Make your greed limitless, your ambition boundless, and watch your inner genius flower: Sadhguru on achieving success – Times of India

Who doesn’t want to be successful in life? From high-school students to professionals to CEOs, we all aim to achieve more in life, and rightly so. And now to guide readers to achieve success to the fullest, a new book ‘Achieving Meaningful Sucess’ by Dr. Vivek Mansingh was published on February 28, 2022. The book is a collection of interesting exclusive interviews with today’s influential leaders including Ratan Tata, Narayan Murthy, Kiran Majumdar-Shaw, Sadhguru, Rahul Dravid, Prakash Padukone, Vani Kola, and many others. “This book will be an adept lifetime mentor faithfully by your side to guide you through various stages of life. It guides you in achieving meaningful success including tremendous professional success through multidimensional and balanced life goals, which are the key to happiness and fulfilment,” reads the book’s blurb.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from ‘Achieving Meaningful Success: Unleash the Power of Me!’ published with permission from Penguin India.


Sadhguru Ji on Mind, Body and Soul

Sadhguru Ji, often known as the ‘Millennial Guru’, is famous worldwide for founding the Isha Foundation, a spiritual organization focusing on yoga and social work.

For his passion for teaching yoga and holistic living, he is revered by millions across the world. He is much loved for his hard-hitting, highly-relatable sermons that
are packed with much humour and laughter! With his unique and incisive vision, he speaks eloquently about the need to be deeply aware of one’s self and being

meditative right from a young age.

He has written several books, such as Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy, Mystic’s Musings and Death: An Inside Story. His book Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny made the New York Times bestsellers list. It was a moment of pride for all Indians when he addressed the United Nations Millennium World Peace Summit, the British Parliament’s House of Lords, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and International Institute for Management Development. He has also spoken at the annual World Economic Forum in 2007, 2017 and 2020.

In 2017, he received the Padma Vibhushan from the Government of India for his contributions to social welfare.

‘As long as you are locked up in your own logic, the magic of life will not reveal itself to you,’ he says.

I have personally benefitted from his Inner Engineering course and my face-to-face, one-to-one meeting with him. He is one of the most impressive persons I have ever met. Here are his thoughts on taking care of mind, body and soul, and leadership.

VM: You have interacted with many top business and political leaders. In your opinion, what are the top three qualities of these leaders?

Sadhguru: A leader is someone who has deep insights. In other words, he sees what others are not able to see. A leader must also be a symbol of integrity and must

be able to inspire the best in those around him. Being an inspiration need not necessarily mean that a leader has to be very charismatic or flamboyant. Many inspire

others simply out of their absolute commitment to what they do. So these are the three ‘I’s: Insight, Integrity, and Inspiration.

VM: My definition of leadership is: ‘The ability to motivate yourself and your team towards achieving a goal, and getting the best out of you and your team, even in adverse circumstances.’ Your thoughts on leadership?

Sadhguru: If you are a leader, you need to do everything that works in the best interest for everyone, or at least as many people as possible. You have to be inclusive—every thought, every emotion, every action that you perform should not be about you but others and your followers. Consider everyone’s well-being.

VM: To achieve success, one has to make sure mind, body and soul are taken care of. Your thoughts on the best way for people to do it?

Sadhguru: In yoga, we look at the human body as five koshas or sheaths. The first sheath is called annamaya kosha or the food body, because what you call the physical body is just a heap of food. The second sheath is called manomaya kosha or the mental body. These two layers can only function in connection with the third dimension, the energy body or pranamaya kosha. You can compare this to computers today—there is hardware and software, but by themselves they cannot do anything

unless you plug the computer into quality power. Pranamaya kosha is the dimension in which most of the yogic practices function. If you keep your pranamaya kosha in perfect balance and fully activated, you will be in a great mental and physical state and there can be no such thing as disease either in your physical or mental body. Yoga is capable of activating inner energies in a way that your body and mind function at their optimal capacity. It is a means to create inner situations exactly the way you want them. When it comes to external situations, we are all differently capable. But when it comes to the inner situation, we are all equally capable. All human beings, without exception, are capable of turning into the architects of their own joy and the masters of their own destiny. Yoga offers us the key.

VM: One has to aspire big to achieve big goals. So, how does one create a balance between being aspirational and being content?

Sadhguru: Contentment means containment. Why would anyone want to contain his life? If you have lived a life of contentment, that means you did not live, you contained your life. It is very natural for every human being to strive to be something more than what he or she is right now. The problem with our world is that there is not too much ambition, but too little. We have scaled down our ambitions. We need to up the stakes. Why are you stingy about your desires? Anyway, you want well-being, so why don’t you be magnanimous? It is not just about, ‘I want to be well.’ It is ‘I want the whole world to be well. I want the whole existence to be well. I want all life to be well.’ Be really greedy with your ambitions. Whatever is your ambition for yourself, extend that to all life on this planet. Make your greed limitless, your ambition boundless, and watch your inner genius flower. If we bring about this shift in leaders, from operating out of narrow personal ambitions to operating out of a larger vision, that will be the greatest thing for the future generations of the world.

VM: A short message to our youth about doing well for themselves and the world.

Sadhguru: Youth means a lot of energy. In terms of energy, what a youth can do, a child or an old man cannot do. But unbridled energy without stability and direction is always destructive. Whether they are in academics, vocational training, or simply doing whatever they wish to in their lives, if only youth are a little more stable, this energy could be put to better use for their own and everyone’s well-being. Youthfulness will go waste if there is no stability. Only those who are stable can use the quality and the talent that they have to the fullest extent. The most important thing that needs to happen to youth on the planet is to become meditative. Before the youth manage businesses, nations and the world, it is extremely important that they learn to manage themselves. The whole process of yoga is the science of inner management where you create an inner possibility of being blissful, joyful, peaceful by your own nature, not because of something that happens around you. So, yoga shows the path on which you can build your life and achieve success.

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