Good Will Hunting
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’!
The general meaning of ‘success’ is more or less achieving something you desire or plan to have. Now, since people desire different things, I agree with you that being successful means different things to different people.
If one desires to be happy and one is happy doing nothing, sure, he is successful at being happy and doing nothing. But is he successful in his career? I don’t think so. Career is a chosen profession or an occupation. Doing ‘nothing’ doesn’t sound like a profession or occupation. Does it?
That sure doesn’t sound like a profession or career. If one chooses not to chase those big jobs or big money or big promotions, happy with what he is doing, would you call him being successful?
Of course, I’ll call him successful at being happy with what he is doing.
Well written post, Som.. As u said, success n happiness doesn’t come with default settings. According to me success and happiness goes hand in hand. Success is not just achieving something, but it is finishing the work with excellence, which in turn wud give me happiness. Even when we do the smallest thing in a day and complete them with satisfaction, that wud result in success as well as happiness to me.
if the answer for all the three following question is same then that is what success in career
What you want to do +
What you like to do +
what you have to do
Adding one more – what you do
First about the movie:
I think the movie with its intelligent screenplay sidestepped an important point – “What defines you today is what happened to you in the past”. Without all that past, there is no “you”. At birth you are really nothing. Then things ‘happen’ to you – like your parents sent you to school even though you really did not want to go, your teacher taught you, it is not good to take someone else’s pen without their permission even though you felt it is so natural to take it when in need, all the relatives/friends kept telling you that becoming a doctor or engineer is the ultimate goal, when you were clueless about what does it even mean to lead a life, etc. “You” gets defined.
).
Now if at some point in the past you were given the freedom to choose and define success as you like it, I am sure you would have chosen not to go to school, would have chosen to take others’ items without their permission, would have chosen to play cricket, tennis, etc. You were not given that freedom to do so. Why do you think you need to have that freedom now? (If you say you are grown up and have the right to do so, then remember that, this concept is also not your original but what the world fed you
Now at 25+ you assume you have free will and have all the right to choose and define what is success for you leaving out the world. Isn’t that an illusion? What happens to you today (like watching “Good Will Hunting”) will define your future. In the case of Will Hunting, his past defined him to be a janitor and an arrogant guy. Lambeau wanted to redefine it. He felt that he could make his life worthwhile according to the collective judgement of the world (there is nothing right/wrong about it. It just exists). But what did Sean do? He assumed that Will’s life is already defined and nobody should change it. How can he make that assumption? Everybody’s life gets redefined by circumstances. Lambeau would have played his part in WIll Hunting’s life. Why should Sean has the ultimate authority to define Will’s life (by not giving the chance to Lambeau)? Sean just decided Will’s 20 years of existence (that too pretty abnormal because of abusive father) was enough to define him and he does not need any further directions. How the heck can he make that decision?
Now coming back to success in life:
It is not much different from what I said above. The world defined you and you define success. So definitely the world has a part to play in it. It will continue to play a part and your definitions will keep changing or evolve accordingly. So defining success is meaningless.
Everyone wants to be heard, wants to be recognized and wants to feel valued (at least by someone close to them like mom, dad, wife or husband if not by the world). So, sadly you can never define your success unless you are in this world alone. Even worse you cannot even decouple happiness and success because they are so entwined (like your mother will become unhappy about you not doing something which would affect your happiness in turn).
We are all social animals. If you are content with your definition of success and do not give a damn about what the world thinks, you would not have blogged it here and cross-posted it on Facebook
So live the life for the moment (here we agree), play it by the rules others defined (here we don’t), just that you can choose how you are going to play it and feel happy about it, but remember you cannot change the rules
DISCLAIMER: All the opinion expressed here is what the world fed me for the past 28+ years. So do not blame me for any mistakes. Blame the world
Ofcourse yes, the world surrounding a child shapes him/her. But just becuase the world fed us something, we don’t have to necessarily agree to it (even after we have got an age where we can think what is good and what is bad). You might argue that what we think to be good and we think to be bad are also coming out of the experiences and the learning that the world fed us. But there is a difference here, after you have become an adult you have got the ability to analyze what the world feeds you and what the world has fed you.
The world has all along fed the generations that castism is the way to live the life.. women should be at home, these were rules defined by the world. It was those who could think and analyze what the world has fed, were able to make this place a better place to live. If everyone accepted the rules of the world and life, then where is change for betterment coming from?
Lambeau was trying to impose his visions on this boy. He was not bad. He was a nice guy. He loved Mathematics. But he was wrong in assuming that everybody who exhibited natural talent in that field should also be directed in that field. What Sean did was helping Matt understand what he really wants. It had to be Matt’s choice. Not Lambeau’s. And Sean did not make a choice for Matt, he let Matt make a choice. That’s the big difference.
So our point of disagreement is just one line: “Whether you truly have a choice independent of the world or not?”. You think Sean is right because you believe Will had a choice of his own. I do not think you have an independent choice at any point in your life (that is why I would have allowed Lambeau to play his part in Will’s life). All your choices are fed from the world. So there is no question about whether world (Lambeau) forced you or you really made a choice (Sean).
I will use your own arguments. Why do you think, it was a selected few who always made the difference let it be caste, slavery, etc? I am saying the time has come for these concepts to go away and they went away. Noone should take credit for that. I never claimed that the world does not evolve. It does. Just that it evolves collectively. It evolved collectively against ideologies like caste, slavery, male chauvinism, etc. Similarly what you consider good today will go away tomorrow and a Soms born on that day will argue something like “My god! In 2011 people elected the government by voting! How atrocious it is? Good that someone changed the rules of the world and finally we have one unquestionable supreme leader”. That is collective evolution.
Who defined betterment? Why is slavery wrong? Why should women be given equal rights? Why is it wrong to kill a fellow human who lives next door but not wrong to kill in war? Why is it *not* wrong to have someone clean all the mess you created in your house?
Without beating around the bush, the crux of my argument is, if you can give me one golden rule which will stay true even after several 1000 years, I will agree that you have something called independent judgement born out of logical thinking alone. If you cannot, it shows that all your judgments directly/indirectly depend on the state of the current world – people you have met, books you have read, etc (note that this does not exclude your ideas being radical and challenge the common world view. Just that, this will also happen within the framework. Change for ‘betterment’ also comes from within).
To give a perspective from science (which is more concrete than philosophy
), consider relativity. It is considered radical and out of the world which changed the way physics worked from the day human started thinking. Still if Einstein had not found it, someone else would have found it within the next 50 years (some even say within months considering Minkowski and Hilbert’s works). It clearly shows that, the time for relativity had come and Einstein was just talented enough to be the first person to see it. Individual has no bigger role than that in science. In summary the world fed Einstein the seeds of relativity and Einstein was just the first man to realize it.
Similarly for morality, ethics, philosophy, etc one man cannot do anything. The time will come (because of the evolution of collective wisdom) for some concepts to go away and they will go away. Nothing special about them.