Unlocking the Hidden Keys to Success: A Preview with Faris Aranki

What if success wasn’t just about being smart — but about what you focus on and how well you connect with others?

This short audiogram preview features highlights from my full conversation with Faris Aranki, founder of Shiageto Consulting and the mind behind the formula: 

Success = IQ × EQ × FQ.

🎧 In this teaser, you’ll hear:

• Why most people misunderstand success
• How emotional intelligence changes your leadership
• What young professionals need to prioritize right now

This episode is part of our podcast series on Courage & Clarity in Life Shifts — and the full episode drops in just a few days. Tune in for this taste of what’s to come — and get ready to redefine how you lead, grow, and succeed.

Transcript

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I've had a multi-pronged career, David. I started straight out of university as a high school teacher. I was a trained mathematician and economist, so I went and taught that for six years and I taught around the world. So that combination of teaching, which is having to simplify things to a difficult audience, particularly when you're teaching a subject like maths. and also working in a multicultural environment. As a teacher I taught in Latin America, I taught in South Asia, I taught in the Middle East. Each of those cultures has a different way of absorbing information, of doing stuff with the information. So, unbeknownst to me, I was learning all about behaviors and psychology through my teaching career. But ultimately, I was only a teacher for six years. I then moved into the corporate world. And that's where I started to work in the strategy world. Actually, I joined an oil and gas firm and I used my maths and economics. to do strategy and analysis. And it wasn't long before I was headhunting to strategy consulting where I went in 12 years from analyst to partner. So I kind of did all the consulting and it really became fascinating with what was strategy. I wrote some big strategies for big companies around the world. And then when I went back to see if they were doing them, nine times out of ten they weren't. And that's where I realized that having a great strategy alone, an idea, isn't enough because in those 90 % of times it was human behaviors that were stopping the strategy from being successful. And I realized from my teaching experience I was very, very good at fixing them. Get me in a room with people who didn't understand, couldn't agree, couldn't get excited by an idea, and I could fix all that. And that's where the idea of Shiageto was born. You know, you've got to build strategy not just thinking about the IQ part, you've got to think about how does it feel for the people, but also how focused. Well actually the focus bit, the FQ, was the thing that came to me last. You know, when I really dug, I said it's still not just about a great idea and a bunch of people really excited by it. There's got to be something else and that's when I realised it was about focus as well. IQ, EQ, FQ, and success is very much linked to my own life. The FQ in particular is the aspect that is my weakest of the three. I looked back at areas of my life where I've been super successful versus ones where I haven't, and it was that lack of discipline, lack of focus, lack of prioritization. So I think about the things that went really wrong. Often we learn most from the failure, not the success. But it's when you compare the failures to the successes that you can spot where the areas of development are. And I just look at my life as a constant experiment. And that's the attitude I approach with my clients. I'll give you the ideas, let's try them out. And if they work, we keep doing them. And if they don't, we'll pick the next idea. So very much, my successes and failures have been the backbone for this methodology and for the successes and failures of the companies that I work with.