Dr. Abraham George - Shanti Bhavan Founder | The Life That Actually Matters

Success Story with Scott D. Clary

Success Story Media

Business, Education, How To, Self-improvement

4.6 • 326 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2026

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Dr. Abraham M. George built a fortune on Wall Street, founding Multinational Computer Models and selling it to Fortune 500 company SunGard Data Systems in 1998. Then he walked away from it all. Armed with a PhD from NYU Stern and decades of finance experience, he returned to India in 1995 and founded Shanti Bhavan—a residential school that takes children from extreme poverty at age four and supports them through college. The model works: 98% graduate college, 97% land jobs at Amazon, Google, and Goldman Sachs, and every single graduate earns more in five years than their parents earn in a lifetime. His parallel work on lead poisoning exposed that 51% of Indian children had toxic blood levels, triggering India's 2000 ban on leaded petrol and protecting hundreds of millions. Featured in Netflix's "Daughters of Destiny," Shanti Bhavan has directly transformed over 15,000 lives—proof that one person's strategic commitment can dismantle generational poverty. ➡️ Show Links https://www.amazon.com/Mountains-Cross-Finding-Purpose-Service/dp/B0F2GK4HW9 https://www.instagram.com/dr_abraham_george/ https://www.drabrahamgeorge.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/abraham-george-519315274 ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ ShipStation - https://www.shipstation.com/ (Code: SuccessStory) Square - https://square.com/go/success SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/scott Monarch Money - https://www.monarchmoney.com (Code: Success) Claude - https://claude.ai/success Huel - https://huel.com/scott (Code: scott) Revenued - https://www.revenued.com/ NetSuite - https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:25 – Did He Get Rich Just to Give It All Away? 06:49 – The Near-Death Moment That Changed His Life 09:28 – When Money Became the Wrong Goal 11:33 – Walking Away From Success to Serve Others 13:22 – Finding Purpose When You Feel Lost 18:57 – Scaling Impact Without Quitting Business 24:25 – Sponsor Break 27:09 – Building a School With No Education Experience 33:24 – A 17-Year Promise to One Child 36:00 – India’s 1,500-Year-Old Caste Crisis 42:35 – How Giving Changed Him 44:58 – The Brutal Reality of Building Shanti Bhavan 48:53 – Can Poverty and the Caste System Be Broken? 51:34 – Sponsor Break 53:27 – Does Shanti Bhavan Actually Work? 56:25 – Why Compassion Isn’t Enough 58:18 – Why He Had to Write Mountains to Cross 1:01:57 – What Makes the Sacrifice Worth It 1:06:15 – The One Lesson He Wants His Kids to Remember 1:07:12 – What He’s Fighting for Now

Transcript

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0:00.0	You made millions specifically to give it away. Why?
0:03.0	I had made up my mind to spend my life on social service to do what I decided to do in my search for purpose.
0:11.6	He left behind corporate success to solve problems most people never see.
0:16.0	Dr. Abraham George is a social entrepreneur whose life has spanned battlefields, boardrooms, and villages in rural India.
0:22.4	Lying in the hospital thinking about what had happened, apart from injuries, I was quite okay.
0:27.9	That was a miracle.
0:29.2	Asking yourself, now that you have a second life, what should I do with it?
0:33.5	People early in their careers, they want to be successful in their business and they want to make a lot of money.
0:39.3	The purpose of your existence can't be for making more money and it's an endless game.
0:44.3	He could have built a comfortable career, but instead he chose a different mission.
0:48.3	Championing education, health and equity for the most underserved.
0:52.3	His story isn't about comfort. It's about conviction.
0:55.6	You need to find agents for change. People who have a heart. You don't need a lot of people.
1:00.9	If they are really committed, they can carry all the others. It is not whether you came from a poor
1:07.0	home or not. It is the opportunity you have. You have to believe that human beings have the potential.
1:13.6	It's a matter of using that potential.
1:21.6	Dr. Abraham George, you made millions specifically to give it away. Why?
1:30.8	Well, I didn't make millions to give it away. That would be a wrong assumption.
1:37.8	But I had made up my mind to spend a good part of my life on social service. And I knew that I need to make enough
1:48.5	money. So I had work for my own company and otherwise for 25 years and made a reasonable amount
1:56.9	of money. And apart from leaving aside enough for my wife, my children, I felt that I
2:05.8	should use most of it to do what had decided to do almost 30 years earlier. So the reason is that I had found in my search for purpose to my life,
	...

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