The North Star concept — my personal experience as a Seeker of Wellbeing

Je tusi dukh nahi seh sakde tan safatlta kiven samb loge. “If you can’t handle failure, how will you handle success? Success is a result of lessons we learned from our failures and never repeated them again. There’s no direct route to success. Everyone has to go through failures to conquer the milestone of success”.

Punjabi proverb

The North Star is the anchor of the Northern Sky; a skymark that guides our path as it glows brightly; that leads followers towards a purposeful destination. In Punjabi, it’s ‘ਉੱਤਰੀ ਤਾਰਾ’ or ‘Utarī tārā’.

One can call it a metaphor or even a cliché, but the Northern Star analogy illustrates my personal and professional journey rather well. After working for years in supply chain management for Expeditors International, then Microsoft, I founded Edifecs, a leading healthcare technology company with the mission to improve healthcare outcomes, reduce costs and accelerate innovation. Owing to years of excessively hard work, my body started showing signs of burnout as I approached my forties. It was following the Northern Star that allowed me to come to terms with the fact that I had to change my ways in order to sustain myself and my business.

A Seeker is the One who seeks. The one that keeps seeking or searching until he finds his or her north star. That Northern Star of my Seeking was Roundglass.

I founded Roundglass in 2014 with the intention of empowering and enabling others to prioritise their mental health and incorporate wellness into their professional routine. While the idea of founding another company in order to reverse the effects of burnout may seem paradoxical, Roundglass should, critically, not be thought of as another company in my portfolio.

My relationship to Roundglass is as much personal as it is professional: it is the fruit of a lasting labour of love, a desire to make the world a more harmonious place where mental health is offered the same attention as physical health, and where burnout is avoided by ethical and respectful business practices. Roundglass is not just another guide to wellness; it is reinventing wellness.