Sanjay Lohani 2.0

I am back.
And hopefully in a better, improved version, this time!

Let’s start from a faraway place with a not-so-far-fetched concept.
640 Kms South of main Japan and 500 Kms north of Taiwan, is a small Japanese island called Okinawa. It is just 110 kms long and 11 kms wide and roughly has 15 lacs residents. What’s special about this island?

Okinawa is located in the famously called “the Blue Zone”. Here people live way longer than the average Western life cycle and hence has an unusually large population of centenarians. The inhabitants of this island carry the secret to longevity and vitality. They live a long, happy and purposeful life.

One of their secrets is often said to be “ikigai” (Japanese - “iki” for life and “kai” for meaning) which translates to the reason for which you wake up in the morning.

Like many others, I too got fascinated by this concept and (sometime back) delved on these aspects for myself to see if I can arrive at my ikigai. After some intense mental duelling, soiling many papers and a bout of insomnia, I arrived at my ikigai – Rise and help People Excel.

The process obviously involved huge amount of introspection - deliberating on why I am, where I am and where I want to be. It helped me touch upon a kind of restlessness, which over past few years has been seating somewhere deep inside and which I wasn’t able to put my finger on.

It underlined a revelation that making people sell medicines/medical devices is perhaps not my raison d'être. I loved the part of inspiring and motivating teams to deliver Customer Delight by offering solutions to their unmet needs with appropriate products. What I didn’t enjoy was organisations’ compulsion to push expensive yet undifferentiated products to Customers who didn’t necessarily need them!

This wall-street induced compulsion of unduly pushing products often creates fault lines in the entire eco-system generating unnecessary stress which sucks away the joy of having a creative approach to what you love doing in the first place. The more I moved up, the worse it became and then ceased firing my neurons the way a marketing idea, a complex people issue, or inspiring young minds often does.

Emotions play an unusually big role in making us excel in what we do. Many youngsters over the years have asked me what made me a successful – when I look back – I didn’t have much as I begun (just passing marks in graduation and no MBA!) but I had an intense desire to succeed. Desire is an emotion. I wouldn’t have reached here without that one ingredient

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I am now out to re-invent myself starting something which is in sync with my deepest desires and brings in harmony between my gut, head, and heart. I am foraying into helping professionals excel through “experiential learning”. I know its not going to be easy. I know it would mean a trade-off on my plump corporate package. But I feel at peace with the knowledge that I will put everything into making this work to create the future I want!

Would you care to give a thought on what’s YOUR ikigai and share the same with me?