Nirav Modi episode (Punjab National Bank Scam)
throws an important point about success perceived by many.
I am reminded of Aldous Huxley “There are things
known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.''
In this context an article by Manu Joseph posed
some important questions in his article "Nirav Modi and the myth of the path to
success ". I will reproduce a section of his article herein:
“Until a
few weeks ago, a vast number of small and aspiring entrepreneurs saw in his
life and words, as they normally do see in the lives of billionaires, a path to
material success. But in the telling of his story, in the analysis of his
success, what he omitted was a fact he must have known—that he was committing a
fraud, or a technical fraud. It was an important omission. Even if we consider
the possibility that he is “a marketing genius” and that he had a deep
“understanding of luxury”, the fact is that his extraordinary and swift success
over the past decade was built on some shady dealings. The real message was
that you have to game the system to be a very rich person in India. If you do
not know how, or if you do not have “the ballsy core” for it, you are nurturing
a wrong aspiration. We do not know if this message is true. We only know that
in the case of several disgraced rich people, it has been true.
This is the sort of
detail that is usually omitted from inspirational stories—an unflattering or a
nefarious truth that is usually so crucial to the success of the inspirational
figure that every other factor is trivial. What if the truth is that every
analysis of success in the world contains such crucial omissions? What if
corruption, or even luck, is not merely a contributor to success but more
fundamental than that? What if success is often a consequence of unspoken or
inglorious or even unknown and mysterious causes? What if the publicly shared
reasons for material success are, in reality, inconsequential? This means the
notion of The Path is an illusion, and the entire aspiration market has been
fed only the placebo of inspiration. The podcasts, books and interviews that
explain the success of the successful might be precious as journalism, as
knowledge, but even as broad guides to how to achieve your own success, they
may never help you in the objective. This may explain the simple fact that most
businesses fail, most people do not succeed by the measure of their own
ambitions. The notion that a path to success exists makes those who fail
believe that they chose the wrong paths.”
I personally believe no one knows why one succeeds and others not.
References:
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