Get some love, before you chase success || Acharya Prashant, at IIT-D (2023)

Acharya Prashant

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Transcript

00:00 Namaste Acharya ji. I just came to this room and I was aware that the theme of this session

00:07 was kept as defining your own success. So basically I would like to you to address to

00:16 everybody including me that what success is in true sense and how do you define success

00:23 for an individual independently. I need to be successful only if first of all I realize

00:30 there is a shortcoming somewhere right. Basic principles. There has to be a back drop of

00:38 failure for me to talk of success correct. If I am already home will I even talk of success.

00:50 If I am already ok will I talk of accomplishment. Will I? So when you say you need to be successful

00:57 there is a tacit acknowledgement that you are not yet successful correct. You are not

01:06 yet successful therefore you need to be successful which is all ok. None of us is born successful

01:14 so we need to be successful. But I am emphasizing on that because a lot of people talk too much

01:21 about success without first inquiring into what their shortcoming or need or failure

01:28 is like. If I do not know my requirement what is it that I will order in a restaurant or

01:42 mega mart or some other place. The world is a great shopping mall it might have everything

01:49 to offer but first of all I must know my own requirement. So all kinds of things are there

01:56 and people are chasing all kinds of things and that is called as success. But what is

02:03 it that you really need? Do we pay attention to that? Do we inquire into that? Success

02:11 is something obviously we all need but what will be the definition of your personal success

02:17 who will tell you that? Come on please who will tell you that? And therefore success

02:24 is something highly highly personal highly personal. There can be no one set criteria

02:32 that fits all. You have to figure out what is it that you lack within and the person

02:40 and the purpose of life is to address that lack. If I lack let us say in knowledge then

02:47 my success lies in gaining knowledge. If I lack in faith something as basic as faith

03:00 my success would not lie in gaining knowledge or money it would lie in gaining faith. So

03:10 if I lack in love what is the point in becoming a successful entrepreneur? It is love you

03:17 lack and you still lack that. Raising four new firms or factories will not address your

03:27 loveless state and a lot of people do that because life is loveless. So I will I will

03:38 start one more venture that would not help you. You are treating the wrong disease, you

03:45 are barking up the wrong tree. Are you getting me? But our education does not take us inward

03:53 school, college, UGPG, doctorate, formal, informal our education fails to take us inward.

04:02 It is not that the subjects that we are taught are all worthless they are very very important,

04:09 very important. I will forever remain thankful to my schools to IIT, to IIM and to all the

04:20 authors whose books I read. I will forever be indebted to them but the fact remains that

04:32 education of the self is far more important than all the other kinds of knowledge that

04:39 we are given and that is something we do not have. The result is that the person is chasing

04:47 goals all her life without even knowing whether the goal is worthy enough. There is nobody

04:58 who is without target, ambition, desire. All of you have to do lists, all of you have dreams

05:05 and that is all ok. To be human is to dream, to be human is to desire that is all ok, that

05:14 is fine. The question is, is your goal worthy enough and what is it that decides the worthiness?

05:22 The answer is suitability. Is your goal suitable to you or to your neighbor? The goal today

05:29 is to run 6 kilometers, you are 55 kgs, the neighbor is 95. So, do not ape his goal. His

05:48 goal is suitable not to you. You rather go to some cafe and get a sound breakfast that

05:55 is what you need 55 kgs. But we copy others goals. We act as if there is a universal criteria

06:04 of success. We never look at ourselves and ask who am I and therefore what do I need?

06:17 That question is never never raised in our classrooms. Who are you? Self, that word is

06:24 entirely missing from our curricula. Self, self, you are taught mathematics and management

06:31 and engineering, science, languages, polity, sociology, literature. But who is it that

06:38 receives all the knowledge? The self and the self is never taught. How wise is that? Please

06:47 answer. Is that wise? Is that wise? That is not wise and therefore after all the education,

06:54 we still have very very stupid goals, very stupid goals. We do not know the nature of

07:01 the self. We do not know where our dreams and desires and dreams can turn into greed

07:10 very quickly. There is nobody who teaches us the distinction between dream and greed.

07:17 When the 2008 crisis happened and I was just 5 years out of IIM at that point and all of

07:24 my batch mates were in the same banks that collapsed. So when that crisis happened, I

07:33 was in touch with a few of them and I noted that the ones responsible for the meltdown

07:40 were all from Ivy League institutions. Not just IIM Ahmedabad, I am talking of Howard,

07:51 Wharton, Kellogg's, all the fancy names and what is it that they gave to the world? A

08:03 huge crisis that resulted not only in economic hardship but actually a lot of deaths. How

08:10 did that happen? They were from such fancy backgrounds and still they did something so

08:19 suicidal, so childish, so irresponsible. How did they do that? Because they were not educated

08:25 in the self. That is the problem. So you do not know the distinction between dream and

08:31 greed and the distinction is not very obvious mind you. You need to be taught, you need

08:36 to enquire, you require time to delve into that. It deserves respect, it deserves to

08:43 be a course, it deserves to have textbooks, it deserves to have examinations. Otherwise

08:51 you will keep making stupid decisions and the goals. His goal was to buy an island.

09:00 The result, he sunk a 100 year old bank from the island. The island never came about. The

09:07 bank too collapsed. But that is the goal that you inherit from the movies. If I am successful,

09:19 I will have a yacht and an island and massive property in London. Who wants to settle down

09:29 in Gurgaon or Bangalore? Come on. London, London, that is the place and that too, not

09:35 central London. It has to be the suburbs where amenities meet the countryside. So that is

09:42 the kind of life purpose most people operate with. Think of this. This is somebody's life

09:52 purpose and that fellow is an IITian. Then he went to NIM and then he did his PhD from

09:59 Harvard and this is his life purpose. I want to buy a yacht. Are you a kid, 4 year old?

10:06 That is how my nephew behaves. He is 4. Every time I visit the house, he is like, toy. He

10:13 wants a toy yacht. This fellow wants a bigger yacht. What is the difference? What is the

10:21 difference? Please tell me. All your life, your goal is a toy. Give me a toy, please.

10:28 The next toy, the next toy, the next toy. You do not realize life is toying with you.

10:36 Before you run after goals, shouldn't you ask where are your goals coming from? I am

10:45 asking you, please. Had I just chosen the common goals, I would not have been standing

10:52 here in front of you. That would have been to the relief of many of you, I understand.

11:02 This the point I have come to is not at all a social point. Not at all a point my education

11:13 ever taught me to come to. I was all alone, very lonely all throughout my journey. Forget

11:20 about this being an established path of movement. This is not even a very acceptable area of

11:38 human activity at all. People talk of entrepreneurship. This is not even an industry. It took 20 years

11:45 of solitude to come to this point. That is when all kinds of goals were beckoning. Not

12:07 just professional, personal as well. The day my name appeared in the civil services list,

12:14 some minister came rushing with his daughter's hand. He must have had access to home ministry.

12:30 He got my address as well from the list of successful candidates. He came in, nice one,

12:37 Brahmin, looks decent. Just check whether all his organs are okay. Like you check an

12:47 animal. That is the kind of goal the society bogs you down with. Now that you are a civil

13:00 servant, get married to an influential politician's daughter. He will have a truckload of dowry

13:07 to offer and the daughter too is good looking, not to deny that. If you have money, very

13:24 easily that makes you good looking. So goal, what is it that you want in life? You must

13:31 know and that is something I repeat, very very personal because your goal has to arise

13:50 from your own insufficiency. Your dream, your desire, your ambition has to be rooted in

13:57 where you are still insufficient, deficient. What else can be a goal? If I am someone who

14:09 is easily scared, my goal has to be, come on, get rid of my fear, fear of failure.

14:19 Get rid of my fearfulness. There is a world outside and there is a world inside. Where

14:26 do you live? I am asking you. Please tell me. Where do you live? You actually live in

14:32 the world within. Even the world outside is experienced inside. Therefore, the insufficiency

14:39 has to be within. The insufficiency that you address has to be an internal thing. Therefore,

14:48 the goal has to be internal. You cannot just say my goal is earning money. That is an external

14:53 goal. Yes, the external world can offer you a path but a path is not a goal. Earning money,

15:00 if it is, you feel a suitable way to get rid of your fear, then do earn money. But earning

15:11 money cannot be an end in itself. If earning money is a way to get rid of your fear, then

15:19 earning money is okay. But earning money, I don't live there. I live in here and I do

15:26 not know what is in here because my senses do not take me there, nor does my education.

15:35 The eyes cannot look within, correct? And the role of the education is to take the student

15:40 within and education fails in fulfilling its role. This is not a goal. It is a goal. It

15:48 is not my fourth appearance at IIT as a speaker. This must be my twentieth or something. Back

15:53 in 2011, I was here teaching the students a course called self and value clarity. There

16:00 was a course I had designed and I had pleaded with the authorities here. It has been more

16:10 than a decade. I do not exactly remember all the details. But I came here at least ten

16:15 times then. In 2011 it was. A few recordings are in fact available. If you go to YouTube,

16:22 you will find some of those sessions. Some ten, twenty or thirty students sitting in

16:28 a classroom and I am talking to them and the topic is the self. Because my experiences

16:40 were constantly telling me we lack in this, we lack in this. And because my ecosystem

16:45 consisted of, comprised of people from IIT, from IIM. So I was seeing that it is this

16:51 place that needs that thing the most. So I chose to address this place, typically IIT

16:58 Delhi because it is my alma mater.

17:06 Goal setting is life setting. If goals go wrong, life goes wrong. Your goal is everything.

17:13 Take more than twelve and a half seconds in determining your goal, please. That is how

17:25 we determine our goal. Okay, so what is it that you want, what is it that you want, what

17:32 is it that you want? Okay, let's take an average. Let's take an average of what everybody else

17:37 wants and that becomes my want. Oh, he is quite famous and he is quite powerful and

17:44 he is elderly. So let's take a weighted average. These people will have double the weight.

17:51 2x plus y plus 3z divided by 6. That becomes my goal.

17:59 How responsible is that? You live as yourself, right? We have relationships, we have this,

18:22 we have that, but ultimately you have a solitary existence here, in here, right? And you exist

18:29 for the sake of your own liberation, correct? When you die, nobody else dies with you. When

18:35 you suffer, frankly nobody else can suffer with you. Oh, they can empathize, that's okay.

18:42 And you were born alone. So your goal cannot be a communal goal. It cannot arise of society,

18:51 tradition or such things. Pranam Acharya ji. My follow up question is,

18:58 what if we are failing getting our success? We are trying hard, sometimes we are getting

19:15 distracted also, sometimes we are on the path, but what to do? I mean.

19:22 The real goal is so big, so immeasurable that you will anyway never fully reach it. But

19:30 its uniqueness lies in its beauty. You just keep going towards it even if you fail a million

19:45 times. It leaves you choiceless, optionless. I just said that this is my 20th year since

19:52 my PG. What am I doing all these years? Till around 3 or 4 years back, who knew this unworthy

20:12 fellow, nothing. What keeps you going then? What makes you stay put? Love. The beauty

20:19 of that which calls you, compels you and the very indispensability, you cannot do away

20:36 with it. You have seen it, you have fallen for it and now you cannot ditch it. Whereas

20:43 when your goal is trivial, petty, then you will get disappointed very soon. Also instead

20:55 of changing your approach, you will change the goal itself.

21:06 I used to find it very surprising when people would start a concern and then sell it off

21:13 in the 4th year. So you started a company and then probably you were able to bring an

21:20 IPO and then earned lots of money and you said now I am selling it off. It was impossible

21:29 for me to even think of selling off that which I started. Not that there were any buyers

21:36 anyway but even if there were any buyers, I would have never even dreamt of selling

21:42 it off. How can you do that? It's a love affair and without that how do you manage to live?

21:52 I was failing all the time, constantly failing. That gave me all kinds of thoughts but never

21:59 the thought that I should do something else. That thought never came to me. I would have

22:09 very happily tolerated living a life of complete failure for the next 40 years even. Let's

22:19 say I would live to the age of 70. I would have been very happy, constantly and daily

22:26 failing till the age of 70 but I would have never changed the goal. I would have tried

22:34 out different things. If I have some intelligence, if I have brain cells to think, I would change

22:39 my approach, I will do this, I will do that but I will never sell off that which I love.

22:48 There must be something in your life that you cannot compromise with. There must be

22:54 something non-negotiable. Do you understand that? If there is nothing non-negotiable in

22:58 your life, then it's a very sold out life. All else is negotiable. Not that you have

23:05 to be a bigot or a stubborn fellow who has no flexibility. You must be able to compromise

23:15 on everything except one and that one thing is your goal. This is what I want and that

23:22 is possible only when I said the goal is large enough and compelling enough, beautiful enough.

23:33 The goal must be able to enthrall you, captivate you.

23:43 Finally I got something I can live for and die for and then failure is not a big problem.

23:50 I have spoken to empty halls with just three unwilling, unfortunate ones in attendance

24:10 and I have done that dozens of times. I was never cursing my luck. There were moments

24:17 when I didn't have money to get my bike refueled. It's a conscious choice. Nobody has inflicted

24:38 that on me and it would have been very easy at that moment to beat my chest and say I

24:45 have abjectly failed and I will either change the goal itself or commit suicide. I am not

24:58 trying to set myself up as a role model or something but I just can't help remembering

25:07 my own failures at this moment and I don't want you to succumb to the so called failures.

25:14 If the goal is right, the goal itself is the victory. Once the goal is rightly set, you

25:22 are already victorious. Now how can you fail and if the goal is wrong, then you will be

25:28 a failure even after all your victories. You will be a failure even after all your victories.

25:36 You boarded a train and came a thousand kilometres. That must be some great distance covered,

25:43 right? What if the train is the wrong one? All your successes are just your sob stories.

25:52 If your goal itself is wrong, you have travelled a thousand kilometres indeed but you have

26:01 reached the wrong destination. You never wanted to reach there. That destination will give

26:06 you nothing. Yes, do travel. There must be a lot of rigour and intensity in your life.

26:13 You must live a very happening and active life. But the first and the most important

26:24 thing is that the goal has to be right. Also, lest it scares you, you will not get the goal

26:31 right in one go. It's a process of experimentation. The goal evolves. So do not be too apprehensive.

26:42 What if the goal is wrong? Give yourself time. See what matters to you. Apply yourself to

26:53 that. Stay with that and then revisit, review, modify. You have that freedom. Are you getting

27:00 it? Failure etc. don't mean anything. They just mean that the game is on. The game has

27:16 already won and now the game is on. I am already victorious in advance. Who can defeat me now?

27:23 That should be the approach.

27:34 Thank you very much. It was really very inspiring session. No doubt that you have extreme depth

27:41 of knowledge and wisdom. I think the audience were very impressed. It was a very thoughtful

28:02 session. Incidentally, we do not have such types of sessions too often. I strongly believe

28:08 that they should happen. It's an experiment which has succeeded very well. Especially

28:15 the boys and girls, they need this type of session more often. That's one thing that

28:21 comes to my mind. Second thing that was important, I will just share with you. These boys and

28:27 girls think that we are too busy as a professor. So they said, "Sir, would you like to be

28:31 there in the beginning or towards the end?" I said, "What do you mean?" "You are very

28:38 busy so you can welcome or you can come for giving the vote of thanks." I said, "No,

28:45 I have understood what type of session is going to be and I will like to stay from start

28:52 to end." I can say with a lot of satisfaction that it was worth sitting here for more than

28:58 two hours. It was really very, very valuable. Thank you very much and we look forward to

29:03 having more sessions from you. Thank you very much.

29:11 Thank you. Thank you everybody.

29:18 [Music]

29:26 [Music]

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