By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Deepak Chopra
- The ways COVID is changing entrepreneurship.
- Global solutions for a post-pandemic world.
- The power of educational reform for impoverished youth.
- Strategies for giving back.
- The power of mindset.
- The Freedom Employability Academy
- The role empathy plays in business.
- Why gratitude is essential for success.
Mastering Your Mindset for Success
Having the right mindset is essential, especially when starting and running a business. No matter the stage of life or business, improving your mindset creates drastic changes for the better. Whether you move out in fear or faith has a large part in determining your success. The intention you begin with and how you move through failures are the litmus tests on any journey.
The COVID19 pandemic has shown us the need for better processes and systems that prioritize service over profit. When you put profits first, you sustain a few, but when you put people first, everyone profits.
This week I sat down with Deepak Chopra, entrepreneur and founder of the Freedom Employability Academy. He lives by the principles of courage, persistence, gratitude, and giving back. When you master these lessons, they take your life to another level and increase your resilience personally and professionally, even during global pandemics.
An Unlikely Entrepreneurial Start
Chopra never intended to start his own business, now his supplements are sold in stores across America. He was trained as a chemical engineer at IIT Delhi, but couldn’t find work after college. A lucky break in New York City landed him a job at a vitamin manufacturer. The hiring manager didn’t need anyone, but he saw how badly Chopra needed work.
As with most entrepreneurial ventures and all success, his is built on a track record of failures. As the adage goes, it isn’t what happens to you in life, it’s how you choose to respond. Chopra chose to respond by staying flexible and thankful: “My failures got me to where I am today and I’m grateful for them.” It takes the right ratio of planning and luck to get any big idea off the ground.
Courage and persistence are the cornerstones; the rest falls into place. It doesn’t matter if you fail. Failure is a natural part of the process of success. More important than failure is taking action towards your goal and committing to stay the course and do your best in each moment.
Success isn’t a solo endeavor. It takes a village; a network of people giving second chances, advice, money, or a hand up to someone who is where they were just a short time ago.
Empathy and generosity are inherent in the human spirit. The people who are in touch with these qualities are the ones that give back when it’s their turn at the top. Giving a lucky break often feels just as good as getting one.
Intentional Sustainable Co-creation
The main goal of businesses over the last century in America has been to drive profits. Macho nationalism and fierce competition with other countries is part of a dying paradigm. Slowly and surely it is being replaced with an ideology that places importance on our identity as global citizens intentionally creating a better future for all.
More and more businesses are catching on to the sustainability model, which is built on empathy and whole systems thinking. Instead of chasing personal dreams of fortune for the benefit of one at a cost to many, our focus is shifting to global dreams of prosperity and symbiosis.
As we have seen, death, illness, and time spare no one. Borders haven’t stopped the spread of COVID 19, or fire, or hurricanes. It is time to stop thinking nationally and competitively and time we consider ourselves citizens of the world. Evolutionarily speaking, we are all on the same
Giving Back: The Freedom Employability Academy
To minimize the severe poverty Chopra saw around him as he grew up in Dehli, he started the Freedom Employability Academy, an NGO that provides education for impoverished youth.
The organization is based on four core values:
- Helping people develop professional skills alongside strength of character.
- Teaching critical thinking skills that serve students for the rest of their lives.
- The belief that technical skills are as important as self-confidence and positive habits.
- Developing socially responsible, community-oriented citizens with a desire to give back to their communities.
When exploring what strategy would serve the most people and get the best results, he narrowed it down to three skills that would prepare impoverished youth living in the worst neighborhoods of Dehli for career opportunities.
- Building English language skills to a level that makes you effective in the workplace: communicating effectively and comprehending instructions
- Developing personal (soft) skills: resilience, self-confidence, determination, learning how to learn, adaptability, ethics, collaboration, being part of a team
- Reframing contribution for the greater good as part of everybody’s mission in life: considering the impact and purpose of every action
The FEA usually doubles, but often triples and even quadruples the average income of their students and boasts over 21,000 graduates.
The Importance of Education Reform
If we want a healthier more peaceful world, we need to focus on reforming the education system and giving everyone equal access to this vital resource. Education is the fastest and most effective way to empower people. Efforts from people like Chopra and the team at the FEA are making sure parts of the population don’t slip through the cracks.
While there are countless initiatives all over the world, there is plenty of need right in the U.S. Where are areas you see in need of education reform perhaps right in your hometown? What can we do to create initiatives like the FEA right here at home?
Aligned Intention
Our current economic and education systems are built on a survival of the fittest philosophy. When you bring empathy into the equation, things shift for the better. We must cease making the separation between business and personal. All businesses are for people by people. Taking our humanity out of the equation undercuts the entire mechanism.
Everything is connected. Organizations aren’t robot arms, they are a coalition of people working toward a common goal. Those goals need to be realigned for good of all. Then, not only will we achieve harmony and higher rates of efficiency, we will begin to evolve and create wealth on a different level. The benefits will be exponential.
In the kill or be killed binary business model, terms like self-made, sink or swim, grind, and blood sweat and tears get thrown around. The ego likes to convince us we achieve success through our own grit and sheer willpower. The truth is that we are swimming in a sea of connections, a speck in a larger network of lucky accidents and chance meetings. We rely on each other.
Gratitude is Essential for Success
Gratitude is the antidote to this arrogant attitude. Everyone has help, even if they aren’t aware of it. No man is an island. Without the average Indian citizen paying taxes on matchboxes, there wouldn’t have been money to fund the IITs of the world.
As graduates of IIT Dehli it behooves us to thank not only our professors, our parents, and the friends we made there, but to those Indians who didn’t get the opportunity to go to such a fine institution to better themselves, and yet paid their taxes so we could.
Take a moment to thank the invisible hands that made your current reality a possibility. From this place of gratitude, empathy blossoms, and generosity spreads from the inside out. We must all do our part to give back, our happiness, and our survival depend on it.
Conclusion
I sat down with Deepak Chopra, the founder of the Freedom Employability Academy to talk about education reform, giving back, and the secrets to his entrepreneurial success. As we move into post-pandemic life, a global whole-systems review is in order and we must question the intention and function of institutions and infrastructures that we are quickly outgrowing. The shift toward sustainability and empathy is the way of the future, and the businesses that get on board will be the ones that survive. Awareness that we are all interconnected and gratitude, are the foundation for realigning our values as we recognize we are global citizens facing the same trials.
Starting this December 4th, IIT alums and innovators will come together for a live virtual event. Calling all engineers of the future! This conference is an opportunity to coinvent and codefine paradigms for the new world. You can find out more at IIT 2020: The Future Is Now. We hope you can join us.
