While reading, came across this interesting piece of advice:
The noun and the verb:
Many people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job
title without the work. Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far
more interesting than just wanting the noun.
The philosopher and writer Nassim Taleb once said: “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel, or a private jet.” Enormous success and outlier accomplishments require that and extreme luck or timing.
It’s not true to think that the world is a meritocracy. Plenty of brilliant people fail to succeed and plenty of not-so-brilliant people find themselves successful beyond their wildest dreams. The world is random and a cruel place that does not always reward merit or hard work/skill. Sometimes it does, but not always. Still, the more usable and practical distinction to make is between what is up to us and what is not up to us. Being recognized for your work may be on someone else but becoming an expert in a field, that’s up to us. Keep reading, learning, going out and experiencing things. Marcus Aurelius said that the key to life was to tie our sanity—our sense of satisfaction—to our actions. We cannot control every situation in our life, but we can always control what we feel and do about it. We should realize that we have power over our minds but not outside events. Will is the ability to choose our perception and take the action we can even when the odds seem unbeatable.
Do work. Be happy with that. Everything else is irrelevant.
It’s not true to think that the world is a meritocracy. Plenty of brilliant people fail to succeed and plenty of not-so-brilliant people find themselves successful beyond their wildest dreams. The world is random and a cruel place that does not always reward merit or hard work/skill. Sometimes it does, but not always. Still, the more usable and practical distinction to make is between what is up to us and what is not up to us. Being recognized for your work may be on someone else but becoming an expert in a field, that’s up to us. Keep reading, learning, going out and experiencing things. Marcus Aurelius said that the key to life was to tie our sanity—our sense of satisfaction—to our actions. We cannot control every situation in our life, but we can always control what we feel and do about it. We should realize that we have power over our minds but not outside events. Will is the ability to choose our perception and take the action we can even when the odds seem unbeatable.
And of course the mother of all philosophies, Bhagavad Gita:
karmanyevaadhikaaraste maa phaleshu kadaachana |
maa karmaphalaheturbhuu maatesangotsvakarmani ||
Chapter 2, Verse 47
This is probably one of the most famous shlokas from
Bhagavad Gita and we all have heard of at some point. Krishna here
explains that never consider yourself to be the cause of the results as results
are not solely depends on your efforts. It depends on multiple factors, for
example, situation, other people who are involved. Also, do not attach yourself
to inaction because sometimes when the work is hard and burdensome, we opt to
inaction.
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