Moving Forward Through the Pandemic — An Interview With Vijay Eswaran

Vijay Eswaran is a prominent Malaysian entrepreneur, speaker, philanthropist, and author. He speaks regularly at global events, including the World Economic Forum, and has received numerous awards for his endeavors in both industry and philanthropy. His accolades include the ASEAN Business Advisory Council and Lifetime Achievement Award for Global Entrepreneurship in 2016.

Eswaran was born in Penang, Malaysia to a prominent and well-educated family. Although he enjoyed a privileged childhood, he spent his younger years working as a taxi driver in order to fund his higher education. Finally, he landed a position as an information system engineer and spent time working for various companies in North America and South-East Asia, including IBM.

In 1998, Eswaran struck out on his own and established the QI Group of Companies, a multinational conglomerate with interests in direct selling, retail, financial services, real estate, hospitality, and education. Since its inception, this network has trained and empowered over one million entrepreneurs across the globe.

A defining feature of Eswaran’s career has been his dedication to promoting positive change in his communities. Environmentally, Eswaran controls all that he can, ensuring that his company adheres to sustainable practices in business. He has, for example, instituted a company-wide policy of promoting vegetarian meals, and he has placed a ban on single-use plastics in all offices of the QI Group. In terms of building community, Eswaran also commits 10% of the company’s revenues towards the RYTHM Foundation, the social impact initiative of the QI Group.

The 2004 publication of Sphere of Silence marked the highly-lauded beginning of Eswaran’s career as a prominent author in his industry as well. The debut text has been translated to numerous languages and has been reviewed by people around the world. In the text, Eswaran outlines a guiding practice, which he dubs the Sphere of Silence. He describes the practice as a modern-day tool for achieving success and promotes the idea that sixty minutes of silence a day can help anyone achieve their goals. According to Eswaran, the practice is made up of three paths: Those of duty, knowledge, and devotion. It sets into motion the process of liberating the mind. Like any pursuit, practice is important, and with time, applying the Sphere of Silence can help readers sharpen their minds, improve the focus of their days, and attain whatever their goals may be.

How can the Sphere of Silence help us navigate through life?

Well the best way to describe it is that we are in essence spending an hour to control the other twenty-three hours in the game. Now the question is whether it’s worth spending that hour focused on how to control the remaining twenty-three. The reason that this is important is because more often than not, the twenty-three hours that I’m talking about is like being on a roller coaster.

Throughout life, most of us are just basically running from one appointment to another, one meeting to another; we are constantly running to something that is we identify as urgent, and this is the problem with our lives. We go running from one urgent matter to another urgent matter, trying to keep up but leaving behind what is truly important. However, what can change our lives is if we learn to differentiate between what is urgent and what is important. Let me explain.

If I met you a week ago, and we were crossing each other on the street and I said “Hi, can you have a cup of tea,” and you said “No” because you had something urgent to do, such as go to the bank. More often than not, if we met again later, I might say, “Hey, we missed a cup of coffee the last time, you were rushing somewhere. You know, I can’t remember what it was,” the joke is you probably wouldn’t remember it either. It seemed critically urgent at the time, so much so that you postponed this chance meeting that we might have had. However, you forgot what the urgent matter was the instant it was done. That’s what urgent means, and those events make up 90%, maybe 98% of our lives.

Now here’s my take: Everything that’s urgent can wait.

Most things that are urgent don’t last a day, let alone the week. So the challenge here is, if you look at the people, the so-called movers and shakers on this planet, people who have drawn the lines that we follow, who designed the roads we drive, who wrote the music we listen and the books that we read — these people function more in the space of important than urgent.

Therein lies the so-called secret, if you like. If you can balance your day so that you spend more time doing things that are important as opposed to urgent, then your life changes.

So, how would you define the two? As I said, if something’s urgent, it usually dies within the day; you’re lucky if it lasts a week — if it is important enough to last a week.

But if you’re doing something important, the more important it is, the longer it lasts. So, if you’re doing something that will make a difference to you in a year, now that would fall into the category of being important. If you think of something you did five years ago, and it is still something you remember, now that was truly important.

So, the question is: How much of today will count in a year? How much of today will count in five years?

The Chinese have a brilliant saying, and I think it clearly defines the difference between urgency and importance so well. The saying goes like this: A mendicant, or a beggar, lives from meal to meal. He cannot think beyond his next meal. His life actually revolves around one meal to the next. A laborer is paid daily wages, and therefore his day runs from one day on to the next. Basically, sunrise to sunset, and then it starts all over again. That’s the limit of his imagination.

Then we go on to what is called a farmworker who gets paid by the week. Again, his life runs on a weekly basis. A landlord, he lives off his rent; he lives off his monthly income and his life revolves on a monthly basis. A Mandarin or a nobleman lives basically on a year to year basis. Farmers function season to season.

But a king, a king has to live at least five years at a time. And an emperor, an emperor plans a hundred years at a time. He has to consider three generations down the line. So, the question is: Whose thinking do you practice: that of a mendicant, a laborer, a king, or an emperor?

So, bring me back to what I call the time of COVID-19, which is where we are. How does that type of thinking, how can that help us now?

This is the first time in which you can actually sit down and do things that you have actually never been able to do until now: introspect, retrospect, redesign your life, take a look back.

First of all, you should begin with gratitude. The most powerful thing and the most powerful emotion is gratitude. You cannot be negative if you are grateful; you also need to be positive. You need to recognize that every day is a gift — Every 24 hours, every time you open your eyes, it’s truly a gift, and it’s a gift from the man above. But even though you have a gift that is only limited to 24 hours, you need to plan a hundred years at a time, like the emperor.

Now, how do you deal with that contradiction? You have to do what you need to do to get through the day and that’s urgent, but at the same time, you need to focus on the impact that you’re going to leave in this world, the legacy that you are going to leave in this world. Your children, your neighbors, every impact goes out in concentric circles, like a ripple in a pond. The question here is how important is that thing? How important is that impact? What are you doing to truly make a difference, and what can you do differently?

But if you serve the greater good with your talents and your skills, you really do end up in a good place. And everybody else does too. It sounds like you’re saying that with different words?

Pretty much. And strangely, the contrast of silence to me is awakening. Not so much from Eastern philosophy but primarily coming from the Christian belief. Plus, some of my own beliefs.

I spent a year traveling around Europe and I ended up in a little monastery — A Franciscan monastery where I learned the practice of silence, which was performed during the time of lent.

The thing that woke me up to it, which remains very clear in my mind, was when I was sitting down just talking about silence and this beautiful description was given to me by a lay father at the time or a lay brother at the time. He said to me the oldest scripture is the body, our human body. Uniquely enough the body was structured in a fashion, he explained, that the scripture is our bodies written by the hand of God. He says you have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, a left and right side of the brain, a left and right side of the heart, two hands, two limbs — but slam in the middle of the face is this singular thing, and that’s the mouth.

Now, if you want to try and interpret this writing that is written across your body, in the design of your body, which is obviously created with intent, then he says, you must observe twice as much as you speak, think twice as much as you speak, hear and listen twice as much as you speak, work twice as much as you speak, and read twice as much as to speak. Yet what do we do? The exact opposite.

Is it Malaysian or if it’s Eastern where all these ideas are stemmed from?

I spent more time in the west than I did in the east, so it is pretty much evenly spread out in my experience.

Your grandfather, you mentioned something about how your grandfather had some ideas and that you pirated some of your grandfather’s ideas.

Don’t we all? I think grandparents have a great influence in our lives because they often get to spend more time with their grandkids than the parents do in the early years of life.

A lot of that influence came from my granddad. My granddad practiced silence every day of his life. For him, it was a habit. I didn’t really get into it until much later in my own life, but once I did, I totally understood the strength that you can draw from it.

Lastly, can you tell me about your latest book?

Well my latest book is called Two Minutes from The Abyss, and I guess that says it all. We are only ever two minutes from the abyss, two minutes from the edge, as it were. The book basically talks about exactly many of the things that I have discussed here. Ultimately, if you’re going to put it into one line, the book simply says, “Get up again each time.”