You and I are here today, wherever we are now, for one purpose – to have a relationship. Not just human beings, but every living thing on earth exists for a relationship – cat, dog, ant, plant. But that’s not all. Every single nonliving object on earth, created or manufactured – stone, river, pen, knife, computer – exists to facilitate and enhance a relationship. Now if some objects are used by man to destroy relationships it is not in any way the fault of the object.

The single most important activity in your life today is building relationships, starting with your loved ones.

Obviously, nothing exists for a relationship for a person to whom everything had its origin in a primordial nonrelationship. If everything is an offspring of a primeval accident or aberration, then everything can logically exist for one purpose only – to survive at the cost of every other existence by becoming the fittest, which is possible only by making others less fit than it.

Everything exists for only one purpose for the one who believes in that origin – to aid him, to please him, to comfort him and to give him pleasure in his relentless quest to make his survival as fit as possible.

But if you are among those who believe that the universe and all things in it, including you and the people in your life, were put here for a purpose that transcends the self, then you better be taking great care to ensure the continuance and health of your relationships. You better be always building and developing relationships all around you, otherwise the relationships are going to wane and eventually wither away. There is no middle ground in relationships. You build, develop and cherish, or you neglect, demolish and cast away.

Every uplifting word you speak today will go unswervingly on its ordained course to build a better relationship; every harsh word that you utter, if left unchecked, will be an avalanche gathering even harsher words and acts and crash in the abyss of a bitter relationship. This is the ultimate result of the universal law of cause and effect.

Far more than the law of gravity and the laws of motion, this causal law is more immutable and more inexorable than any other universal law. Immutable, because it cannot be altered or changed in any way; inexorable, because it cannot be stopped or avoided. The law of gravity is immutable but it is not always inexorable. A man who defies or does not believe in the law of gravity and jumps from a five-storey building to prove he is right suffers the inexorable consequence. But I have heard of at least one published case of two drunks opening what they thought was a door and falling from the French window down several floors, and then getting up from the ground and staggering arm in arm jovially away. But I am yet to see or hear of a case of someone escaping the effects of the causes he set rolling in his relationships.

There is no middle ground in relationships. You build, develop and cherish, or you neglect, demolish and cast away.

As a parent, every word you speak to your child is going to enter his conscious and from there into his heart and boomerang to you in multiplied effect. Ever noticed that when a child screams at his parent it is always at about 50 decibels higher than it is when the parent shouts at him? The words that wound the child’s heart continue to have their domino effect even into his adulthood, spilling into his relationship with his wife, his children, his colleagues, his fellow commuters, and even with his Dalmatian that jumps on him in affectionate greeting when he returns home after an unnice day at work. Put the blame on his father or grandfather, or somebody else up the line, who got the verbal cannonballs rolling down the generations.

As a husband or wife, every word you speak to your spouse is like a chunk of concrete falling from the ceiling of a beautiful edifice, or a polished stone that goes to further reinforce the foundation. Golden wedding anniversary celebrating 50 years of intimate relationship happen when all the words and acts of the husband and the wife have inexorably gone on to finally complete a celestial home for the couple. Divorce after 10 or 20 years is where the dagger-sharp words and deeds kept shedding vital pieces from off the marriage mansion year after year, until there was nothing left to live in, and the couple go looking for new mansions to live in.

‘I am a marvelous housekeeper’, said Zsa Zsa Gabor. ‘Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.’ The beautiful actress had nine mansions to keep, but not a single heart to weep with her.

May your every word go forth to soothe, and not to seethe. Let your fingers handle to bring the healing touch, to always caress and to fondle, and never to harass.

This website has one purpose in all its contents – that you and your family may go on to build beautiful lives and homes which you can pass on from generation to generation.

 ‘We have all made such a fetish of financial success and forgotten frequently that success of any kind, when it does not include success in one’s personal relationships, is bound in the end to leave both the man and the woman with very little real satisfaction.”   Eleanor Roosevelt 

 

 

 

Courtesy: Victor1558 – flickr.com

If you have been doing the same work for the past seven years – I mean, doing the same kind of activities in your job, receiving the same kind of rewards, going through the same level of life experiences – I am afraid you may be unwittingly living on the mediocre plane. Seven years is plenty enough for any ambitious person to start moving out of his or her present borders of accomplishment to new frontiers in their dreams. But I suppose a large percentage of people in any human endeavor are quite content working the same way they have been doing since the past many years, as long as their job is continuing to remunerate them with what they have been happily receiving from it all along.

But for a small percentage of people, mediocrity is the biggest thief of their human potential. These are the people who are always moving on, the ones who are always expanding their present borders and exploring uncharted territories. These are the relentless innovators who are always trying out new methods and untried strategies in their work. And such people do not remain long on any pinnacle of success they have attained.

“One of the temptations in life to be guarded against is that of sinking into a spirit of complacence, to slack off. As we climb the hill of life, it is natural to rest a moment on reaching the summit of a ridge. The temptation is to stay there, satisfied with your efforts.”   Lord Chatfield

In the sunset of your life, when you look back at all that you have achieved, your greatest sense of fulfillment comes from the bold and extraordinary initiatives you took in your job, in your personal life, and above all, in your relationships. You refused to be an ordinary bleating sheep in a familiar herd grazing contentedly within the fences erected by others, or even by yourself. Your spirit soared to new limitless pastures that your inner eyes had espied beckoning you from a distant shore.

‘The difference between a successful person and a very successful person is the size of his or her dreams.’   Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

If you resolutely decide that from today you will begin to break out of your ordinarily successful life and search for unexplored new frontiers in your professional and personal goals, then on this very day you have flapped your wings of aspiration and begun your ascend to the azure skies of your grand vision. And if you dont take your eyes of that distant shore, you are surely going to reach it sooner or later.

Perhaps, if you are a business executive, or a professional, you can start by trying to implement something extraordinary in your company – something that no colleague of yours was innovative and daring enough to try so far. If you are a decisionmaker, perhaps you can stretch your vision still further to include some seemingly ludicrous projects – until the world gasps at the fruition of what they once thought was merely your eccentric dream.

‘We must overcome the notion that we must be regular. It robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.’   Uta Hagen

By the way, for the sake of some odd men whose wings are clipped not because of a dearth of imagination but because of another reason – a marital one – I give below an insight from a renowned achiever of the fairer gender. I came across this quote soon after I finished writing the preceding paragraph. It will give all our male readers a new perspective on mediocrity:

‘Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.’   Margaret Mead, US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology (1901 – 1978)

The Queen of Sheba Kneeling before King Solomon. Solomon is recognized in several faiths as the greatest human achiever in history.

As the former editor of several business magazines and corporate publications, it was part of my job to research, glean and compile the world’s best ideas in business management and professional excellence. And now I have given up all other jobs and returned to my native country to focus on searching out and bringing you the most effective and proven principles for personal and professional fulfillment for today’s aspiring men and women.

If you are a young professional, you very likely began your career with a dream goal. You wanted to reach a certain high station in your career journey. You are now headed in that direction, and it is most probable that you will reach that station if you are diligent and persevering enough.

Motivational writers, management gurus, seminar presenters, professional trainers, and business consultants make millions of dollars in royalty and fees showing lesser mortals how they too could make it to the top echelons of their business or profession. They share with their readers and audiences the proven secrets of effective management, or the various strategies for corporate dominance, or the core principles of right decisionmaking, or the seven spiritual laws of success, or the bunch of golden keys to becoming an influential leader.

Here, in this message, I would like to share yet another ‘secret’ for aspiring achievers – of a different dimension. This secret comprises a set of keys that most success propounders have little knowledge of, or if they do, they do not have the gumption to ruffle the settled feathers of their readers and audiences by clinking these unusual keys before them. You see, these keys are corporately and professionally of sensitive nature and the risk of making a politically incorrect statement might mean fewer readers and fewer invitations to speak in chandeliered corporate meeting halls.

Almost always, all the laws and principles of success that are presented by management experts have one basic origin: in the pia mater of brilliant men. And because these laws are extruded from the wide experience and exceptional knowledge of wellknown achievers, their application in the lives of aspirants often do produce better work and greater achievements.

I had been a fan of motivational writers from my boyhood. I enjoyed collecting all kinds of motivational books –  how to win friends and influence people, how to fall in love or make a woman fall in love with you (after several pathetic flops in sincerely applying the laws of attraction revealed in this book, they finally worked with the umpteenth woman I tried to draw into a longterm relationship), how to be assertive and confident, ‘how to develop a million-dollar personality’ (in those days nobody had amassed a personal fortune that reached ten figures, or the author, J. V. Cerney, would have revealed the secrets to developing a billionaire-grade personality; but I recommend that you get a copy of this book from Amazon – in the least it will take you on memorable fantasy rides), how to generate mind power by thinking positively, how to ‘bluff your way in publishing’ (also available on Amazon), how to build a powerful memory (this book set me on a brief career course where I found myself conducting memory training seminars in companies…until my own memory began to give way), how to successfully raise kids and rear chickens at the same time (the kids worked, the chickens didn’t), and on. I enjoyed jotting down notable passages from the writings of the great in business, politics, religion, sciences, arts, military – starting from Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill to Peter F Drucker and Tom Peters, from Norman Vincent Peale and Dwight D Eisenhower to Warren Buffet and Herb Kelleher (former CEO of Southwest Airlines, my favorite model among business leaders of this generation. I strongly recommend every young executive to read his influential article ‘A Culture of Commitment’, available free online – just type the title in your search engine). Their books, articles and the passages I have jotted down are literally among my most prized possessions today.

Just a few days before I gave up my job in Dubai and returned to India to take up this mission, I received an invitation to meet seven of the world’s ‘top leaders and leadership thinkers’. The invitation said it was my ‘once in a lifetime leadership experience’. The seven leaders mentioned were Rudolp W Giuliani, Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Alvin Toffler, Lester C Thurow, Frank Maguire and Michael E Porter. I was familiar with the names of three, very familiar with one, and hadn’t the faintest clue who the other three were, but the seminar seemed to promise some precious nuggets of insights I couldn’t dig up anywhere else on good earth. Of course, there was some cost to accepting the ‘invitation’ – about US$ 3000, with a substantial discount of $450 if I pay up five months in advance. Anyway, I had to leave the country permanently before the seminar was held, but I don’t think I missed much by not meeting these ‘top minds’ as I had tunnel access to a nugget mine with incomparably more prodigious output than all that the savviest brains could offer me. Nevertheless, I would certainly encourage my readers to get their eyes on the writings of these and other respected authorities whenever they can. What they say is based on their successful experiences in leading global corporations, in researching into what makes excellent companies, in analyzing world events, in probing the profound depths of human innovation, and in laying bare treasures discovered from previously unknown gorges of the human subconscious.

The World Daily Bread site of inspiration for current and aspiring decisionmakers does include insights gleaned from the quintessence of the lessons promulgated by the world’s great leaders and successful people. But the provision of such insights is only supplemental to the core purpose of this site, which is to inspire men and women of intelligence and deep compassion to go beyond the borders of their imagination, beyond the frontiers of the ordinary achiever’s aspirations, and blaze through paths never trodden before and reach territories never attained in corporate or national, or even global, history before.

Based on my decades of observing various categories of achievers and studying the writings of many successful people, I am convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that if a person diligently applies the principles propounded by them, he or she will attain a high level of success in their respective fields of endeavor. But this success is not guaranteed, and even if one achieves his dream goal, the duration of his tenure at the helm of success is never certain. There are a thousand factors that can keep a diligent and intelligent person mediocre or a failure all his life. There a million negative forces everywhere, any one of which could pull the success rug off the feet of a promising achiever.

While I know many earnest men and women who have achieved what they had aimed for, I know far more equally capable people who have been prevented from reaching their goals because of a sudden or eventual physical infirmity or other adversity that cropped up in their lives. Some were hindered because of mere bad luck or bad timing (for example, a small invention in Japan obsoletes overnight a product of years of dreams and hard work of an earnest entrepreneur in a third world country); others were trapped in political circumstances (think of the potential achievers languishing in the turmoil and upheaval prevailing in many war-torn countries).

Some have all the material success they had aimed for, but are now more miserable than the biggest flops in corporate history, because of a marriage gone sour, or a death in the family, or quickly diminishing eyesight, or something else their otherwise fine intellect can’t cope with. One old friend of mine was having all the success he wished for in his life: fine wife, three mansions, great business. One day, while driving his car, he rapidly began losing vision in both his eyes. His whole life course changed from that moment. After some time of struggling to cope with her husband’s handicapped state, my friend’s wife quit and left him alone. His business also left him and probably his mansions too might have changed hands – I didnt ask him. But he survived. After his series of calamitous misfortunes, he slowly started to pick up his broken life, and a few years ago I met him and arranged to have him visit a wellknown eye specialist in my country to see if he could regain at least partial sight so he could go about his life without having to depend on anyone to take him around.

But not so in the case of another friend of mine. In the prime of his life as a successful executive, he, like my other stricken friend, began to lose his eyesight, but at a less galloping pace of deterioration. When total darkness continued to become increasingly imminent and he realized he could not continue much longer before he had to totally depend on others to move around, he reached an emotional nadir. Rather than choosing to live in total darkness and complete dependency, he chose to consume poison and cut short what he believed would be a tragedy swept life. He was an ardent believer in God but hadn’t grown in understanding yet to realize that it is in tragedy that God gives those who depend solely on him their supreme opportunities for success in life.

You see, achieving the pinnacle of one’s goals as taught by most success teachers is dependent on too many factors beyond man’s control. It can never really be guaranteed by any human..

Many consider King Solomon as the most successful man in history. His final conclusion about his great achievements?

‘Vapor of vapors and futility of futilities. Smoke, nothing but smoke. There’s nothing to anything – it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? What profit does man have left from all his toil at which he toils under the sun?  Oh, I did great things: built houses, planted vineyards, designed gardens and parks and planted a variety of fruit trees in them, made pools of water to irrigate the groves of trees. I bought slaves, male and female, who had children, giving me even more slaves; then I acquired large herds and flocks, larger than any before me in Jerusalem.

‘I piled up silver and gold, loot from kings and kingdoms. I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song, and – most exquisite of all pleasures – voluptuous maidens for my bed.

‘Oh, how I prospered! I left all my predecessors in Jerusalem far behind, left them behind in the dust. What’s more, I kept a clear head through it all. Everything I wanted I took – I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse, held back nothing. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task – my reward to myself for a hard day’s work!

‘Then I took a good look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing.’1

The greatest achievements of mortals on earth in the final analysis count for literally nothing and will eventually prove to be mere smoke ascending into nothingness from a fire that burned for a fleeting moment and snuffed out forever. Unless…unless those achievements are based on the one success secret.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate and tireless critic of Soviet totalitarianism, was among the most persecuted men in Russian history, but today he is regarded by his nation as one of their most successful and esteemed citizens. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

‘Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” ’²

So what is this one absolute secret of lasting success? The greatest human achiever in history, whom I mentioned earlier, and who finally saw the real worth of all his efforts, concludes his life findings in the following words:

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is man’s all.”¹

Whatever a person’s faith, when he or she determines at the outset of their pursuit of success, at the outset of undertaking any great project, that they will always fear God and keep his commandments – specifically, The 10 Commandments – then that person is guaranteed absolute success in his or her life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest men of the 20th century.  By Verhoeff, Bert / Anefo [CC-BY-SA-3.0-nl], via Wikimedia Commons

This website will explore the lives of political leaders and business magnates of the two kinds and examine the fruits of their achievements.

All the secrets of success expounded by motivational writers and speakers work only if they are acknowledged and applied as ramifications of the laws of perpetual success revealed by the Lawgiver himself, which he codified as ‘The 10 Commandments’. And the plain exposition of these ‘secret’ laws is what this website and all my books are about. Every message in here is based on these laws of success which have proven themselves astonishingly effective in the lives of men and women of exceptional achievements throughout history – men and women who attributed their great success solely to their earnestness in keeping The 10 Commandments – the Creator’s greatest gift to men and women who seek good success.

¹ Ecclesiastes 12:13
² “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag”, Ericson, Edward E. Jr.

Courtesy: Tiyo Prasetyo – pixabay.com

Men and women are born for trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards, so says an ancient scripture. All the power of positive thinking a person has acquired so he can be in control of his emotional state, all the preparations and precautions he has taken to cushion himself against trouble in his life, all the how-to manuals he has read to be happy and successful – they all fail pathetically when a calamity strikes his life.

I believe that many of you who are reading this have experienced at least once in their life the level of pain or sorrow that nothing at that time could have comforted you or reduced your suffering. You just had to endure it alone until the passage of time softened or healed that deep emotional wound.

The loss of a member of the family, or betrayal by a spouse, or a disaster that wipes out all a person’s carefully laid out plans for life…what can the bereaved, the betrayed, and the victimized really do at such times? Nothing that can alleviate the pain.

Nothing can make a personal calamity go away or reduce its impact on your emotions, but there is certainly something you can do to endure the pain more courageously, which can also help you confront such troubles boldly in the future. That something is the realization that there are still many other things which you havent lost yet, and that you can start redeeming those blessings and opportunities from today on before they too are gone.

When a devastating trouble strikes a person, that person is never the same again for the rest of his or her life. The afflicted man or woman will either become a more understanding, a more patient, and a more appreciative person inside, or he or she becomes an embittered, disgruntled escapist – always fickle, always trying to elude reality by overindulgence in eating and drinking, promiscuity, excessive socializing, or even total seclusion from society.

How will your present trouble – if you are going through one – affect you in the long run?

Are there activities and pursuits in your life which appear so pressing and important today, but which, when a life-shaking disaster occurs, will expose their worthlessness? Does the loss of a job, or the problems at your workplace with some colleague, or an injury done to you by a relative, or the lack of money to do the things you have always wanted to do, cause you a lot of agitation and sleeplessness today?

In comparison, how about the loss of your spouse’s trust in you, or the loss of your child to drugs or to some lifelong debility? How about the death of a childhood friend, or the deprivation of one of your senses – perhaps your sight, or hearing, or mobility?

This may seem like a familiar anecdote, but I have actually whined in the past because I didn’t have an extra pair of shoes, until I actually met and befriended a happy man who couldn’t use his feet. I moaned because I couldn’t live where I wanted to live, until I met a man who hadn’t a place to lay his head down in peace until he was taken to a Cheshire home, where he lived contentedly till he died a few years ago. I fretted because I couldn’t get a better job in my younger days…so I left my kids mostly to themselves as I roamed around for a better opportunity in life…till my children grew up to adulthood without having their dad always near them because dad had crossed the ocean to look for a better job so he could come back home a rich man one day and finally spend some quality time with his kids and buy some quality stuff for them.

Oh, how inconsolable my remorse is, that I had sacrificed several years of my time with my family so I could climb several rungs higher in my profession. It was after my children had grown up and gone away from my nest that I realized my sacrifice was not worth it at all. The rungs on my ladder of success had only led me to a high chamber of heartbreak and regrets.

When all your accomplishments are done, all your dreams fulfilled, and all your energies finally spent, would you look back and remorse in great anguish that all those things which had seemed so important then for a happy life were but ephemeral desires which added nothing to the quality of your life or to your relationship with loved ones.

Or would you look back and rejoice that you had the prescience to know what was really important at all times…your time around your loved ones, your patience with those who exasperated you, your forgiveness for those who offended you, your unswerving commitment to every relationship that came your way – these are absolutely the only things that will stand you in good stead at the final count.

So when pain and sorrow come your way, there’s nothing really you can do to escape the suffering, but you can put them to great use as forceful reminders of your urgent need to focus your life on the remaining blessings in your life before they too pass from you.

Have you observed that all the people on earth who are qualified and skilled workers, and who have achieved a measure of success in their professions, can be placed in two categories?

The first category of people succeed in whatever is given to them to achieve. As long as they have someone to direct them and set work goals for them, and are given the opportunity to achieve them, they will keep on achieving, oftentimes to great levels of excellence. In this category you will find all types of people – professionals, executives, housewives, students.

The second category of achievers comprise those professionals who are always coming up with new ways to perform a task, or with offbeat concepts that result in innovative products or services. They dare to think beyond the parameters set by their revered teachers, mentors, and managers. They are never bound by traditional systems, rules, or boundaries. Their eyes are constantly looking around for new shapes and fresh avenues, their minds are continually pondering an unusual phenomenon or a novel concept. Their ears are ever sensitive to catch a new sound. Their fingers never desist from handling a never-before handled objects. These are the kind of people who daily live by the motto stated by that great advertisement copy I once saw on tv: ‘When was the last time you did something for the first time in your life?’.

Such are the people who found new enterprises and keep them going from strength to strength through decade to decade with ever innovative products and fresher services. Among them you will find Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Herbert Kelleher, Lee Iacocca, Ralph Welsh, and even my fellow villager, Appu, who came up, in my young days, with a revolutionary way for yoked oxen to pull with less struggle a cartful of burdens.

Appu just placed a lining of rubber on the round surface of the wooden wheels of the ox carts. But what a awesome difference it made to the oxen in my land, and what a difference it made to the ox drivers who now could have a far less bumpy ride to the market and back; there’s now no need for them to use their whip as frequently as before on the poor creatures’ already-split hides – split by the merciless lashes they received when they just couldn’t climb the steep country roads steadily with a ton of race sacks bearing down on their napes!

For thousands of years, ox carts ricketied over earth’s rough terrains on wooden wheels. And even after rubber was discovered, wooden wheels continued to be standard equipment for hundreds of years. Nobody had stretched their imaginations far enough to device a way to make cargo transport in my land more convenient, until Appu.

I suppose most human workers fall under the first category. They are good achievers on someone else’s ideas and opportunities. But when it comes to their discovering something on their own, or creating their own ideas, or creating new opportunities where none existed before, they are stumped.

There are two achievers of the first type in my hometown in India. One of them is an excellent dressmaker with his own boutique. The other is a seller of excellent coffee powder.

Both of them were once excellent achievers in their fields, and they were aware of this fact. So the dressmaker gave his shop the name Expert Dressmakers. The coffeeseller went one step further. He named his four by four meter cubicle of a shop ‘All India Coffee Industries’. Not ‘Industry’, but ‘Industries’. And why not, his coffee was so good he saw no reason why he could not have a conglomeration of industries arising from his shack.

A month ago, when I went to my hometown, these two achievers who set up their businesses 40 years ago, were still doing their trade as diligently as ever. The dressmaker is aged, but he still has the same shop churning out expertly tailored dresses as he has been doing since my father’s days. He used to make the best suits in the town in those years. I just couldn’t forget the first suit that I wore proudly to the Gulf, a product of the expert craftsmanship of this mastertailor.

So, on this latest visit to my hometown, I bought expensive material for a couple of suits and gave it to this noted dressmaker. And he made them with the same excellent expertise and in the same style that he made one for me 25 years earlier.

Of course, I had to throw the suits in the garbage bin soon after trying them on once. The style was fashionable a generation ago, but today if I walk around in them, people would think that I had inherited the suits from my father.

Courtesy: Mohamed Ezz_ezz_0-photobucket.com

As for the coffeeseller, his hair is grey now but he still sits in his four by four meter shack, selling coffee powder whose aroma is still as tantalizing as it was to my nostrils eons ago. And he still has the same signboard ‘All India Coffee Industries’ outside his shop.

You see, these two professionals in my hometown are simply victims of the loss of their most creative opportunities with their parents. They might have been good students at school, getting good grades in everything they learned from their teachers. They became skilled workers and experts with all the knowledge they were taught by someone else.

But once people stopped teaching and monitoring them, they stopped learning, and they stopped accomplishing anything new. They remained all their lives under the ceiling and within the parameters of what they were initially trained for. They did not know how to educate themselves beyond their taught ceilings. They couldn’t demolish the opportunity barriers erected around their imbibed knowledge boundaries and soar to new unexplored frontiers. They could think in new dimensions only if someone else’s thoughts blazed through old frontiers and took them there.

These excellent but constrained achievers are simply victims of the loss of their most creative opportunities with their teachers. They might have been excellent students at school, getting exemplary grades in everything they learned in the classrooms. They became skilled professionals and experts with all the knowledge they were taught by someone else. But when the times changed and with it the methods, these achievers continued to further hone their old skills.

Thomas J. Watson is the most famous name in IBM’s history. He was the chairman of IBM in the 1920s to the 50s, and the main architect of making IBM an international company.

The first thing anyone saw on entering his office was a plaque on the wall above the head of the IBM chief. It had just one word written on it: THINK.

The IBM chief explained that the greatest fault he found in talented executives was that they did not think for themselves. Said Thomas J. Watson:  ‘ “I didn’t think” has cost the world millions of dollars.’

Many companies started following the IBM chief’s example and put up THINK signboards for their employees to ponder over. Then in the 1970s, long after Thomas J. Watson was gone, THINK signboards were pulled down from IBM walls.

Thinking, you see, began to lose its appeal since the 70s decade. In fact, today the chic thing to do is not think too deeply. You cannot buy a THINK wall slab anymore, but you can purchase another one over the internet. Here is the image of that bestselling sign:

The company that makes that signboard and sells it in millions has given a rationale for their signboard. This is what their advertisement says:

‘This magnetic board can remind you of all sorts of things, from the dull meaningless existence that is your work life to a large number of tasks you have to do. As the sign reminds you, you are not paid to THINK…anything that eases the burden on your brainpower is surely a welcome addition to any home or office.’

Though obviously intended to be facetious, what the sign says is nevertheless symptomatic of our present age.

There is a worldwide conspiracy to thwart men and women of exceptional caliber from exerting brainpower beyond the sheepfold. Don’t be swayed by any awesome phenomenon or product that could distract your mind from generating its own innovative thoughts – whether it is a latest gadget that could make obsolete or redundant your mental skills, or a sweeping corporate fad that belittles a timeless virtue, or an alluring doctrine from spiritual gurus that rationalizes an aberrant lifestyle.

Beware of teachers, preachers and researchers who ease your need to think your own ideas and generate your own original ways to make your life and other’s lives more productive, enjoyable and meaningful. When you are an original thinker, constantly applying newer and more effective methods to make work more rewarding for yourself and others, you are automatically ensuring the perpetual usefulness of your achievements.

So, if you want be an achiever whose work is always in demand, be constantly fresh and daring in your thoughts, and keep moving from one innovative level to a higher level. Think for yourself and you have already placed yourself on a future pinnacle of achievements where the usefulness of your work will last even beyond your generation.