Video Information: 08.01.21, Rishikesh
Context:
~ What is perfection?
~ Perfection lies in what?
~ Why there is need to know right field before excelling in anything?
~ Why making right choice is important than getting perfect in wrong thing?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
#acharyaprashant #perfect #work
Transcript
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00 Does the person you are with encourage you to read?
00:05 You have to ask, what does he bring for me?
00:09 Roses or books?
00:12 If someone has a stake in making you better, that person will push you towards books.
00:17 Books are what we all need.
00:21 Namaskar, how are you?
00:36 Namaste.
00:37 I am Sahil Chakraborty, second year undergraduate student of Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering.
00:43 My question is that everything I do, I think it needs to be perfect.
00:48 Due to this, I end up procrastinating a lot of things and focus only some minor ones that I do almost perfectly
00:57 and feel satisfaction in only those things.
01:01 But I am still not happy that I am not focusing on main things that I think are main in my life.
01:09 How should I get out of this trap?
01:13 No, you should be perfect in the perfect work.
01:19 First of all, your choice of what you are doing needs to be perfect.
01:24 If I make a very imperfect choice at the first place and pick up some trivial work to do
01:33 and then I excel in that trivia, what have I attained?
01:39 Excellence is important, but in the right field, what will you do by excelling in let us say, you know, hunting rats?
02:00 A fellow might say I am the world's best rat hunter.
02:09 Some talent show will come and pick you up and say, you know, his name needs to go to the Guinness book.
02:15 He is a great rat hunter.
02:19 Most people who we admire as very talented people or high achievers are exactly this rat hunters.
02:30 No doubt, they have excellence, but must we not bother to ask, is this the field you needed to excel in?
02:48 Is this the field you needed to excel in?
02:52 If I, Sahil, right Sahil, Sahil, if I present a number to you, I present a number to you,
03:04 some random number of let us say 6 digits and I say this is the money I am going to
03:10 give to you and I say you have the choice to change any 1 digit in this number.
03:30 It is a 6 digit number.
03:35 It is the money I am going to give to you and you have the choice to change any 1 digit in this number.
03:42 What would you do?
03:45 Change the first one to 9.
03:48 Change the first one to 9 straight away.
03:51 So, you know where to excel.
03:53 Why did not you change the last one to 9?
04:03 Because you do not want to be a, yeah, because you do not want to be a rat hunter, right.
04:08 That is what most of us waste our lives doing.
04:14 If life is a 6 digit number, we pick up either the last digit or the second last digit and
04:21 we spend all our energy and time trying to maximize it.
04:26 What is more, we succeed in maximizing it.
04:31 What do we get?
04:33 What do we get?
04:35 The real thing never gets done.
04:39 The top digit never gets addressed because society has conditioned us to never to look
04:48 at what is the most important.
04:52 That goes a begging unaddressed and we remain fiercely concentrated on the trivial things
05:01 in life and we excel there and we are fitted and admired, felicitated.
05:12 So, the delusion that we are somebody and we have achieved something gets even more
05:21 reinforced.
05:22 I think I am somebody, even the society thinks I am somebody.
05:27 See what kind of respect they are offering me.
05:31 See the magazines are carrying my pics and interviews.
05:35 See they are calling me the young leader of the decade.
05:48 Before you excel, ask yourself what must I excel in?
05:54 What is worth it?
05:58 Before you speed down a road, ask yourself which road to take?
06:04 Speed comes later.
06:09 The choice of the right road comes first.
06:12 It's far better to be slow on the right road than to be lightening quick down the wrong
06:21 road towards your own destruction.
06:24 Acharya ji, you talked about choosing the path first, choosing the work that we want
06:35 to put in our efforts and that has to go by tackling the problem of perfectionism.
06:44 Since either it is a thirst of the ego or maybe it's a thirst of the consciousness itself
06:53 that we have to be perfect at that particular work, then only we will move forward.
06:58 But if that work is not yielding something.
07:00 I repeat, you see, making the perfect choice is far more important than being perfect at
07:15 the perfect choice.
07:19 Pick up the right project even if you can't initially excel at it.
07:26 Instead you are taught to choose as per your strengths because that's what the society
07:34 and the body want.
07:37 They say pick up something you can excel at.
07:40 That's a very very bad way of decision making.
07:43 They say identify your strengths and make your decisions based on your strengths.
07:51 No.
07:53 What you are actually saying is I cannot tolerate being bad at what I do.
08:01 Therefore, I will just pick up something I can be good at.
08:08 You are giving prime importance to your ego.
08:11 You are saying if I am doing something, I must be good at it.
08:15 Else I will feel bad, I will feel low, I will feel insulted and nobody will respect me.
08:21 No.
08:22 No.
08:24 First of all realize what is it that really must be done.
08:31 Must be done.
08:34 And then pick it up even if you cannot excel at it.
08:40 Slowly you will learn.
08:46 It is far better I said to be slow on the right road than lightning quick down the wrong
08:54 road to your destruction.
08:59 Being slow is alright.
09:00 Being on the wrong road is not alright.
09:03 I am not saying that you should be deliberately slow.
09:06 I am not saying you should be slow for want of effort.
09:11 I am not giving you a license to be lazy.
09:16 What I am saying is that the right goal might indeed be so demanding that you might not
09:24 be able to excel at it at least initially.
09:29 The right goal might not correspond to what your established strengths are.
09:35 Therefore, you might find yourself struggling initially if you pick the right goal.
09:41 It does not matter stay put.
09:45 Stay put even if you find yourself failing repeatedly.
09:49 All this comes in the domain of perfection.
09:54 You are still perfect.
09:55 How you perfect?
09:56 Irrespective of my repeated failures, I have perfect patience.
10:06 Irrespective of being beaten 20 times, I am still perfectly in the arena.
10:17 I have not run away.
10:20 This is deeper perfection.
10:23 Perfection is not just about winning the championship quickly.
10:30 Perfection is also about trying again and again not running away, being the perfect
10:36 loser.
10:37 I lose again and again, but I know that this battle is important.
10:46 Therefore, I will stay put perfectly.
10:51 This is perfection.
10:53 Perfection does not lie in the output of the work.
10:56 Perfection lies in your intention.
10:59 Your intention, your direction should be towards liberation that liberation itself is called
11:05 perfection.
11:08 As long as your intention is directed towards liberation, you are working in perfection.
11:16 Even if in the eyes of the world, you are a defeated one, even if the worldly scorecard
11:24 shows you to be a continuous loser, you are still in perfection.
11:31 So, be in pursuit of perfection by choosing the right work and the right work is that
11:40 which leads to perfection and then do not bother about the result.
11:45 If you have to lose, keep losing.
11:46 Thank you.