During the weekday, I am an old-school banker and as boring as they get. I studied engineer, then immediately after that completed my MBA and started working for Citibank in 1992. Ten years in Citi, half in India and half in Dubai, were like a boot camp of the corporate world. There I learnt about work, about people and about what makes people work.
The impressions and lessons gathered there have been the basis of much of my professional personality and thinking after that. Later I was lucky to part of the core group that launched a new bank from scratch in Dubai in 2002. For the last ten years I have been working with a leading Dubai based bank managing the asset management and treasury sales businesses. I am often invited to speak to university students and introduce them to the concepts of my book Ready, Steady, Go! I am also invited to various literary festivals and try to attend when time permits. Lately, I have been trying my hand at professional photography as well.
I have many authors that I like and I tend to read and re-read their books often. Two of my all-time favourite authors are Eckhart Tolle – Power of Now and A New Earth – for how beautifully he has distilled the knowledge of Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism and Bible; Mitch Albom – Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven – for the powerful simplicity of his writing.
My father’s book was published when I was 12 and my mother’s books were published when I was 20. So there was a sort of a peer pressure at home to become a published author – haha!! I wrote my first book when I was thirteen – it was a Enid Blyton inspired mystery novel that still remains in its original notebook with me. Coming to the present, it was just a few years back when I saw my elder daughter getting ready to join professional studies that felt like jotting down some notes for her from my own experience in the corporate world. Those bullet points slowly evolved into paragraphs and pages till I realized that I have come up with a collection of ideas and anecdotes that can make help anyone to navigate their careers better. The eureka moment came when I realized that most of my suggestions were basically pointing to the fact that our education system does not prepare our youth for the real world. Worse, our schools and colleges leave them with blind spots that holds people back from achieving their true career potential. That is how Ready, Steady, Go! was born.
One of the chapters in Ready, Steady, Go! is called “Think Like a Golfer.” This chapters talks about the cut-throat competition that exists in the professional world and its many pitfalls. Excessive competition not only wreaks havoc on people, their health, their families and their colleagues but in the long term it destroys the very organizations that encouraged the competitive spirit among their staff. The chapters delves into the genesis of this competitive spirit that gets programed into us during our school and college days where only the ‘number-one’ students are rewarded and recognized, whether it is academics, debates, sports or extra-curricular activities.
This system of reward creates ‘sharks’ for whom winning is synonymous with beating others or leaving others behind. This takes away their ability to work and collaborate with others. They want to be ‘stars’ and if they are not, they get easily frustrated. The chapter then introduces the game of golf where competing players never engage in a duel, they cannot impact the score of the other player, they do not block or tackle each other; all they can do is focus on their own game, play against the par and improve their own handicap. Winners on the golf course do not have to beat anyone, they have to compete against their own self and give their best. The real world needs more people who can think like golfers, who can carry others along and be happy in the success of others. This is when they and their organizations can become successful and more importantly stay successful.
I don’t consider myself as a naturally gifted writer. I have a slow and deliberate process of writing. I start focusing on thoughts that occur often in my mind. I then start making notes in a diary. And because these thoughts come at any time of the day, my diary is always with me – whether I am in office or in my car and it is next to my bed when I am sleeping. Often, I have woken up in night to write down some new insights or a better way to rephrase a sentence. Next, I start plugging these insights into what I am writing. The main writing work happens on my laptop. But even then there is a lot of rethinking, deleting, rewording and rewriting.
Due to this slow process of writing, and given that most of my real writing is done only over the weekends, it took me two years to complete Ready, Steady, Go! The framework was prepared over one weekend and the first draft was ready in about 3 months but I think I must have re-written the book at least three times before I was satisfied.
What I love most is the process of thinking and how it engrosses me at all times when I am writing. What amazes me is the power of our minds and how it can keep churning out ideas once it is focused.
Writing is a very lonely and sometimes frustrating journey. But having lived through the two years writing my book I realized that the process of becoming a published author had just begun. Good publishers are inundated with book proposals and are very selective – after all they invest all the money in producing and distributing the book. Life is even more difficult for a first time author. After doing a lot of research online I realized that I need a literary agent to represent me. When I started writing to literary agents, even they were not very forthcoming. Finally, an agency in India accepted to represent me and within one year secured a contract with Jaico Books, India’s oldest book publisher and the house of authors like Robin Sharma and Deepak Chopra. I then worked with Jaico’s editorial team and finally the book was released after another eight months. The entire process from the time I put pen on paper to book launch took about four long years.
I am very patient by nature but the process of writing and getting my book published developed patience into my core strength.
Many of us have an author inside us but are unable to reveal it because we just don’t know where to start from and what to write about. I get asked this question a lot when I visit literary festivals and my advice always is read a lot and then write a lot. Write about anything, however mundane your subject be. For it is only when we start writing freely, that the literary pipes in our brains get unclogged and the real stuff starts flowing through. I was writing a weekly newsletter on global capital markets for my bank for four years before I suddenly realized how easily I could also write about any other subject.
eBooks have democratised the world of words. Publishing houses and snooty culture-vultures have now lost their monopoly on literature. eBooks and social media allows everyone to express themselves and get instant feedback. A writer today can experiment a lot more, thanks to eBooks and social media. But I don’t think physical books are going out of favour any time soon. In fact I was looking at some data that showed that physical books continue to grow despite the proliferation of eBooks. I guess what is happening is that thanks to eBooks, the overall pie is growing. Many young people who had never developed the habit of reading, as we did in our childhood, are coming to read.
Ready, Steady, Go! is for young professionals to transition smoothly from the academic world to the real world of business. My next project is for professionals who find themselves stagnating in management roles and despite their best efforts and huge sacrifices, fail to breakout into the big league. My next book will address aspects of personal leadership that can help professionals to reach the top of any organization. This book, unlike the first one, will be a fictionalized book about one of the favourite sport played by senior management all over the world and the leadership lessons it offers on the playground. I cannot reveal anything more at this stage; request the readers to wait for some time!
I would like to understand and write about the great spiritual masters like Meister Eckhart, Jiddu Krishnamurthy, Rumi, Marcus Aurelius, Eckhart Tolle and pure spiritual concepts like Zen Buddhism, Sufi Islam, Advaita Non-Dualism of Hinduism etc. I am fascinated by the spiritual aspect of our lives, not by religions. I believe spirituality does not need any religion; in fact religions have taken the help of spirituality to spread their message. Hence, I would like to think about and hopefully write about pure spirituality of our being.
Deepak Mehra is the author of the best seller “Ready, Steady, Go!” published by Jaico Books, that has become a must-read for anyone who aspires to rise above the ordinary in the modern professional world. The book has become part of the induction curriculum and management training programs for many large corporates in India. Deepak is an alumnus of IIT Varanasi and IMT Ghaziabad and has over 24 years of experience in banking across India and the Middle East with organizations like Citibank, Credit Suisse and leading local banks. Throughout his career he has been developing, leading and coaching teams of high calibre young professionals in truly multi-cultural environments. He is a regular speaker on Dubai Eye FM radio as well as in seminars and conferences internationally. He lives in Dubai with his wife and two daughters.
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Very nice article. Just had 1 additional question on the ebook point: If getting a physical publisher and the resulting time to launch the book is so lengthy, should we not simply publish an ebook ourselves? Kindly advise. Thank you
By Parag Tikekar (Jun, 2017) |