Udayakumar Gopalakrishnan is a big fan of one-liners. One of his recently launched books Stay On The Road To Mastery has a whopping 153 one-liners written by the author himself. “I always had a flair for writing and the English language. My passion for writing is why at a very young age I won the best article award in the school magazine three years in a row. During my college days, I contributed articles to Outlook as well.”
Fast forward to the year 2016, the author decided to put his years of training knowledge in cold, hard print — leading to the publication of his first book What It Takes To Be A Leader With Passion. “This book did pretty well in the market for a first-time author”. A graduate from Loyola College, he spent 11 years in senior Human Resource roles at major corporates like Murugappa and Rane before founding his own firm CORE MIND in 1993, working with the training and development of corporate professionals.
After the launch of his first book, he was besieged with multiple questions from readers and it was these questions that spurred him to visualise the need for the books Stay On The Road To Mastery and Pause With Questions And Scout For Answers. Rather interestingly, both books were launched on the same day. Imagine that! Uday’s passion for taking his books public drove him to complete the books by October 2018, though the initial idea occurred to him only in 2017. While Stay On... took a year to wrap up, Pause With Questions... was written in a span of one and half months.
Why such long titles in the age of the 140 (now infinite) character tweet? Uday took to the title of the book after hearing a co-facilitator at an international coaching webinar use the phrase 'be on the road to mastery' often. While that statement depicted to him an endless journey, he added a consistency factor, and voila, he had his title.
How did he manage to juggle his training workload and writing? “It was hard but a challenge that I enjoyed. I consciously dropped my client assignments over the last few months, except a few of my long-term clients. This phase of his life was a combination of passion and sacrifice and launching these books were a result of hard and work and self-motivation. After eight tumultuous rounds of editing, proofreading and corrections being made, not to forget the three-week deadline with Amazon for the online book launch, I just know that it was absolutely worth it and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process.” he smiles.
Both books enable every individual to introspect and speak to his/her inner being to understand themselves — and build better lives for both themselves and the people around them. “This introspection is much needed for every corporate professional," who are by default his target audience because they are in "constant need to embrace adaptability to different scenarios”, says the reflective practitioner. Stay on..., according to the author, is filled with musings and one-liners, which enable readers to connect with their emotions. Both books take us through chapters that can help celebrate life through ups and downs.
Pause with Questions... is for professionals and leaders who need to understand why they need to break away from their schedules and take time off to become effective leaders. The idea behind this book is for every individual to elicit answers or solutions that are available with the respective reader. Every single individual is endowed with the wisdom of answers for every question. The content of this book is divided into 'Questions you can ask yourself' and 'Questions you can ask others'.
When asked about who his ideal readers would be, the author explains, “The positioning of my books is such that it targets corporate professionals in the middle and senior management but that does not deprive the juniors of reading it. I know for a fact that there are a good number of individuals in the current generation that love reading and the perks that come along with it.”
