The Anexas Story - Chapter 45: Celebrating Sacrifices

Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn, I continue to write a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone! 

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If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want will be the sacrifice. For any worthy ambition, you need to sacrifice a piece of yourself. Our mission statement reads ‘Enabling individuals and organizations achieve excellence.’ And it is not easy to enable others to excel. It demands sacrifice. All of the team members have sacrificed a lot to see Anexas fulfill its mission. Almost everyone by choosing an entrepreneur-like status while working as an employee with us has in a way sacrificed the security of a regular job. They embraced the uncertainty which a mid-scale consulting company brings in, especially in uncertain economic times.

For me, the travels a consulting job demands also meant a significant sacrifice on time I spent with my family. I missed attending some of the annual functions of my twin kids, dining out on our marriage anniversaries, celebrating own birthdays and being with parents when they needed me during health crises. Varsha has also been very understanding, I must say. People sometimes jokingly ask me, “Is your wife still with you?”

I answer that. Yes, I am like that. My neighbors in Bangalore think that I stay in Bangalore and travel for assignments to the Middle East. Friends in Copenhagen complain that I am not spending enough time during summers in Denmark. In Dubai, people think that I travel for my job. In Riyadh, my neighbors like how often I go on vacation to India to meet my family. Such perplexed puzzlement shows no signs of receding in the future with incessant addition of new cities.

However, on a positive note, travels are not as bad as they are said to be. Traveling around the world has given me a chance to visit places I always wished to see. I learned a lot during these trips, which I often undertook with my family. This is especially true for the historical places about which I had read in school days. Traveling there gave me a chance to connect to childhood apart from getting a peek into history. For example, while consulting one of the largest steel plants in India in Durgapur, I was able to visit Rabindranath Tagore's house in Shanti Niketan reliving those moments many decades back which students must have spent with Gurudev. Similarly, while consulting in Chandigarh for one of the largest FMCG companies, I was able to visit Amritsar, the Golden Temple and also Khatkar Kalan, the birthplace of Bhagat Singh, the great freedom fighter whom I adore so much. Conducting workshops in Delhi enabled me to visit Mahatma Gandhi’s Birla House residence and his ‘Samadhi Sthal’ in Rajghat, and while in Nagpur I could visit his Ashram in Sevagram.

Workshops around the world, right from Switzerland to Korea, have given me a chance to take my family to those countries and visit all the historical places these countries are known for, be it the ruins of the Roman empire, the Colosseum, Tower of London, Lincoln Memorial, White House or the Great Wall of China. One more reason to look forward to assignments around the world! As they say, if you wish to soar higher, be prepared to fly longer! However, the kind of travels Anexas demands can take you around the world umpteen times. Frankly, it is not good for the spine, the colon and the sweat glands and it is not always so much fun, but as they say, when things get tough, the tough get going.

My family would not dispute the last sentence, I hope. Yet another thing I miss is leading large teams which I was used to when working in large corporates. When you are on your own, you deal with a smaller team than what you are capable of leading. Unless, of course, your venture itself becomes a large corporate, which obviously was not so in our case!

And then there is one more thing which I miss. As a child and even during my college I always wanted to drown myself in the nectar of literature and the vast literary knowledge great writers and poets have left for the world to read. My poems and stories published during early days is sufficient proof of this fascination for languages. This love for literature might be stemming from the literary atmosphere my parents provided in childhood as both of them have done exemplary work as writers.

But you can’t do everything in life. For Anexas, I had to sacrifice my love for literature and poetry completely. More so, Hindi literature. I have, on and off, written in Hindi and sometimes in English. Some critics have indeed appreciated those bits and pieces of random creations. But virtually, such contributions from me have been sporadic, given the kind of rigor running an enterprise entails. I can understand, because deep inside me, my inner self reasons that instead of creating poems, why not create opportunities, jobs and enterprises, which can bring the same joy to people that a good piece of literary work brings to its readers? Enterprise needs sacrifices. It asks for blood and sweat, not only yours, but that of your loved ones or things you love, too.

Dreams have a price, but not living your dreams has a bigger price.

By the way, I have still not sacrificed one dream, the one and only one fantasy, the childhood dream! To meet the other Amitabh. Yes, the Bachchan! Would love to ask about his sacrifices when I meet him.

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For subsequent articles, please watch this space.

You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com

or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7

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Amitabh Saxena is founder of Anexas, a well-known lean six sigma and project management consulting organisation. He has trained over 50,000 participants and has 30 years of experience in consulting more than 300 organisations around the world including Fortune 100 companies across industry domains. With a strong team of 25 Master Black Belts, his organisation Anexas has been helping individuals and organisations achieve eminence through excellence since 2006. They can be reached on [email protected].