Acharya Prashant recounts the journey of establishing his foundation, which began after he completed his MBA and found himself unsure of what to do. His primary obligation was to settle his education loan, for which he took up a corporate job, the kind one gets from an IIM campus. During this time, he used his free weekends to work in an area where he had relative clarity. He picked up books he had read over the past 10-15 years and devised a course on the real meaning of leadership, which he then proposed to a few management institutes and taught on weekends. He realized that the shape of the world can only change if the human being is changed from within. This understanding was central to his work, which was a new concept on management campuses that typically focus on external subjects like markets, banks, and supply chains, rather than the inner self. After settling his loan, Acharya Prashant left the corporate sector, where he had felt like a misfit and switched jobs three times in three years. He then founded Advait Life-Education. He expanded the scope of his courses, diluting the content to make it accessible to junior students, like B.Tech students, not just postgraduates. This move was met with resistance from his own team, students, their parents, and college management, as the spiritual content was alien to the educational ecosystem. He describes this period as a constant battle where he had to prevail every single time to continue his work. He faced questions about whether his courses would lead to better careers or academic results, and he had to prove the value of wisdom literature by delivering tangible solutions to students' everyday problems. To address the students more directly, he started holding large, open-question interactions called 'Samvaad' almost daily. These sessions were recorded and later published on YouTube and transcribed into books. The initial phase involved dealing with a wide spectrum of students, from IITs to those from more average backgrounds in remote cities. The entire process was a challenging war, where he had to be prepared for any kind of question or resistance. In 2015, the PrashantAdvait Foundation was established to remove intermediaries and reach the masses directly. This allowed him to move beyond the constraints of institutional timetables and engage with people through wisdom camps and online courses, focusing on their intimate life problems rather than abstract metaphysical concepts.
