It was November of 1993.  I was into the 10th year of my working life, a young father of two trying to provide a comfortable life for my family . My personal life was picture perfect but my professional life was anything but. I was stuck in a job  I hated, with a boss that I could not get along with and a set of  colleagues who were in this constant competition to see who could suck up more to the boss. Every week day was a torture and the end of the work day couldn’t come soon enough. I had, in all modesty, an outstanding academic record and  I kept asking  myself if all the blood, sweat and tears  spent giving myself the best chance to succeed professionally finally did not mean anything if this was what the rest of my working life was going to look like.

” Why did you stay?” would be a fair question to ask and the answer was simple – I was too scared to quit because I had a family that I needed to provide for and I did not have any family wealth to fall back on. The choice was binary – either grit my teeth and put up with the frustrations on the job front or quit and put my family at risk. And so  I  continued to show up for work every day, caught in a hopeless no-win situation – till that day in November of 1993, when my outlook on life changed forever.

It all began innocuously. A brief memo from HR that I had been nominated to attend an internal training program on ” Time Management” over a weekend later in the month. My first reaction was to go completely ballistic –  it was bad enough having to interact with these colleagues during the work week without having to sacrifice time with my family over the weekend to spend even more time with them. I looked at the participants’ list – and it had every one from the Chairman to the entire top and senior management – and my next thought was why in the world a group of obviously successful managers would need to be schooled on managing their time better. Opting out was not an option ( remember this was me trapped in a box at the time ) and so, it was with all the emotions of a sacrificial lamb being led to the altar, that I dragged myself on Saturday to the training program.

The trainer was a Professor Kichu Krishnan from Bangalore – a very pleasant, extroverted person and some one that I liked almost immediately. His initial remarks really caught my attention and I started thinking that this would not be such a wasted weekend after all. He said – and I paraphrase here – ” I am not here to tell you how to manage your working hours better. That is something you guys have already figured out and each of you has adopted a system that works for you. My objective is something bigger. Each one of us comes in to this world with a finite amount of this resource called time and what I hope to achieve over the next two days is to provide each of you with insights on how best to leverage this resource.”  Powerful, impactful and it immediately caught my attention. He then went on to set the stage in terms of how he would go about doing this. The program then really got going. Prof Krishnan started off by telling  us that it was important that each of us needed to have a set of life time goals, to serve as a sort of lodestar to where each of us wanted to finally end up. As an exercise, we  each took a few minutes to write down our life time goals. He then wanted us to write down a list of things we would like to achieve in the next 5 years ( medium-term ) followed by a list that included our immediate goals for the next 6 months. He then asked us to compare the three lists. ” There has to be something you are  trying to do in the next  6 months that has a bearing on your 5 year goals, which, in turn, has an impact on your life time goals”, said Prof Krishnan. I was not privy to the lists that the other participants put together but, in my case, and, from the general reaction of the others in the room, there was not a great deal of correlation between the three lists for most. I was already getting increasingly convinced that the weekend was not going to be a complete waste of time and then Prof Krishnan asked us to prepare a 4th list. ” Lets put together a 4th list. You go to your  doctor and he tells you that you are terminally ill and that you have only 6 more months to live. In that situation, your immediate, medium and life-time goals all become one and the same. In that unfortunate situation, what are your life-time goals?”, he said.  I thought long and hard and put together a list of what I felt absolutely needed to be addressed before the 6 months ran out. Once we were all done, Prof Krishnan instructed,” Now compare the 4th list with the first  3 lists and see what they have in common.” Again, I had no access to the other participants’ lists but I was  startled  to find that, in my case, the first  3 lists were overwhelmingly professional goals and objectives while the 4th list was deeply personal and entirely family related. Like the mundane but important tasks of writing a will, making sure the life insurance premiums were paid, ensuring all bank accounts were joint etc to maximizing the time I would spend with my loved ones and checking off my bucket list. And then he uttered the words that changed my life forever – ” HOW DO YOU  KNOW YOU ACTUALLY HAVE MORE THAN 6 MORE MONTHS TO LIVE?”

That’s absolutely true. We go through life assuming that life stretches ahead of us endlessly and that we could always get down to doing the things we really needed and wanted to do at some indeterminate point in the future. And then, one day, we wake up to the realization that life has gone by and its too late. What a tragedy and what a waste of a life !! That was the whole point of Prof Krishnan’s message – the 4th list is my true list of goals and objectives. Take care of the items on that list and the 1st three lists will take care of themselves. The rest of the training program passed in a blur but this message was so powerful that I have based my life from that point on this basic tenet – If you need or want to do something, the time to act is now because tomorrow might be too late. That Saturday night, my wife and I discussed how frustrating my professional life was and that I would like nothing better than to be my own boss. She fully backed me and told me that I should chase my dreams. In 7 days following that training program, I walked into my boss’s room and offered my resignation – it was one of the most satisfying experiences in my life. A month later, on Dec 31, 1993, I had served my notice period and on Jan 1, 1994, I took my first  steps as a self-employed entrepreneur. I have never looked back , nor have I ever regretted that decision. From Jan 1, 1994, I was and have been the master of my own destiny. I have lived life on my terms, done most of the things I have always wanted to do and have enjoyed a tremendous work-life balance ( which to me was an overriding priority ). If I compare myself to my peers, like my business school batch mates, I am probably not the most successful from a financial point of view. But I can guarantee that I have lived a much fuller and satisfying life than almost all of them.

There are examples from within my own life and family about the need to take care of the 4th list. My sister was married to a rising star in the IT consulting business and had so many opportunities to travel the globe with her husband. She turned them down because she thought she needed to be around her children when they were in high school. ( I understand fully that that was probably what she wanted to do , that this was her 4th list ). Her constant refrain was that she would start travelling with her husband once both children were off to college. In the spring of 2003,  soon after her younger child was accepted into University of Michigan,  she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. And, with that, ended not just her plans to travel with her husband but also put the brakes on her husband’s career progression – he pretty much spent the next 4 years working from home taking care of her till she passed away in 2007.

So, here is my advice to all of you reading this. Don’t assume that you have all the time in the world to chase your dreams. Prepare a 4th list like I did in Nov 1993 and see that list through. That is your real list of hopes, dreams and aspirations and  focus on making those a reality.