– Part one of three in this series about losers (applies to men only).
I write about how to experience bliss in life because life can end abruptly with dances never danced and music never played and because we let the losers, people who don’t deserve our generosity, creativity, and presence use us for their good and our detriment.
Bliss in every moment is the obligation we have to ourselves and to those who matter to us. I am passionate about instilling this insight into my clients and community because I lost precious time, energy, opportunity, and peace for my ignorance and the lack of skills to deal with losers. Keenly aware of the lessons learned from my mistakes, my life’s work now is to share, serve, and inspire. By using the knowledge and tools to redirect losers who suck the life out of us, we can magnify the impact of our energy, the precious life force we must continuously replenish.
Having lived a lifetime already, I have great fun fighting fires every day from morning till night – delivering delight to customers I take delight in serving, bridging students who feel blocked to their full potential, educating invisible veterans regain their perspective of civilian life, and become productive again, giving talks to provoke thought about living lives that are worthy of us, investing in young juveniles who have not yet grown a beard but are locked up for offenses they never knew could get them locked up, and kicking my mentoring clients’ lives into high gear because that’s what they aspire to. This is what ignites my passion; every morsel of food tastes heavenly and every relationship reaches love.
This is my bliss. My mentors know how grateful I am for their kindness and my friends know their value in my life. Of course, my family thinks I am crazy and that’s the joy of having good children. They make demands on me to help them become better adults making me better in the process. What’s heaven got that I don’t have? I am living a life that is as close to bliss as I can imagine.
What is your state of bliss? What do you imagine it to be?
This first-in-the-series blog will shine the light on the lessons to keep losers out. The pounding of the hammers on the ordinary metal when heated white-hot purifies it to forge the strong and flexible Samurai blade that cuts through the sword blades made of lesser metals. While I will always be working on purifying my steel, my clients and mentors believe that I have a compelling obligation to immediately put these lessons in the service of good men seeking to activate their full potential.
Winners and losers
Where losers don’t see a path to winning, winners find some kind of positive way. They circumvent the wall, jump it, break through it, or burn it down. Aware that they must shield their priorities, they don’t surrender their spirit. They achieve their objectives. They win!
Losers are men who don’t have a grip on their behavior, lack the discipline to stay focused on the mission, have no consideration of others, don’t take responsibility for failure, and have a disdainful disregard for the consequences of their reckless actions. Some losers even live on their spouses’ incomes. They manipulate others for personal gain; charm others to take advantage of them, and some of them cross the boundaries of decency and integrity in their lust for greed, celebrity, or pride.
Lately, some readers have characterized my writing as a strong masculine voice. I have only one voice of authenticity and experience. It is the voice of the man who’s taken life’s hammering to face adversity as a father, son, worker, mentor, and student that taught me to see my priorities clearly. I can only speak of the truth of my lessons as a man. It is my only authentic identity.
My description of losers applies only to men. The advance reviewers of this blog’s draft say that I will anger losers (men) and delight winners, who will take this opportunity to turn their vulnerabilities to strengthen themselves.
Before I share my strong views on excising loser men from our lives or help them turn into winners, I want to share some milestones of my life’s journey so that you can assign legitimacy to my forceful voice. It’s not important to measure the magnitude of which blow hit how hard. Only the totality of the lessons learned is important.
I grew up in India, the land of seekers. Teachers and gurus were once revered as manifestations of the divine, where a given word was honored, loyalty was a given, compassion was integrated into life, and charity was life’s mission. I knew all of this. It was a part of my cultural DNA. Yet, I tripped.
At 20, I arrived in America to go to school and learn. Instead, I fell into a dark isolation depression. Bracketed by the fear that I wasn’t grasping the content of my courses, stopped by the pride of admitting that I was slipping in academic performance, and haunted by ignorance of how to climb out of the hole – all in the pressure of not knowing how I will pay the tuition because I had no access to funds, I hid my reality. Internal isolation while hiding reality was the price I paid for the lack of courage and confidence; breaking my word and earning dishonor, feeling the shame for seeking the path of least resistance, and keeping silent when I should have screamed for help. I strived for success alone. Sleepless nights, shady-cheap-shared apartments (13 Hazard street, Houston), or on the wrong side of the tracks where my apartment got robbed, no food in the refrigerator, going to graduate school on a bicycle in Houston, TX, and working at an all-night audit job at the downtown Whitehall Hotel were par for my education like they have been for many immigrants.
My first $395 car, I purchased from the night audit job income was from a German Volkswagen mechanic tourist who had toured all of North America in it and would sell it if I gave him and his girlfriend a ride to the airport hotel. The speedometer did not work, it rattled and vibrated when braking, and it had no back seats. The car’s repair story has its own many awesome and funny twists.
The right and wrong choices I made in choosing expediency over diligence and faith taught me many priceless lessons. That was 30 years ago.
I was lucky. A million mentors threw lifelines and pulled me out when they saw me gasping and struggling to stay afloat. Two top Fortune 50 companies, Xerox and IBM planted solid skills for 20 years. Nothing about transactions surprises me. Mentors taught me how to size people. Nothing about people scares me now. That did not protect me from making mistakes.
I invested in rental properties in Long Beach and Redondo Beach in California and rented them at below-market rates to veterans, and lost heavily when my property manager forced legal eviction because he had turned the garage structure into a Meth lab. I had built him the structure for a machine shop because he lost his legs and the machine shop would give him a good income. He paid below-market rent for 8 years, had won a $6M settlement for his injury, and still left the home with a full week of cleanup, many dump truckloads, and months of repairs to ready it for a sale while the market declined 80% in value. Luckily, the sale was still profitable. I also invested in Sacramento, CA, and Detroit, MI properties but lost my shirt on them because the taxes and union wages made it impossible to make financial sense. I could invest because I got some spectacular successes in Xerox, which included my team’s winning a global contest among 20000 teams in Xerox’s drive to win the national quality award. I did not seek political affiliation. Two years later I got a 30-day notice to find another job within Xerox or be laid off. My name was on the list because they said I could easily find one, which I did. After 3 years of top national performance and recognition in my new job, I took early retirement from Xerox at age 42. Performance alone does not shield you from hits. Hired by IBM, I got the top rating of 1 out of 5. For two years, I never met the two levels of managers in my reporting chain in NY while I worked from Colorado. Imagine. This happened at IBM, a top 50 Fortune company. The guy who wrote my review that year was returning from another assignment and feared my reputation for getting work done. Remote work has a dark side. Incompetent and insecure managers can easily backstab remote team members. Good companies are not immune from bad managers.
Overall, my two decades of solid training under the watchful eyes of wise bosses and mentors who championed my work opened new doors for growth, maturity, and responsibility. Still, exiting IBM was my life’s best blessing, because it started me on the journey beyond simply solving very large global profit problems. As a fresh entrepreneur, I was able to spend time with my ailing father in India. A one-month visit and another three months’ brought him life. Eventually, when he took his last breath, my palm measured his last pulses. It’s the most precious divine gift I could have received, to be free to serve him in his last days. In the infancy of my entrepreneurship work, I plunged into a series of poor-liquidity crises and years of anger at losers who wilfully blocked my access to funds when I needed them the most to invest in new ventures, a public speaking and mentoring business, a series of books on achieving our potential, and a family startup that my children started with my wife – a therapeutic beverage company, with service to others as the primary objective over profit. It was a rough ride.
Anger at wrongdoers does not turn losers into winners. They don’t do right because it is right – if they lose money by doing it. Eventually, I left the losers behind. The toxicity from anger was my loss of peace and wealth, and more importantly, the creation of new opportunities.
New opportunity? Ever tried mentoring your family to run a business when they’ve had not a day of business experience? Oh yeah, they have no consequence of not following your guidance. If something goes wrong after explaining and offering to teach, and you get upset, it is a sure invitation to a fantastically shiny empty dinner plate and upset adult children. The home is tense and everyone is frayed. I was the investor and what I said had little weight if they didn’t like it. The guy who could influence large global teams to execute successfully had no respect in shaping the family business?! For example, my family would see other brands bring in investors and scale to massive proportions. I wasn’t taking investors’ money. Our business is built for wellness first and profit next. It should really be a non-profit enterprise. I know where we can cut corners and others do. We don’t. But if an investor came in, we would need to defend our choices. I don’t want my wife or family to be scolded by an investor. Oh, how much heat I took for that. Then I succumbed and explored some big investors. I was embarrassed when those meetings made us look amateurish, but they reaffirmed my earlier decision that that was the wrong path. So we continued to grow on our own. Some of those ventures who took in investor funds collapsed because they banked on money for branding and growth instead of better quality produce.
Fortunately, we will mark the ten-year anniversary of the business this year with our values intact, debt zero, customers brand-loyal, and lots of amazing lessons for the entire family about cutthroat competition, amazing mentors, and the need for constant agility. One barrier we faced was reliably delivering small packages to many retailers economically. When no distributor would do this for us, we launched a new food delivery venture that employs veterans and pays them 50% more than minimum wage while mentoring them to become financially stable. These are socially awkward veterans who have been homeless, can’t hold down a regular job, and have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). When they smile at you, some of them will creep you out. If they get angry, their intensity will scare you.
These veterans, invisible to the government and country are the best workers for me. Why? We have a checklist for everything they do. Checklists are the most reliable tools for the military. When they work at my job, they transform their lives. In two years, one of them, the most coachable of them, saved enough to buy a truck to do side moving gigs to earn more, is learning algebra online to ready himself to coach kids because coaching mathematics pays well, and has set a goal to save $50K in two years. He is building multiple income streams. I see and serve invisible America that few educated and affluent Americans have seen. Where most Americans would find a loser in these men, I see their winning spirits.
I teach my students to have multiple sources of income. It’s the best insurance against economic uncertainty. Draw multiple sources of income from your strong authentic core. For instance, I earn an income from selling my book, giving paid talks to companies, teams, and conventions, mentoring professionals, transporting food while mentoring veterans, and profiting from our family’s beverage enterprise. All this allows me to volunteer; to mentor youth facing prison, be a voice for better education, and deliver positivity through a radio show on our community radio station. All the work and volunteering comes from my core authenticity and passion. All work becomes a joy and all interactions bring good cheer. This is why every morsel of food, every breath of air, every sunrise is full of joy and delight. Everything I do ignites my passion.
What fills me with gratitude and humility is the blessing that my mentors from 40 years ago still grace my life. Mrs. Anju and Prof. Pramod Varshney at Syracuse University fed me countless meals when they had no idea how precious those were for me when I could barely pay for Swanson’s cheap packaged dinners. My sponsor at American Airlines, paid me for a summer job after my internship finished even when I was not eligible to work for pay. His kind family hosted me on every family holiday. Rob Mehr my Syracuse University classmate gave me shelter in his Houston apartment and let me use his car until I found my legs. Of the many more kind souls, George Promis stands out for not just hiring me into IBM but also shielding my work, because all my work by this time in my career was such that no one else dared touch. I rose in my career fixing projects and taking hits while doing what most considered those projects career-killers. Those career-killers were growth catapults for me.
Few appreciate the grandeur of this nation and the generosity of its citizens like I do. America grants every citizen the freedom to achieve whatever he wants. It’s on him to summon help. When the universe sees true and sincere struggle, it sends help. This is a universal truth. Winners summon help while losers hide in their insecurities, fears, and false pride.
In the time of crisis some years ago, my aunt, my father’s youngest sister sent me $10K as a no-time limit, no-interest loan. It arrived on a day when I had no money for gas or food. My wife returned a $400 food processor to Costco to have cash on hand. The loan has of course been returned with great gratitude. Knowing that the fires of credit card disputes were still burning around me, and my children’s education was midway, my aunt asked for me to keep the money. I could not. She loved me but the money came during a crisis and it came in consideration of her love for my father. If I kept it, it would break my father’s heart and hurt his pride. Oh, there were plenty of others who could and should have done right and fixed the issues years earlier. But losers don’t act. They make excuses, shrink from responsibility, conspire together, and hide behind rationalizations. This time, I was screaming. Everyone heard my calls. No one stepped up.
While on one hand, I faced the cash crunch in my personal life, simultaneously in business I was safekeeping $250,000 for him in my account until a client resolved his business partner dispute. Another time, I asked a client to make a significant equipment investment on my behalf. After agreeing immediately, within months he acquired the assets I needed. In those hard times, my accountant of 30 years asked if I would consider filing bankruptcy. It would wipe out the debts I owed. I flatly refused. It would defeat the promise of America that anyone here can make a good life when he is willing to work for it. My life is evidence that this is so.
I share my life journeys for you to see the broad spectrum of life and cultures which have shown me the best of winners and worst of losers among professionals and persons. I want to help you develop your own clarity about how to be a winner and be around and like winners who uplift and inspire. As well, to know how to walk away from the losers who suck.
When my students and clients trust their visions in my care, educating them about conserving and channeling their energy is one of my top priorities. When losers who’ve never won at anything squash their spirit, optimism, and passion, I want to crush them. A better way is to educate my students and teach them how to recognize losers and keep them from zapping precious energy that holds limitless potential.
In the next blog, I will dissect the losers (men only), show you how to recognize them and how to steer clear of them.
To read more about my approach to reaching your potential, read my book: Find Your Everest before someone chooses it for you. Or you can also listen to the audiobook.