A DATE WITH DESTINY

A DATE WITH DESTINY

Control your destiny or somebody else will.

Jack Welch

In my firewalk seminars I always tell people that walking on fire is nothing but a date with their destiny. Once
you start trusting your power which is hidden inside you, you can do miracles. You must know: Who are you? What are you doing? And for whom are you doing? If you do not believe who you are, then people around you will make you believe what they want. Once you have trust and conviction in yourself, you can win every battle in your life. Your destiny can be shaped in the moment of your decision, nothing can stop you.

Once I had finished my firewalk seminar and gave my last media interview to CNN IBN television channel.
The moment the media and participants moved out, I collapsed. I was hospitalized. Here I am sharing the most painful and intimate part of my life and miracle of keeping belief in myself. I have a business line of academic institution. This entire business was controlled by six persons. I had authorized them to take all decisions. When I had recruited them for teaching in my institute, most of them had a marginal income per month. Their survival was difficult, their family was under poverty line. Rathore foundation had made them to grow upto few lakh rupees per month. But then I came to know that the institute has suffered a huge loss. I was surprised to hear this. My only mistake was that I trusted these people completely and gave them absolute freedom to manage the business. My humble suggestion to readers of this book is to make a proper reporting system in your organization, no matter how close the persons working there are with you.

I was on the verge of bankruptcy. All the telephones were disconnected. Water supply was also stopped. Every day I was getting reminders for payment of electricity bills. The cheque of my daughter’s school fee had been dishonoured. She came up to me with the cheque and said that the cheque had bounced because of insufficient funds in my account. I had a car, but no money for petrol, even my daily meals were with borrowed money. Yah! My office was mortgaged for making payment of salaries to employees. All my competitors had already declared that “Rathore has gone bankrupt”. Friends had stopped calling me. The worst was when I used to call them—they did not pick up the phone. It was very hurtful. Even if I went to their office, they avoided to meet me, making excuses of busy schedule or that they were in a meeting. But as I was in motivation business, I used all the techniques on myself and it worked. I was not broken from my mind, my mind was still working and I knew things will change soon.

When I was in the hospital, my wife saw my so called trusted managers in office. They were having a meeting
in my office, using my resources, my staff to dump me. This is what the Hindi saying says, malik ka juta malik ke sar (owner’s shoes on owner head). My wife came to me in the hospital and explained everything. My competitors started spreading wrong information that my institute would close down in two weeks. Those people of mine were also planning to open their own institute. They were evaluating the legal implications of using the same brand name “Rathore Institute Pvt. Ltd.” This entire issue was unbearable to me both financially and emotionally. One of those who had conspired against me was very close to my heart. His actions were quite astonishing and unimaginable. He was very close to me. He knew what could I think and how I would think. He knew that I was in a bad state financially. He was thought that it was the right time to dump me. But at the same time he used to come to hospital to show sympathy.

Whatever information he gathered, he used to brief the status to the managers. These people took away my institutes employees and had kept them at their newly hired office. My mistake was that I could not come to know all this earlier as I was busy in my motivational lecture business. That was toughest time I ever saw, not because of loss of money, but because of the emotional loss. I wondered how could a person conspire and plan to dump a person who did everything for them. I recalled how I helped him to search for doctors when he was suffering from TB. But I did not lose my cool and decided to keep myself in control.

I told my wife, “Look, I am now aware of their bad intentions and know that they are pretending to be
concerned with me.” Almighty God was with me. They fought among themselves over the issue of who would control the new business. Everybody wanted to be the boss, everybody wanted to be the Chairman of company. Hence they decided to postpone their plans for a year and the timeperiod of one year was good enough for me to recover my business. I thanked God. In fact, I was buying time and controlling my anger, hurt, disappointment, frustration and uncertainty about the future. I was not being used by my emotional threshold, rather I was using my emotions to grow.

I knew that it is not the event but the meaning given by me to the event which will control my life. Now I can shape my destiny the way I want. After this incident, I started giving more time to my academic business and became more serious about it. Now I have learned to balance my institute as well as my profession of a motivational speaker. I had read that Rajiv Chandrasekhar of BPLmobile had converted a loss making business to a profit making one. I believed that if he could do it, then I could also do it.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants had introduced a new subject “strategic management”. To penetrate the market, I decided to teach that subject free of cost and to complete the course in six days. Each day there would be a six-hour class. The same subject was being taught by others in four months, with fees of Rs
5000.

I had taught in my corporate strategic seminar about BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) and Michel Porter’s Generic Strategic Alternative to Succeed. I was using the same models in my own life. According to these models, if you bring a unique product at a competitive price, youcan be the market leader. My product was unique as the course was for only six days and it followed cost leadership. After announcing my class, I went to Mumbai for a seminar. When I returned, my flight landed Delhi at 2 o’clock in the night. The very next day was the class of the new programme. I was not expecting a good response as I had been away from this market for a long time.

When I reached the venue of the class, what I saw was unbelievable. I saw almost 20 PCR police van, the traffic was creeping at a snail’s pace. There was bumper-tobumper traffic and a big traffic jam. About 500 students were inside the institute and almost 2000 were on the street, running here and there trying to get and entry to the class. Many policemen were trying to manage the crowd. Almost all the residents of the area had come out on the streets to watch what was going on. When I got down from my car, everybody rushed towards me and expressed their desire to attend my class. That was really the happiest moment of my life and one of the greatest comebacks in the history of academic world. I thanked the Almighty God, the Creator, and the Hanuman mandir at ISBT Delhi where this idea had first come to my mind.

After two hours, when I went inside the hall, I could sense the mental condition of the students. The hall was
as hot as a furnace because of the presence of so many people. However, the lecture was cancelled as it was difficult to accommodate so many people and there was interference from the police. Subsequently, I booked a much larger auditorium and started taking classes there, of course with minimum fees. My all financial problems were solved. In one day I had become a rich man, with no financial difficulties. The most important point was that in six days all existing competitors were out of business. A new entrant had abolished them. It looked unbelievable, but fact is that most teachers who had been teaching strategic management had left teaching or theyhad started teaching other subjects. My deepest thanks and gratitude to Michael Porter whose method I used to eliminate competitors.

This particular incident gave me a lot in my personal life as well. My wife, who used to stay at home, decided to join my business. At present, she is the Professor of Management Accounting and controls my six business centres. I really feel very happy when I see her busy, helping me.Now I did not need the people who had conspired against me. Once again I was the leader in my business. But I did not ask them to go. I was still helping them, but did not give full control . Now they were only like any other faculty—come, teach, and go; no decision making powers. All these powers had shifted to my wife. One by one they started to leave from my organization, and that is what I wanted. If all of them have gone together, it would have been a great loss to me. I created a situation to get them to leave one by one. After all, I was running the business and they had helped me not to become an emotional fool. They had helped me to be practical and run the business with my mind rather my heart.Now I use a combination of both heart and mind. If somebody ditches me, it does not hurt me—I take it as one more experience. I thank them for teaching me how to do business and respect the suggestions of my wife, which I always used to ignore earlier. She got all her happiness out of this issue and her talent as leader and controller came up. God alone knows what he has
hidden and where. We just need the reference.