True dedication does not feel like painful sacrifice. When a goal becomes love, unnecessary distractions quietly lose importance instead of being forcefully abandoned. Personal growth and contribution to society are not separate; meaningful work naturally benefits both oneself and others. Real freedom is not outward performance but inner clarity. Life should be measured by inner elevation, not by comparison with others’ achievements.
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Questioner: Good evening sir. My name is Saksham. So my question is that, is it really needed to sacrifice everything for that one goal, your family, your friends, your recreational activities that you are doing since your childhood, as you have always been very active, but now you have to achieve that one goal? So you have to stop everything and then achieve it. So should we have a balanced life or a goal-oriented life?
Acharya Prashant: See, whenever you will need to sacrifice, whenever sacrifice will be an activity additional to the goal that you are pursuing, it's quite likely a strong indicator that there is very little love for the goal. I'll clarify. The mental model you are coming from is: here is this goal that I have chosen, right? And you're asking me, should I be fully dedicated to this goal or should there be balance? That's the word you used, right? Balanced. Should I invest myself 100% into this or must there be other things as well? And the presence of 10 other things, in addition to this one, is what you are calling as balance, right?
And if I advise you, let's say, that no, put your heart and soul into it, 100% focus here, then the other things will need to be what you are calling as sacrificed. So there would be two things then. You're talking of two parallel activities: one, pursuing a goal; secondly, and separately, more importantly separately, dropping all things other than that goal. Whenever that happens, there is probably a mismatch, a dissonance.
