AIMA speech
Good
evening everyone. Let me say it at the outset….ITS REALLY SCARY HERE!.
The biggest managers of the biggest corporations in the biggest
convention for management...AIMA. Really it’s a sadreflection that in such an august company of
people
and such a collection of skill set...and big business houses and
managers.. . all you could manage was to get a speaker from Bollywood to
speak at the convention. Economy must really be bad.
But
who am I to speak about the economical downtrend across the globe etc,
or anything else for that matter..... just reading the topics being
discussed before I came on stage.. .1 was frightened. Shit scared.
Couldn’t understand a word.
COULD FINANCIALISATION OF COMMODITIES BE USED TO INCENTIVISE SUPPLY GROWTH WITHOUT INFLATING PRICES...?
Yeah if u say so.. . or no if you are in a bad mood sir.
Managing
liquidity...supply crunch...risk of npa...csr
mandate...ceos...coos...cfos...ufos...mind boggling and numbing for a
person like me...who can just about say kkkkcorporate management without
falling over his own shoelaces. And I have to speak about Courage in
this scared and ill informed mindset of mine.
But
here I am and so are all of you wonderful people. I wish you a great
convention and a happy economy.. .and I want to thank my friend Shiv for
giving me this opportunity to speak in front of such an extraordinary
amazement of grey matter....all you highly successful...perhaps the most
successful people in the world and give a speech on success...!!
Am I the only one who is seeing this irony or are you all too busy holding back your laughter as to what I will say here.
Apart
from my lack of knowledge and fear the only other problem is that I am
really not good at giving discourses on how to be successful. I am not
good at this because I don’t really know what can I say to you highly
motivated people that you don’t already know...about life ...business
and success.
So
I will bore you with a few details of my life and how I got to be a
movie star...and mainly talk about success and how it came to be. Let me
forewarn you, this is a recycled speech. Whenever I am called to give
speeches at ypo or some such big organisation...I use this speech. Its
generic... simple... and makes me give no
commitment in our first meeting. Somewhat like
the corporate world itself.
The biggest problem with success is that any narrative of success is bound to be at least a little bit
dull...because its not your story. I have sat down with people who tell
me their stories of success...and I am like...man...get the hell out of
my sight...if I want to feel jealous...I will see
some other actors successful film...I don’t need
the story of your life. Second..and more importantly so...successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so.
Take Warren Buffet. Here’s a guy who must get
asked five times a day how he became the most
successful investor of his era. His answers —
“Reinvest your profits,” “Limit what you borrow,” etc.—are no different from what any
fool could tell you. Buffet isn’t being cagey. He simply doesn’t know.
Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of
experience that we learn from. We enjoy it; perhaps we even deserve it.
But we don’t acquire wisdom from it. And maybe that’s why it cannot be
passed on either...me being successful does not mean my children will
also be so...how much ever I teach them what all I did in my life and
even if they follow it to the letter. Success just happens. Really.
So
talking about how to become successful is a waste of time... instead
let me tell you very honestly...whatever happened to me happened because
I am really scared of failure. I don’t want as much to succeed as much
as I don’t want to fail. I come from a very normal lower middle class
family...and I saw a lot of failure. My father was a beautiful man...and
the most successful failure in the world...my mom also failed to stay
with me long enough for her to see me become a movie star. We were quite
poor actually at certain junctures of our lives...and I have even
experienced a kurkee...where they throw you and your house stuff on the
roads. Let me tell you...poverty is not an ennobling experience at all.
Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression...1 had seen my
parents go through it many times. It means a thousand petty
humiliations and hardships. At an early age after my parents died...I
equated poverty with failure. I just didn’t want to be
poor. . . .so when I got a chance to act in films it
wasn’t out of any creative desire that I signed
my films...it was just purely out of the fear of
failure and poverty that I signed most of my
initial films. Most of them were discards of actors and the producers could not find anyone
else
to do them. Deewana was discarded by Armaan Kohli...Baazigar was
rejected by Salman Khan and Darr was negated by Aamir Khan. I did them
all for just making sure that I was working to avoid unemployment. The
timing..or something was right, and that made them happen and I became a
big star. I asked Dilip Kumar sahib once...that why he did Devdas...and
he looked at me and said...for the money yaar. Bimalda paid me one lac
of rupees....I didnt know it would be such a great
film and make me such a huge actor....that’s
the
only reason I did Devdas. Which means sometimes our success is not the
direct result of our actions...it just happens on it’s own and we take
credit for it...out of embarrassment sometimes.
So
I believe the true road to success is not just the desire for success
but a fear of failure. I tell everyone if you don’t enjoy and be scared
of you failure hard enough.. .you
will never succeed. I am not going to stand here and tell you that
failure is fun. . .but I will insist and hope that all of us...should
experience failure in some measure. The extent of what each one of us
perceives as failure may differ...as it should. . .but I believe one
needs to pass through some stages of failure if they really want to
succeed.
So how does failure help us.
1. First
and foremost..its not the absence of failure that makes you a
success...it is your response to failure that actually helps to buffer
the reverses that you experience. I for
one have two responses to failure...first is
pragmatism..
.a recognition and belief that if one approach does not work...then the
other will or might. The second response is fatalism. I fool myself
that it was bound to happen and I need to move on..not get caught up in
the oft repeated question...God why does it happen to me ???
2. Failure also gives me an incentive to greater
exertion...harder work...which invariably leads to later success in most cases.
3.
Failure is an amazing teacher...if you don’t fail...you will never
learn...and if you don’t learn...you will never grow. There is a well-
known story of a bank president who was asked the secret of his success.
“Right decisions,” he replied. “How do you get to know how to make right decisions?” came the follow-up question. “Experience,” was the answer. “Well, how do you get experience?” asked his interrogator. “Wrong decisions,” he replied.
4.
Sometimes it has taught me stop pretending that I am someone else than
what I am supposed to be. It gives me a clear cut direction that
hey...maybe I am not supposed to be doing this... let me just concentrate on finishing and doing things that really matter to me..that define me...instead
of following a particular course that actually is taking me away from
what really my core liking is. KKR my cricket team is one such example,
till through the advice of my friends like Shiv I took on a ceo and whole new department that would
handle the job better.
5. Failure also gets you to find...who your real friends
are. The true strength of your relationships only get tested in the
face of strong adversity. I lost lots of friends post Ra.One apart from
losing a lots of audience too and post Chennai Express, I am happy to
tell you though I haven’t made any new friends...1 have a whole new set
of enemies.
6. Regular failures...also have taught me empathy towards others. Being a star...it is easy to be prone to the notion that I am superior...self sufficient...and fantastic..instead of realizing that I was just plain lucky or got some lucky breaks.
7. Overcoming some of my failure has made me discover that I have a strong will...and more discipline than I suspected. It has helped me have confidence in my abilty to survive.
So all in all I think failure is a good thing. Won’t
bore you with more details of how failure is a
good thing...cos you wont call me back again for a talk on success etc next time...but would like to tell you all...that life is a not just a check
list
of acquisitions, attainments and fulfillments. Your qualifications and
c.v. don’t really matter. Jobs don’t matter. Instead life is difficult
and
complicated...and
beyond anyone’s control and the humility to know that by respecting
your failures will help you survive it’s vicissitudes.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making
a
few failures in life. I say making because failure is not an exterior
force, I believe it happens due to our own actions and reactions, in
such convoluted ways that we may not understand, but we are the reason
for it. So don’t be weighed down by it, cherish the experience and learn
from it. By experiencing all and accepting it, will you experience
success, not in isolation of life’s full offerings.
Let me conclude by saying that my hope for you is a lifelong love of learning, exciting and
inspiring dreams, businesses, profits, deals,
power lunches or whatever turns you guys and girls
on but alongside I wish you a fair number of moderate failures too. By
experiencing all, I hope that you will experience success.
Success is never final....just like failure is never
fatal.
Courage is ill defined if we think it is doing
something
macho...risky or chancy. If that happens at somebody else’s others
cost, its even less courageous. Courage is doing what YOU are afraid to
do. Personally scared to do in whichever capacity you work. There can be
no courage unless you are scared. So be scared...to feel the courage.
Be fearful. I believe one has to have the fear of failure so much...that
you get the courage to succeed.
So
that’s my learned piece on courage in success. Or what I call THE
SUCCESS OF FAILURE....AND BEING SCARED ENOUGH TO BE COURAGEOUS, TO MAKE
IT SO.
OR IF I WAS TO PUT IT IN THE WORDS THAT SURROUNDED ME AND I WAS SCARED OF, WHEN I ENTERED THIS AUGUST GATHERING....
THE
THEORY OF: THE MANAGEMENT OF HIGH RISING FAILURE TO CONVERT IT INTO
SUCCESS BY GROWTH INDEX OF 100 PERCENT, WHILE UNDERSTANDING THE INDICES
OF FEAR AND NOT COMPROMISING THE SYNTAX OF OUR COURAGE GLOBALLY, WHILE
KEEPING A HOLISTIC 360 DEGREE VIEW OF OUR DOMESTIC MARKET THROUGH
RIGOROUS SYSTEM AND PROCESSES.
In simple terms or film language it means....If at first you don’t succeed...reload and try again.
SHOOT
FAST... SHOOT FIRST and be ready to take a bullet too....and remember
what Don said..... iss company ki management ke dushman ki sabse badi
galati yeh hai....ki woh isS company ka dushman hai...kyunki jab tak
dushman apni pehli chaal chalta hai....yeh company apni agli chaal chal
chuki hoti hai.....
Thank
you very much all. I am open to all kinds of questions and answers
now.. . SPECIFIC AREAS OF INTEREST TO YOU ALL OR GENERAL CHITTER
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