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ARE YOU READY TO SUCCEED?
UNCONVENTIONAL STRATEGIES FOR ACHIEVING PERSONAL MASTERY IN BUSINESS AND LIFE
By SRIKUMAR S. RAO HYPERION
Copyright © 2006 Srikumar S. Rao
All right reserved. ISBN: 1-4013-0193-2
Chapter One
An Ideal Life * * *
It is a beautiful spring morning. It is radiantly sunny and warm, not hot. There is a cooling breeze and fluffy white clouds drift lazily by. A little girl skips down a path in a green, green meadow. She pauses by a fence to pet a cow. She reaches out to catch a beautiful orange butterfly but it flits out of reach. A rabbit, startled by her approach, drops the carrot it was eating and scampers away. The girl laughs, the happy sounds completely filling the air with the tinkling laughter of innocence and gaiety.
Stop right now and evaluate your life. Is it filled with that effortless pleasure? Or drudgery? I want you to feel that effervescent joy. Ask yourself, are there great dollops of that in your life? If not, WHY not? Probably, many answers come to mind-work, financial obligations, family responsibilities. If you are like many of the thousands of students I have taught, you probably feel somewhat trapped-in a job you dislike, in a relationship you have outgrown, in responsibilities that feel onerous, in surroundings that suffocate.
Do you sometimes feel like a gerbil in a wheel, or as if you were trying to runthrough chest-deep molasses? Do you sense that there is much that you have to do but are unsure of what, and how to go about doing whatever it is?
Go back to a time in your life when you had a deep, meaningful conversation with someone. A conversation that was rich with significance. One that nourished you on many levels. Maybe with a parent. Or a friend. Or a favorite uncle or other relative. Or with a romantic partner. Recall the feeling of closeness that you had, the affection that welled up. Remember how long it lasted and how good it felt.
When was the last time you forged such a connection with another human being? If it was more than a month ago, why? Are most-or all-of your relationships a series of meaningless interactions? This can happen with friends and colleagues. It can happen with spouses and children and parents. Is it happening with you? Do you have a series of trivial conversations on such momentous topics as where you had dinner, and what you bought, and what movie you saw or plan to see, and what some celebrity did? If you want more out of your relationships in life, in love and in work, this book will help you fashion deep connections with the people around you. Even some of your interactions with perfect strangers will become nourishing and sustaining.
Virtually everyone who has followed the program in this book reports having more deep connections with colleagues than in many previous months or years of life.
Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted.
This book will help you stop wasting your days. It will help you discover the joy of effortless action. It will help you get started in discovering your "purpose in life," the grand design that gives meaning to all of your activities, the endeavor to which you can enthusiastically devote the rest of your life. Note that I said "get started," not "arrive at." There is a nonlinear relationship between the "work" you do and the "results" you get. Immense exertion can produce little outcome and, at other times, a little effort can yield a huge payoff. But if you have an open mind, you can learn to create serendipitous opportunities. When you are truly moved by deep inner conviction, you become a leader, one who cares for a greater cause than personal well-being. Then you will find joy first creeping, and then rushing, into your life.
Is This Book Right for You?
Do you sometimes wonder what you would like to do with your life or whether the career path you are charting is the right one for you? Are you troubled by ethical conflicts in the workplace and in your personal life? Do you have the nagging sense that there is a great deal you have to accomplish and that, somehow, you are not living up to even a fraction of your potential? At odd moments, does a train of thought along the lines of "Is this all there is to life?" spring up unbidden in your mind?
Are you somehow, at some level, dissatisfied with the way things are? This does NOT mean that you have not achieved conventional "success." You very well may have, but you know there is more and can't quite put your finger on it. Is this discomfort strong and growing? Do you have a curious mind and enjoy being challenged by radical ideas and have even come up with a few of your own, or would like to? Are you willing to make the effort to "know thyself"?
If the answer to most of these questions is a resounding yes, then it is likely that you will benefit profoundly from this book.
Here is an even better indicator. The rest of this book discusses topics ranging from freedom to leadership to happiness. There are parables and quotes and strictures. Watch your reactions as you read. Do you find yourself nodding your head? Do you go, "Yes! Yes! That's exactly the way it is"? Do you find yourself so drawn to the material that you cannot put the book down?
If the answer to these questions is also yes, then you are assuredly an excellent candidate for a happy, meaningful life.
Why Change Matters
This book will help you create the internal changes that will resonate far beyond your individual pleasure. Indeed, we can never truly live an ideal life unless we recognize that we are inseparable from others. As Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe sagely observed in a purported 1855 letter to President Franklin Pierce, "Humankind has not woven the web of life ... we are but a part of it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. All things are bound together ... all things connect. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls also the children of the earth."
There is little question that we are living in a time of acute change. As always, at such cusps of evolution, the world around us seems to have gone crazy. Government has all but collapsed in many parts of the globe, and its institutions are not held in high regard here. There is breakdown of social order, growing inequality of wealth and opportunity, a seemingly permanent and increasingly disliked underclass, and a degradation of standards in fields ranging from education to popular entertainment.
There is anxiety about the future, seeds of generation conflict, widespread environmental despoliation, and growing polarization of society. Technology has, in many instances, accelerated and exacerbated these trends. On the flip side, there is still a thriving global economy, an increased ability to meet the basic needs of most of humanity, a dynamic international business community, and a growing realization that radical surgery needs to be performed on the existing order of things. Shifts of consciousness can occur with startling rapidity in these days of electronic communication.
I take it for granted that you would like to do your bit, and perhaps a little extra, to leave the world a better place than when you entered it. If you do not, this book is emphatically not for you. Change will have to happen at three levels before the "new era," whatever it is, arrives:
1. Individual attitudinal change. We will have to recognize that we do not function in isolation, that we have an impact on society and are, in turn, impacted by it. Personal aggrandizement at the expense of everyone else is counterproductive. Greed is neither good for you nor good for society. 2. Organizational structural change. The world has altered greatly in the last few decades, but our institutions-business, government, religious, and societal-have remained antiquated. The old command-and-control hierarchies are totally unsuited to the present era of instant multilevel communication. Employees seek personal growth and autonomy, citizens want quick responses to major economic and societal upheavals, and individuals want to revel in their respective individualities. Our current structures and practices are grossly inadequate, mere Band-Aids incapable of coping with severed arteries. Many smaller firms and local governments are experimenting with radically different ways of internal organization. Out of the existing chaos, the butterfly will emerge. The form and color are, as yet, unknown. 3. Societal value change. As long as material accumulation remains the index of success, we will have excess. We will have things galore, but happiness will remain a stranger. Consumption will continue as the measure of well-being, and investment bankers will ingeniously devise ever more convoluted instruments, which may or may not help the organizations on which they are foisted but will certainly ensure themselves a very comfortable early retirement. Too many of our athletes, politicians, and business leaders have become poor role models, interested solely in power and wealth, but we as a society have spawned them through our idolatry. Better leaders will emerge only when we change what we honor. When, for example, a teacher who builds a championship chess team from given-up-for-lost ghetto kids is celebrated more than a drug-ingesting pugilist. There are indeed signs that a backlash has begun, but they are inchoate and diffuse. This book will get you thinking about all three types of change. Individual attitudinal transformation is, to some extent, under your control and will certainly start happening as you move through the chapters and complete the exercises here. When you reach a position of authority, you can experiment with structural change. The experiment is more likely to be beneficial if you start refining your ideas now. If you reach a position of great prominence, and I hope you do, you might well make a contribution to a change in societal values that will also be affected collectively by the actions of all of the persons you influence. Think of it as the spreading ripples from a stone tossed in a pond, with the ripples growing stronger instead of attenuating.
The First Ripple: Individual Change
Consider this vision:
You wake up in the morning suffused with an ineffable feeling of joy, a deep sense of well-being. You go to work, to a job you love so much that you would pay for the privilege of doing it. You labor intently but are so focused that time flies by unnoticed. At the end of the day you are invigorated, brimming with more energy than when you started. You have a penetrating awareness of the course you are charting, a clear knowledge of your place in the scheme of the universe. Your work feeds this, is congruent with it, and brings great contentment and peace. You face obstacles, big ones and small ones, perhaps more than your fair share of them. You understand very clearly that their purpose is to test your mettle, to bring out the best in you even as the abrasive whet-stone serves to finely hone the knife. So you plow on indomitably, sure of what you want to achieve and yet unconcerned about results. At times it seems as if you are riding the crest of a powerful tidal wave, as if the universe itself is helping you, working with you and through you. Locked doors open mysteriously. Incredibly fortuitous coincidences occur. You accomplish prodigious feats, feats you would never have imagined yourself capable of. Yet it would have been perfectly okay if you had not accomplished them. You accept Accolades gracefully but are not swayed by them because you march to the beat of your own drummer. Your personal life is intensely fulfilling. You are active in a variety of civic, charitable, and political causes and successful in all of them. Your spouse is perfectly compatible with you, a true helpmate in every sense of the word. You beget progeny and your offspring bring great satisfaction. You have a sense of trusteeship toward them. You know that they will chart their own paths and that much of these paths will be forever veiled from your eyes. You Are the springboard from which they are launched, and you are glad to bend and provide the greatest thrust that you can. And then you watch with a full heart as they wend their own ways. So it goes on year after year each day more perfect than the one before. Your gratitude is so intense that at times it is like a physical ache. Your heart bursts as you thank the universe. What have you done to deserve such good fortune? And when the time comes for you to depart, you do so joyfully and in peace, achieving identification with the Cosmic Principle, that incredible merging that has been called many things by many peoples but is ultimately indescribable, far beyond the feeble capabilities of language.
A life such as described above is your birthright. You have to reach out and claim it. Will you succeed? I do not know. I do know that the first step toward getting there is recognizing that you want to get there. All change begins here, and no change is possible until you have the deep desire for it. It is extremely important that you desperately want to live a life as described above. It is equally important that you not particularly care whether you do or not. If this sounds like a paradox to you, you are absolutely correct. It is. Remember that all paradoxes are resolved as you reach higher levels of understanding, even the ultimate paradox of all-that which we call life.
Think of that desperate seeker who wanted enlightenment from the Master only to be told that working twice as hard would mean the process of change would take twice as long. That parable contains the secret of personal mastery. You should be steadfast in your pursuit of that goal, but not fixated on it or consumed by it. Your ideal life does not yet exist. You will have to construct it in bits and pieces-somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle.
The Second Ripple: Organizational Change
Contacts are important. Every upwardly mobile professional knows this. How we network with and relate to others in the organizations that surround us determines much of our lives. Politicians know it better than anyone else. Experienced stockbrokers get signing bonuses because they can bring a book of business. Lawyers and lobbyists get hired because of the thickness of their Rolodexes. There are books, courses, and seminars on how to network better. But there is a vast difference between a "networking" contact and a true contact. When we recognize that difference and act accordingly, organizational transformation can begin.
I have always had a problem with the notion that you should cultivate a person based on his-or her-position and the help that you might potentially receive sometime in the future. Apart from the ethical and personal honesty issues involved, consider the enormous amount of time expended in the pursuit of such contacts-the after-hours socializing; the parties and formal affairs; the joining of business, civic, and community organizations to meet the "right" people; and so on.
Suppose it were possible to set up a system whereby you did not have to build a network. Anytime you needed help, a person would appear who had precisely the knowledge and/or resources you required. You can learn to function in this way. There are many prerequisites, the most important being a change in your intentions. Instead of relating to others solely with the purpose of fulfilling a personal agenda, it becomes critical that whatever you are trying to accomplish bring material and spiritual good to a larger community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ARE YOU READY TO SUCCEED? by SRIKUMAR S. RAO Copyright © 2006 by Srikumar S. Rao. Excerpted by permission.
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