Money is not the only measure of success. It depends on how much you've learnt in life
Saal mahine ke leeye khaane peene ke leeye, kitna paisa chahiye aakhir jeene ke leeye? goes a line from the song Phir na kehna Michael daaru peekar danga karta hai from the movie Majboor.
Kunal Bajpai was wading through the water at Juhu beach, humming this number. Hindi movies have a song for almost every situation in life, he thought.
Bajpai has a flat, overlooking the sea on bandstand in Bandra, where he stayed with his wife and child. He had done well in life as far money and work is concerned.
After graduating from one of the top B-schools in India, he worked his way through various organisations and is a fund manager with one of the top mutual funds in the country.
With the markets booming and his mutual fund giving greater returns than the market, he will certainly take home a couple of crores this time.
On weekdays, he never left office before 10 p.m. The weekend was usually spent sleeping and trying to spend some quality time with his small family. It has been five years since his marriage. Within this span of time, he has changed three jobs, with better money being the criterion each time.
He had rationalised to himself that he was skipping jobs for better work. Higher the money he earned, higher his expenses went. And when he looked around, all his friends from the business school, his colleagues in office, everybody seemed to be doing the same. He got a feeling that he was not moving at all.
A sense of determinism overtook him and he started flowing with the tide, jumping from one job to another.
Beyond a certain point, he really did not need the money he earned; but he wanted it show how successful he was. Money had become his idea of success.
The dominance of the economic imperatives has created a society where success is now equated with material success. Research shows that relative wealth matters more to individuals than absolute wealth and that, to a large extent, explains why money motivates people.
This morning, he had woken up with a feeling, "What am I doing with my life?" He took his car and headed straight to Juhu beach. Life is more than just surviving and, even if it's just surviving, it still begs the question, survival for what? Bajpai realised that there was a clear lack of purpose in his life .
The process of finding a sense of purpose in life, like other important things, can only be encouraged and not taught. There is no science for this and an individual has to think his way out.
There are no perfect answers for this and we must keep searching. An individual should truly believe that life will not always be like it is and, in a few years, a new direction will be needed.
To find one's true purpose in life, individuals should experiment and make mistakes, to learn from one's actions, to take feedback and start again. Learning happens only when we sit back and think and analyse our actions.
Life could be divided into a series of activities (other than obviously what an individual does for a living). Individuals should try and get different things from different bits.
Money, however necessary, should not be the only measure of success. We can, if we wish, write our own scripts, for our lives, instead of living out those that someone else wrote for us.
The example in the article is hypothetical
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