Making a Difference

The Chintan Project is helping businesses figure out their larger purpose and leveraging that into success

Amit Chintan Ramlall is certain about one thing: everything and everyone has a purpose in this world - a reason for being. Your purpose, your resources and strengths, and your challenges are each unique to you. You make your greatest difference when you leverage this unique combination.

The 20-year-old entrepreneur and founder of The Chintan Project, an Edmonton-based advisory and consulting firm, knows his own calling in life is to help others find and follow their own underlying purpose — their own North Star. Since launching his company at 10 years old with the help of his parents, Kumar and Pratima, he has advised, consulted, mentored and supported businesses, leaders and teams turn their “crap into fuel,” helping gain clarity, build capacity and find motivation and inspiration in their lives and work.
As a person living with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Ramlall believes his condition is the key to his success. “I’m not someone with a disability who is stuck — that’s not me,” says Ramlall, who converses with the help of his father and a plastic card printed with the alphabet through a process called facilitated communication. 

As a young child, Ramlall struggled with physical and other developmental delays. He learned to read at three years old, which would ultimately change his life. Struggling with physical limitations, it allowed Ramlall to find healing, giving order and understanding to his world. He developed an insatiable thirst for reading, devouring pages at a speed that allowed him to amass a list that at last count had reached more than 14,000 non-fiction books. “That allowed me to climb into the minds of and have conversations with some of the greatest minds who have ever lived,” he says. “It is the combination of my studies and this certainty of purpose, this uniqueness that is in each and every one of us that I leveraged.” He also began traveling frequently with his parents, visiting countries all over the world and meeting with experts from diverse fields. One of these experts with whom the Ramlalls worked was Dr. William Padula, a world-recognized neurological scientist and the founder of the Padula Institute of Vision Rehabilitation. 

“When Amit was 12, we knew that his reading and comprehension capacity was extremely rare. He could read a single page in the time it takes the average person to read a word, and more importantly, he had an incredible capacity to understand and retain knowledge,” Padula says. “Today, Amit Ramlall somehow transcends wasteful processes, and he launches into deep discussions within seconds to minutes. He provides a challenge to thinking that I haven’t experienced with any other person in my lifetime.”

Ramlall began using that broad knowledge base to write extensively and soon, as his insights and unique perspective spread through word of mouth, friends and colleagues began reaching out for advice. It wasn’t long before the Chintan Project was born. 
For Ramlall, businesses are well-positioned to make a “grand difference” in the world. He brings that belief, along with his certainty that everything has purpose, to his work with his clients. That certainty extends to the challenges, both big and small, individual and collective, we face today, he adds.  There are three main ways to make a massive difference, he says: start a religion, be a politician, or start a business. “But only the business route is inspiring to me,” he adds with a smile.

In his conversations with his clients, he often pushes them to change the way they look at the struggles that brought them to him in the first place. Because challenges have a purpose, he holds them accountable to find the opportunities for learning, growth, and impact that are wrapped within. 

“The only things you have control over are your perceptions, your decisions, your actions. And we help our clients have more empowering perceptions, decisions and actions, because often it’s simply their thinking that is the bottleneck between good and great,” says Ramlall. 
It was Ramlall’s own experiences and challenges that helped him develop this view — as a child, being labelled as incapable or even stupid led him to consider how he could leverage the perspectives he has as a person with autism to both benefit himself and others. 

“You as an individual can only control your perceptions, your decisions, and your actions.  You can bring order, choose the frame and glasses through which you perceive your life, challenges, and opportunities. If you don’t empower yourself and govern yourself from within, you will be governed, overpowered from without. That’s not unfair — it just is,” Ramlall says. 

“Your greatest empowerment and a businesses’ greatest empowerment comes from being true to purpose. This is the connection we make in the practice that is Chintan. This leads to clarity and certainty that few ever get to know — and those who do, make a grand difference in the Universe."