Congrats on your new book, Unleashing the Greatness in You: The Power of Self-Leadership. What’s your motivation for writing it?

I believe that every parent wants their child to be great. Every employer wants their employees to be great ones—and everyone who starts work wants to do a great job.

I also truly believe everyone can be great! Based on my own personal journey, my children’s aspirations, my consulting work with many different industries and organizations in many countries as well as my executive coaching work, I have seen people from different educational backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities embark on the journey to greatness, and achieve it. This has been most gratifying for me.

Greatness is not just a dream. It is achievable.

Yes, anyone can  be great—especially you!

 

What are the challenges you faced in writing this book?

This is perhaps one of the most difficult books I have ever written. My first challenge was to define what exactly I meant by greatness—unless you know where you are going, you will be lost in the jungle of misplaced values and misguided role-models.

Second, I didn’t want it to be a do-it-yourself book. I wanted it to be a book to inspire people, and encourage them to look deep into themselves to realize their own potential. How could I write in such a way that it motivated and encouraged people to act, but not simply be another self-help book? In the end, I filled it with stories of inspiring individuals and how they achieved greatness.

Third, I wanted to deal with real issues and challenges, which have derailed many promising people’s ambitions. I wanted to candidly confront the hard issues like greed, sex, morality—issues that we seldom talk about.

Finally, I wanted to encourage those who have failed to recover. I wanted to help them recover from their failures and mistakes, and rise up to greatness again.

 

Why is this book so important? Why should people buy it?

I’ve put in everything I’ve seen from decades of studying, learning from and meeting truly great people. But just reading it will do nothing for you—unless you read and digest the content, learn what will derail you, work on ways to become great, recover from your failures and practice self-leadership.

I hope and pray that you will begin (and finish) your journey to greatness. Here’s to your success!