Recently wathced the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’. Don’t wonder why I was so late in watching such a good movie, I just happened to miss watching it (like the other good movies :) )
The movie was mind-blowing, to say the least. I love movies that evoke long lasting strong emotions or thoughts. This was one such movie, which kept me thinking long and hard about the way the 2 characters Prof. Gerald (Stellan Skarsgard) and the therapist Sean(Robin Williams) portrayed 2 very conflicting, influential and significant ideas about Success and the purpose of Talent.
I have had many long conversations/arguments/bashing with 2 of my good friends about what is success (success in career to be precise). When you look at someone who has made his way into Google (I guess I should probably change this to Facebook 
) and creating one of the finest products that shape the next generation of technologies or someone who just sparked the idea of iPhone and made it the love of smartphone owners or someone who has got a great GMAT score and got admitted to Stanford, Harvard… or one of your foes who seems to somehow do things faster and better than you and has become the toast of your management, or that guy who just seems always to know the way to get promoted faster that you all the time – when you look at these folks does it occur to you that they are being successul?
When you look at a guy who has not had big awards, who does not seem to have a flair for MS, MBA, seems to be getting promotions pretty slow, works for a pretty ordinary nothing fancy company, doesn’t earn big money – do you think that this person has not been successful in his career? But what if this person is more peaceful in his life that the examples mentioned above? Would you still regard this guy as being unsuccessful in career?
Which one would you weigh more – happiness or success?
In my views, success or being successful is just about doing what you like to do and being peaceful with life. Even if that ‘doing what you like’ is actually ‘doing nothing but lazing around’, if one is still peaceful, I would call that person being successful. Sucess is not a universal standard, it is pretty personal. What job one does, how fast one gets promoted to the top, how big one earns, how significant one’s work is —- these are the global standards which many around you and me seem to have employed to measure how much you and me have succeeded in our career. There are so many eyes around you and me constantly watching and rating us how successful we are in our career. Some of you might want to give importance to these global standards (or I should say common standards) and measure yourself against that, some of you just don’t feel like accepting these common standards but are forced to due to peer pressure, some (like me) who want to give a damn about these common standards but still have that little fear in mind whether you are taking the right decision to give a damn. What if that decision that we took turns out to be a wrong one too late in the game, to change it? It demands guts! And then there is a popular belief that many of those around you and me hold – that those of us who talk about success being personal and not a global standard are the ones who cannot excel in global standard and so finding an excuse to say its personal. Now, this is crap! Just because one does not accept the global standard, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they could not meet that global standard.
The movie also talks about the purpose of talent – is the purpose of talent is to use that talent? I disagree! I side with Sean (Robin Williams) on that. No matter how gifted one is, no matter how talented one is, in my view, what is important is doing what he/she likes doing, even if it is actually doing ‘nothing’!
