THE GANDHI FORMULA

How to Be Everything All at Once

- STEPHEN KIESLING

Hitendra Wadhwa, PhD, is a renowned Columbia Business School professor and the founder of the Mentora H Institute, which provides leadership training to organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to social enterprises and educational institutions.

In his new book, Inner Mastery, Outer Impact, Dr. Wadhwa shows how all success, both inner and outer, arises from one place: our Inner Core. He focuses on how we can activate the core energies of purpose, wisdom, growth, love, and self-realization to create our framework for success in life and leadership.

You're obviously drawn to mathematics-you have a PhD from MIT-but you seem equally drawn to spirituality. What's the connection? I think all of us have a hunger for truth, a curiosity to understand things at the deepest level. Mathematics for me has been a pathway to truth-and so has spirituality. I find a lot in common between these two pathways. Mathematics is a pursuit of perfection and beauty, where you look for symmetry and patterns and connections across entities. Mathematics is also the pursuit of precision. Ultimately, it reduces things down to what are called axioms, the core, essential, inviolable, timeless truths.

Spirituality to me is the same pursuit of perfection and precision. It's the same search for patterns and beauty and connections in the Universe, to understand the simplest core essentials of what life and existence are about. Of course, it's pursued through a different medium. In mathematics, it's the intellect. In spirituality, it's the discovery and awakening of spirit.