Recipe for success

Magical Mindful Living
5 days ago
3 min read

Let's discuss recipes for success. I am sure you have read atleast one biography of a successful mentor. Maybe its sports, engineering or business studies. Maybe its art. Ones who were successful, once they were successful have given a list of items to do. Stepwise process to success. Often we believe in them, and we make our own stepwise guide. Follow these cycles all our lives and hopes for the best. But after all these same struggles you have been through I now realise there is no recipe for success. And this article is to why.

Literally we are like ping pong balls.

We are like ping pong balls in a casino game. Have you seen how random they fall down when released from a same point. Each and every ping pong ball takes a random walk down its obstacle path to ultimately end up in some random place on the board. Yet when we look at all the balls there may be patterns we observe. Our society closely resemble the ping pong ball table.

Although there are patterns individuals take apparent random journeys. Just like we cannot predict the path of individual ping pong ball we cannot predict the journey of any individual in the society. Yet we see patterns. Let's look at some patterns.

Hardworking pays off

Smartwork pays more

Habits govern our happiness

Success depend on the people we associate

Some people live by these so called rules, get successful materialistic or other and they write a biography, falsely thinking rules they followed brought their success. But for a rational mind it may seem otherwise. Non of the rules guarantee the success. Past performance doesn't predict future success. There is inherent luck involved in everything we do. Do not believe me? Consider birth.

Everything you do in your life, the success faliure, struggle and happiness depend on the place you were born. And there is no way we can remove the influence of this factor from our life. As everything aroused after this single factor its influence is inherently there. No matter how much I followed someone's success rules, I would be adding my cocktail of personal factors into the pot. Who knows the same rules which made someone successful might even kill me in the process. And this is only one reason I cannot give you a set of success rules. Nobody can know all the factors involved in an apple falling to the ground. Yet alone which affect our thoughts.

Similar observation comes from mindfulness. And it's more subjective explanation. Its the will. How much influence we have on our will determines our success ultimately. Imagine you have a complete control of your life. Then success is very easy. You just need to sit down with a mentor and schedule your day filled with quality work that mental happiness will immediately follow and after sometime material success will follow. But this is not the case. No matter how attractive our plan may seem we will find that we cannot stick to it for longer periods of time, without causing suffering. It seem useless even to try these flowcharts. But what is the reason?

When you are mindful you will notice how limited, negligent or even absent our control over our will and thoughts. As an example just a moment ago, a crow passed near my window, making crow noise. I am unable to pay attention to anything else. I'm unable to stop thinking about it or think anything else when it happens. Listening to the crow has made a change in my stream of thoughts that it will never take the same path if it was not there. Same will happen when you put any new observation about life. Just like an obstacle in a ping pong game. We take a different turn every moment in life.