Believe in yourself, and keep changing

We talk to ourselves hundreds of times a day, he says, and much of it settles in the subconscious mind, which then runs us like a programmed computer. Negative self-talk was learned, so it can be unlearned. Tell yourself what you can do.

Look back at the times you trusted yourself and the times you did not, and compare what happened. Don’t cling to the past or blame yourself for it. Feed the subconscious good thoughts, and keep away from people who are sure they will fail.

In his 2025 interview he said something unexpected: perhaps he has held a few illusions about himself, and that is not bad. When you think you are something special, you move towards becoming special; when you think you are nothing, you fall. Whether your graph goes up or down is for you to decide.

Don’t wait for others to lift you up, carry you, pass you or find you a job, he says, and don’t blame corruption or reservation for everything. Tell yourself that these vacancies are for you, and that you will get through. Be stubborn, but stubborn with yourself.

We often treat a physical weakness or disability as the reason we cannot progress. He tells the story of Beethoven, whose hearing began to fail around 1800 and who was almost deaf by 1818, yet kept composing the music the world still plays. Sympathy and support matter, he says, but a weakness need not decide a life.

The story that moves him most is of a woman with a seventh-class education who fled an abusive marriage with her three children and found work as a maid in Delhi. Her employer, a professor, gave her a pen and a register and asked her to write about herself. The book she wrote was rejected at first, then published, and has since appeared in many languages. If she could do that, he asks, what is our excuse? He calls it one of the examples that have touched him deep inside.

He also tells of the early steamboat in America, when crowds gathered at the river sure it would not move, or would not come back, and called it the devil’s work. A few decades later steamships were crossing the Atlantic. Change always meets disbelief, he says. Your fear exists because you do not accept change. Accept it.

We spend our lives trying to change others and are controlled by what they say: one comment and we are hurt all night, one compliment and we are happy. Learn to be quiet, think about what you can do, and change yourself. And question things, as Socrates taught: don’t accept something only because it is written down or because someone said it.

Believing in yourself, for him, goes with believing in others. Don’t think the world has gone bad, he tells young people; the world runs on a few good people. We are taught to expect the worst: that a pickpocket will be on the train, that the patient died before the doctor came. Say instead that the doctor arrived and saved him. In his own life, he says, hardly two people in a hundred turned out to be bad. And remember the good moments: think of the good things people did for you, not the hurts, and life becomes beautiful.