Rethinking Success: A Broader Perspective

Success is often perceived as multi‑dimensional. It may show up in financial achievements, relationships, professional excellence, values, service to the nation, personal worth, or inner fulfillment. What defines success for one person may look very different for another.

Consider a few examples:

• A celebrated film actor may achieve remarkable professional success, yet struggle in personal relationships.
• A soldier remembered for extraordinary bravery and sacrifice for the nation represents a deeply successful life, even without material wealth or public acclaim.
• A national leader may exemplify success through vision, influence, and leadership.
• A spiritual teacher who transforms lives and brings meditation into everyday practice represents success of a different, yet profound, kind.

There can be countless such examples, each highlighting a different dimension of success.

When we reflect more deeply, we begin to realize that success in its totality is not limited to achievements, strengths, possessions, or accomplishments alone. A person may be truly successful even without fame, wealth, formal education, or widely recognized achievements.

As Sri Sri Ravishankar beautifully says, success is not a state or a phenomenon; it is an attitude.

Here are a few thoughts to reflect upon:

• Being born as a human is, in itself, a success.
• Being able to transcend cravings and desires—whether through experience (bhog) or restraint (yog)—is success.
• Recognizing one’s roles in life and performing one’s dharma with sincerity is success.
• Smiling through all situations and being able to bring a smile to others is success.
• Success is not measured by what you have, but by how you feel within.

Know this: you are already successful in life. Whatever you choose to do from here only adds new dimensions to that success. !!

Love ...

Making Complex Decisions

A very common cause of misery is the desire to control & take perfect decision in life. I believe that there is NO decision that is perfect till it is being executed perfectly. A very good decision may be proved a failure if not executed well, while a not-so-good decision may be translated into success, if executed well.

Another common botheration is fear of failure, while making a choice/decision. No one else should make a choice for me, I have to face it myself. Everbody's life is full of successful events & failures, no one can be successful always & in all his/her life-events.

One fine day Gandhi Ji made a decision to choose a life of sacrifice, peace and non-violence. People around him, considered it a very stupid choice to leave the comfortable life full of wealth, facilities & securities. But he found meaning of his life in the decision, not only he himself but many inspired souls get elevated & dedicated themselves for the cause of country. There may still be a debate and perspectives, some may consider it, as imperfect decision and some may consider it otherwise.

There are few simple steps to practice for making an effective decision for a situation in professional life or Project Management:

1- Understand the situation & it's essence, severity & impact
2- Collecting enough data, analyz it. Try mapping data & situation to ensure you understood the essence in entirity.
3- Evaluate different available decision options;
4- Preparing pros & cons
5- Building mind-map;
6- Considere past experience of any such similar situation & applying learning
7- Knowing all listed above, you would finally arrive to a conclusion/decision with estimated risks.
8- Now prepare execution-approach to cater to the situation, I am sure now it has better chances of success.

Core of Happiness

The core of happiness is you. The basic nature of human is happiness, joy & peace, know it & you will start believing it.
The problem starts when I associate the word ‘Always’ with it. E.g. I want to be happy always.
I need to remember that there is nothing in this world which is constant, everything is changing.

Learnings - a thought to myself

Life is full of learnings, some of them come easy way & some hard way. And many a times we ignore the learnings unknowingly & flow with the incidents and the corresponding emotions.

If we remain concious & observe situations/incidents that are happening in life from the perspective that 'what the life is willing to teach me?', I am sure we will be amazed by the answer that we will get.

Observing the past situations, life always first choose the easy way to make you learn & when we ignore repeadly then only, life chooses the hard way to make you learn. I should learn to be sensitive to recognize the easy way of learning so to correct early, isn't it?

Instead of flowing into emotion and generating negative energy, I should feel 'wow', that life has so many ways to teach me various things.

Keep learning.

Salary Revision

Why Salary Revision is so important?
As we all know, this is the time for salary revision. We may recieve our revised salary information any day. All around, there is only one topic to discuss i.e 'how much increment this year!!!'. This question came to me this morning that 'why the salary increment is so important'. Following is what I could justify myself with:

1- Need: Few of us must be at the salary which might not be sufficing our living needs, hence to live a normal life we need more funds. Hence the only hope is salary revision this year.
2- Greed: Humans by basic nature are greedy, so we are. What ever we earn we find the ways to spend and whatever we earn it falls short. Also the desire to acquire more assets. So greed is another reason.
3- Value: There are two aspects; value in the market of the skills employee carry & value that existing company percieves for the individual. Most of the organizations don't share any comparitive information of the performance of an individual. The employee might percieve the salary increment as a performance indicator & choose to get de-motivated ("someone says money cannot be a motivator it is always a demotivator").

Date: 05-May-2010

Reaction vs. Response

One of my friend shared an article explaining the difference between reacting to a situation and responding to a situation. Given a situation where we are not in control, most of the time we react, instead if we remain calm and choose our reply and respond accordingly, we will be more effective in managing the situation.

To express the essence, I would narrate a story in a later posts.