Sadhguru: What decides our success?

QUESTIONER: If we want to succeed in life, what plays a major role – fate, God, effort or luck?

Sadhguru: Fate, God, luck, effort – maybe all of them, but in what proportion? When you say fate, obviously it is something you cannot do anything about. When you say luck, again obviously it is something you cannot do anything about. God is also not something you can do anything about. The only thing that is in your hands is effort. Put your hundred pervcent into your effort. What happens, happens. Don’t leave proportions of your energy and your capability to luck¸ God, fate, and all these things – that is not your business. If there is such a thing, it will act. Your business is only effort, and the effort has to be incisive; it should be focused and calibrated. Simply creating effort is foolish.

Hard labor alone is not going to get you somewhere. The right kind of action, the right timing, the right place – all are important.

For these things to happen, you need perception and intelligence. That is all you must do in your life – constantly look for ways to enhance your perception and your 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. Intelligent people on this planet are generally the most miserable people on the planet. This is simply because they have an active intelligence but no perception of life.

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.

You should not be aspiring for success. It is a miserable way to structure your life. You will simply cause pain and suffering to yourself and every[1]one, because your idea of success right now is that everyone should be below you, while you are on top.

This is not success; this is sickness. Never think, “I want to be successful.” Just see how to make yourself into a full-fledged being, and it will find expression. If it finds good expression, people around you will say, “He is a great success!” That is fine. People should recognize that you are a success, but you should not be thinking about how to be successful. That is a very wrong way to approach life.

Once you have come here as a human being, the potential of what it means to be human, all the dimensions of who you are must be experienced. Only then I would say you are successful. And the ability to explore that potential, the daring to explore that potential will come to you when you come to a state within yourself where there is no fear of suffering, that no matter what the life situation is, your experience of life will not alter itself.

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 18-20 hours a day, seven days of the week, 365 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 among the 50 most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan, India’s highest civilian award, in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.