Action, Results and Happiness

The most famous message of the Gita often quoted as:

"Do your duty, do not expect the results of your actions."

...gives an impression that we are expected to be more or less robots on this earth just bothered about our duty and stay detached from the outcome. Let me rephrase it, and then its power becomes a little more clear:

"Do not rely on the results of what you do to be happy. Happiness is your birthright! Enjoy it whenever you want it by making your action as the reason for your happiness rather than its result!"

What I truly can be

I like it if people can respect me for what I truly can be more than what I am because of my actions.

Self Confidence

Self Confidence is the willingness and boldness to take action and accept all of the consequences.

The Purpose of a Business

The purpose of a business should be to solve a common problem at hand. It should not create new desires and new problems.

This is not my philosophy speaking, but basic economics. For example, consider the automobile industry. The Toyotas and the Nissans and the Hondas solve the problem of a reliable, economic way of transportation to a very good extent. But I would not say the same with the Ferraris, Mercedes, or the Porsches. Do they solve any common problem? I don't think they do.

In fact, they add on to, or magnify the big pile of problems we already have to deal with - envy, discontentment, insecurity. The power of the human mind should be used to solve and eliminate existing problems that make life more meaningful. It is too valuable to be wasted in creating new problems for ourselves.

Accepting Others

I should not ignore and be indifferent to habits of people that irritate me. At the same time, I should not get sucked in, and let their negativity affect me.

Instead, I should be aware of the negativity, work around it, and get my task done.

I should do this because:

- the task at hand is more important to me than fixing people.
- I love to solve the problem at hand more than solving the person.
- I don't associate people's actions with their identity.

The secret of life

....is to love at least one thing beyond your own self.

Love for Books

Reading, I tell you is one great habit and a very good way to spend time. I wasn't really fascinated by reading sometime ago, but now books are my best friends.

I just thought I'll list some that I have read that have had a big influence in my life:

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace - Ricardo Semler
Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box - Arbinger Institute
The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem - Wayne Dyer
The Art of Possibility - Rosamund and Benjamin Zander
Thunder of Silence - Joel Goldsmith
The 8th HAbit - Stephen Covey

This one, I am reading and is already exciting:

Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A new meaning for Leadership

Leadership is the ability to clearly see the inherent goodness in ALL people at ALL circumstances.

No right, no wrong - only choice

One thing I realized have been grappling with is to understand and know what is the correct thing to do for the moment. Yes - the "correct" action. I wanted to be correct. I didn't want to be wrong.

But what I came to realize is there are no "correct" or "wrong" actions. There are only choices that you can make. You make a choice in life and move on without regrets.

A big mistake people who were like me make is to look back regretting choices that we made and label them as "wrong". When this happens, you don't accept yourself they way you are today. You become opinionated and are not really happy about your own self. And it becomes tough to move on.

At every moment in life, we need to make decisions. The best way to look at the options we have is not by labelling any of them as "right" or "wrong" and "correct" or "incorrect". Because if we do, we disdain or become attached to the choices and it becomes difficult for you to forgive ourself if realize later that we picked the choice which turned out to be the "not so correct" one.

So the best thing we can do is to pick a choice using our instincts and invest on it. Give it our all. Don't look back because we could not have made a better choice for ourself.

This question may arise: What if my choice is to kill and not to kill. Isn't the "correct" choice obvious?

Not always. What if people are being held hostage by a serial killer? What if he is going to kill you if you don't act in time? What I am trying to say is that the notion of "correct" and "wrong" is what we tell ourselves at that moment. There is no definitive guide to what the correct action is at any given moment. If there was such a guide, then life wouldn't be so unpredictable as it is now.

The only thing we can do is to trust that our instincts will guide us the way it is meant to be and invest in what our instincts tells us. It is best to affirm that our instincts will be driven by a power far greater than me and have faith that it will guide us on a good path which leads us to somewere nice. If someday if we were forced to chose to kill, then we cannot move on if we begin to regret and blame ourself for having done the "wrong" action.

The world is perfect as it is and will be perfect the way it is going to be tomorrow. I could not have been more perfect than I am today and I am always going to be perfect as I am tomorrow.

A quest for my Identity

I think I found what I was going through. An explanation warrants a little bit of history, or perhaps an analysis.

Some of you may know, till about year ago I was pretty much the happiest guy on earth. I was happy with what I was doing, what was happening, and most importantly, I was happy with the people around me and I was under the correct impression that the world is a perfect place as is.

But things changed. I began to "know" that I was happy and wanted to stay that way. I wanted to share my happiness with people. I wanted to show people what it mans to be happy! But soon enough, I also became conscious of myself and began to see unhappiness around me and my desire to correct it began to creep in.

Around the same time, my involvement with the volunteering activities got very regular. I used to be there for all the activities promptly and I even got chances to lead some of them. I pretty much earned the unofficial title of "Mr. Reliable". Even at my work place, I was kind of the "to-go" guy for the area I worked on. And of course, I was proud of myself and patted myself on the back for a step ahead in life.

All these developments led me to believe that I had the ability to become a leader because I was good at what I was doing and all I need to learn is how to motivate people. Easier said than done huh! So I began taking up initiatives and offered myself wherever needed. I knew that a good leader has to set good examples. "Because if a leader does not, then who would like to follow him? BE, DO and TELL. Not the other way." But then what I couldn't see till recently, was this innocent thought which had always been hiding in my mind: "Well, you want to be a good leader. So you need to be an idealistic person. If you go wrong, then you cannot be effective. So you always need to be correct!"

What a spoiler it was! Unconsciously, I didn't let myself be wrong. I wouldn't forgive myself if I failed to do something "correctly", forget me blaming others if they didn't do their job "correctly" - that always happened. And I started to make conscious efforts to portray myself as an ideal person. When I look back now, I can see myself suppressing the actions I would naturally do when I am amongst my friends and stay a quiet person - deep in my own thoughts, trying to analyse what the correct thing to do was for that time. This made me so conscious of myself, and I started wondering what people think of me. And the thought would come: "Am I living for others, or am I living for myself?" I began to ask myself who I really am because I lost the sense of my identity - I was obsessed about what people thought about me.

In my visit to India this time, I didn't speak even with my parents as I usually would, and not even with my brother. I was in my own shell quietly resisting any conversation that would let my true self slip away. My folks could see my resistance and made all attempts to set me free, but it was all in vain because I wouldn't speak up.

And then when I came back here to the US, it was the jet-lagged sleepless night that brought me back to my own self. I could not sleep and my thoughts raced and raced about why I was this way with my own folks. "YOUR OWN FOLKS you fool!" - forget about friends here!

I called my mom in the middle of the night and broke down.

I am yet to find out how much more there is for me to see of myself. And I am in the quest for my own true identity.