Who defines you?

https://youtu.be/bmGtVp8Gpe0 Auto-generated transcript:As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa rahmatullāhi wa barakātuh. Wa ṣalātu wa ṣalāmu ʿalaykum wa rahmatullāhi wa barakātuh. I am walking in Shiran Palace, KBR Park. And as you can see, they have this road. So, they installed these concrete blocks in a completely undrown chain. And then when they finished that whole work, then it rained. Heavy rain and the whole road got converted into a drain. And then somebody says, oh, how can we, we need water for the, we need space for the water to run off. So, then they hired a whole bunch of labor and removed these blocks individually, one by one. Every so many meters. Right? So, nobody thought that it would rain. Can you believe this? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. rains is a discovery for the forest department okay i think the way money is squandered is not funny anyway the park is very beautiful it's uh massively destabilized left alone so uh they haven't tried to improve it uh meaning destroy it so we have uh the natural vegetation and it's like an urban forest of grasses it has all kinds of different trees and lots of birds uh mammals reptiles small mammals uh reptiles and so on one of the most commonly seen things is peacocks absolute profusion of peafowl in this part what i want to talk to you about today is a thought which is that when we talk about careers we talk about life and so on we talk almost exclusively in terms of success in terms of victory right so what are the successes what are the victories and so forth and we run away from failures especially failures where the failure was not due to was not due to natural causes but was due to our own lack of judgment or wrong judgments we try to avoid that and pretend that it didn't happen or it couldn't have happened well after all how can i be wrong no i suggest to you that hooking your self-esteem hooking your self-image to success is a very dangerous thing and the reason is dangerous is because of how we are conditioned to define success our conditioning is that we from the earliest childhood whether it's a parent whether it's a teacher and then as we grow older it becomes a boss it becomes a individual boss and might become few rise enough in an organization and it could be the board of the organization but multiple external people our success what we like to call success depends on what they start doing and how they keep dealing with success this is what we are constantly moving on, my God, success is highly traveling fellow nano bio environmentalist andinary and 150 and display profile among other things as you walk along the screen or beyond the screen you have a long Parkinson who will say what can i do this or where I can do that or what can i do that or what can i do it this way there is an increasing strength of love it is a responsibility to keep growing lines across business since you are involved in it it is a complement in life okay so i have just been in the last several months over school you tried to define but instead they say about it. So if they say, oh fantastic, great job, we feel happy. If they say no, bad job, we feel unhappy. The job itself, what is my view about my work? We don't think about that. So our self-image and our self-esteem is hooked to success as defined by somebody else. Now that somebody is only looking at a final output or outcome without having almost no knowledge or very limited knowledge of what it took to get to that place. They don't have that knowledge, more than likely they don't care. But they will pass some judgment. So we also have this habit. We say, oh great, good job, fantastic job. Tommy, you're a great guy. And Tommy feels sad, glad, bad, mad. Now, as I said, the big problem with this is that then our happiness is always in the hands of somebody else. And if we are not able to get that good, then we are in trouble. Now, you might say, well, what's the alternative? I read a very wonderful LinkedIn post which I reposted also with my comments. This person says that in Japan in a preschool, they carried out an experiment. The experiment was that for one month they banned the word good. I'm assuming they would have banned the word bad as well, or maybe they don't say that. So anyway, they banned the word good. So, a child brings in his or her work, you don't say good job. Now, what do you say? They said, you described the work. You say, oh, Johnny, I noticed that you've used so many colors. Right? And you stop with that. You don't say, oh, that's a great thing. No. Oh, Johnny, I noticed that you've used so many colors. I noticed that you have put this thing, which is maybe a car, in a different perspective. You have not described the thing itself. You have not drawn the thing itself. But you have drawn other things which point us to coming to a conclusion about what this is about. So, effectively, you've spent some time looking at their output, whether it's, for instance, I'm, for example, I gave you a painting, but it could be anything. Describe what you're seeing. Describe the effort. For example, they're having an argument, two kids. So, you must say, well, Johnny and Tommy, I see that both of you are very convinced about your own point of view. But I don't see you trying to understand each other. So, again, description. You're not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't see you doing that. I don't see you trying to understand each other. Are you operating from the principle that only you are right or can be right? Is that what's going on? Here is a I told you about the peacock. So, here's one with a little baby. Here's another one coming up here to me. Is it all juveniles? Is this the here? The third one. So, you describe what you're seeing. So, whether it's painting, whether it's behavior, whether it's prose, what not. They tried that for one week. And they saw that the children became more reflective. The children spent more time on their work. The children experimented with it. They changed things. They improved things. They did all that. Whereas in the past, they bring a thing to you, the teacher says, good, great work. That's it. They're finished with that. They're completely and totally finished with it. They will not go back to that work because within quotes, they have a sense of having achieved. I got my star. I got my good rating. That's it. They're not concerned about doing anything about it in any other way. Whereas by describing, this is what it does. The point I want to make for you is this. That life consists of, life is holistic. Life is not linear. This is an Indian kid being an Indian kid. Completely out of control. Anyway, so, life is holistic. Life consists of, life is holistic. It's not one thing only. It's not only success. It's not only failure. It's a combination of both. So, while there's nothing wrong in feeling happy about success, taking the example of the descriptions, what is much more important is to look at what led to the success. Why was I successful? What is it that I did differently from what I would other, otherwise have done? What is it that I did differently from the other people in the game? Right? Analyze the game. Analyze the whole thing and say, what made me succeed? Similarly with failure, you'll be surprised that not only is failure not always bad, but strangely, if you think about that, it's only heroic failures. Where you have one person or a group of people fighting against overwhelming odds, that becomes then the stuff of poetry. This is what the poets sing ballads about. This is what people shed tears about. A thousand years later, one of the most famous of these is the poem, The Heroic Struggle of King Leonidas, the king of the, the war king of the Spartans against the army, Persian army of Darius. This happened in 480 BC. King Leonidas took a stand at a place called Thamopylia, which was, literally, like two pillars, but it was two mountains, a very narrow mountain pass, and held up the Persian army long enough for the Greeks to be able to mount whatever defense they could. So he was basically buying time for his people. His death was practically assured that the Greeks were going to die. There was literally no way that King Leonidas could have won. He had 300 Spartans with him. They don't acknowledge that in history, but they also had about 2 or 3,000 slaves. When we talk about the 300 Spartans, there's a movie called The 300, which is a typical Hollywood movie, but certainly not very, you know, historically accurate. But overall, sketch-wise, you might want to see it. So he stood against these partners, these Persians, and eventually all of them perished, but it was a great fight. One of the famous statements or dialogues between Darius and Leonidas is reported, but later on, somebody researched it and said, oh, he's a great fighter. But this never happened. But anyway, it at least sounds like a nice story. And the story is that Darius asked to speak to Leonidas. And Leonidas said, well, what do you want from us? So Darius said, look, nothing. Just acknowledge me as your suzerain, as your, as the supreme ruler. and bow to me and I will let you go. Spare your life, spare Sparta, spare Athens, which was the other city-state. But if you don't do that, he asked him, this Leonidas asked him, well, if we don't do that, what? He said, then we will darken the sky with our spears. He said, we'll blot out the sunlight with our spears, meaning that we have so much ammo that we will blot out the sunlight with our spears. And Leonidas said, in that case, we will fight in the shade. In that case, we will fight in the shade. Now, how did that end? It ended with Leonidas and all the Spartans with him and all the helots with him, the slaves. Everyone did, everyone killed. How that happened was,