Sir, Are You Successful?
Questioner: Good afternoon and Jai Hind sir. My question to you is that people define success by different terms like influence, happiness, fame, name, etc. So, sir when did you start considering yourself success?
Acharya Prashant: First of all, thanks for inviting me here. I don't consider myself a success even today. So, your question is founded on an assumption when you say that when in the past did you start considering yourself a success? You are assuming that at some point I did or currently I do, no I don't.
I don't think there is any endpoint called success. As long as one is alive, there is more and more to be done continuously. One can declare herself successful only if the target is too small, or too limited. And then you can get close to the target or win it and say that you are successful, but that kind of declaration means nothing. One is then just fooling, pampering himself, does not mean much.
There can be milestones along the way. As you move, you can probably see that you are going past a few important points and even those points are important only relatively, right? Relative to where you currently stand, you might find that a few milestones mean much to you. But in the overall sense, in the absolute perspective, hardly anything that you have gone past makes much significance or holds too much meaning, right?
So, one has to continuously keep moving. This notion of becoming successful, this idea that by reaching a particular point or by having a certain accomplishment one can declare himself as successful is not very mature and is also dangerous, because it limits you. It tells you that there are certain things to be had, and more or less those things are universal, right? You want to have an educational degree, you want to have a job, you want to have money, you want to have a settled kind of life, and you want to be regarded highly in society, and if you have all these things then you start calling yourself successful.
This is a limiting, rather debilitating idea. It will not allow you to move beyond these things that we just listed. And even among these things you know, what it is that counts in the common idea of success? Money. Because if you have money, prestige can be bought. If you have money, much under the sun can be bought. So, primarily the idea of success as it is prevalent in the youth today and is being aggressively sold in the market is about having money. If you have enough money, you can call yourself successful.
No, that is not a valid idea, right? Because you have to look at yourself and ask yourself, “Who am I?”, “Why am I born?”, “Why do I exist at all?”, “Is there complete fulfillment?”, “Isn't there more that needs to be done?”, “Isn't the fire still burning?”
There are frontiers after frontiers, there are skies beyond skies. How can you stop at some place and just abruptly, randomly, arbitrarily call yourself successful? What I have seen from my little experience, and when I look at my peers and my batchmates is that the moment you call yourself successful, you start stagnating, because success is like a destination, no?
The idea that we have been sold is that you move to attain success. Extend it logically, then it means that success is the end of all movement. If one moves, that is if one works to attain success, if that is the idea, then success will be the end of all movement, right? The destination. And if you reach the destination, then what are you still traveling for? If the train has reached its destination, you are supposed to deboard, aren't you? And if you don't get down on your own, you are thrown out. That's the meaning of success—deboard, finish, game up.
Why do you want to finish the game so early, too early? Life is anyway short, life is anyway short, you can never have too much of it. And on top of it, you want to end it inwardly, at the age of thirty, thirty-five, or forty? That doesn't make sense, right? So, Vedanta says, “Charaiveti Charaiveti ,” continuously keep moving.
Don't fool yourself by declaring yourself as arrived. Don't tell yourself that you have reached an important position. Don't inflate yourself. Don't become a big one or a successful one in your own eyes. Retain that humility and don't douse the fire, right? Because that's the fact. Nobody is fully liberated as long as he or she is alive, which means that the mission still remains unfulfilled.
If you are breathing, if you are still breathing then the mission remains on till your last breath. You are somebody who must keep working, walking, moving. So, the first thing I would advise, know what is it in life that you must keep striving for, working towards, and then endlessly work in that direction. Let there be a direction but never a destination, right?
So, you know the broad direction in which you have to move, and the movement has to be immense, endless, infinite. One moves in the direction of liberation without ever arriving, that's something that does not quite please the ego, because the ego likes to arrive. It likes to settle matters. It likes to say, “The end, the matter stands concluded.” Don't fall in that trap.
