Success is a perception and it is
always misjudged. The best thing is to stop judging success.
Robert Frank has rightly said that
“there are natural limits on hard work and talent”. We refuse to accept it.
Hence the concept Hard Work Pays is drilled down on every child passing out of
school.
The article on How Luck Separates
winners from losers captures correctly why we refuse to accept that there are
natural limits and luck has a role:
“Why don't we acknowledge it? Because it doesn't make for good
biography . When people look back upon their careers, “they'll remember all
those times they got up early and worked late. They'll remember all those
difficult problems that they had to solve. They'll remember all those very
formidable opponents that they had to vanquish along the way... But what
they're much less likely to remember is that there was a teacher in the 10th
grade that steered them out of trouble or maybe they got a promotion early on
because a colleague who was just slightly more qualified couldn't accept it
because he had to care for an ailing parent.“
“When you're riding a bike into a headwind you're keenly aware of that.
Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away...You're battling
against it, it's at the front of your mind.Then the course changes di rection;
you've got the wind at your back.What a great feeling that is for about 20
seconds, and then it's completely out of your mind. You're not even aware that the
wind is at your back.“
That wind is luck.
I accidentally stepped on to a
comment by Bundy Bear about TED talk by Alain De Botton “A
kinder, gentler philosophy of success". Immediately I viewed the TED Talk. The talk surely highlights what we are missing and how things
have changed.
I will reproduce the sections
from the ted talk so that readers will be encouraged to hear the Talk:
Material Goods
“I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional
rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It’s not the material goods we
want; it’s the rewards we want.”
Envy
“The closer two people are -- in age, in background, in the process of identification -- the more there's a danger
of envy, which is incidentally why none
of you should ever go to a school reunion,because there is no stronger reference point than people one
was at school with. The problem of modern society
is it turns the whole world into a school.”
Perils of Meritocracy:
“In other words -- what is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent
and energy and skill, you will get to the top,
nothing should hold you back. It's a beautiful idea. The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the
bottom also get to the bottom and
stay there. In other words, your position
in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing.”
“But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely
meritocratic; it's an impossible dream.”
Influence of modern education and
system:
“You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor
person, that person would be described
as an "unfortunate" -- literally, somebody who had
not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the
United States, if you meet someone at the
bottom of society, they may unkindly be described
as a "loser." There's a real difference
between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of
evolution in society and our belief in who is
responsible for our lives.”
Curse of development:
“--in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim -- it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed, individualistic
countries than in any other part of the
world. And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally
-- they own their success, but
they also own their failure.”
The below statement clearly highlight
how we have stopped worshiping non human in other words on why Indian System
of having 36 crore of God is beneficial:
“The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary
things. And so we tend to worship
ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something
transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is
-- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit
of doing that, which is, I think, why we're
particularly drawn to nature. Not for the sake of our
health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape
from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own
competition, and our own dramas. And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.”
Enjoy the Ted Talk:
References:
Article:
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