Abhinav Pandey’s book guides you on how to make use of your negative traits like arrogance to be productive. He tells Divya Kaushik that his next will be on karma and destiny
Be fake. Be manipulative. Be arrogant. lying is not bad. If someone will tell you to do all this you probably will think he or she is guiding you to make your way out in this bad world by doing all things you were taught not to do as a child. But Abhinav Pandey has a point to make: “All these negative aspects do have something good about them. You can use your them to be productive, learn better things in life and achieve success. The only thing you should know is where to draw a line.” The author who has come up with a self-help book 9 Don’ts To Success believes that negative traits of one’s personality can be used to learn some basic things in life. For instance, he says that lying can be used to develop good communication skills with perfect body language. “let’s face facts and accept that each one of us lies, though the purpose and scale of lying might differ from person to person. When we lie we are very cautious about our body language and we try our best that our expressions, hand and eye movements support the untrue statement that we are going to speak. Taking that as an example, we can try and improve our body language in usual course of communication, too. We can try and express ourselves better in every situation,” explains the author, who didn’t intend on writing a book. “It happened out of the blue. After completing my education I was giving interviews for jobs. First I tried in Mumbai and I did not get what I was looking for. Then I moved to Delhi and gave an interview for a job with a big firm. Even after giving an interview I kept thinking something and the idea to write a book was almost immediate. I was sure I wanted to write a self-help book because I thought I will be able to do justice to it. I based it on success because that is what everyone is running after these days,” shares the author, who has included aspects like arrogance and taking risks in his books. Taking risks is not really a negative trait, we ask. “It is not, but I have included things which stop people from doing better in life. I have seen many people, to be precise, my own friends who are well established in jobs but are blessed with talent like singing. They have faith in their skills but they still are not willing to take risk from the fear of failing. One should not set such strict boundaries for oneself that they act as a barrier to your success. Each chapter in my book comes with tips and control. I want to tell people where to draw a line and how to keep a check on their negative trait. We have to learn to balance negativity or make use of that for something productive,” he adds.
The book is a light and an easy read as Pandey “did not want to preach.” Getting the publishers for the book was a big task. “Profit figures matter for the publishing houses and then there were no takers for a book that tells people to believe in their negative traits. The other point they were apprehensive about was that the book was coming from some 25-year-old and not someone who has seen life in detail. But then finally I managed to convince Grapevine India, who chose to publish the book as it targets that part of the youth who is struggling with their examinations, scores and first generation entrepreneurs. The market is currently flooded with commercial fiction books and a self-help book can certainly be a breather for them,” he says.
The book emphasises on the fact that showing acceptance and being experimental in life can yield great results which are of tremendous value. The spirit of being adventurous is always rejoiced.
Pandey is now working on a book on life. “I will delve into how the machinery of life works. I will talk about karma and destiny. Some believe that it is karma that makes one who he is and some think it is destiny. But I think it is the balance of both. Then I will be looking into things like rebirth and salvation,” he informs.