The Power of Perseverance with Principles...By James Sinclair h-h

August 2, 2007

1st Augest 2009 ”Making money is not the driving rationale for my being in business. Our focus is to serve. I face total financial disaster without fear of lack. I cannot lack since abundance is everywhere. The only place a recession exists is in the closed mind of ignorance.” - James Sinclair, Chairman of Tan Range Exploration, Ltd., USA/Tanzania The Power of Perseverance with Principles James Sinclair is the Chairman of Tan Range Exploration, Ltd., USA/Tanzania. He is known internationally for calling the top of the gold market in 1980. Being a trader came naturally to him, he told us. “My father was a man of extraordinary discipline and extraordinary human capacity, and was one of the greatest traders ever on Wall Street. As a result, I already knew what I wanted to be when I was six or seven years old. “Even as a kid I always wanted to know God, and I prayed, ‘I don’t know where you are or who you are, I just know you are. So you’ve

got to find me ‘cause I don’t know how to find you’. My mother was a strong Catholic, but I wasn’t too much into church. However, I did know that there was something out there making it all happen,” he confided. “My spiritual practice has matured since I’ve known my spiritual teacher, Sathya Sai Baba. For me spirituality is a constant event within the human experience. It is included in our thoughts and activities that take place in our day-to-day lives. Creativity can materialise through any individual anywhere at anytime. But the means of that is what Sathya Sai Baba has taught and it is very simple: it is to “watch” and be happy. Whenever Swami teaches, he will always define a word in the meaning that he intends to communicate, so it may not necessarily be in the dictionary. “Watch” is to watch your words, actions, thoughts, character and heart. ‘Happy’ he defines as unity with Divinity. Be brave, don’t lie, do your job, quiet your mind and at the end of

the day fold the cards. Wake up the next morning, see what’s dealt and play it the best you can, don’t worry about it. See the job, do the job and stay out of the misery. If there’s anything that attracts God, it’s having courage and having courage is doing what falls in your lap and doing it right, no matter what it is. “At one time, when looking deeper into the subject, I found one thing in common among the more successful people: introspection. What is introspection? It is quietude, a period of time for reflection. This quiet time is a period of retreat because it is sort of a ceremony. It is a period of time where I reflect upon the teachings of spiritual masters. I consider it to be a critical part of anyone’s life to seek this quietude. So in my organisation, everyday we start here with meditation, right in this office. Previously, I had an office with hundreds of people and even then we started exactly the same way. I tell them, ‘Take your time

and be quiet; begin all activity in silence. Before or after lunch, however you do it, be silent. And before you leave the office at the end of the day, be silent.’ “When I was the Chairman of the Board of a public company in the late 80’s/early 90’s, their stock price grew from US 19 cents to US $56 and was then bought by a major corporation. How did we do this? We raised our corporate profile by our personal behaviour. I went to Tanzania, Africa and lived with the people and we acted as responsible citizens, undertaking the needs of an area of a developing country that was within the scope of our economic impact and environment. We saw to the needs of the people and their health; we built a hospital. My influence with this company was from 1989-1995. “But then after this level of success, the management began to act in extremely unethical ways. They were doing some very wrong things like stealing money from the stockholders for

themselves and hurting people. I first went to my management and said, ‘Can I convince you not to act in this way?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can I plead with you not to act in this way?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can I pay you not to act in this way?’ ‘No.’ So I fired the management. The problem with this was, the management was also on the board, so they turned around and fired me. Then I called a special meeting of the shareholders to determine what to do with all of this, and that is called a proxy. “The business of business and the business of life are one. The reason for living and working is to act and the reason to act is to seek excellence in everything that you do. If you are going to run a business, then run it well." “In all of this, I became a warrior and fought against them. I asked them to cease and desist and change their policies and asked them to liquidate their major asset, which was a piece of land that they were going to build a mine on to extract gold. When they refused I executed the public proxy against them, which cost me personally US $5 million. Even though this was a modest company, the legal battle reached the level as if it were between two of the largest corporations in America. “The management immediately began to throw dirt at me, but through

all of it, I never deviated from the high road. The way I handled this publicly was to say that they weren’t capable of building a mine and therefore the asset should be sold. I knew if you put US $300 million in these guys’ hands, it would have been a disaster. So that’s why I executed a proxy to force the sale of the company. “Do you know what hell is like? Hell is having 21 lawyers working for you. I put every cent I had in the world into it. No one paid me anything to do this. I did this because following God through my spiritual teacher and my sense of ethics had made me a warrior. “I was drinking 16 double espressos every day just to stay awake with all of the tension and fatigue, and eventually I went blind in one eye. They attempted to ruin my reputation. They sued my wife, they had detectives trailing my children, they said I was part of the mafia. They took my money on three different occasions using legal manoeuvres, but even after all

of that I ended up beating them. “Initially I lost the proxy because they paid one of the stockholders to get his votes, but even then I still got 47.3% of the total vote. But that didn’t stop me. They had so many lawsuits that they couldn’t get financing to build the mine. What won in the end was nature. Nature was on my side. This property was so valuable that a company came in and bought it. “Even during this extreme tension, I took the time to be quiet. I wouldn’t miss that time for anything in the world. When I couldn’t sleep at night, I went to my meditation room. Even if you can’t meditate, you can pray. Prayer for me is not ‘God help me.’ Prayer for me is ‘Give me courage, give me strength.’” James Sinclair told us that life has taught him that “The business of business and the business of life are one. The reason for living and working is to act and the reason to act is to seek excellence in everything that you

do. If you are going to run a business, then run it well. The most successful person is the person with the least desires. The successful individual is the contented individual. So success could be as much about planning a garden as it is about running a major corporation.” Just like James Sinclair, the next conscientious leader you will meet, Dr. Ananth Raman, focused strongly in his interview on the concepts of values and ethics: “Values such as justice, truth, and respect for others, equanimity, ability to take decisions, honesty and integrity are the core values that became very strong for me when I went into business. These are more on the ethical side, rather than on the spiritual side. Somewhere along the line however, these two kinds of values began to link. Now I think of ethical

values as nothing but a reflection of my spiritual values.” Ram ChuganiKobe, Japanrgcjp

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