Career and Competition: Sure You’re Running the Right Race?
Questioner: So, my question to you is: since 10th onwards, I have been into this competition cycle, like first getting good grades in 10th, then later on clearing JEE. Then, after coming to college, we realized that we not just have to be good at academics but also develop communication skills, get exposure, and also worry about our placements. After getting jobs, I have seen many people talk about perks, incentives, etc.
I had recently read a quote in your recent book Truth Without Apology. The quote says, “The joy of overcoming yourself is much deeper and more authentic than the fleeting pleasure of indulging yourself.”
Now, if a person is always into competition, when would he have time to pursue his passion, if he’s always competing with someone else?
Acharya Prashant: That’s right. Well said. See, there are two types of competitions. One is when you are running alongside the other and continuously looking at the other. Obviously, if you’re continuously looking at the other, there can be no passion, no love, no inwardness. You are just looking at the other one, and the other’s actions are not controlled by you. The other can suddenly slow down and you’ll feel happy. But this happiness is borrowed happiness, right? Something happened there, and he dictated when you would be happy.
In fact, he can just smile to himself and say, “Let me make this one happy now, let me slow down a little,” and he’ll start laughing. Equally, the other one has the power to make you sad. He’ll say, “Let me just accelerate a bit,” and this one will start crying. So this is the first kind of competition, in which really there can be no fun.
The second kind of competition is when you are running with yourself. You are acting because you want to act. You have known what deserves to be done, and you have jumped into it and immersed. And in this again, it is possible that there are others running ahead of you, beside you, behind you, it’s again possible. But now you are not looking at them. Externally, situation one and two may look almost the same. The critical difference is whether you are doing something with respect to others, or whether you are doing it because there is joy for you in it.
What we have seen is, what history suggests is: the ones who run by themselves, for themselves, are often seen beating the competition without wanting to. They don’t even want to beat the competition, and at the end or at some point, they discover that they are ahead of most of the pack, and are surprised. They said, “How has this happened? We never intended to be ahead of others.”
The intention was something else. What was the intention? The intention was a love affair between me and this thing that I’m doing, that was the intention. That’s what I did. And lo, I suddenly find I’m ahead of the pack.
And this surprising thing, I’ll give you two examples. The first one from IIT and the second one from somewhere else. Like everybody who prepares for the JEE, I too had targeted a top-100 rank. Didn’t get it, in fact, missed it by a mile. So there was this curiosity, reached the campus. What is special about the top-100 rankers?
And since it was IIT Delhi, we even had a few of the top-10 rankers. They chose the CS branch; they were there. And what I found quite curious was that many of them, most of them, said that they were taken aback by their rank, that the rank came as a surprise to them.
These were people who really had their heart in what they studied, at least at the JEE level, maybe not later on in the campus. So they loved solving problems, Physics, Maths, Chemistry. They enjoyed that. It was their enjoyment that kept them going, that enabled them to do the long hours. And then the result was declared, and they said, “All India Rank 5? How is that possible?”
One of them said, “I think it is some kind of typo or something,” and waited for three or four days in case the JEE office issued a clarification or correction. “I just couldn’t believe I’m...” That's how you beat the competition, not by targeting the competition, but by being with yourself.
My CAT exam, I was not too keen on the CAT, on going to the IIMs. I was preparing for the UPSC. So, my UPSC mains were in the November month of the year 2000, and the CAT was scheduled on December 9th or 11th. So I hardly had a month to prepare.
I joined a test series so that I may just know where I stand with respect to others. I joined the test series and I was never one of the toppers there. I was doing well, fine, but not much preparation, not much inclination either. So, not one of the toppers there. The toppers again were from IIT, I knew them.
So came the D-day. We wrote the exam and the pattern had changed that year. Instead of four sections, there were only three. Instead of 180 or 190 questions, there were only 165. And the questions were a lot tougher. So, I anyway used to do some 120-odd questions, 120, 125. That year I did 113. I thought I had not done very well, and just emerged from the center.
There I found the others almost sobbing, long-faced, inconsolable. I asked what had happened, and these were the ones who were scoring 140, 150 at the time of the mock tests. I said, “What has happened?” There was hardly anyone there who had reached even triple digits, 80s, 90s, maximum 105.
It was then that I came to know that the pattern had changed, the questions were much more difficult than the previous years. I was not comparing. Even “previous year” is a comparison, do you see this? “How is the pattern compared to the previous year? How is the difficulty level compared to the previous year?”
So, I still did 113, and that was much more than what most of the others had done. And when the results were declared, I got shortlisted for a particular scholarship, and the shortlisting there happens on the basis of your CAT score. So I could estimate that I was probably one of the toppers in the exam this time. And that was unintended. You don’t beat the competition by continuously wasting your energy on surveillance. “How is this one doing? How is that one doing?”
One fellow came to me and said, “Three hours a day I waste on just tracking the competitors. Not just tracking them, actually laying traps so that they waste half an hour or something.”
I said, “Fine. Do you succeed?”
“Yes, I succeeded. I’m very smart. I waste at least an hour of my competitor’s time every day.”
How many competitors do you have?
“There are five or six tough ones.”
And how much time do you use wasting their time?
Three hours every day to waste their one hour. This fellow wastes. This is not the way of love. This is not the way of authenticity or commitment. Do what you have to do, and the results, let them show up on their own. And then even if the results are not what the world demands of you, you won’t be disappointed. Why? Because you anyway had a good time, you were doing what you loved to do.
If the results are great, that is a bonus, that’s an extra thing. Even if the result is not great, you say, “Fine, I mean, who cares?” The food was delicious. You are already satisfied. Now, if you find a huge discount in the bill, that’s a bonus. There, if the discount is not there, you are already all right. No? Again, outlandish?
Questioner: Sir, that was a wonderful session we had. We have a few more people who would love to have a heart-to-heart conversation with you. So, with your permission, can we have a panel change?
Acharya Prashant: Yes.
Questioner: Sir, so I’ll be starting with the question now. It is related to all that we have discussed right now, and maybe even an add-on to Kathan’s question, which was about passion. So I’ll start with, I was very weak at Math in the 11th and 12th standard. When I came here, I started a new approach and started to do everything right, worked hard and everything. And I got good grades when 50 out of 180 failed in our batch. So this kind of inspired me,” okay, I can help, use this to teach others.”
Acharya Prashant: Maths?
Questioner: Yes, Maths. It started with Maths. So I started teaching my batchmates, I started teaching the backlog ones especially, and it was all good. And I even extended this to a YouTube channel, and I started teaching Math there as well.
So, my initial question was, how can I extend this? I can extend my teaching ability and extend my YouTube as well. Then I came across a quote of yours which states that “Real success is not about winning the world; it is about not being defeated by yourself.”
So I took a step back and thought, okay, what is real success about? Then in the last year, I am, if we term it as success at the school level, like, I’ve been winning hackathons, or I’ve been doing great work in research or in other fields as well. It all started with Math only. And due to this, I’m not able to put my videos more on YouTube, because there I’m not getting the reward which I am getting from somewhere else. So it is like a dual-passion problem.
Acharya Prashant: It is not that, it is about sticking to just one thing. Please understand, if you have been right with one thing, that one thing will enable you to move on. Right? That is the right relationship, because as a young person, you are evolving. If there is something that you relate to, right?
That relationship has been meaningful. If it helps your evolution, if it allows you to expand, diversify, even move on, that is auspicious. It’s not that you are being disloyal or something. It is good.
You were not good at maths, then you developed a certain proficiency with maths, and then you evolved to becoming a teacher. You started helping others, and then you expanded your circle and created that YouTube channel. And now, because these things have been all right, hence you will graduate, ascend to something else. That is fine. That does not mean that you have been a deceiver or that there is one passion you are not attending to. You don’t need to think that way.
Questioner: Then, sir, how to satisfy ourselves?
Acharya Prashant: This next thing that you are moving to is not a thing of your satisfaction?
Questioner: It is. Then I am not getting enough time to, you know, like, I love to teach.
Acharya Prashant: You want to attend the YouTube channel as well?
Questioner: Yes.
Acharya Prashant: Then there are other places you are giving time to. Reduce time from there. The day has 24 hours for everybody. There is this thing that you want to do, and there is this thing that you want to do (two different things) Then definitely, you have to cut down on some other things that are not up in the priority list. See how much time you waste in gossip, or on the phone, or in other things. I mean, you’ll have to extract time from somewhere.
Questioner: Continue both.
Acharya Prashant: Whether you would continue both depends totally on you. I’m nobody to guide that. It depends on your relationship, the intensity of your love for what you are doing.
See, time should never be a problem, because we complain about time only when we do not measure it. And you cannot manage what you do not measure. Hardly anybody I know measures time, how much time do I put into this, into that, into that, into that, into that? And if you can actually measure that, you’ll be astounded. You’ll be astounded at the proportion you waste every day, knowingly or unknowingly. So there is always enough time in the reserve, just that because you don’t measure it, you never come to know that so much buffer is still available, being wasted in many, many small ways.
If you really love what you’re doing and you find you are falling short of time, then you will measure time. Once time is measured, you’ll find it can be managed.
Questioner: Sir, I wanted to add a question. I feel the majority of the panel has talked a lot about passion, what they want to do, what gives them the drive. So, you mentioned something when you were answering Kathan. You said how passionate people care very little about money because, you know, 24/7 they are behind their dream, which gives them the drive to move on.
So, there have been a lot of instances, or like I’ve seen interviews of older people who, when asked, “What would you change, one thing in your life, if you could change one thing, what would it be?” some of them have responded that they wouldn’t work that hard.
Now, if you are a passion-driven person, but you also crave social connection, and you don’t want to be left out from your friend circle, from your parents, or anything, how do you strike a balance between the two? Or do you have to sacrifice one to achieve the other?
Acharya Prashant: See, if you have been working just because somebody else has been pulling the strings, somebody else has been operating the remote control, then obviously, at the end of your life, you’ll be left complaining that you worked just too much, and you’d be left wanting that you had more free time for yourself, right?
If you are working as an expression of your creativity, your love, your devotion, then you would want to die in the harness, as they say. You would want to die working. You will say, “I’m never, never going to be retired because this is not work. This is love.”
If you find somebody who, at 80, is saying that the one thing he would want to change in his past is that he would work less, this is a fellow who has been very unfortunate and very unkind to himself. This is a fellow who has worked just for the sake of social sanction or domestic pressure, or some unconscious desire. He has been working for those reasons, and therefore, at the end of it, at the sunset of life, now he’s regretting. Now he’s saying all that work has gone down the drain because all that work was in the wrong direction, from the wrong center.
If you have been living rightly, then work is the most beautiful thing.
