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Buddhism is Really a Study of the Self

March 26, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Buddhism is Really a Study of the Self When you study Buddhism, you study yourself. You figure out the nature of your mind.

You focus not on some dogmatic view—the Buddha made no claims to being a prophet, and Buddhism owes its origin to no divine revelation. Instead, Buddhism emphasizes more practical matters, such as how to lead your life and how to integrate your mind.

The Buddhist path isn’t about being a proper Buddhist or comprehending the Buddhist creed. It isn’t something to believe in; it’s something to do. It’s about understanding who you are and how you can fully realize your potential—not as a Buddhist but as a human being.

Idea for Impact: “Who am I?” is a pivotal question of Buddhism. The Buddhist path encourages you to awaken to liberation.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Do You Want to Be Remembered for?
  2. What Is the Point of Life, If Only to Be Forgotten?
  3. Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’
  4. Leaves … Like the Lives of Mortal Men
  5. Confucius on Dealing with People

Filed Under: Living the Good Life Tagged With: Buddhism, Legacy, Life Plan, Life Purpose, Meaning, Mindfulness, Philosophy, Virtues

Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

March 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Each term, on the last day of his management class, Harvard strategy professor Clayton M. Christensen had the habit of asking his students to apply the principles of management business to their personal lives.

'How Will You Measure Your Life' by Clayton M. Christensen (ISBN 0062102419) “Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career,” he would push them to ask the difficult questions and pursue purpose and meaning in their careers and their personal lives.

Toward the end of his life, after suffering a stroke and contracting cancer, Christensen published a Harvard Business Review article, which he expanded as How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) This New York Times bestseller struck a chord with many business leaders, especially in favor of Christensen’s reflections on pursuing fulfillment.

Lesson #1: Don’t over-invest in work or under-invest in relationships.

Christensen talks about various motivators at work and encourages you to think about how you want to be remembered. He argues that ultimately your most significant sources of joy in life will be your family and your close friends. Devote time to these relationships, and they’ll enrich your life:

The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships on the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them.

Lesson #2: Don’t lose track of the essential things. Allocate resources appropriately.

Christensen recalls some of his business school classmates entered the school with a noble cause—many of them wanted to change the world. But when they graduated with student debt, they took jobs for money to pay off their debts. And that was just going to be a temporary thing. But, over time, they got caught up in their careers, making money and chasing possessions. Their original pursuit of the noble cause petered out and, along the way, they lost track of what was important in their lives.

Christensen encourages building and implementing strategies in your career and your personal life to achieve your goals. The underlying tenet of that success is how you allocate your time, money, and other resources. How you spend these resources will determine your life’s outcomes.

How you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.

Lesson #3: “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

Three lessons from Clayton Christensen's 'How Will You Measure Your Life?' Christensen tells a story from his college days when he played university basketball. His team worked hard all season and made it to the finals of some big tournament. The championship game was scheduled on a Sunday. For Christensen, a deeply religious Mormon, playing on the Sabbath (the “seventh day”) was against his religious beliefs.

Christensen did not comply with the coach’s demand to break the Sabbath statute “just this one time” for the big game. Christensen did not want to violate his religious principles. His team won the tournament anyway.

Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed. … Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. However, each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

Idea for Impact: Intentionally choose the kind of person you want to become. Commit to that path.

Read Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) It’s not a long book—perhaps overly worded in parts—but it’s a intense and thought-provoking book.

Christensen and his co-authors don’t provide answers. Instead they present guiding principles that make you put things in perspective and help you become intentional about building a contented life. The parallels between running a successful business and running life are worthwhile.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Buddhism is Really a Study of the Self
  2. What Do You Want to Be Remembered for?
  3. What Is the Point of Life, If Only to Be Forgotten?
  4. A Train Journey Through Philosophy: Summary of Eric Weiner’s ‘Socrates Express’
  5. Change Isn’t Just Possible—It’s the Way Life Works

Filed Under: Living the Good Life Tagged With: Legacy, Life Plan, Life Purpose, Meaning, Philosophy, Questioning

What Do You Want to Be Remembered for?

February 17, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Curious History of the Nobel Prizes: Alfred Nobel Changed His Likely Legacy from “Merchant of Death”

Alfred Nobel Changed His Only Likely Legacy from The Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel (1833–96) is most remembered in the awarding of Nobel Prizes every year. The spur for the Nobel Prizes apparently came from a remarkable incident of careless journalism.

Nobel patented the explosive dynamite in 1867. Before long, he became very wealthy as the owner of a vast international explosives empire.

In 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludvig died. A French newspaper wrongly announced Alfred’s death instead under the title “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (Eng. trans. “The merchant of death is dead.”) The article called him the “dynamite king” and reported, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”

Upon reading this obituary, Alfred Nobel was so distressed at the prospect of how the world possibly could remember him. He wanted to leave a better legacy for himself and rewrote his will. Nobel left 94 percent of his estate to institute five prizes to celebrate the greatest achievements in chemistry, physics, physiology/medicine, literature, and peace. (The “Nobel Memorial” economics prize was instituted in 1968 by the Sweden’s central bank.)

Make a Conscious Intention to Embrace the Spirit of Your Life’s Work

'Managing the Nonprofit Organization' by Peter Drucker (ISBN 0060851147) Peter Drucker (1909–2005,) the 20th century’s leading thinker on business and management, advocated self renewal through the probing question “What do you want to be remembered for?” in his Managing the Non-Profit Organization:

When I was thirteen I had an inspiring teacher of religion who one day went right through the class of boys asking each one, “What do you want to be remembered for?” None of us, of course, could give an answer. So, he chuckled and said, “I didn’t expect you to be able to answer it. But if you still can’t answer it by the time you’re fifty, you will have wasted your life.”

I’m always asking that question: “What do you want to be remembered for?” It is a question that induces you to renew yourself, because it pushes you to see yourself as a different person—the person you can become. If you are fortunate, someone with moral authority will ask you that question early enough in your life so that you will continue to ask it as you go through life.

Your Life’s Work Becomes the Essence of Your Legacy

'Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society' by John W. Gardner (ISBN 039331295X) Emphasizing self-renewal and its inhibitors, the American intellectual John W. Gardner wrote extensively about the need to embrace change for personal enrichment and fulfillment. In his seminal Self-Renewal: the Individual and the Innovative Society (1964,) Gardner encourages a sentient attitude toward the future to kindle self-renewal:

For self-renewing men and women the development of their own potentialities and the process of self-discovery never end. It is a sad but unarguable fact that most people go through their lives only partially aware of the full range of their abilities. … Exploration of the full range of our own potentialities is not something that we can safely leave to the chances of life. It is something to be pursued systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of our days. We should look forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent. And by the potentialities I mean not just skills, but the full range capacities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding, loving, and aspiring.

Idea for Impact: Asking, “What should be your legacy?” is a Great Self-Actualizing Exercise

The English novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) wrote in Mansfield Park (1814,) “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”

One single spark in your mind has the potential to alter your life forever. Inspire your personal renewal by contemplating the following questions: What do you want to be remembered for, 5-10-20 years from now? What should be your legacy?

Without doubt, you can’t tell your future—you really don’t even know what’s going to happen next. Even if you make a deliberate plan, it probably won’t succeed because reality will regulate your plan. In spite of this life’s uncertainties, reflecting on the question “What do I want to be remembered for?” can help you become more intentional in your behavior and more mindful about your life’s purpose.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Buddhism is Really a Study of the Self
  2. What Is the Point of Life, If Only to Be Forgotten?
  3. Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’
  4. Leaves … Like the Lives of Mortal Men
  5. Confucius on Dealing with People

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Legacy, Life Plan, Life Purpose, Meaning, Mindfulness, Mortality, Peter Drucker, Philosophy, Virtues

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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