Mystic Mantra: What decides our success?

Do not try to put up a recipe for your success. For example, twenty-five years ago, everyone wanted to become a doctor. If you want to study, the first choice was medicine. Let us say you became a doctor, but then everyone came to a yoga program and stopped having to go to doctors. Business will go down. It will no longer be a good profession to go into. Anyway, very few people are becoming doctors because they want to become doctors. There are a few doctors who really want to be doctors, understand the human system and serve people, but others are becoming doctors because they think it is lucrative. It is quite disturbing for me that someone's sickness is a lucrative business, because you would not want everyone to become healthy.

So, do not put a recipe on your success. Real success happens when you use yourself to your full potential. If that has to happen, you need perception and an active intelligence. "How do I grow my intelligence?" Don't worry about that. The important thing is to enhance your perception. If you are able to see life just the way it is, you have the necessary intelligence to conduct it well. If you are not able to see life the way it is, your intelligence will work against you.

People today are trying to broaden their minds, which may make one socially successful, not truly successful. If you want to be truly successful, you must be able to see everything just the way it is, without distortions. If you can see everything just the way it is, life becomes a play, a game. You can play it joyfully and you can play it well for sure. If you can play it well, people will say you are successful.

If you have to find fulfillment, if you have to know the joy of doing something, you will only know it when your action is total - hundred percent. In everything that you are doing, if you are absolutely hundred percent, you will notice your action will have a certain sense of exuberance. My activity stretches for almost eighteen to twenty hours a day, seven days of the week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Maybe in someone else's mind this would look like slavery. It is not so for me, because I spend my days in absolute exuberance, and that is so for lots of people around me. This is success, if you want to name it that way. But what I would say is, this is life. Life, if lived totally, is success. If it is lived in a meager fashion, that is not being successful. Once you are here, you must explore, live and experience the full depth and dimension of your life.

Ranked amongst the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru has been conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.