Can you find a sense of purpose without pursuing success?
In a fireside chat format, Kahran shares with Divya his surprise that his father, Pradeep, had never felt successful, as Pradeep shared in our last episode, and Kahran and Divya articulate some of the emulate-able parts of Pradeep's approach to life, along with the nature of the often revised definitions of success and being successful.
Purpose unravels the moment you try to pin it down. It's not a destination — it's the pattern that emerges when you look at what you keep coming back to.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week we talk about Divya's interview with my father Pradeep, an interesting experience to hear him talk about success and the meanings that he's assigned to it. We go deep into success and purpose and unpack whether success is always the changing all-posts or whether being successful is a state of mind that maybe you can someday achieve.
So as our devoted listeners may remember, I've been doing an MFA this season because it started the semester. I think around when the season started, right? Yeah. We had our last conversation of the semester yesterday for this class.
And I was talking about how I feel like there was this moment when I was studying photography years earlier where I learned about taking something that was for something and the kind of using the skills to tell the story I wanted to tell. And the story I was telling them was about how there was this photo that I once printed in a way that it looked like night, even though it was shot in full daylight.
It was just kind of fun. I was playing with the tools. And I was saying I reached out at this point where I'm thinking about revision for my work in a similar way, where I think for a long time revision to me was making things more clear or making things more comprehensible.
And something you and I have talked about in recent days is this notion that there's a certain type of comprehensible that you need in business speak. You need in the workplace. And I've done a lot of that in my past work. And now trying to write poetry, that's not always what you're going for.
You're trying to create some amount of emotions. You're trying to tell a story. And those stories maybe are at odds with being fully comprehensible. So it's an interesting metric because I think even in creating art, I would say, and I'd be curious about your thoughts, especially in conjunction with my father last week.
But I feel like for me, even in creating art, there is kind of like a success metric a little bit, right? It's like, where am I getting this piece to a place where it feels complete? And that, to me, has been a question which I'm trying to define exactly, right? Like, what are those goalposts of complete?
But I think something I've realized in the last few weeks is that revision has changed its purpose for me a little bit, right? And now I'm not always just thinking about revision. It's not just about driving towards a completeness state that is about comprehensibility. And I think revising that notion and saying, OK, maybe success in this situation is not
just about creating something that is complete, right? That there maybe is an incompleteness. Like, that can be part of the story being told. Yeah. So I just wanted to share the story with you because it's something that I'm percolating with a little bit.
And I do feel like it is kind of a changing definition of success again. But it's interesting to me to realize that something I thought was a tool to be used in a way is actually really kind of something else. So that's also interesting because it feels like artistic maturity in a certain way. OK, so like I'll give a different example, which would be slightly more objective.
If you are studying math or physics, there are right answers when you are studying, right? Like you are given problems, you have to solve them. Problems become slightly more abstract as you study higher and higher math or physics. But there is a right answer. But then as you move into research, there is no right answer.
You don't even know if the problem that you're looking at is the right problem. Will it have an answer? Who knows? Like a lot of research doesn't result in anything. Right? Like even people who work prolifically don't really end up finding quote unquote right answers.
And I feel like a lot of educational training, it primes the brain for finding right answers. And in case of art, that is like really, at least I feel like it's very limiting, partly also because I've never really been trained in any sort of like creative discipline at all. Like all of it is self trained, which is even more interesting then because you
would actually expect that you would come from the right answer heritage because that was your formal training, right? Like you were in physics and you were in maths. You were in those places where there was a right answer. But I wasn't in art for that, right?
Like I'm sure if I went into research right after, like, you know, my masters in physics, I would have struggled with that problem. But art was a different paradigm for me. And it was like strong enough in my head that I was like, I'm not going to approach it the way one would approach STEM.
Okay, here I'm going to give you an example if I can. Yeah. So here's this poem, right? And it's a very short poem that I'll just read to you. It's called In the Morning.
After In the Morning, I hear only the birds. Hello, hello, hello, they call. Hello, hello, hello. This poem, I feel like there's a sense of sorrow and a sense of wonder I feel. And I like that.
I like that journey. I like that there feels this little bit of tension in it. And so as I think about, I don't know, so I can think about as could this be more? And I do think in some ways that maybe it could be more, right? Because I think when, when I read it or when I hear it in my head, there's
stuff that's not yet conveyed when it's on the page. What does more mean here? Layers of meaning, I guess. Ways to connect with you. Because if you say that like it can be more expressive, then it would be less
open to interpretation. Like the more you express explicitly, the less open to interpretation would be. So like, for example, I could hear this poem right after, like, let's say somebody has passed away and I could think in one fashion. I could hear this poem after a breakup and I could think in another fashion.
I could hear this poem after like, you know, a one night stand and I would feel completely differently. And it's the same poem, but because it is abstract, it is open to many different meanings and these are just like three meanings that I thought of in the short duration that I heard the poem.
And now I had come across a very interesting concept yesterday called ergodic literature, which is basically literature that requires the reader to put effort. I was showing you that book. I don't know if you remember House of Leaves, which had like really interesting
type setting. It's a horror book, thick dome, right? And I was just showing you how it has like, you know, all of these formatting and like this weird structure. And it's a heavy read, not just because the content is heavy, like something
like, I don't know, Ulysses would be. Like it is heavy read because the form and the amount of information is just like it's hard to understand. Like it follows that truth resists simplicity kind of notion. And there's this entire category of games that just started from like the souls
like games from from software. But like these are games which don't have like, which are really hard to get into as in like, you know, they will beat you up again and again and again. Like the games are known for their gameplay difficulty. They don't have easy mode.
You can't pause the game. There is no such thing. Like if you die, you lose the stuff that you were carrying. It's just like, you know, all sorts of these weird challenges that are not a part of the game making like second right now.
Right. And same is true for the story. Like, you know, people would be like, Oh, how we figured out that this particular king probably ruled after this king in this kingdom is because we found this old sword and the description on that sword said something.
And like, you know, it is over the years that people have sort of like, you know, unraveled some of this. And like, I personally always find that kind of literature very interesting. Like I feel myself getting engaged with it a lot more because there is this like space for me as a consumer to get in and do some amount of like thinking
and some amount of just like keeping my eyes open and oh, what's going to happen and work. And I feel like even when I was reading the description, I felt like, oh, poetry is inherently ergodic in nature. It requires you to do work.
And that's why like a 40 page book of poetry might take you as long as 400 pages of story. Right. Like, yeah, you can run through a 400 page romance novel in like six hours and 40 pages of poetry is also probably going to take you six hours, especially
if it's good poetry. Yeah. I have some few hundred pages poetry books I've been trying to read and they're just, I mean, it's so slow reading for me. It's like someone who can only read a poem or two, you know, and then you're like,
you need a break. Yeah. And so like, at least for me, it feels like it requires a certain amount of maturity as an artist to get to the point where you do trust the audience that they will get some meaning out of it, even if it is not the meaning that I
intended or a meaning that I even imagined. Like they'll get something out of it because there is enough here for them to build on. Yeah. And I think part of why I have felt a lot of kinship with certain like
performance artists is because I think that this notion of highlighting incongruencies in life or incongruencies and thinking is really interesting to me. So even if it's like, it just makes you look at something slightly differently. Like that's all you get out of it.
That feels kind of interesting. Give me an example. So say, you know, this poem I just read to you maybe after you hear that poem in the morning, you hear the birds and you're just reminded of it, right? In a wistfulness, right?
So it just gave you a little bit more of a moment the next time you had that moment like that. I was thinking about performance artists. Like there was this artist we were talking about in class a couple of weeks ago who like she and her boyfriend stood naked in a doorway and then people had to
walk between them. Do you know who this is? Marina something, I think. Oh, Maria Abramovich. Yes, I'm pretty, yes, I'm pretty certain.
Yeah. Right. And it's like those. I mean, she does a lot of very interesting performance art. She's probably the only performance artist whose work I understand.
And I think that's just really right. It's so even if a lot of people don't get it, or you mean it just sits with you in a certain way, I think that's such an interesting way to think about it. I don't know. I realize as I'm talking that I'm still doing kind of what you and Pradeep were
talking about, which is like really keeping purpose and success intertwined in my head. You know, so it's like, does this achieve a purpose that I am excited about? And therefore, do I feel successful in that? I feel like you are doing that. But my question would be, whose purpose and what purpose is it solving?
So like, let's say, for example, there could be, I wanted to communicate this. And I feel like I have expressed that idea or the concept or the feeling properly. Or like, you know, it could be that I have an idea, a concept, something that I am like trying to communicate, or it could be that the purpose is that somebody else should get it.
Where are you drawing the line of purpose here? I think what I'm saying is kind of framing it almost in a harder question, unfortunately, which is saying that I need to determine the purpose I'm trying to achieve with this piece of work. And then I will condition my feelings about whether the work is successful or not
as to whether or not it achieves that purpose. Now, it's great in theory. The problem you then run into is that you're forced to be a contextualize all the work all the time, because you're like, Oh, well, what is the purpose of this? And then, you know, is this helping my larger purpose?
And I'm like, well, I don't really know all the time what larger purpose I'm chasing here. What is the broader purpose of all your work? Oh, great. Now we're into the really big question. I don't know.
I mean, like it does have to be a grand, but like, what is the larger purpose of why you create, you know, the deepest why, why do you make? If I were to make it slightly lighter for you. Like, honestly, for me, one of the major purposes is that it is really fun to make things. Like in the last two days, as I've been like, like a mad person making my game,
I feel happy, right? Like there is just so much joy and delight in creating something like I understand what people must feel like when they give birth to a child. Tell about your game a little bit while I'm thinking. I think it's so cute.
It's such a cute idea. You might as well tell. Give a lot of teaser. Okay, so I'm like trying to build this board game where you get points by score. You are a fashion designer competing with other fashion designers and you score
points by making costumes and different costumes can get different kinds of scores. And all of those outfits are like, you know, what you are trying to aim for while your models work their own way. Yeah. Hopefully, like, you know, once I have more prototype and testing and stuff,
we could even do a case study on the, like, you know, Joy's blog about it. It might be interesting. Yeah, I think one of the things that was really interesting in this piece you wrote a while ago was about how you were writing about how you use your process in order to create that piece.
So I feel like this could be looking at the way you use, like the way you think about game design in making a game. I feel like would be an interesting, interesting thing. I was chatting with one of my classmates yesterday and they were talking about how they want to redefine their relationship with the social media platforms.
And it's just been kind of a complicated relationship because both they're making a career from the time and energy they're putting into the social media platforms, but also it's like a real suck on just like creativity and being able to find the mind space and just having like a healthy relationship with yourself and social media and hearing it and thinking a little bit to myself
that I feel like if you can keep define goals from things and it's really hard with something like social media that has its whole like dopamine loops going on. So more speaking generally, but if you can define your goals for something, then it becomes easier not to try and fulfill all of your goals. Something I think we've talked about earlier in the podcast is something I
really have struggled with is that notion that it's like, oh, you know, I'm emptying the dishwasher. How can I do it in this most optimal way possible? Because I really enjoy when I manage to optimize my life around me. And it's like, well, no, maybe the goal I really want us to do here is like,
figure out how can I do it in a way that feels the least exhausting possible? And if that means, you know, emptying it over like two hours instead of emptying it all at once, like maybe that's the right thing for me, right? But I can figure out which goal I'm going after. So I don't just default to certain goals.
And that's what I meant by like artistic majority by the way. It takes a certain amount of doing the work and exposure and experimenting to stop getting into the zone of everything needs to be perfect. Like it's after you have done things for a while that you start feeling like, oh, I could try and I could do something different and I will make another thing.
And that can serve a different purpose. I was just thinking about how when we started working together, I was working on this play and I was like so obsessed with it that I was going to make it into this perfect thing. And I did get it to, you know, most of the way there, but I don't know.
I guess there's a purpose I feel in being able to transliterate things across different mediums. So I think in being able to take what is a feeling and being able to capture that in words or in form is very interesting to me. And I really enjoy that process of being able to do that.
And I also just kind of find it very helpful for like how I live my life. And then I think similarly, like when I think about how I think about photography, a lot of that is similar, right? Where I feel like being able to capture a feeling about a place is very cool to me. And sometimes it does mean that you're telling a story across like many photos
or something, but that's been the work that I really love to do. And the times when I really have put in the time to kind of take a work to a final story, it is a story about trying to capture the feeling or telling the story of a place. And very much on like emotional level. So I like that.
I think something you said a few weeks ago was that stories that can make you laugh and make you cry in the same story really just shows like a lot of finesse in storytelling. And I think that notion is very exciting to me. Like that's the place where I would like to get to
and being able to really have this kind of finesse in my chosen mediums of storytelling. How's that for a purpose? That sounds awesome, but also like one isn't evaluating purpose. I was recently. I don't know if you've read Ocean at the end of the lane by Neil Gaiman.
I don't think I have, actually. There is this line somewhere that like one character says to another, am I doing good at being a person? And the other character, like the wise lady says that you can't fail at being a person. And I found that like even when I had read it earlier,
I found it to be such a meaningful way to look at relationships and art and like just your existence. Like, sure, I might not make the most beautiful XYZ. I might not express it the most XYZ way. But the fact that one did, it means something to the self,
even if it isn't resonant with the world. And like having a almost all state in winning rather than an and state in winning, I personally feel like it's a recipe for joy in life. So like, you know, it did this piece, strike a good balance between joy and sadness. That would be good.
Or did it make somebody feel really joyful? That would be good. Or it made somebody feel really like, you know, touch deeply upon some sort of like sadness or grief or that kind of feeling. If your poetry could, you know, shift between the three hues,
that would be a lot easier for you to do, which means you would do it much more, which means that you would give to the world more with the art that you make. It's also like optimism is the way to keep going on, not like just a nice escapist story when tells themselves.
I guess I could see that in like a creative context. I do think it's possible to like fail at being a person in like a non-creative context. Like behind every corporate policy that is like terrible is people enforcing that policy, you know, and like choosing to make those policies versus other things. And I think like we begrudge responsibility sometimes in a way that I don't think necessarily, you know,
we're saying, oh, it was just my job. And it's like, well, I didn't have to be your job, you know, like. I mean, I think that like if one sort of denies their own humanity, then they are denying their own personhood. That's fair.
But as long as one is in touch with that, I don't think that there is anything. It's also a very broad statement. So, you know, that you could. I didn't agree with that. But like it makes me think of like one of my exes who was a psychotherapist.
And it was very interesting because she talked about, like, you know, some prison inmates that she had done, like, you know, therapy on. And you could see that she was like, yeah, but you do feel compassion towards these people. And ultimately, like, you know, at the core of it, if you can see people's humanity, you will feel compassion for them.
You know what I mean? Yeah, you know what you mean? Let's like, we can come back to the original, like we have a date or a lot. Yeah, no, that's what I was kind of thinking about. Right. Whereas it was kind of thinking about.
See, the other thing that really struck me from your conversation was that it really highlighted to me how much I feel like there's this not only this intertwining of success and purpose, but also this notion that, like, in order to be kind of in a good state or content state or happy state, right, like you need to be in a place where you feel successful and if you don't feel successful, at least in some way in your life, it's hard
to be just not depressed. I think was what I realized as I was listening to the episode. And so it was so interesting to kind of hear that you could have purpose without feeling successful. And then also, which I guess cognitively, I knew, of course, but it feels interesting to kind of hear that and articulate that.
And then also to look at it and say, you can kind of go on and just stop chasing success at some point and be like, that was something I had and that's done now. And now I'm doing other things almost. At least to me, it also gave me a more nuanced definition of success. I realized at some point when he was talking about how, as he grows older, the list of
things that he can do grows shorter. Yeah. Or the things he can't do grows longer, whichever one of the two. It reminded me of like one of the things from a talk that Neil Gaiman gave, where when he was successful, super successful with Sandman in the early 90s, and Stephen King gave him
this advice that you should enjoy this. This is great. And Neil Gaiman was like, I didn't. For the next 10 years, I just kept worrying about the next idea, the next book, the next story. And I really should have enjoyed it.
I should have looked around and thought, this is great. Somehow what, like Pradeep said, reminded me of that. Like if I look around in my life today, I work with people who I really, really care about. I have friends who I really respect, who are talented, who are skilled and who are kind individuals.
Like it's a good life. It's a really good life. I think sometimes like in the chasing, we can become so narrow minded, so narrow focused that like we let almost like other people's definitions ruin our feelings of success. And at least like my takeaway from thinking about that conversation was also a lot of it
is about just letting yourself feel successful. So right, I feel like just now you did exactly what you and I have been doing, which is saying we redefine the definition of successful to make ourselves feel successful. I thought just what was so interesting, what my father was saying, which was he didn't do that. Right.
He left his definition of success being, was I successful in changing made in India? And then when that wasn't successful, he just moved on, carried on. Yeah. Yeah, that's just so interesting. In some ways, he also redefined it, right?
Like he said that like, you know, it looks like a good day or it feels like a good day because, oh, I came back from my travel after a month and the grandkids have grown up and they are funny. Like, you know, that is the feeling of success. Like, I don't know, at least to me, it feels like he dissociated the feelings of pride
and positive association with one's life that one gets from the feeling of social achievement. So you're saying it's the experience of pride and joy in that experiencing that moment you said, no, or in the past? Some part of like experience of success is pride and joy in the state of life now or
in the past. Correct. I don't know when you think of success, don't you think of like, yeah, you know, chest up some big smile on your face. Like, doesn't that feel like success?
I don't know, like a marathoner or like, you know, a runner crossing the finish line. It could be also kind of, yeah, a way that people think and use the term. What are they feeling? Achievement is an external thing. And that's what I mean.
Like, to me, it sounded like Pradeep separated the two. To him, success was his definition and his goals, not achievements laid out by the world. For lack of a better example, in the book you just gave me, Atlas of the Heart, there's a section where she talks about in the shame section about how we use shameful socially in a way that's not really that helpful.
Okay. Because we kind of say a behavior is shameful. What we really mean is that it's not, there's a level of courtesy that was not associated. But that's not really a place of shame or doesn't it? It's not really what we're trying to achieve.
I'm not being able to say this, that properly. But the way I was thinking about it is I think that success might have a similar notion, where some people are looking at it and saying, you know, this is not the metric that I use. When I think about what makes me feel content or feel good or feel like my life is worth living, I'm not looking and saying, is my life successful?
Yeah. What I am looking at when I think about the word success is I'm saying, you know, successful was decided as a team culturally when I was a formative age. And now whatever that barometer was that we decided as a team, am I performing against that barometer?
And I think some people's success sits at that definition. And then there's some people who they're using it in a different way, which is kind of saying, well, is my life almost like worth living? So while you are speaking, I was thinking about we should probably look at the etymology of the word success.
It comes from the Latin succeederie come close after, which in the mid 16th century went to success. And then in English to succeed. Come close after. Yeah.
I think it has the same root word as successor, because the successor comes close after. Sometimes I find that there are words which you can understand. There is a different definition, which is like succeeded is made up of sub next to and Cito go move. So like that meaning to me is very interesting because it's almost like success.
Inherently, the word is about where to go next. Anyways, like I distracted us, but I was just thinking about like when you were saying that maybe this is how we use the word and like, you know, the definitions evolve. That's when my mind went like, where did the definition begin? Yeah.
No, it's an interesting question. I guess, yeah, it is even today, right? We look at our successes and failures in trying to decide what we're going to do next, which I think is a different thing than using it as an adjective. I don't know if using it as an adjective is that helpful.
This was a successful period, right? Because it's just a way of summing up something like a successful life is unhelpful, but isn't it the same? Like what makes it like, I know there's emotional difference. The load on the word success is heavy.
Just the way we have, like, you know, socially grown up. But how is it different from efficient? Like, you know, you did this efficiently or you did this beautifully or you did this quickly. The success is just like in that term, if we just think about it, oh, there were certain metrics and those metrics are met.
This was successful. It's an adverb, not an adjective. Right. So efficiently, it's a modifier on how you did something. It's not a modifier on the noun.
And that's what I'm kind of wondering about. Is this modifier? Like a successful life is not a noun. The life is the noun, right? So successful is a modifier on life.
Yeah. So then that is an adjective, right? Yeah. So I'm saying efficiently is an adverb. So it's a modifier on the verb, right?
But successful is an adjective. It's an efficient system. It's a successful system. This was an efficient period in my life. Sure.
I mean, you could say that is that the carry the same sort of way. Like, but the thing is like different adjectives go with different nouns. You can't say it was a red period of my life, even though red is a valid adjective. Yes. But what I'm saying is that I think that having these things, it was a successful
campaign. It was a successful project. It was a successful life. What is the difference? I think thinking about them as modifiers on the noun is what I'm objecting to, right?
Which is it's saying that we're looking at this thing and you're applying judgment to it. And I think there's a different thing and you're looking at how you did something, which would be like kind of the verb, right? And then you're looking at saying the process or yeah.
And then you're saying, you know, that that was a process that I felt a certain way about. And I think it's just more helpful the way I'm starting to contextualize, like, you know, thinking about life, right? That just to think about like, how did that go? Right?
How was that process? And then what did you feel about that process and less focus on, you know, the nouns of it, right? Which would have been the outcomes or the actual like tools you're working with or. But that to me feels like that's that's why I keep the initial caveat, right?
Like ignoring the fact that success is a very loaded term culturally. What is the difference? There isn't much difference. Like even the thing that you're saying, it's like what you're saying is it's emotionally too loaded to use it as a qualifier on a noun.
Is this a successful person or not? I'm saying generally, I think it's a nicer way to think about periods of your life or think about periods of things you did, right? So I could think about, you know, was the those video poems that we made successful or if I don't want to use the word successful, but something similar,
I would say, where's it whimsical? Let's say, right? And I think is was I able to approach that process? I made progress against doing whimsy. If that was kind of a goal I was after, right?
That in that was I think about how I did that. Was there an element of whimsy I was able to bring to it? If it wasn't successful, there we are again, if it didn't show up in the final piece, I think I would try and detach those two a little bit. Yeah, but like I made that product whimsically or I made that poem whimsically.
Is there a difference from it was a whimsical poem? Sometimes nouns do have 100 percent. It's different. You're right. It is 100 percent different. Whimsical is not a great analog for success in the situation.
Correct. Correct. Like, but I'm just saying that there are. So you are saying that there are things in the process, but I'm saying that does not mean that trades don't exist and success can be a trait.
It is accumulation of multiple traits. It's an overall assessment, but like assessment and judgment don't have to be the same. Or do you feel like in this context, they do become the same? Sorry, success and what become the same? Not success.
Like, do you feel like in this context, the judgment and assessment, do they become overlapping the moment you start thinking about success? Because like it's a little bit like very sort of separate, but like, you know, we see we have both made products. We have seen this, you know, the biggest resistance is to do user testing.
Why? Because the assessment feels like a judgment. When the user doesn't use something that you have made, it feels like a judgment on you and not an assessment of the efficacy of the product. Right. And we feel like, you know, that is what is happening when one is trying to assign
success or failure to something in their head. This reminds me of something that, again, I was chatting about with my classmates a couple of days ago, but one of them was saying that they've looked at meditation for years as a thing to achieve something. And we read this one Alan Gensburg speech, actually, that he gave as a talk.
And it's really about how meditation has no purpose. And you can kind of go in with it, thinking that it has no purpose. And it'll just be a lot easier for you to kind of, because you're not really doing it for a purpose, you're doing it to kind of be in a certain way for a period. So I guess I feel like there's maybe a question of evolution here, right?
In thinking. And I think that there is a layer where it is a very judgment or a valuatory and assessment based approach to success and saying, you know, where I am today, am I meeting these metrics? And I wonder if there's a different thing that one can kind of evolve to where
it's more looking and saying that there's this kind of intangible state of being, the state of being where I am able to pursue things that in a way that I'm achieving the purposes that I'm looking for. And I don't know, I'm struggling to kind of give a qualifier for that state of being without it being a like a judgment or a valuatory qualifier.
Right. Because every, like the ways I'm being able to try and think about how do I define what that state of being is? It's like, those are a valuatory, right? Like, am I being able to achieve the purposes I'm achieving?
And I think that there might be a way of thinking about success where you're kind of evolving past that sense of, is it always just an a valuatory experience where you're looking back at a period or you're looking back at a project or looking back at your life and you're saying, was this somehow meeting these standards versus kind of saying, I'm existing in a way that I'm being able
to do things and that existence, almost like you would say, like, you know, what the purpose of meditation is, right? Like, like being in that kind of state of mind is a state of mind that I associate with this amorphous thing that we call success, right? Which is like a way of looking at yourself almost.
Yes, I have like a bunch of different thoughts. One of them is, don't you think that's actually a format of how the human mind works? Like, I feel like we are programmed or like our hardware is like very oriented towards thinking in binaries, right?
So like when we look at a complex situation, we ultimately still do want a yes or no, a zero or a one answer to it. It's like, you know, is the neuron firing or is it not firing? There isn't somewhere in between. Like it's not kind of firing ever.
Like it is firing or not firing, right? So part of it is just like whenever you look at something to me, I don't think like looking at something and thinking, hmm, that was not successful. It necessarily has to be charged or like feel like a negative evaluation of the person.
And I feel like in the way we are discussing somehow, like those two things are getting over, at least to me, it feels like those two things are getting overlapped where like the evaluation of a situation or a period becomes an evaluation of the identity. When you think about points where you feel not successful and I don't know if
there's any examples you might feel willing to share. Can you say you don't feel that way? Yeah. Give an example if you can. So like let's say that I didn't get through college the first time I applied,
right? I had to take a drop here. Generally, one wouldn't say it's a pleasant feeling, right? Like, oh, I wanted to go to this college and like, you know, you generally hearing from social perception is that, oh, how could you not do it?
What a failure, right? And I would say that like in the moment, the self perception was also that and like a lot of the feedback that like my dad got or like, you know, I got was, oh, you should have taken something you're wasting a year. And now I look back and I'm like, it was no big deal.
Similarly, like, you know, getting in physics, like it is objectively not a great thing. Like I didn't get a branch of study that I would have really liked because I didn't get the kind of score that I would have really liked. And both of those are failures. But I also don't feel like, you know, oh, I am a failure because of that.
Like I feel like to me, it's a little bit like making dinner out of whatever is in the fridge and not lamenting about, oh, why did I waste the broccoli yesterday? I didn't even make something useful. So and I'm not so much asking, would you still carry it today? At the time when you looked at it, we were like, oh, you know, that period of my
life was not successful. I don't feel that like it wasn't successful anymore. In the moment I was feeling like, oh, this is hard. And I feel like a failure. In transitory moments, I'm not opposed to feeling like a failure.
I also think that like sometimes that is a metric that tells you I'm not getting what I want. Like failure is a desire indicator, right? Just like envy is a desire indicator. Failure is a desire indicator. I want something. I didn't get it.
I want to push towards that. Yeah, I don't know though. I just, I feel like you're still looking at it and wishing that there was a different outcome, right? So there's like this still sense of like a
valuatory assessment against this criteria that was saying that there was a criteria that would have made me feel successful. And then. But I don't carry negative affect towards my identity because of it. What I'm saying is like the situation can be evaluated negatively, but you don't
have to carry the negative affect on your identity. I am not a failure because I had to do a drop here. But I did fail in getting in college in the run, like, you know, in India, you call it getting inside in college and running, like I didn't get in running. So I did fail.
Yeah. And I guess what I was trying to say though, is that I think that today I met a place where I would then redefine a new set of success metrics for myself, right? And I would go after a different set of success metrics. And what I was hypothesizing though, is that there's a way that you kind of evolve past that where it stops being this kind of set of ever changing judgments
and that there's somehow you get into a state where you are in a more enlightened state where you're feeling because I'm agreeing that I think there is this cultural definition of successful and what it means to be successful, that I think it's more about a like an ideal state of mind than really like actually being in a valueatory criteria of, you know, have you achieved these sets of
binary goals, at least the way we like seem to hypothetically have this delusion of what it means to be successful. It seems like right. It's this ideal life almost. I mean, that I feel like comes from envy because like people just want to pick
and choose parts of people's lives. Like honestly, people who are very, very, very creatively brilliant. They are often very troubled mentally. They feel isolated. They feel disconnected.
They feel like nobody. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a certified genius yesterday and he was like the first time he was in his twenties. He met this person who has followed like a very similar career path, a very similar life to him.
That person told him, oh, you are a genius. Life must be hard for you. And I feel like that's the thing that like a lot of people, when they wistfully look at quote unquote successful people, they don't realize like I was talking to Sam recently, she's doing a thesis on organizational psychology and
she's talking about it as a part of that, that like there is a alienation and mystification of success that leads to dehumanization and isolation. Right. I feel like some part of it is just like that, that, oh, your life would be great if you just had this, this, this.
And it's like everything comes with trade offs, whether it's an effort or it's in isolation or it's in like, you know, different life choices or it's in, I don't know, there's certain things that are revealed in our society. And we think that anybody who does those revealed things would be considered successful.
Yeah. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at a little bit because I think in my mind, the myth of the successful person is someone who is able to show up in their best self all the time. Right.
It's kind of like in my head, the way I think they mentioned the myth of the successful person, right? Like they're able to be the perfect mother in the moments they want to be the perfect mother. They're able to also, you know, do the perfect things at their job and then
also be able to, you know, climb a mountain if they're first fielded to climb a mountain suddenly. And I think what I'm trying to articulate and maybe even just like conceptualizing for myself as I'm doing it is I think that there's actually this state of being kind of aware of yourself and aware of like what you are able to say yes to in
those moments so that you are able to kind of say yes to the things you can do wholeheartedly. And that's where I think that what we consider as almost the ideal successful person is it's more about a question of evolving in a way that you are doing less stuff you don't want to do.
Right. And I think that is the way we idealize successful people is actually that they don't do stuff they don't want to do. But getting to that point is actually a process of getting more in touch with yourself, not actually chasing these barometers of what we say is like, oh,
this is success, right? In this moment, this is success. This is very interesting. Also, I don't know if you realize it, but you basically said success is not chasing perfection, but it is chasing authenticity.
I feel like we have to do a whole episode about that. Exactly. Yeah. When you were saying I was like, that is an interesting insight because part of it is also that right?
Like we success such a broad term that like, you know, we include so many small things in it and these are not like perfection and authenticity are not small terms in themselves. Like it might just be really interesting to talk about that next time, probably. Yeah.
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