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This is Karan Bajaj and today I want to talk about a topic which is very important to me.
How to become exceptional?
And I’ll use my own example of going from a mid-list commercial fiction writer in India to getting a six-figure, worldwide publishing deal with Penguin Random House within a year of making that intention.
So what I’ve learned about how to become exceptional?
- You need an exceptional goal.
- You need to take exceptional actions towards getting to that goal.
- You need exceptional persistence.
– Let me deconstruct this a little bit. So let’s start with an exceptional goal. For me this meant, I set an intention that I want to be a New York Times, number one bestselling author. Now for someone else, this could have been perhaps an easy goal to accomplish but I have never had an MFA. I’ve never taken any formal writing course and I’ve always basically taught myself to write. So to set an intention for me, who was just a small writer in India to become a worldwide, New York Times, number one bestseller was a big goal to set. So that was kind of step one, having a goal, an exceptional goal allows you to work towards that exceptional goal.
– The second step is that you need to take exceptional actions towards accomplishing that goal. I realized very quickly that if I had to accomplish this goal that I’d set for myself I would have to do things very differently from what I had done in the past. And also very different to how people do things. So for me, that meant that I decided to take a year off to just research and write the book. Again, this could be something that’s pretty simple for other people but for me coming from very Indian conditioning of having a job and kind of working well in the corporate career. And it was kind of a big move but I knew that an exceptional goal required exceptional actions. So I decided to go cold turkey, I quit my job. And for a year I just researched and wrote the book. And that research took me from Europe to India by road. Living in hostels, living in pretty bare living conditions. And then in ashrams in India, I spent months on end. Also in meditation retreats, in silent meditation because that was the theme of the book. So coming from a very kind of you know, standard corporate kind of existence to take a whole year off to do this stuff was the exceptional action I took towards the exception goal.
– The third thing I’ve learned towards becoming exceptional is to have exceptional persistence. Because anytime you go against the grain to reach a very, very lofty destination, you’re gonna face a lot of rejection. So in my case, I was rejected 61 times by almost every literary agent in the US, before I was accepted by one. And then I got multiple publishing offers within a week of being accepted. But I had to go through a journey of being rejected 61 times over six or seven months. And every day it hurt but I made the intention to keep getting better in order to accomplish my goal. So how do you become exceptional today? I would say just three things. Set an exceptional goal. Realize that you’ll have to take very exceptional actions that people around you are not taking towards getting that goal. And third be prepared for a lot of rejection and don’t give up, just be persistent. If you do that, I think as Napoleon Hill in ‘Think and Grow Rich‘ said “If you have an exceptional goal in mind you are setting yourself apart 59 from 98% of people because 98% of people” are not thinking like that.” So this is the summary of what I’ve learned on how to become exceptional.
I hope it was useful and as always I’ll keep sharing snippets of my learnings over the course of the next few months with you.
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