Wednesday 28 February 2018

Missing the essence

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. 

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