There are few individuals and just by coming in contact with them transforms lives. Jeet Kumar is one such individual whom I came across about 15 years back. He has been my mentor and played an instrumental role in me becoming an entrepreneur. Having a conversation with Jeet always leaves me in awe as he gives sharp perspectives on what human beings are capable of and how we can achieve great things together by being a leader. In this process it is equally important to be at peace internally and spread joy around the people we live with – our family, co-workers, business partners, customers, associates and largely a community. Living an abundant life of abundance opens up so many possibilities in an individual’s life. I am very glad to see he has shaped his perspectives in the form of the book – Insights into creating abundance.
Author: Jeet Kumar
Amazon link: Insights into creating abundance
Knowing Jeet over the years I have seen him re-iterating a few simple yet powerful foundations one should follow in their lives in order to achieve abundance. In his book also he covers them and much more with details. Since this is a book review blog, I would like to call out the top-5 points that I have learned or learned from him which is the center theme of this book as well.
- Freedom to choose: Unlike any living organisms on Earth human beings are the only species which can choose. This means, between what happens to us and how we react to that there is always a delta. This delta is way bigger than what we think which in fact changes the way we live our daily lives. Things can happen in the form of poverty, mental and physical limitations, challenging environments or difficult people around. Irrespective of all these challenges one can choose to live a life of abundance by spreading a lot of joy and happiness. Suffering is always optional. Jeet takes example from his early childhood situations with so many challenges and how exercising the freedom has helped him to start living a life of abundance.
- Leadership: Once an individual makes a choice so many new possibilities open up where you start seeing every individual be it a family member or an employee as a possibility rather than a Human Resource (HR). This leads to the natural transition of an individual getting transitioned into a leader by bringing in meaningful and transformative changes in others lives. Here being a leader doesn’t mean a title or position or designation rather setting the vision of abundance and helping others to achieve the same. This means an individual goes beyond himself by fully leveraging the power to choose and the vision to make a contribution in this world. Jeet delves into tons of practical examples and how he realized the leadership potential in himself and how it became a foundational thinking of his organization InTimeTec by building the next generation of leaders. In subsequent chapters he goes deeper into three integral elements for the leadership to be effective – Integrity, Listening and Conversations.
- Integrity: While there are a lot of definitions of integrity Jeet calls it out as completeness. Integrity is ensuring 360 degree of an individual is aligned in terms of vision, intent, conversation and execution. Often we see many individuals having so many contradictions in their lives. Few examples could be:
- Excellent academic record but poor collaboration skills with co-workers
- Top performer in the organization but had a divorce
- Very caring father but failed to provide financial stability for his family
- Successful entrepreneur but engaged in fraudulent financial transactions
If you see in the above examples the core issue is incompleteness in some aspect. Integrity is all about replacing but with and in order to lead a life that is complete. When we live a life of and thinking-saying-doing happens in a synchronous way which is nothing but integrity. For a leader integrity is the foundation on which further things need to be built.
- Listening: This is my favorite topic! Right from school days we are often trained by our teachers on various modes of communication namely reading, writing and talking. Unfortunately the fourth and most important form of human-to-human communication, listening is never thought formally in any schools. Listening is such an integral aspect of being a leader which Jeet calls out in various chapters. Listening means getting into the shoes of the other person. This doesn’t mean you are agreeing or disagreeing to what the other person is saying. You are neither providing solutions nor getting judgmental. It’s purely an action performed to understand things from the other person’s perspective. Most often we confuse listening with hearing which is about providing fixes or taking in only what you want to hear or push your agenda in the name of listening.
- Conversations: While integrity and listening helps an individual to lay a strong foundation of being a leader. However, in order to design a process to achieve the common vision, drive action, make course corrections, cleaning up the mess you create requires a lot of conversations with others. It can be a teenager son who is going through difficult times or a customer with whom the work relationship has strained or a low performing employee whose contributions need to be improved. All these things can’t happen overnight by swallowing a pill or with the help of a machine. As a leader you are supposed to make it happen by having conversations and enjoying the whole process. During this process it is natural for the leader to have break-downs in terms of poorly completed conversation, missing delivering a particular result or failing to get the transformation on the other individual. In such cases the leader should have the necessary humility to accept it and clean-up the next day and show up powerfully as a leader on a daily basis. There are multiple chapters where Jeet reiterates the importance of having powerful conversations.
There are about 8 billion human beings on the planet today. Every day at least a few thousands are born and die on the same day. If we extrapolate, our Earth itself is such a tiny piece in the whole universe. The lifespan of a human being can be considered either too insignificant in this whole scheme of things. Here we have a choice. Either survive / suffer on a daily basis and die one day! Or live a life of abundance by being a leader, enjoy every moment of life, making a huge difference to other human beings and die one day! Again the choice is yours. If you want to explore the second choice i.e the path of abundance learning and applying some of the points from this book will make your life really worth it. Live on!
