Why Fast Minds Need to Master Slowness? || Acharya Prashant (2021)

Acharya Prashant

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Transcript

00:00 Namaskar. I am second year undergraduate student of Department of Metallurgical and Materials

00:09 Engineering. My question is that everything I do, I think it needs to be perfect. Due

00:16 to this, I end up procrastinating a lot of things and focus only some minor ones that

00:23 I do almost perfectly and feel satisfaction in only those things. But I am still not happy

00:31 that I am not focusing on main things that I think are like main in my life. How should

00:36 I like get out of this trap?

00:42 You should be perfect in the perfect work. First of all, your choice of what you are

00:48 doing needs to be perfect. If I make a very imperfect choice at the first place and pick

00:57 up some trivial work to do and then I excel in that trivia, what have I attained? Excellence

01:07 is important, but in the right field, what will you do by excelling in let us say, you

01:22 know, hunting rats. A fellow might say I am the world's best rat hunter.

01:36 Some talent show will come and pick you up and say you know, his name needs to go to

01:40 the Guinness Book. He is a great rat hunter. Most people who we admire as very talented

01:50 people or high achievers are exactly this rat hunters. No doubt they have excellence,

02:02 but must we not bother to ask is this the field you needed to excel in? Is this the

02:16 field you needed to excel in? If I, Sahil, right Sahil, if I present a number to you,

02:29 I present a number to you, some random number of let us say 6 digits and I say this is the

02:35 money I am going to give to you and I say you have the choice to change any 1 digit

02:55 in this number. It is a 6 digit number. It is the money I am going to give to you and

03:05 you have the choice to change any 1 digit in this number. What would you do?

03:12 Change the first one to 9. Change the first one to 9 straight away. So,

03:18 you know where to excel. Why did not you change the last one to 9? Because you do not want

03:30 to be a rat hunter. That is what most of us waste our lives doing. If life is a 6 digit

03:42 number, we pick up either the last digit or the second last digit and we spend all our

03:50 energy and time trying to maximize it. What is more we succeed in maximizing it. What

03:58 do we get? What do we get? The real thing never gets done. The top digit never gets

04:08 addressed because society has conditioned us to never to look at what is the most important

04:19 that goes a begging unaddressed and we remain fiercely concentrated on the trivial things

04:28 in life and we excel there and we are fitted and admired, felicitated.

04:39 So, the delusion that we are somebody and we have achieved something gets even more

04:47 reinforced. I think I am somebody, even the society thinks I am somebody. See what kind

04:55 of respect they are offering me. See the magazines are carrying my pics and interviews. See they

05:03 are calling me the young leader of the decade. Before you excel, ask yourself what must I

05:20 excel in? What is worth it? Before you speed down a road, ask yourself which road to take?

05:31 Speed comes later. The choice of the right road comes first. It is far better to be slow

05:42 on the right road than to be lightening quick down the wrong road towards your own destruction.

05:52 Acharya ji, you talked about choosing the path first, choosing the work that we want

06:02 to put in our efforts and that has to go by tackling the problem of perfectionism. Since

06:11 either it is a thirst of the ego or maybe it is a thirst of the consciousness itself

06:20 that we have to be perfect at that particular work, then only we will move forward. But

06:25 if that work is not yielding something. I repeat, you see, making the perfect choice

06:37 is far more important than being perfect at the perfect choice. Pick up the right project

06:48 even if you cannot initially excel at it. Instead, you are taught to choose as per your

06:57 strengths because that is what the society and the body want. They say pick up something

07:05 you can excel at. That is a very, very bad way of decision making. They say identify

07:11 your strengths and make your decisions based on your strengths. No. What you are actually

07:21 saying is I cannot tolerate being bad at what I do. Therefore, I will just pick up something

07:31 I can be good at. You are giving prime importance to your ego. You are saying if I am doing

07:38 something I must be good at it. Else I will feel bad, I will feel low, I will feel insulted

07:45 and nobody will respect me. No. First of all realize what is it that really must be done,

07:58 must be done and then pick it up even if you cannot excel at it. Slowly you will learn.

08:13 It is far better I said to be slow on the right road than lightning quick down the wrong

08:21 road to your destruction. Being slow is alright, being on the wrong road is not alright. I

08:30 am not saying that you should be deliberately slow. I am not saying you should be slow for

08:37 want of effort. I am not giving you a license to be lazy. What I am saying is that the right

08:46 goal might indeed be so demanding that you might not be able to excel at it at least

08:53 initially. The right goal might not correspond to what your established strengths are. Therefore,

09:03 you might find yourself struggling initially if you pick the right goal. It does not matter,

09:09 stay put. Stay put even if you find yourself failing repeatedly. All this comes in the

09:17 domain of perfection. You are still perfect. How you perfect? Irrespective of my repeated

09:27 failures, I have perfect patience. Irrespective of being beaten 20 times, I am still perfectly

09:42 in the arena. I have not run away. This is deeper perfection. Perfection is not just

09:52 about winning the championship quickly. Perfection is also about trying again and again, not

10:01 running away, being the perfect loser. I lose again and again, but I know that this battle

10:12 is important. Therefore, I will stay put perfectly. This is perfection. Perfection does not lie

10:21 in the output of the work. Perfection lies in your intention. Your intention, your direction

10:28 should be towards liberation that liberation itself is called perfection. As long as your

10:37 intention is directed towards liberation, you are working in perfection. Even if in

10:44 the eyes of the world, you are a defeated one, even if the worldly scorecard shows you

10:52 to be a continuous loser, you are still in perfection.

10:58 So, be in pursuit of perfection by choosing the right work and the right work is that

11:07 which leads to perfection and then do not bother about the result. If you have to lose,

11:13 keep losing.

11:18 [Music]

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