We Deserve: Claiming Our True Worth

By Rayol John Augustus Ph.D.

We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years. All of us have our own mountains to climb and conquer. One thing is certain: we will have to actively pursue success. It does not just happen. It is based on small everyday choices and efforts. It requires constant work and care. It requires us to be persistent, consistent, and patient. We may succeed, or we may fail. Every time we fail, it brings us closer to success.

People who are successful are the ones who keep failing and getting up. The most important thing is not to quit trying. We have to start by selling ourselves to ourselves. Once we achieve some success, it is easy to forget all the small efforts we have put in over the years. So it is wise to take a good hard look into our life. We will see the long way we have come and appreciate every part of it. We need to appreciate ourselves and know that whatever we have we deserve.

When we finally succeed, all that people see are the results. Suddenly, something you worked on for years looks like an overnight success. But as we know, success is never a coincidence. It is not a question of luck either. The harder we work, the luckier we get! If we want people to be aware of it, let them be a part of our journey. Let them know that whatever we have achieved, it is because we learned, we followed certain principles, we got out of our comfort zone, we changed, and we grew. What we have, we deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973661764

Rayol John Augustus Ph.D.

Rayol John Augustus Ph.D. is the Founder and President of the Shreis Scalene Group of medical device companies, Renewable Energy Company and Social Marketing Company. He came to the United States in 1994 as Advisor for Defense Technology to the Ministry of Defense, Government of India. He has a diverse background as an engineer, a diplomat, a businessman and an author. His academic qualifications include a BSc. in Physics, Bachelor’s Degree in Aeronautical Engineering, Post Graduate degree in Business Administration, Diplome de Specialization in Aeronautics, MS in Aerospace, a Ph.D. in Technology Transfer, a Master’s degree in Divinity and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies. As a practicing Christian and as a businessman, Dr.Augustus believes that God wants us to prosper as long as we follow certain laws of success as laid down in the Scriptures. He believes that it is better to try and fail than to not try at all, for all things are possible with God. He is a proponent of seed faith, lives his life trusting God’s law of sowing and reaping and believing that if we do what it takes, we will succeed for we deserve. Dr. Augustus lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA with his wife Prof. Meena Augustus Ph.D., their daughter Nichelle and son Nichol and their families.

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Copyright © 2019 Rayol John Augustus, Ph.D.

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Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

ISBN: 978-1-9736-6175-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-6176-4 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 5/1/2019

Contents

Chapter 1 What Am I Worth?

Chapter 2 We Deserve Happiness

Chapter 3 Are We Entitled?

Chapter 4 Maslow and us

Chapter 5 Let’s play the game

Chapter 6 Am I a Gideon?

Chapter 7 Pain of Comfort

Chapter 8 Let’s keep learning

Chapter 9 Lessons we practice

Chapter 10 Count on us

Chapter 11 Break down the walls

Chapter 12 It’s in our hands

Chapter 13 Born to Succeed

Chapter 14 Our right choices

Chapter 15 A Life of Passion

Chapter 16 Bouncing back

Chapter 17 Running our race

Chapter 18 Watch my back

Chapter 19 Getting along

Chapter 20 Are we butterflies?

Chapter 21 We are just us

Chapter 22 Why put us down?

Chapter 23 Retuned

Chapter 24 Serving for Success

Chapter 25 Is It Worth It?

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife Prof. Meena Augustus Ph.D. From the day I met her in December 1969, she has been a constant source of inspiration to me. What we have and what we are about to receive, we deserve due to her efforts. The best is yet to come Meena.

It is dedicated to our first daughter Sharon. We could not hold that warm drop of sunshine for long. She was ‘born to blush unseen.’

It is dedicated to our second daughter Nichelle. God has blessed her with a lively resilient spirit. Nothing can keep her down or dampen her zest for success. Her good cheer and dynamism inspires us.

It is dedicated to our son Nick. He is all that I wanted to be growing into manhood – quiet, focused, meticulous, daring and caring. He has read Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and Nick is a Man!

Therefore, I dedicate this book to my family, for who we are, for what we believe in and for being ready to stand up, defend and even fight for what we believe in.

We deserve, we will not be denied.

Rayol John Augustus

Disclaimer

What do I have to disclaim in this book? Are we at a point where we can say we have arrived? No. Are we at a level where we can say we have learned everything? No. Are we at a state where we can say all our relationships are happy and thriving? No. Are we at a thriving phase with all our business partners? No. Are all our many ventures profitable? No. Are we at the prime of our physical fitness? No. Are we sure what lies ahead? No. Then what are we talking about?

Yet, the very fact that we realize that all these things are what we lack, keeps us going on and on. We know our weaknesses and so we know our strengths and all that we have received and deserved and all that we will receive and deserve is because we choose only to build on our strengths.

We have fulfilled many of our dreams and we have met many of the milestones we set for ourselves, but we are still in the process of growing and accomplishing. We hope those who are close to us learn from our weaknesses, grow with our strengths and learn to expect and accept the blessings that they have earned and truly deserve.

Rayol John Augustus

Acknowledgement

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves. The greatest good our mentors have done for us is not just in sharing with us their many riches, but rather to reveal to us our own. They have helped us to be ourselves by their own willingness to immerse themselves in our world, in our private feelings and experiences. By their affirmation of us, as we were and are, they have given us support and strength to take the next step and the next, one at a time, in our own growth and prosperity.

We have consistently tried to live up to the expectations that out mentors had of us. I thank our mentors who allowed us to see the hope inside ourselves.

You, dear Mentors, are what we deserve!

Rayol John Augustus

Preface

Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these, they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.

~Francis of Assisi

The second paragraph of the first article in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America states that, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The older we get, the more we realize that happiness takes work. Life is a great equalizer. We realized that those who smile in public have been through everything that life threw at them, as much as those who moan, cry and scream. However, they just have the tenacity, the courage and the strength to smile anyway.

A lot of us do not think we deserve the best or that we deserve success. We miss happiness because we do not think we can have happiness. One reason is that we have an inherent fear of failure and of losing face in front of those whom we respect and love. We do not stop for a moment to think that the degree to which we are willing to risk looking bad is in direct proportion to our success. My wife and I are entrepreneurs and as entrepreneurs, we have learned that we have to be ambitious, to be willing to step up to the plate and do what needs to be done to reach our goals. We may not have everything that we need and some people may not like what we have to offer, but we have learned not to care but to do whatever it takes to fulfill our dream keeping in mind the good of those around us.

When I was sitting in the Social Security Administration Office, it was a rude awakening for me as I looked out of the window and saw a flock of Canadian geese flying south. Those geese did not need a visa or a passport to travel the world. Why do we humans need one? We were born free. Do we not have the right to travel free and live free? If I am a contributing member of society then I should be free to contribute positively wherever I want to. Am I encroaching on someone else’s territory? On their rights? On their freedom? This I can understand. We came to the United States because we too had a dream. We believe that we deserved to be free and wealthy and we were willing to work for it.

This was our ambition. Were we wrong to aim so high? Was our ambition misplaced? I do not think it a crime to reach for the stars, but I consider it a crime if there are no stars to reach for. Ambition is one of the globally admired personality traits. It can also bring us benefits because of the continuous achievements we will make in life. Of course, I am aware that certain types of ambition can go wrong when they affect other people’s lives in a negative way. To us, the best type of ambition is when our ambition becomes the desire to reach a big goal or to fulfill your life purpose. If our ambition can lead us to do things, where other people are better off because we were ambitions, then there is nothing like it.

Our wish list is long, but simple and doable. We want to make something of our lives. We want to leave a legacy behind us. We want to be remembered for all the right reasons. We want to do things right, and we want to do it within our allocated time span. Mark Twain said, The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. We do not want to live in a trance and sleep walk through life. We do not want to be mired in the stability of mediocrity. Life is short and it can unexpectedly end. We want to live life to its fullest, with our family and our friends and those ‘friends’ whom we have not yet met. We want to go through life at our own pace where we can and whenever we want to stop and smell the roses. We want to be able to live in our home, not get back to just sleep in a house.

As I said, our wish list is doable. However, we need to make some changes and wise up on our choices in life. Meena and I had to decide what was important to us. We were not going to live in a rut and do what people expected of us. Theodore H White said, To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform. We want to do what we think is right and what makes us happy. Everything else will then fall in place. We have that faith! Were we risking everything coming to America? Were we risking everything by stepping out and starting our own businesses? How can anyone live life without taking those chances? We did not want to look back on our lives and say that we never took chances or fought the good fight. We rather take chances and fail, than take no chances at all. Personally, I would rather leave this world with a bang than a whimper!

Life is without meaning and we bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever we ascribe it to be. Just being alive is the meaning in itself. We had to be willing to get rid of the life we had planned for ourselves, to have the life that is waiting for us. As in nature, the old skin has to be shed before the new one can surface. We do not need anyone’s permission to be our true selves. We do not want to change others, but only ourselves. A great stumbling block for us was the illusion of control. It was the belief that we could control people and events around us to serve our own purpose. It is an illusion and does not work, to achieve whatever it is that we may be seeking at a particular point in time. Although this illusion is shattered almost every day of our lives, we keep clinging to it. To clarify, we do have some control over our responses to the many stimuli that come our way, but the illusion of control takes our attention away from this small window of control, to the world at large, which is largely beyond our control.

The way we live is in our head. Change what is in our head and we change our life. Another illusion we had was that we could manage time. It is not ours to manage. We could only choose how we spend what was given to us. We could spend it in the past, the present or the future. If we think about it, we realize that the past does not exist and neither does the future. The only true reference point we have to this moment in time, and to this thing we label existence, is a feeling of presence, of being here in this body, of seeing the world through these eyes. You cannot feel the past or the future, but you can feel what it feels like to touch something right now, to see something, to hear something. We mess up our lives by dwelling in the past and mulling over what has happened or constantly and anxiously anticipating what is to come, while all the time missing the present. Meena and I found and still find that we are victims of time. We had to force ourselves into understanding that to not be living in the present is to be pulled apart between two worlds, the past and the future. To constantly reside in this state, prevents us from enjoying life and finding happiness. Every moment is a new moment and every day is a new day, a blank canvas for us to paint on.

Another enemy we had to contend with was the ‘dream-stealers’, people who were always trying to tell you something cannot be done. Sometimes this comes from the most unexpected sources, even those who have been trained to only think positive. In our businesses, Meena and I have to live with it every day of our lives. No matter what we decide to do with our lives, there will always be someone around to point out the many ways we could fail. I read somewhere that every winner loses, but not every loser wins. Successful people do not start out successful. What makes them successful is that they keep pushing through failure. So why should we compromise on our dreams or our values? Are we closed-minded? No. We always try to keep an open mind. Just because we are right about something we do, does not mean that there are no other better ways to do it or to look at it.

Meena and I speak through our actions. Just ideas are useless if we do not act upon them. There are times when we do something and someone else comes to tell us that they had the same idea. So have hundreds of others on the internet! Why did you not do something about it? When something is done, then people step in to tell you how it could have been done better. Why could you not do it yourself in the first place instead of waiting for us to do it? We want to do things while everyone else is just talking about it. It may not be earth-shattering breakthroughs, but these are things that we want to do for our families and ourselves. These are earth shattering to us, because it will leave a legacy for those following us. We will do these things, whatever it takes, while we can and we will get what we deserve. As Mark Twain says,

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.- Mark Twain

Rayol John Augustus

Chapter 1

Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life.

~Nathaniel Branden

What Am I Worth?

W ho wants to know? Why do you want to know? How do I even answer that question? I know that we so often answer it by social