Questions, I believe, are a powerful tool to uncover something. And a very powerful question to uncover what someone cares about in the world is to ask what pisses you off about the condition of the world? What is it that if you had the power to, would change?

When I ask this question from myself, I somehow get very passionate about some dormant opinions of mine.

See I have been very big on education. I believe that is the single force that can elevate lives of people and as a result, it is what has been one of the most meaningful factors in pushing the human race forward. And I don’t even mean the conventional K-12 education. I mean the act of education. Learning. Study. And mastery. Education in the literal sense, straight from the dictionary.

So for that matter, education can never end after formal college education. These institutions only lay the foundation for a life long education. They provide the individual with a mental faculty and a framework of getting information and making sense of it, to make it usable or actionable.

And we do teach our people great subjects like Maths, science and humanities. Problem is that no one teaches personal development. No one even talks about goal setting or growth in life. Or what is the science of achieving goals, and mind you there is a science. No one even teaches achievements, hardly do we study great men and model their formulas for success in their careers or personal lives. We don’t even teach our people about the mind and what is the ontology of us human beings. What are our primary and fundamentals characteristics, motives, needs and what is our thrust towards. We hardly teach relationships and God forbid if there was a formal class on Love and Empathy. Or operating with harmony in a group. See these topics are so taboo that people think that only those who have some ‘problem’ in life should take such education. Rest of us, they assume, are natural masters in the above mentioned topics.

But I ask, is it so? Do we naturally know why our mind keeps running into self-sabotaging thoughts and action patterns? Do we get out of school and naturally know how to find a career of our true passion and also how to build a money empire with what we earn?

If we take a real look inside, all of these topics are of utmost importance. And we naturally don’t have any expertise in these, nor do our parents or conventional school teachers, because they too didn’t get a formal education in these. But I kid you not, there is substantial amount of research and knowledge available in these topics and with the advent of internet its even accessible to all of us. But what is truly needed is that these topics come into the conventional education system. So that a professional, along with learning how to run a business well, also learns how to learn his life well. To have amazing relationships, mastery on personal finance, is vibrant and enjoys great health and fitness, contributes to community and is over all an emotionally and socially intelligent being. A truly civilized citizen if you will.

And this can happen only with a culture change. Culture is a very powerful force to get conformity. If a lazy, procrastinating child (even though children are not lazy at all) was abruptly put in a school where all the other children were freaks in continuously creating personal development goals and then creating an environment of support for fulfilling these goals (consequently achieving these goals too), this child would feel a sudden pressure, a phenomena called eustress, to positively change his life. What all your peers do, is cool. And you better do it with them, even outperform. But sadly, the current condition is that there is no culture of personal development or growth, and that’s what people normally conform with.

So what I am an advocate of, is getting life education in the main stream. And making it ‘cool’ to study these topics. Get educated yourself and then teach your surroundings.

It’s about time that we as a society were amazing at this thing called ‘quality of life’, both individually and in communities. (Mind you, there was a time when we were not so good at ‘warfare’. And over time we did make advancement and breakthroughs in that discipline and right now we as a society are pioneers at warfare)

All I ask for is that we become pioneers at peace, love, contribution, growth, success, vitality. Eutopia can be made, no big deal!

I am more of a ‘words’ person than a ‘numbers’ person.

That’s why when the pressure of my high octane sales job used to be too much to take, I would resort to go to a cafe or a lake side, and read a good book. It was the way in which I relaxed myself. There was one very critical decision I made along the way though, that changed the whole course of my life over the past one year. I decided to read quality books. International bestsellers, the most thought provoking concepts, autobiographies of some of the most spectacular men & women in the history of the world. And what I read started to open up a world for me. I instantly became aware of a possibility. That life can be much more than just doing the mundane tasks of an already ill managed organisation, only because your well intending yet clueless boss wants you to do it. And you listen to these instructions only because you’re too scared of even the prospect of your paycheck not arriving the next month.

Let me be clear, I did not work in an ill managed organisation, nor my boss was clueless. But I found a whole new level of intention that these great men operated with. They didn’t just play for the next month’s target. They played for changing the way the world worked. They played for pushing the human race forward. Who are these men? Well let’s see. Martin Luther King, George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Napolean Hill, Tony Robbins, Steve Jobs and countless more have come in fields of art, science, philosophy, medicine, warfare, technology, business, politics and philanthropy that have did something that pushed the world forwards.

And make no mistake, this level of greatness is contagious. You can’t just read about these people. You instantly get infected with the high standards these people must have had.

And one of the most pivotal standard that each one of these people had must have been, to make a difference with this life. I can bet that if I had the opportunity of talking to any of these men, they would have told me that they are clear that their life has some purpose, some calling, something that puts them out of bed and in action. That their life has to be for something. Not because it has to. Not because it should. But because they say so.

And by catching, even if in meager amounts, these standards I became aware of a need I have. To create a life that is worthy of my being here. To move and align all my living situations, all my circumstances to match and be fully congruent with who I truly am.

This is what started my journey. Funny thing is that later I found out, almost every accomplished person in the world fully vouches for reading good books. All the people who have achieved something know that there is immense value to be gained by words of great men and women before us. Leaders are readers they say. They also say that if you spend one hour daily, reading in your area of interest, withing one year you will be an expert in that area. And if you want, you can be the top most authority in that area of expertise, just be reading. Reading quality books.

Hope this gets you started!