. But in reality, they were they are not about trying to twist the arm of an honest person who considered and considers copyright violation to be theft. They tried, they failed. I suffered materially. But I slept peacefully at night.

The result of these choices was that in two years, I built a practice with almost every multinational company as a client, but not even one of them ever required me to sign

an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement.

Nobody gave me a certificate of trust. What I didn't need a certificate of trust is nothing more powerful than not being asked to sign an NDA.

Then one of my friends of GE, which was one of my first clients told me, If you seriously want to be a consultant, you must write a book. I did.

Currently, that count is 40.

I had worked for one of India's largest and most respected family businesses for 10 years and was good friends with the promoter family, including one of the first generation founders. So my first book was the business of family business. I dedicated it to the memory of the founder and chairman of the group, Mr. Mm arena, cherub jtr. He was my friend, my mentor, and the best teacher that I could have wished for in this field, and started from being an employee and became an entrepreneur. And so I wrote an entrepreneur's diary. I had stayed out of recruiting as a business, but it helped many clients to assess potential senior managers. And so I wrote a book called hiring winners. I was

an am a leadership consultant. And wrote, leadership is a personal choice.

And deeply interested in wildlife conservation and wildlife photography is a passion of mine, and I wrote the world we don't see. I worked for 10 years in the plantation industry. And so I wrote two books in a teacup and the handbook of tea plantation management, and the list continues. The lesson I want to share here is the importance of documenting life experiences, reflections on those experiences, conceptualizing of learnings, experimenting with those with those learnings and find the lessons without recording and documenting. I would never have had the material to write anything. Documenting is a lifelong habit of mine which

I strongly advocate for anyone who wants to share their experience and wisdom. In addition to all of this, I held and continue to hold myself to the standard that to teach others, one must learn constantly.

So I make it a rule for myself to read, to attend courses, and earn technical certifications regularly. All that takes money and time and making hard choices.

One of my friends asked me, Is it necessary to attend formal classes? My answer is no, it's not necessary to attend formal classes. But usually formal classes are good for two reasons. One is the whole new down to a discipline of progressing in the learning and to the assess your progress. But if you can do both of these things on your own all party

as I write this, at the age of 67, I'm about to go to a two month immersion learning program in the Arabic language, which costs $14,000. And where I will have to live alone in a college hostel. Mercifully, my wife is equally dedicated to her profession as an abstract artists, and is happy to stay alone to let me indulge my madness, about learning new things.

working very hard to earn a living, holding myself to a standard that nobody demanded of me. Or writing and publishing an average on average, two books a year for 20 years, meant that our social life was very limited.

That is where loving what you do is so important.

If you love what you do, you don't need entertainment. This is not the same as being a workaholic. This is dedication. This is the dedication that for example, makes a music maestro, practice for eight hours a day, every day, for the joy of it. Extend that example to any iconic name in any field, in any profession. And you have the same result.

limited social life, and dedication to the profession. I love reading and writing and teaching my best reward

and Alhamdulillah I have had this many times. My best reward is when someone meets me in an airport or somewhere and says Mr. Bae, I don't know if you remember me, but you changed my life.

Ask them I hope that was for the better. Is he? Yes, absolutely. Totally. I am what I am because of you. Now, I know this is gross. exaggeration. I didn't change that person. It was the old dedication to becoming a winner, which happened. But it feels good to know that I made a positive difference in somebody's life. Who cares that I didn't go to the club for the New Year's Eve party.

Winning is about dedication. It is about concentration. It is about focus. It is about making tough choices willingly. It's about stepping forward and saying choose me because

I give you the best value. Choose me not because I'm cheap. But because I give you the best value.

Winning is not an accident. Winning is not an accident. Winning is not a mystery. You will win if you're serious about winning. Winning is inevitable. But only if you do the right things. So is losing. So is losing the choice is yours. Because complete that sentence. Thank you