I am going to say good evening again, because that's how I started the speech. First of all, it's really scary here. Some of the biggest managers of the biggest corporations in the biggest convention for management - AIMA.
It's very sad that in such an august company of people, big business houses and managers, all you could manage was to get a speaker from Bollywood to speak at the convention. The economy must be really bad.
Well, who am I to speak about the economic downtrend across the globe etc, or anything, for that matter? Just reading the topics being discussed before I came on stage, I was frightened. And if I'm allowed to say so, shit scared. I couldn't understand a word. Let me tell you one of the discussions they had earlier on in the day - 'Could financialisation of commodities be used to incentivise supply growth without inflating prices?'
Okay, if you say so. Or no, if you guys are in a bad mood, whatever you say. The other one - 'Managing liquidity supply crunch risk of NPA CSR mandate CEOs COOs CFOs UFOs'... mind-boggling and numbing for a person like me who can just about say, k-k-k-k-corporation management. And the topic that my friend Shiv (D Shivakumar, president, AIMA) told me is, I have to speak about courage, in this scared state and ill-informed mindset. But here I am, and so are all of you wonderful people. I wish you a great convention and a happy economy, and I want to thank my friend Shiv for giving me this opportunity to speak in front of such an extraordinary amazement of grey matter - all of you highly successful, perhaps the most successful people in the world - and he chose me to give you a speech on success. Am I the only one seeing the irony here? Or are you all too busy holding back your laughter on what I'm going to say?
Apart from my lack of knowledge and fear, the only other thing is that I'm not good at giving discourses on how to succeed. I don't know what I'm going to say to you highly motivated people that you don't already know about life. So I'll bore you with a few details of my life. But let me warn you, this is a recycled speech. It's generic and it's simple.
Successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. Take Warren Buffet. Here's a guy who must get asked five times a day how he became the most successful investor of his era. His answers? 'Reinvest your profits, limit what you borrow' - are no different from what any fool could tell you. But he's not being cagey - he simply doesn't know. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it, perhaps we even deserve it, but we don't acquire anything from it. And maybe that's why, it cannot be passed on either. Being successful does not mean my children will also be so, however much I teach them what all did in my life, and they follow it to the letter.
Success just happens, really. So, talking about how to become successful is a waste of time. So let me tell you, very honestly, whatever happened to me, happened because I'm really scared of failure. I don't want as much to succeed, as much I don't want to fail. I come from a very normal middle/lower middle-class family, and I saw a lot of failure. My father was a beautiful man, and the most successful failure in the world. My mom also failed to stay with me long enough to see me become a movie star. We were quite poor, actually - at certain junctures of our lives, I had even experienced what we call in Delhi a kudki - how many of you know about it? This is a thing that the government does when you don't pay the rent of your house, and they throw you and your stuff on the roads.
long Live SRK