My story: Why you have to read this book

No-one would ever have believed that the underprivileged child of a migrant worker, Harald Psaridis, would become one of Europe’s best-known leadership experts, because the omens were really not good.

The child of a Greek immigrant worker, I grew up in Vienna. Although I was born there, and that was where I felt“at home”, every day my environment wanted me to feel otherwise: I was teased, ridiculed and shut out, because for my classmates I didn’t count as a“real” Austrian; I was always treated as a second-class citizen.

My father, who migrated from Greece to Austria in the fifties and who worked as a fitter in a car tyre firm, did his best to support his family financially and enable me to complete my schooling.

Not only was our economic situation tough, above all it was the personal attacks and insults which hurt me to the core. During this period, when others made fun of me and teased me, an irrepressible desire grew in me: I didn’t want to be the“second-class” in the eyes of the outside world, I wanted to become Number One, and I’d show everyone.

But who exactly were“everyone”?

I had no idea.

All I knew was that my classmates had come up with every possible variation and corruption of my surname, and that something had to change.

Because I’d regularly been given a good thrashing by other kids, and knew what it felt like to get a clout, the first step was to get my physique up to a level which could end this state of affairs. To earn the respect I felt I deserved, and actually purely by chance at first, through a friend I got into bodybuilding.

Although I didn’t really have the build or the genetic predisposition to get far in the sport, the regular training enabled me to significantly change my physique. My new body shape (which might usefully be described as“ripped”) now put me at the top of the tree. For the first time in my life I’d got a sniff of something like success, and I wanted more of it.

Aside from new outer and inner strength, bodybuilding had another fascinating lesson to teach me, which to this day remains one of my maxims. This sport taught me what discipline really is! Year after year, with no ifs or buts, I trained almost every day and watched what I ate, so that at some point I could enter my first competition.

Unfortunately it turned out that I’d listened to the wrong advice about how to prepare just right for competition, which led to my spending my first event not on the stage as planned, but stuck in the toilets of the event hall with unbearable stomach pains. As I listened through the wall to the loud music and the audience’s applause, I made a decision: I would become the Austrian Bodybuilding Champion! Easier said than done. At subsequent competitions I look a good look at the competition and had to accept the fact that I would never make it into the top six.

Demotivated by my failures, which really grated on my ego, I was close to giving up and throwing in the towel. Just like that, I went off to my trainer and told him that I would not enter the Austrian championship and that it was all over for me. My t