You are not what your destiny has planned for you. You are the plan for your destiny. Sameer Dua, founder and CEO, the Institution for Generative Leadership, Pune, comes across as a classical philosopher from the era of existentialism and individualism, talking about the ability of a single mind to challenge and change his circumstances.
His book Declaring Breakdowns propagates the idea of a post-circumstance era, where people can rethink instead of blindly accepting their ‘default futures’. Dua starts out by talking about his separation from his wife and his daughter, and how that led him to stop and take responsibility for a personal crash and simply refuse to accept it as his fate.
He then speaks about the ‘5 AM club’, which he founded with his friends who took similar pledges in their lives during that time. In six simple, readable and relatable steps, he tells you how this can be done. Once you have gracefully accepted a breakdown in your life, start focusing on the facts of the moment—true and false. This restores reason. Then ask yourself what the future will hold if you decide to take no action. That’ll scare you slightly and prompt you into identifying missing actions, which he believes are the conversations we should be having with like-minded people.
These steps lead to execution, along with a community that is ready to achieve and share the new, hard-earned future. Dua lays emphasis on the concepts of transparency and interruptions in a world where most just sit back and derive comfort simply by harbouring ideas of a better tomorrow. What sets Dua’s writing apart from the other corporate motivational literature out there is his breaking up of the concept of big change into tiny doable fragments, which he hand-holds his readers through.
By the end of this sub-headed book, believing in Dua’s thoughts is like believing in your own, personal and universal.