Transcript

Challenging the exam itself | Arun Sharma | TEDxRamjasCollege

uh anyone of you know me I'm I'm basically a teacher and uh my journey started uh uh my C journey in in a sense started when I was in the final year of engineering and uh I had absolutely no clue that somebody like me makes it to an I am if you know what I mean I had absolutely no evidence created right through my school or my college ever I I mean no teacher ever had even the faintest doubt that this guy is going to make it into something and the first time I actually picked up challenge it actually turned out to be very easy for me to actually practice and I by by by default or by Design or whatever I suddenly found myself when I B the best Minds in the country studying with them and two years there after passing out of out of IMB I was in the 1993 95 batch my journey actually started there and as uh we just heard uh when you're talking about breaking barriers it's about Journeys and Journeys lead you to barriers which you have to then break so my journey started the day I passed out of ir Bangalore I had a few job offers like most time graduates would have but I took a I took a decision that I don't want to be working in the corporate sector so that was first point where I because I had this kushy job kushy life outcome quite clear that if you work for 20 years as an amrad and you belong to the decent category among them so in 20 years time you'll be heading some company or something like that and I just my first point of the journey was disruption I just disrupted the whole set future I decided that I want to be an entrepreneur so when people ask me this question now even today or if I I try to think about myself what do you do who are you I get three answers from inside me I'm a teacher I'm an author I'm an entrepreneur I don't know which one comes where but in terms of the journey the entrepreneur Journey started first as an IMB graduate I got hold of a franchise of a very very prestigious computer education company which was almost impossible to get at that time I thought wow this is great luck and uh I had absolutely no problems giving up my job at that point of time because I thought okay this this franchise first generation business although I'm a first generation businessman I'm first generation entrepreneur this franchise will take care of all those Landing problems that you have it was supposed to but as I started my entrepreneurship Journey the first step that I took did not really work out and there were reasons for that we were uh I was running a computer franchise if you remember in the 1990s if you look back in the 1990s there there were three brands so to say it was aptech niit and T my franchise was the T franchise which was absolutely difficult to get but I got got that franchise simply because of the fact that I was in Bangalore pass out I could talk my My Way Through The Institute through the interviews and I thought that wow this life is made but then things started working out and today if I look back there's no other no other outcome that should have happened to this what do happening in that industry at that time was we were selling a onee course on computers for around 15 16,000 rupees in the mid90s and what we were teaching in that one year course we were teaching MS DOS Ms Excel MS PowerPoint and maximum the the most complex thing we were teaching was database in a one year course was 16,000 rupees and the street price of a computer crashed to 18,000 rupees because of the imports from China and taian so next thing you know that people got smart and they realized that you don't need to go to a computer Institute to pay them 16,000 bucks [Music] to actually teach you these things you can just buy a computer and you learn much more just by being on it as you all know so we are trying to sell a product which was absolutely not required no matter with what brand you you do that it does not work right you might have the greatest brand name in the world you're selling a product which is not needed any Market will tell you it will not work so where did that leave me in my journey it left me in a journey as a 24y old one year out of I am I had a failed business I had nothing to do I had a huge bank loan because I had taken a bank loan to set this up I didn't have capital from my family so I had a huge bank loan the interest and the penalties of which were larger than what I could get as a salary as an man graduate so that's when I had to take a call it was sing that's when I had to take a call what do you do what do you do with your life your your your career is gone your I has blown off and the only thing you have to now look at is that somehow you have to survive and pay this loan off right with no income source and no backing of a previous generation which is because as I said and continuously say I'm a first generation entrepreneur so the only thing I could think of at that time was the let let me start to teach because that is the only thing I could do with no no capital and that's how my journey my second Journey 1996 97 early 96 late 96 sometime around that time my second Journey as a teacher started and I knew pretty much one thing and I realized one thing that I could I could have blamed hundreds of reasons I could have found why I failed in my first Venture but when I started looking inside myself I realized that the max the maximum reasons why these things are happening to my life was because of myself I told myself one thing at that time and that commitment I have I have kept for the last 20 years in my own life and that commitment I made to myself is that this is once one time s of opportunity for you single swim opportunity you better do your best you can from this point whatever I'll do I'll do to the best of my ability I started working in that way so when I started teaching people obviously being and I'm being graduate again I started getting people who started coming to me and I pretty much started my my my institution my uh organization pretty much started like a very conventional cat training institution where you start getting students you teach them for 3 four months and uh uh you put them through tests and uh there'll automatically be few people who will be smart enough to figure out how these track it and you you'll autogenerate your next group of students from that but for me there was a problem in this whole chair the problem was that I was stuck in a place like because my franchise and my my first fail Venture was there so I started a place like partner and the majority of the students I was getting were people who either did not know English or people who did not know maths there's two categories and I used to get a few people from I and all during the summer vacation who would qualify on their own so when I asked myself this question okay what are you trying to do in this industry and U at least that much you can talk about the as the as do teach you to think a little bit differently they start looking at or they they teach you to start looking at problems to be solved rather than rather than just living the day so problem I started to ask myself okay this this guy who's coming from I he's qualifying on his own he does not need me if I'm there I might convert his 99.6 percenti to a 99.9% but even if I was not there you'll still get through but the question I started to ask myself was could I convert the 70% Tyler into a 99% could I actually work as a teacher because that is the challenge I was facing there as a teacher could I raise intelligence could I as a teacher in my classrooms raise intelligence of a person who does not know how to think mathematically could I raise intelligence of a person in reasoning could I ra intelligence in language and that's the problem I started to solve it took me around 2 3 years in the late '90s to actually resolve this issue when I realized that yes intelligence is not fixed intelligence can actually be raised for people and a very very uh you can say uh star example of how people view their intelligences happened to my life maybe around 10 years after that after this time frame I was giving three consecutive I was giving three different lectures in during a week my normal speaking always is with my 18 to 24 year old institution students people who coming to my institution in that age group and there's this part a week where I was supposed to speak to a group of corporates where they were Vice pres general managers I had a 2-day training session with them and then I had a 4-Hour session with a parent teachers at a parent teachers meet of a girl school where the 9th to 12th girls were going to be part of the audience and the the the the uh sequence was the same I had to First speak to these corporates on Monday Tuesday and on Friday or something I had this lecture with these girls so Monday morning I had I had a prepared session for the whole day with this group of corporates with this group of corporate Executives and uh Monday morning when I started speaking I raised the same question to these people do you think intelligence can be raised and I wanted to tell them that yes it can be and I thought that maybe these people are smart enough to understand that intelligence is not fixed you me anybody can actually pick up or change his or her intelligence you just need to start thinking smarter in situations so when I when I started speaking to this group of uh Executives I had a very tough time putting this point across to them there are people who are literally fighting with me ready to almost come to fisticuff with me trying to see intelligence and if you actually look at evidence around you the evidence is that people don't raise their intelligence they think the same way you look at at your 50-year-old neighbor and look at him 10 years ago you'll realize that he's thinking exactly the same way in the same situation so when when I I mean literally when when I started facing this Challenge from this group uh I I took around 2 hours to explain to these people how intelligence can be raised I I picked up a few maths questions I showed them that you can't solve this now and I'll start thinking this way it will work and I actually proved it to I had to take almost the first half of the day to prove it to them that intelligence can be improved or raised so I was quite comfortable when I went for the Friday lecture I was quite [Music] comfortable to 12 so These Guys these people are pretty ignorant they're not as quote unquote they're not as smart as those corporate executives are so my lecture was quite quite prepared that inco what will I speak I'll start with can it l be raised I'll expect an answer no and then I'll prove what I proved in that Monday lecture and I'll show that over 2 three hours now imagine my flight this's group of girls around 1,500 girls sitting in front of me in the auditori I have a 3our lecture prepared and I tell them do you think intelligence can be raised and the only sound I hear from the audience is yes and I have to suddenly rep my whole lecture luckily since I'm into that all the time it didn't matter much to me I could I could do that but what uh kind of stuck to my mind is that 45y old General manag and vice president know that intelligence is fixed and 13-year-old girls know that intelligence can be changed and where along the way do these people discover that do do we lose it unfortunately the systems for the development of intelligence are not understood by people and that's what once I realized realiz this fact by 2000 early 2000 2001 my first four five years of training i' realized that even if a person comes to me who does not know anything I can train him to get to an I I could make that happen so once I realized that I realized that I've got something to give not just to my students I've got something to give to the world and that's why I decided okay I'm teaching these students in PNA nobody knows me outside let me try to break another barrier let me try to write for a publisher so when I started thinking he write for a publisher the first publisher came to mind was mro because they the largest brand name I just said one page facts that this is the idea I want to write about luckily they were smart enough to understand that there's something good in this and that's how the author Journey started so 2002 2003 I wrote my first book and over the last 12 13 years I have written around maybe 10 plus books as the video showed you and each of these books the idea has been to redefine what is available my journey as an entrepreneur after the initial failure as I become became a more successful teacher and as I got renowned I started getting successful my my organization started getting successful around my success as a teacher but u i I think after around 10 years or so 20067 I disrupted my entire entrepreneurship once more I I started getting too comfortable and what I did was I decided that okay I've got one life I cannot I mean this is not my what I I had started my life for because as I'll tell you when I come to the life lessons that one should take I always believe in challenges that unless you pick up challenges and solve them you're not going to achieve anything in this world and the challenges should be audacious the challenge should be audacious they should be life defining so around 10 years after my uh entrepreneurship started I started disrupting it again and the disruptions Contin and I kind of started winding winding down off giving it away because I wanted to use my life for something else and parall I had also got a lot of writing offers so that was taking a lot of time and uh since uh that time frames or those times were taking taking over uh I mean were taking over my concentration or my Excellence from my field of work I started breaking this down so 20078 I kind of retired from my entrepreneurship and took a break of around four five years focused back on my authorship and continued writing the books as they happened one after the other result as uh the video showed you close to 2 and half 3 million books we have sold till now with my gr and um uh the number of books I sell on cat kind of is has a very close ratio to the number of cat forms that I Amell today so that's again maybe an indication of the fact that once you start once I started inserting Excellence into everything I did things actually started working of course the entrepreneurship 2013 I think some of my students came back from B schools they said sir I think we are not utilizing your potential we want you to work back I said if you guys are coming back you want to build an excellent organization let's build it again so we started the entrepreneurship we now based at can place here but the point I'm trying to make here is what are the lessons for you which this what I wanted to tell you here my stories my personal challenges but what's the lesson for you what's the lesson for anybody who cares to listen so I would want to uh put these lessons down to four or five things that if you remember and keep uh apply to your life and these come sequentially right so for example Excellence is definitely one lesson but Excellence happens in the context of something right so you need to understand the sequence in which you need to execute these things so that you can get the outcomes you deserve and more because for you today sitting here today if I ask you what is possible so my answer to that question will come in the form of another question the question I'll ask you is do you know the Microsoft Co do you know the Microsoft Co we all know that right but I'm going to change this question by adding two words to it do you know the Microsoft CEO in 2045 who's he or she if you somehow get hold of that person today and ask him or her what are you doing how will his or her answer different from your answer so please remember the first thing and my life is a perfect example of this I still remember the day I paid off my loan at State Bank of India I came back so light from that from the bank and when I actually came back home I thought you were 100 ft below the ground ground now you come back now you can go anywhere so please remember the first thing the first principle is anything is possible in a lifetime but what do you need to things will not happen unless you make them happen that's also true the second principle then happens is what are your challenges that you're picking up what are your audition's challenges so if I ask you this question and you can introspect here about about your own life and your own times what have been the the aous challenges you picked up in your life so when you're talking about picking up challenges you have to talk about redefining them so vat talks in 2011 he decides in 2011 that I'll become the best batsman of the world he achieves it Mahatma Gandhi says that I ask the britishers to leave India he achieves it Roger feder times as a kid first that I want to be the best tennis player in the world he achieves it that's what redefinition challenges so the second point the Second Life Learning is that from this point onwards you should live for challenges but then the last [Music] principle put your head down and work that's it once you defined what challenge you're trying to trying to achieve and and you break it down into tasks that okay if I achieve this I'll get that and you define I'll do everything to to to my most excellent State I I'll try to do everything I do as best as I can the last step is just putting your head down and working like nobody's business anything is possible in lifetime and that's the basic prise on which you are to live your life on thanks a lot