Boonkiet's biography underscores power of positive thinking
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Leading businessman Boonkiet Chokwatana has unveiled his biography, in which he reveals that he believes positive thinking is a key ingredient for happiness and success.
Boonkiet is chairman of ICC International, which saw revenue of Bt13.4 billion last year. The company is a distributor and manufacturer of apparel, food and household products under leading brands including BSC, Wacoal, Lacoste, Guy Laroche, Arrow, Elle, Essence, Enfant, Sheene and Mizuno. The listed subsidiary of Saha Group reported a Bt744.3-million net profit in 2011.
Narinthip Viriyabanditkul, author of “The Book of Boonkiet Chokwatana”, said this Thai-language biography was a story about the most prominent Thai chief executive, who discovered a way to unleash his “inner power” that led to many “revolutions”, including those involving the management of his enterprise and a turnaround of his health that has become so strong that he has not suffered from flu for seven years.
Speaking at a recent book-launching event organised by the publisher, People Media Books, Boonkiet said that while Thailand’s worst-ever economic crisis in 1998 had severely dampened the financial results of ICC, it was during that period that he was “reborn” after his discovery of the power of a positive mindset that could determine one’s fate.
Boonkiet said people could program their minds and achieve what they want, provided they think deeply about it every day. Similar to the famous “law of attraction”, “subconsciousness” will do its magic to accomplish a dominant thought. An important rule is not to try to find a reason, logic or evidence for that goal, he said.
Boonkiet said his father Thiam Chokwatana, who founded Saha Group, was his role model on positive thinking because he never spoke bad things, even against his enemies and competitors.
Separately, Boonkiet told a seminar held recently by the Omega WorldClass research institute that one should try to discover his own good and bad mindsets and work to remove the
bad ones through finding out their root cause. Furthermore, one should always seek out “adages” that one can put into practical use in one’s life and work.
“With an influx of information, most people nowadays merely receive a piece of info and pass it [by], and adhere to no ‘adage’. Fortunately, my father was a champion of adages. Even though he could not speak Thai fluently, he always reminded us to think about maxims that one can learn and apply immediately into one’s life and work.
“One maxim he spoke about was ‘When someone does a good thing to you, you must remember; but when you do a good thing to others, you must forget.’ This implies that one should have gratitude without expectation,” Boonkiet said.
