NBR: The focus of this series of interviews is greatest challenges. What would you say your greatest challenge has been?

Yunus: My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see. We think the way our minds have instructed our minds to think. We are familiar with one way of thinking. Most of it comes during our academic years, during our student years. The teachers we had, the books we read -- they made up our mindset, and ever since we are stuck with that. We cannot break through this. If you are a successful student in a university, actually you become the 'mini' of the professor whom you liked and admired most ... So that's what mindset does. When you bring in a new thought, you are in conflict with those old thoughts. You struggle, but the old thoughts still prevail because the mindset is so strong. It would be good if we could have an educational system, a learning process, where we could retain our originality and at the same time accumulate insight and never become a mini professor, but remain ourselves and still absorb different views. Yet institutions have their own mindsets, and it's very difficult to penetrate and change them. So changing has to be done faster. It's a faster world -- particularly in the 21st century -- but human minds, our academic system, make change slow. So this has been the hardest challenge that I have faced along the way.

NBR: So you want change to be at a faster speed?

Yunus: Absolutely. Yes.

NBR: You were among the 25 most influential individuals that the Wharton School and Nightly Business Report selected for this series. In a sense, you are unique on that list. How do you see yourself among that group?

Yunus: I was very surprised. I didn't think I was at that level. These are the people who are admired all over the world, who have accomplished so much. Seeing that I was one of the 25, I was really inspired and overwhelmed. But in a way, if I look back, this is recognition of the importance of financial services to the poorest people. This is what you recognized. Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world -- out of six billion people, more than three billion -- do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame. What kind of institutions have we built that cannot afford to extend their services to the majority of the people?

NBR: And finally, what is your vision for the future?

Yunus: My vision for the future? Two things: to make credit a human right so that each individual human being will have the opportunity to take loans and implement his or her ideas so that self-exploration becomes possible. And second: that it will lead to a world where nobody has to suffer from poverty -- a world completely free from poverty. Not a single human being will suffer from the misery and indignity of poverty. Poverty is unnecessary. The human being is quite capable of taking care of himself or herself. But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities. I have described poor people as like a bonsai -- that little tree that grows in a flower pot. I said you pick the best seed of the tallest tree in the forest, and plant it in a flower pot, and it will grow into a tiny tree. Is there anything wrong with the seed? Nothing is wrong with the seed. It's the best seed. Then why is it tiny? Because you planted it in a flower pot. You didn't allow it to grow in the real soil. The poor people are the bonsai people. Society has not allowed them the real soil. If you allow them the real soil, real opportunities, they will grow as tall as everybody else.