If Excellence Is Your Ideal Everything Else Will Fall Into Place

A young man went to Gautama Buddha and sought the Master’s guidance on how to achieve Enlightenment. The conversation, which in my opinion must be required reading for anyone, went roughly as follows:

Young Man (YM): Master, how long will it take for me to achieve enlightenment?
Gautama Buddha (GB): It all depends on you.
YM: If I put in ten hours of meditation every day, how long will it take?
GB: Maybe ten years.
YM: What if I put in fifteen hours meditation?
GB: Maybe fifteen years.
YM: (getting irritated) What if I meditate for twenty hours?
GB: Maybe twenty five years.
YM: I cannot understand your logic! The more effort I put in the more time it will take ….this is ridiculous! Please explain.
GB: As long as you are fixated and obsessed about your goal you will not achieve it. Just do spiritual practice without one eye on the goal. Let events take their shape.

I was reminded of this story when I saw a TV interview of Nobel Laureate, V Ramakrishnan, an Indian American. The new laureate was the very epitome of humility and one of his statements was eye opening. He said that he embarked on his research, not out of a desire to win laurels but out of curiosity to solve a scientific problem. He was not working with one eye on the Nobel Prize.

My understanding of life is that the things we desire most: money, power, status etc are best left to shape themselves. What we must keep as our main goal, is best exemplified by what a friend of mine, told his young sons. He told them, “It does not matter what you do in life. I request you to aspire to be the very best in terms of excellence in whatever you do. If you choose to be a janitor, try and become the best janitor in town.”

In other words, excellence ought to be our ideal and everything else ought to be a side effect.

Now that we are talking about outstanding Indians, readers might like to know about another illustrious Indian American who figures among the people of excellence in his chosen field. He is Dr.V Ramachandran, an outstanding neuroscientist. He is respected all over the world on account of his pioneering work in understanding the human mind. What is striking about him, apart from his commitment to excellence, is his humility. He travels frequently to India to meet his aged parents at his humble home in Chennai. My friends tell me that he can be spotted sitting in his verandah sporting a lungi and banian, sipping kaapi (coffee) and reading The Hindu paper. He is known to be accessible to anyone who chooses to meet him.

That raises another point. It is time that our media gives extensive coverage to those among us who have excelled (not necessarily in financial terms) so that they might inspire youngsters to not only aspire for world class efforts but to imbibe the personal qualities that go into the making of a Nobel Laureate namely: curiosity, vision, sustained endeavour, without an eye on the perquisites and of course….humility.