Following is the transcript of the above video and Subscribe to my Channel for your free startup and meditation course and 3-5x weekly videos on startups, success models, and writing: https://www.youtube.
Think of anything exceptional I’ve done in the last few years. Whether it’s leaving my job for one year to learn yoga and meditation. Or leave a relationship of six or seven years because it was mutually unbeneficial.
I’ve had a very strong negative reaction from people in my life about it. So for example, when Kerry and I decided to take a year off to go on a sabbatical and learn yoga and meditation, Our family had a very negative reaction.
Everybody was like you’re in your 30s. You should be getting married and having kids and not just taking this year off to go in the wilderness and why would you do that and all that stuff. And in the beginning this used to bother me a lot because I was hungry for people’s appreciation and approval.But over the last couple of years, I found myself very indifferent to people’s opinions. I haven’t cared much about people’s opinions at all. And that has been extraordinarily creatively liberating for me. I wouldn’t have written the novels I’ve written. Or done the jobs I would have done, if I’d truly cared about people’s opinions. And that’s led to very, very positive results. So how do you reach a point where you don’t care what people think about you or your choices. Today I’m going to give you two very practical tips from my own experience and hope they are useful to you. And the first practical tip I would give you is to internalize this idea that people don’t care about the exceptional process that goes into an exceptional end result. But they really care about the exceptional end result that comes out of it. Right? So people celebrate the exceptional end result. But don’t understand the exceptional process that goes into that exceptional end result.
So to give you a practical example, Everybody right now, my friends, my family is congratulating me on The Yoga of Max’s Discontent’ success in the US. It’s being published by Random House worldwide. It’s done pretty well in the US and everybody is like congratulating me about that. But when I took the year’s sabbatical to learn yoga and meditation, purify my life to really take an extended period of time to write the book, everybody was criticizing that choice. Right? So the exceptional end result is something that people celebrate. But the exceptional process is something that they criticize. Right? And in life whenever you are going for an exceptional end result there will be an exceptional process involved in getting to that end result. So if you think of starting your own company, you’ll have to perhaps leave your job behind and that’s a process that people will criticize. But the end result of the start up is successful. You’ll have the same people celebrating it. Similarly, if you’re in a relationship which is not mutually beneficial and you leave that and you then eventually find a more compatible person. People will celebrate the compatibility but they will criticize you on your choice for leaving. So you always have to remember that the exceptional process comes first and the end result comes afterwards. People are going to criticize you for the exceptional process, but that’s necessary towards the exceptional end result. So if you kind of internalize that process two things will happen One, you should stop caring about what people think and second, even better, what’s happened to me right now is that if I’m not getting enough criticism then I know that I’m not aiming for exceptional end results in a big enough way. Right, so that’s kind of the first step to internalize.
The second point is a more philosophical point which is to reflect on why are you seeking people’s validation in the first place? And when I went through this reflection myself, I realized that people’s validation completed me or made me feel complete. At least for a period of time. But if you look at the Yogic and the Buddhist point of view it’s very interesting when they clearly say that man’s soul is crying for an infinite in the finite world. So it’s crying for some kind of an infinite completion and that’s never gonna happen with any kind of finite activity. And the only way you get that is when you break the finite construct and we’ve talked about that a lot in other videos, where you reach that point of complete absorption in an activity whether it’s work or it’s meditation or it’s a relationship.
You are completely losing your sense of self in a particular activity. And that’s your only moment of kind of full completion of that touch of the infinite. And any other thing is gonna be almost temporary, whether it’s success or wealth or validation. All these things are very temporary. Though only moments of complete completion are when you’re absorbed in an activity that you lose your sense of self completely. So if you remember that construct you’ll realize that people’s validation is actually a very temporary means of feeling good. It has no kind of long-term effect on feeling complete at all. So again that helps you realize that it’s not something that is worth chasing at all. So if you kind of remember these two concepts beyond this overall idea that people honestly don’t care that much.
You know like for the most part, 95% of people’s efforts are going into thinking about themselves and their lives and not your life. You realize that people’s opinions should really truly not matter to you. So just keep remembering these two concepts. People care about exceptional end results but not the exceptional process and you have to go through an exceptional process to get to an exceptional end result. So if you remember that point and remember that philosophically people’s validation is not gonna have a positive effect on you in any case, you’ll probably stop caring about people, like I do, so I hope that was helpful and I’ll see you next week.
This is Karan Bajaj and I want to offer you my free meditation video course today.
Subscribe to my channel for your free startup and meditation course and 3-5x weekly videos on startups, success models and writing, https://www.youtube.
