Seizing Success: How Mindset Makes It Happen

Copyright © 2017 Baldev Seekri.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-1408-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1409-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1407-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016921416

iUniverse rev. date: 01/03/2017

Contents

Introduction

Section 1: Success Demystified

• Chapter 1: What Is Success Anyway?

• Chapter 2: The Power of Our Mindset

• Chapter 3: A Success Mindset

Section 2: Success Mindset in Action

• Chapter 4: Finding the Best

• Chapter 5: From Cuba with Love—Enrique Brouwer

• Chapter 6: The Spirit of Kilimanjaro—Dolores Cummins

• Chapter 7: A Messiah for the Promised Land—Iggy Ignatius

• Chapter 8: Looking Success in the Eye—Christina Vitagliano

• Chapter 9: A Relentless Crusader—Mike Ritz

• Chapter 10: From Trinidad to America to South Africa—Audra Ryan-Jones

• Chapter 11: A Trendsetter—Sanjiv Dhar

• Chapter 12: Learning from the Best

Section 3: Ten Commandments for Developing Your Success Mindset

• Chapter 13: Developing Your Success Mindset —The First Five Commandments

• Chapter 14: Developing Your Success Mindset—The Remaining Five Commandments

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Dedicated to

Late Suhagbanti Seekri

My mother, whose presence I still feel in protecting and guiding me to move forward

Introduction

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

—Henry David Thoreau

When I was sixty-eight years old and retired after a long corporate career that my friends and colleagues described as enormously successful, a visit to my childhood home in India provided me with a vision both jarring and inspiring.

By all external standards, I was the embodiment of achievement. Educated as an engineer in India, with an MBA in management earned in my adopted United States, for thirty-five years I had climbed corporate ladders, won promotions and praise, and turned around many struggling businesses with solutions that had eluded others. Ironic, then, that sitting and praying in the modest house where my life began, I should discover the truth about myself, literally plucking it from a pile of dust on the floor.

The truth was this: Seen through the eyes of others, I was a remarkable manager and leader. But looking inward that day, I realized I was a lousy manager and leader of myself.

On my way back to the United States, I pondered what had happened. To my astonishment, answers came readily and clearly. I realized that I was like the majority of human beings who see only externally and want what they see. They spend their lives chasing it, seek to beat others to it, and then feel empty after finding that their success was a phantom.

How often as a child in my little village of Dholeta did I clutch my lustrous one-rupee coin when I wanted something desperately, praying in my little corner for God to make me like Ali Baba, who knew the code words to open a treasure cave? And then I would set the coin down, leaving it for my next wishful prayer.

Fast-forward to 2008, when sixty-eight year-old me—newly retired from Texas Instruments after many successful turnaround assignments and following an insistent yearning for the places of my childhood—set off with my wife for the first visit to our native land since I left for the United States in 1973. We were surprised to feel as though we were visiting a foreign country, not the land of our ancestors. Treacherous roads were now wide highways; skyscrapers rose in place of worn old buildings; and sleek modern trains replaced the steam engines we remembered. We were dazzled by this new India and reassured that the country of our birth was well on its way to becoming developed and self-sufficient.

How proud we were! For three weeks we took it all in, saving for last the wellspring of nostalgia that awaited in Dholeta, where after their retirement in the 1980s my parents had donated our ancestral house to a needy family and emigrated to live with my brother in Dallas, Texas. The two-story dwelling remained, now surrounded by newer homes. Its occupants, thanking us profusely for our family’s generosity, gave us carte blanche to look around.

I explored every room, cherishing the memories. The lady of the house asked us to stay for lunch, and we gladly did so, sitting on the kitchen floor and savoring chapatis—fresh bread hot from the skillet. My eyes moistened as I remembered doing exactly that with my loving mother in the same kitchen so long ago.

One last memory tugged at me, and I gave in to it. After six decades, I was once again in the remote corner of the house where I so often had wished for Ali Baba’s gift of instant gratification. As I sat there weeping with recollection, I noticed something in a dust pile. I rubbed it clean and could not believe what I held tightly in my grip. It was the coin, and save for a patina of rust, it was just as I had left it.

As I scrutinized it, a thought occurred to me: Where would I be if God had granted my youthful wishes for effortless gratification? I pictured myself a miserable old man who had never left his village, slowly decaying and without purpose. Of course, along life’s way I stopped believing in miracles. But deep in my subconscious I suspected through my school, college, and early working years—filled as they were with people much smarter than I—that someone would provide a key to my elusive mantra of finding the easiest path to success.

In high school, I relentlessly resented the demands for rote memorization and good grades. At the respected engineering college of Punjab University, I believed I was in the company of the smartest people in the state, but they offered only high expectations and deadlines. I walked out in 1962 holding a degree in Chemical Engineering but no magic lantern.

The light, it turns out, was shining in an unexpected place. The author Eckhart Tolle makes that clear with his parable of a beggar who for years had been sitting on the same box at the side of a road. When a stranger asked him if he had ever looked inside the box, the beggar said, No, but there’s nothing in there. The stranger asked him to have a look anyway, and when the beggar pried open the lid, he saw that the box was filled with gold.

This is what I missed as a younger man while I carved out my external version of success. I failed to grasp that looking inside melds wisdom of the heart with the power of external learning—a combination in which the sky’s the limit for genuine satisfaction and happiness.

This book is all about putting priorities straight, about putting the horse before the cart so that we can undertake a journey of success that is genuinely fruitful, meaningful, and enjoyable.

There are countless books on the subject of success, but with few exceptions, they approach success from the wrong angle. They preach about how success can be achieved quickly and retained forever, and they are hooked on the methodology and the management of success, not on the most fundamental piece of the puzzle: our mindset of success.

While methodology and management of success are certainly essential pieces, the total answer resides in attitude—the mindset that defines the quality of our life and is the architect of our successes and failures. A flawed mindset forces us to put the cart before the horse and tempts us to make our search for success a long, meaningless journey. Developing and deploying a right mindset can start us on a thrilling adventure in pursuit of our genuine success.

Without the right mindset, methodology and management of success are wasted tools.

This book will open the way to solving the mystery of success. We will focus on developing a right mindset for success by answering the following:

• What is success anyway?

• Where we will find it?

• Who will get us there?

In the first part of the book, we will seek answers to these vital questions and develop a success mindset model capable of guiding us to our joyful, authentic success. In the second part, we will see our success mindset model in action.

This is not a journey we will undertake alone. Accompanying us will be seven great people who share their personal life stories of discovering and navigating new paths to fulfillment by developing the right mindset. In their remarkable success stories, we will see the substantiation of our success mindset model, and we will also gain additional knowledge to keep our success mindset healthy and sturdy.

These seven remarkable people represent diverse cultural values and beliefs spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. The four men and three women range in age from their forties to seventy-plus, and they span a gamut of professionalism that includes business, nonprofit organizations, education, leadership, and executive coaching.

Their journeys will take us to the places where they discovered the true meaning of their personal success, including a refugee camp in the Florida Everglades; the deathbed of a firstborn in an Australian hospital; the climbing steps of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; the serenity of Yogaville Ashram in West Virginia; a low-income mill town in northeast Connecticut; the sacred valley of the Incan spirits in Peru; a hospitality management class in Salzburg, Austria; and an elementary school in Trinidad, an island in the West Indies.

In the third section of the book, we will implement all the learning from the first two sections in contemplating Ten Commandments for Developing Your Success Mindset, a step-by-step guide that will help you chart your own path to your success. Your initial move in this direction should be to take first things first, so please resist the temptation to skip that section without first reading and understanding the opening chapters and the priceless (and often surprising) wisdom offered by our seven role models.

The goal of this book is simple: to convince you how valuable and indispensable your mindset is for seeking, attaining, and growing personal success that is lasting, meaningful, and enjoyable. I want to inspire you to learn to put the horse before the cart in your success journey. I did the opposite and spent most of my life chasing phantom success.

Section 1

Success Demystified

Chapter 1

What Is Success Anyway?

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth:

not going all the way, and not starting.

—Budha

Two very successful friends doing business in the same market were asked this question: What does success mean to you? The first said, If I keep on achieving increased profits in my business year after year, I will count myself a real success. The second said, If my business keeps on positively affecting someone, I will count myself successful.

*

A very successful executive was asked this question: Does it bother you that while your efforts are making this organization very prosperous, you are being paid much below what others at the same level of contribution are receiving? Not really, was his answer. When probed further, he explained, Compared to my mother at my age, I am doing pretty well, and I feel very successful.

*

The leader of a highly profitable organization was asked this question: Why don’t you declare your organization a real success? His answer was, As long as our competitor is not put to rest (RIP), we are not successful by any stretch of the imagination.

*

More than fifteen thousand worldwide members of the Integrated Leadership and Change Management group on LinkedIn—representing CEOs, leadership gurus, change consultants, virtual thinkers, and many other pros from diverse areas—were asked this question: What is your definition of success? No two respondents had the exact same answer.

*

Six political candidates for governor of the state of Rhode Island in 2014 were asked this question: What is your definition of success for your state? Weaving in political wisdom, all of them had extremely different visions of success in their state.

The above are just the attempts of a single person (me) in 2014 trying to put my hands around the mystifying phenomenon of success. If I had continued on asking the same question about success to different individuals and the leaders of different organizations, the responses could have been endless without a universal consensus on the definition of success.

For most of us, success is like a mirage. We desperately need it, we keep on hoping that it is in our grasp, and it keeps on eluding us. Despite countless success stories and alluring success recipes from mystics, our journey toward this mirage goes on unabated, filled with wishful thinking and shattered dreams.

Even if we come close to the fringes of this mirage, we find it meaningless. Do we really know what we are looking for?

Why Humans Perceive and Seek Success Differently

Why don’t we all stay with the same scripted definition of success and take custody of the same path to our success? The answer to these questions resides in the ageless truth that while we, as human beings, are amazingly similar, we are also mysteriously different from one another. Let us explore this truth further.

The following are among the ways in which humans are amazingly similar:

• Our vital organs function the same way.

• We are all susceptible to positive and negative emotions.

• We all want to be an accepted and recognized part of the environment we live in.

• We all want to compare and compete with each other for getting most of the reward.

• We all know where we are.

But humans are mysteriously different in ways like the following:

• We perceive reality differently.

• We aim to pursue our unique path to reach the goals bearing our legacy.

• We have our own standards of measurement of our satisfaction and happiness.

• We all keep on wondering who we are,

Why are we such a strange composite of similarity and dissimilarity? Is this a divine mistake in our creation or a bungling of human evolution? The fact of the matter is that it is neither a mistake nor a mix-up. It is simply our uniqueness as a human organism.

Our Uniqueness Makes Our True Success Highly Personal.

Ever noticed that when you are in the middle of making a decision, there is a silent tussle going on inside you over different alternatives, and it is quite difficult for you to get to a final conclusion? Even when you have decided to choose one of the alternatives, you keep on second-guessing it and are quite perturbed over that decision.

Decision Dilemma

Does this mean you are not a confident person? Not exactly; the real cause of this tussle is an ongoing tug of war between your mind and your heart to win the argument. These two autonomous assets of yours have their own ways of perceiving everything. Based upon their varying perceptions, each one of them will strongly advocate for its own selection. In other words, there is an evident disharmony between your mind and your heart manifested through your ongoing inability to decide. The cause of their disharmony is the difference in their anatomies:

• The human mind is a miraculous machine capable of colossal calculations, categorizing, and reinforcing. Judging by the yardstick of our past experiences (good or bad), our values (learned governors of right and wrong), and the intensity of our aspirations, our mind determines if a choice is right for us and will lead to our satisfaction. If its determination is in the affirmative, it will advocate for that option strongly. On the other hand, if its determination is in the negative, it will plead for staying away from that choice. In other words, our mind is always centered on our satisfaction through accomplishing our goals, safeguarding our values, and fulfilling our egos.

• The human heart is not the prisoner of any reasoning or logic. Buried in the depths of our heart is our uniqueness; we are entirely different from anybody else. You can call it our soul, spirit, mystery, or anything else, but amazingly, it has a natural instinct to feel if a particular alternative or choice is good for us and will make us and others happy. If a particular choice feels good, the heart will strongly advocate for its adoption. On the contrary, if its feeling is in the negative, it will advocate for the abandonment of any pursuit of that option. In other words, our heart is centered on our happiness through our compassion for others.

Our mind is the dictator of our satisfaction, and our heart guarantees our happiness.

In our daily existence, we are constantly in the middle of this tug of war between our logical mind and our intuitive heart. Sometimes we get swayed completely by one or the other of them to reach a decision to its liking, but in the end, we regret it.

Think about that moment when you were greatly tempted to do something to improve your well-being at the cost of somebody else’s. Your mind strongly pleaded with you to go ahead and do it, because it had determined that it was right for you to improve your welfare. But inside you, there was a strange voice telling you that this was not good for you, as it would hurt somebody and make you unhappy. In any case, you went ahead and exploited that opportunity. Although you felt great momentarily, as time went on, you felt miserable for making that choice.

Allow me to share with you a personal decision I made in the year 2010. I was offered the opportunity to make a substantial financial investment in a company called ShantiNiketan located near Orlando, Florida. I was invited to invest a large sum of money (over $100,000) in building a retirement community for first-generation Indian Americans. The offer boasted an excellent rate of return on my investment in four years.

Unlike other financial decisions, which usually take me months to decide even for miniscule investments, it took me less than a day to go for it and invest a large part of my savings into this project. Why did I do that so rapidly? Because my calculating mind and my intuitive heart were in harmony with each other in my decision making.

In the cognitive operation of deciding, my mind had quickly calculated how much my investment would