Discover the purpose of life, says Yossi

NEW DELHI: If you think it's a jungle out there in the corporate world, then you should listen to Yossi Ghinsberg. The internationally acclaimed inspirational speaker was lost in the Amazon for 20 days with no food supplies or weapons, but survived to not only tell his story to the world but to also use the law of the jungle to bring order to his own life and to the world of business.
Yossi believes the Amazon experience (which, in retrospect, he thinks wasn't all that harrowing) changed his life and gave him an understanding of his self and life purpose.An experience by itself is only an experience and we become a victim of it only when we start questioning it and saying why me, he says.
Speaking at the Indiatimes Strategy Summit on Motivation and Success in Delhi on Tuesday, Yossi elaborated on concepts like being in the present, thinking positive, realizing your life goals and so on by narrating anecdotes from his survival story. There was a moment during his adventure when he gave up on life. He hadn't had any food for 17 days, was wet day and night and his skin had peeled off from his feet because of an infection. At this point when a helicopter search party failed to mark him in the forest, he plunged into despair and lost all hopes of survival. "I cried and cried and the pain was so much that for the first time I prayed to God to let me die," he says.
But in that moment, he saw a women next to him, pleading to him to get her out of the forest. For two days Yossi took care of her, built her a camp with twigs and palm leaves and felt they would manage their way to safety.
He later realized that the woman was purely a figment of his imagination. But the surreal experience did teach him an important lesson: Doing things for others is a greater motivator than doing them for yourself. Similarly, he draws parallels between competition in the corporate world and the vast bio-diversity of the Amazon. Occupying only 4% of the landmass, the Amazon has 50 % of the species of the world. Still there is no struggle for survival because each species is unique, with an inbuilt mechanism to survive. Companies too should always remind themselves of what they are best at and focus on that rather than annihilating their competition, he says. He says each of us must reconnect with our mind and soul and discover purpose in life. It could be love, success, money or compassion. But find your life goal, he urges. Because life without purpose is recipe for disaster.