Co-founder of one of the home-grown Taxi-hailing Unicorn was once asked,
“What is Success, according to you.”
And our ultra-successful entrepreneur gave an unconventional reply; he said,
“Success, in my opinion, is about having “happiness & peace in my life.”
And after hearing that reply, I couldn’t resist myself from smiling.
Do you want to know why?
Let me try!
Suppose you have a sufficient amount of life experience. In that case, I bet you can appreciate that happiness is a fleeting emotion that prefers to visit us when we’re at the cusp of experiencing the fulfillment of one desire before the emergence of a new desire.
Hence, at the fundamental level, happiness is mostly dependent on our lack of desire. As long as we don’t carry the burden of a new desire, we’re content celebrating our earlier desires’ fulfillment.
You can experience this state when you no longer want to change anything in your existing life.
Unfortunately, this state is fleeting because it doesn’t take long for us to get smitten by a new desire.
It’s a lot like trying your best to enjoy a football game where both the teams keep shifting their goalpost.
After a while, sooner rather than later, you’re bound to get frustrated.
And the only sane way to counter this frustration is to stop shifting the goalpost, which in our case is indulgence with a new desire. It’s possible to stop indulging in unique desires only when you cease to have an urge to feel differently.
Which, of course, is quite an uphill task for someone running a massively successful company!
Now you may ask, what’s wrong with chasing peace?
Well, there is nothing wrong with aspiring for peace as long as you can restrain your desire to act on what you observe.
And that, my friend, is quite a challenging task.
Because on most occasions, we all have this craving to fix everything to feel that we’re in total control of our lives.
Noticing things without an immediate urge to fix them is an acquired habit that takes time.
Once you build this habit, your mind will stop generating problems for you to solve. But there is a downside; you might become satisfied but lack ambition.
And I’m afraid a lack of ambition can never be appreciated by someone running a multi-billion-dollar company; the person-in-charge is always harboring a desire for continuous change and improvement.
I guess by now, you kind of know why I was smiling at his reply.
