Written in 2011 and edited in 2015. When I re-read this chapter, I found that there were some exaggerated claims and too many exclamatory marks and unneccessary upper cases for emphasis 🙂 I have tried to soften the language here.

Ah, a book on success! I wanted to write this book a long time ago but couldn’t do that for various reasons. I have always been attracted by the topics of “success” and “motivation”. I spend a lot of time researching these topics and using that knowledge combined with my experience to motivate my juniors and in some cases, my seniors too. Many thanks to all of you who attended my lectures or speeches somewhere and constantly kept pressurizing and encouraging me to write a book on my experience about the ways of being successful. And because success was the topic that fascinated me the most, I heeded your advice and started working on it. Finally, after lots of toil and setbacks on the journey, this book is in your hands, and I hope this book will meet the expectations with which all of you wanted me to write it in the first place. I sincerely pray that “Journey of Success” will show you the journey I undertook and will also simultaneously encourage you to embark on a new journey of success for yourself.

The first title that came to my mind for the book was “Success is not an accident”. This book tries to clarify that success doesn’t just happen. Success is not a chance event. Success is a process. We plan for it. We can plan to be successful and become successful thereby. Isn’t this idea wonderful? The idea that you can be successful by careful planning. Many people believe success is just luck though. Fair enough, because as Richard Templar says “Otherwise how to explain the success of people whom we don’t like?”

Alright, leaving humor aside, whenever you see a successful person, analyze their methods before you attribute their success to luck. If you do believe luck is the reason for success, I tell you that you can actually plan to be lucky. You can prepare to get lucky. The chapters given in this book are preparatory steps for getting lucky. I belive that if you follow the steps described here, you will realize one day that you have become lucky. Because you will hopefully be successful by following the steps described here and success means luck to common people! So, let’s start getting lucky from today!

Sincerely work each of the steps given in this book. Try each of them with faith and honesty. If you don’t, then there is no point in buying or reading this book. You mayn’t like everything written here, but we don’t like medicines either. Still, why do we take them? Because we believe they work, they cure us! The steps described in this book work and will bring us success. So it’s not a question of whether you like it or not, the question is whether you want to be successful or not. You train daily not because I like training but because you like winning.

Some of the “secrets” of success described here might be new to you but for some others, you may feel like “I knew that. It’s not new” or like “It’s so simple.” Well, that’s true. Most of the profound truths are painstakingly simple. We know everything. Everything is before our eyes. But do we use what we know? Have we put them into practice? Has our knowledge helped us in reaching greatness? Knowing isn’t enough. We got to act. Simple advices work. But simple advices are not followed. If you need a brain surgery, you’d rather go to a neurosurgeon who has mastered all the fundamental steps several times over years and years of practice, rather than someone who would want to try new fancy steps everytime they operate.

This book’s main purpose is to inspire you to put these simple secrets into practice. To keep you positive, to motivate you, to help you make determinations and fulfill them. But if you read this book and say “yes, its true.” Or “Exactly. He is right” and then keep on spending your day as you used to, then that’s a huge loss- loss of your money as well as loss of my efforts. But most importantly, loss of a soul that could have reached greatness. You have the potential to be great. Don’t spoil it! My Prof. Chapman (he used to teach us Forensic Medicine in med school) said, “Ignorance can be fixed, but stupidity is forever.”

Being successful is the chief aim of life, for all of us. Our primary objective is to achieve success. It’s not true that successful people are great. They are OK. For example, if someone says me that he respects and cares for his parents, I won’t tell him “you’re good”. He is not good. He is ok. He did what a normal person ought to do. If he doesn’t respect his parents, then he is bad. You can’t tell me I am good because I am not a criminal. If you are criminal, that’s bad. But not being a criminal only makes you OK, not great. Similarly, trying for success is average, if you accept failure that’s bad. Your chief business is to succeed. And if you chose to become successful, you definitely will.

Often times I see people waiting to achieve success, waiting to achieve greatness. But, they just keep waiting all their lives. There is no ideal time for starting anew. No ideal time for striving. No ideal time for working hard. Don’t wait. There will never be a great occasion to show your greatness. There will never be a big competition to show your heroism. So don’t wait for great things, show your greatness in every small thing you do. Show your ability in every work you do. Signature every work you do with excellence. Going back to that neurosurgeon example, the neurosurgeon who makes no mistakes over several years mastering the fundamentals is the best neurosurgeon. I know your personality by looking at your socks and handkerchief. I don’t need to see your coat. I know how good a human being you are by watching how you treat people who rely on you for their jobs, not by watching how you treat people on whom you rely for your own job.

Start today, there is no point in delay. Embark on your journey of success. Your journey to greatness. It starts today. Here. With this book, I will help you, try to give you directions but remember that its you who need to walk. You need to travel the distance.

Students keep asking me how I achieved success at every step? I tell you here, being successful is a habit. The most difficult thing is to achieve success for the first time. When you have achieved that, the thrill of being successful embraces you so tightly that you would never want to lose that feeling. One success will lead to another. That’s why everywhere we see a single person/club/country rules their field of expertise for a long time (majority of soccer trophies are won by a handful of same clubs, same countries; majority of Nobels are won by a handful of same countries).

 Finally, I have used the word “system” many times in this book. What I believe is when your inner self (soul? atman?) is determined to achieve something, it creates a positive atmosphere. It tries to make all circumstances favorable to achieve that object of desire. That inner self has the ability to make things happen. And when something gets impressed upon your inner self ( and that is possible by auto¬suggestion. Auto-suggestion means telling something repeatedly to your inner self, thinking about the same thing repeatedly until your inner self accepts that)-then it creates your manners, your physique, your thinking, your personality everything favorable to attaining that purpose. This is what I mean by the system. Also, in the context of this book the words “The Universe”, “God”, “Almighty”, “Great”, “Infinite Intelligence”, “The Superconscious”, “The Creator” all mean the same thing. However, you don’t need to believe in any form of God or religion in order to attain maximum out of this book.

Have a happy and motivational reading!