My goals in life revolve around personal as well as professional, and I find that hitting my personal goals gives me enough energy to actually go out and tackle my career goals. And that finds its way back around into my personal goals. It's an amazing cycle, and what it also allows me to do along the way is pick up people to rise with me. It's an amazing feeling when you can do that.         

I rarely ever set an achievable goal, and the reason for that is my goals that I set today have to be scary, and they have to push me to want to go and achieve them. If I think, even in the back of my head, that this is something that I can do, then it doesn't become a goal. It's just something you get up and do. It needs to be able to stand the test of time. When I say "stand the test of time," my why has to be strong enough to let me cross the Sahara Desert with a 15-kg backpack on me, inside 14 hours, on the 76 kilometer stretch, with a vow of silence, running out of water and food. Your why has to be that strong.

In 2011, my starting point was 12-to-16 hour workdays, six days a week. My financial and career goals were fantastic; they were being hit. I didn't think I was missing out on anything in life. I didn't realize that I was missing out on time with my family. We live in Dubai, and the weekend for us is Friday and Saturday as opposed to Saturday and Sunday in the rest of the world. I would take the Friday off, and the Saturday I would justify to my wife, Sangeeta, with "Listen, you know what? It's the one day of the week that my clients are probably going to be free, and we will rotate staff in the office to come into the office on Saturday." I would justify having to spend that time in the office because the understanding was to make more money, you had to work harder.

It's a finite number of hours that we all have in the day, and it got me thinking down a different path. Fast-forward to April 2019. Between these two things, I underwent a procedure called bariatric sleeve surgery. The reason is I used to wake up in 2011 and just not have a voice in the morning. I developed acid reflux, GERD. I'd cough all night. As a result, I'd lose my voice in the morning. My assistant would give me a call first thing in the morning, and if she heard a voice at the other end, she would keep my day as planned. If not, she would cancel the whole day. This happened a lot. After visiting a doctor, he suggested that I should make some immediate changes in my life to correct this problem of obesity, which was basically causing all kinds of havoc to my system.

I had tried diet and exercise, and I lost about 30 kilos along the way. But I busted my knees and put the weight back on. Or I had a bad day at work, and put the weight back on. Christmas, weight back on. Tuesday, weight back on. So after dealing with that for a while, I had to find a solution for myself. All I knew is I needed to lose the weight. I needed to become healthier. So I had the surgery. A big goal for me in 2011 was to skydive over the Palm Islands in Jumeirah in Dubai. The requirement for that though is I had to be under 100 kilos for my height, and I was 134 kilos at the time. So I put that down as a goal. I saw the doctor, had the surgery done, and six months later began my fitness journey. Along the way, I lost the weight. I jumped off the plane. I survived it, needless to say.

I realized that to make that change to having more time available for fitness, I needed to put more time away from work. The only way of doing that was to probably work my way up with the clients. So we identified the level of clients’ income that we wanted to deal with, and the kind of clients that actually I enjoy dealing with, and I didn't want to ignore the moment the commission was spent. So this brought it down to a very small, narrow choice, and we started spending more time in that space with those clients.

Along the way I got very active with my family. I got very active physically. I lost a lot of weight. I became fitter. I got into a CrossFit regime, weight lifting, and tried everything along the way. It became monotonous after a while.

Prior to running Marathon des Sables, I'd only ever run 10 kilometers every four or five months. There would be one run, and that one run would leave me absolutely battered. I hated running so much. It was a running joke among my friends: “Rickson's not going to run; forget about it.”

To deal with that problem, I decided to find the toughest foot race in the world, and I'm working now with the end in mind. The date was set. It was April 5, and all I knew was I had six months to go from running 40 kilometers a year to 240 kilometers in five days. I had all the training that was required along the way. It was easy because it's like our appointments. We know that your year ends December 31. You know what your numbers look like, and you know how much you need to accomplish every single month to get to the top of the table mark. It was no different with the running. I just plugged it into my calendar. 10 kilometers, 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers. Sleep, rest, eat, whatever.

It was in my calendar, and it was amazing because that experience helped me deal with my first ever marathon.

So one thing I believe in very strongly is writing goals down. This is a personal exercise for me, and I do this every single day. There’s a white wall in my house, which is like a whiteboard. I get up every morning and write my goals down. I erase it, and I write it again the next morning. I need to be in a place where I can constantly see them. The reason for doing this is out of sight is out of mind. If I can write it down on a daily basis, first thing in the morning, this keeps me accountable to make sure that my activities on a daily basis are basically in line with my goals.