What Is Success?
When you think of the most “successful” person you know, who comes to mind? Is it someone wealthy? Someone famous? Is it your grandparents who have been happily married for 50 years, or perhaps your aunt who raised a number of happy, healthy, well-adjusted children? Is it a friend who gives generously to help others or maybe a neighbor who overcame great odds to build a life she loves? Is it a favorite teacher who has inspired many students to do their best or perhaps a student who constantly outperforms her peers? Is it someone who owns a big house and high-end cars and takes luxurious vacations, or is it maybe a dynamic professional with multiple advanced degrees? We all have our internalized image of what a successful person looks like. For most Americans, a successful human being is someone who has accomplished his or her goals, looks good to others, or has achieved wealth, fame, social status, or significant power and influence. But are these things truly the most significant markers of success?
Sadhguru’s Definition of Success
Sadhguru sums up this definition of success thus: “According to the world, success means you are running a little faster than someone next to you.That is not my idea of success. For me, success is ‘am I able to use myself fully? am I able to explore the potential of who I am to its fullest possibility?’
He continues: “Success is only when you’re able to use yourself to your full potential. It doesn’t matter whether you become a doctor or a politician or a yogi or what the hell you become is not the thing. Success means you are living your life to your full potential, that’s what success means.”
How Do We Achieve Success?
Sadhguru says, “Do not try to put up a recipe for your success. For success to happen, you need perception and intelligence. That is all you must do in your life – constantly look for ways to enhance your perception and intelligence. The rest will anyway happen. If you’re able to see life just the way it is, you have the necessary intelligence to conduct it well. If you’re not able to see life the way it is, your intelligence will work against you. Most intelligent people on this planet are generally the most miserable people on the planet. This is simply because they have an active intelligence but no perception of life.”
“For example, 25 years ago, everyone wanted to become a doctor. If you wanted to study, the first choice was medicine. Let us say you became a doctor, but everyone started coming to yoga programs and stopped having to go to doctors. Business would go down. It would no longer be a good profession to go into. Anyway, very few people are becoming doctors because they want to become doctors. There are a few who really want to be doctors, and who understand the human system and serve people, but others are becoming doctors because they think it is lucrative. It is quite disturbing for me that someone’s sickness is a lucrative business, because you would not want everyone to become healthy.”
“So one thing, one most important thing that people have not worked at is to enhance their perception. They’re trying to broaden their mind – that’s not the point; that will only make you socially successful, not truly successful. If you want to be truly successful, you must be able to see everything just the way it is, without distortions. If you can see everything just the way it is, life becomes a play; you can play it joyfully, you can play it well for sure. If you can play it well people will say you’re successful. You should never think ‘I want to be successful.’ Just see how to make this being into a full-fledged being and it will find expression. If it finds good expression, people around you will say, ‘He is a great success!’ That’s fine. People should recognize that you are a success, but you should not be thinking about how to be successful. That is a very wrong way to approach life.”
Sadhguru says, “A human being has come with such open sense of possibilities. For a lot of people their commitment to success is weak…If you have to find fulfillment, if you have to know the joy of doing something, you will only know it when your action is total – one hundred percent. In everything that you are doing, if you are absolutely one hundred percent, you will notice your action will have a certain sense of exuberance. My activity stretches for almost 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days of the week, 365 days a year. Maybe in someone else’s mind this would look like slavery. It is not so for me because I spend my days in absolute exuberance, and that is so for a lot of people around me. This is success, if you want to name it that way, but what I would say is, this is life.”
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