There are certain men and women around the world whom you can’t help but admire; Tej Kohli is one of these men. He is successful in his business ventures — which is impressive in its own right — but more importantly, he translates this success into his personal life and helps people who need it most.
Who is Tej Kohli?
He certainly didn’t grow up in a lavish household. The New Delhi-born Kohli had modest parents with limited financial wealth. Nonetheless, as Kohli grew up his substantial desire for success fueled hard work that eventually led him to found his own real estate investing company. He quickly found success and achieved immense levels of profitability. What impresses most people, however, is that instead of living in excess, Kohli spends his wealth helping out those less fortunate.
What is the Tej Kohli Foundation?
When Tej became successful, he took a trip to visit a friend in Costa Rica. He saw such immense poverty that he became determined to do something about it, both in his home country and around the world. He set up the Tej Kohli Foundation in 2005, which has grown ever since.
The foundation focuses on helping people in poor conditions improve their lives. It accomplishes this through educational programs and by funding life-altering medical treatments, such as corneal transplants. These transplants cost at least $2,000 and would otherwise be unavailable to most of these people.
Lessons From Tej Kohli
There is much to learn from the life of Tej Kohli. If there is one thing you take away from his story, learn that your success in business only matters if you do something positive with it. Tej used his wealth to make a large impact in his home country in the lives of people he truly cared about.
The second important lesson is that action is necessary to effect huge change. It would have been easy for Kohli to simply donate a small portion of his wealth if he just wanted to appear charitable, but instead he took action to solve a specific set of problems.
How to Apply These Lessons to Your Business
Does this mean that you should take all the profits from your start-up and start a charitable organization? Not at all. What it means is that if you find yourself in a strong financial position, you should use what you can afford to enact change. Find a problem that you want to solve, and contribute to fixing it. In some cases this may require starting a foundation or group, but in many cases donating to the right charities may be more effective. If there’s already a charity addressing your issue of choice, it probably makes more sense to help fund them to make the biggest overall impact.
Making charity part of your personal and business’ core values, as opposed to a PR move, will help you make a big difference in the lives of others, just like Tej Kohli.
