Words matter. These are the best Srikumar Rao Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you embrace ‘positive thinking,’ you are – by definition – spurning ‘negative thinking.’ So it’s as if you were on a teeter-totter and are trying desperately to put all your weight on one side – the ‘positive thinking’ side.
When you try to bring about behavioral change by an effort of will, you actually do violence to yourself, and the chances are very good that you will not succeed. This is so universally true that you can actually make money from it.
Most of us function under the model we have to get something in order to do something, in order to be something. If this happens, then I will be happy. And I’m suggesting to you that we live our entire lives based on that model, and that model is fundamentally flawed.
There’s no destination. The journey is all that there is, and it can be very, very joyful.
It’s wonderful to be grateful. To have that gratitude well out from deep within you and pour out in waves. Once you truly experience this, you will never want to give it up.
I’m challenging the assumption that you need to be a dog-eat-dog person to survive in a corporate environment.
If you want to experience joy in your life, you have to be able to step outside yourself and become part of a cause that is much larger than you; one that brings a greater good to a greater community.
Think of the universe as a benevolent parent. A child may want a tub of ice-cream and marshmallows, but a wise parent will give it fruits and vegetables instead. That is not what the child wants, but it is what the child needs.
When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.
I am not a big fan of positive thinking. The term suggests that there is something negative that you have to counteract by being positive. That is an artificial duality.
We have the ability to craft a life where we are completely fulfilled. We think it is dependent on outsiders, and to some extent it is, but it is much more dependent on the attitude we bring to life.
Do you feel bored and stuck in a rut? Is work drudgery? If so, you are spending far too much time bemoaning your fate and how the universe is not cooperating with your desires. Be present with and in your current situation.
Executives don’t burn out and leave when they feel deep satisfaction. They don’t create the human detritus that disgruntled managers do.
I had a difficult time getting my arms around Einstein’s work, even when I was a physics major at one of the top universities in India.
I don’t focus on happiness as a goal or an end.
You have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community. If you don’t succeed in this, then you will continue to pull that heavy wagon up the mountain, and despite the fact that you are pulling it, it will somehow run over your own foot.
There are terrible jerks, and there are an unusually large concentration of them in the workplace. And that means that you do have to make some changes in your behavior, but there is absolutely no need for you to give them power over your happiness.
Galileo got it wrong. The earth does not revolve around the sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using.
Business schools need to address students on a human being level, not as cogs in the machine to supply fresh talent to big companies.
Positive thinking is so firmly enshrined in our culture that knocking it is a little like attacking motherhood or apple pie.
When you label so much of what happens to you as ‘bad,’ it reinforces the feeling that you are a powerless pawn at the mercy of outside forces over which you have no control. And – this is key – labeling something a bad thing almost guarantees that you’ll experience it as such.
Whenever you’re feeling grateful, you are not feeling frustrated and angry and all those negative states that we go into. And that’s a big benefit in and of itself.
The knowledge that we are responsible for living the life we have is our most powerful tool.
Once you accept, truly accept, that stuff will happen to you and there is nothing you can do about it, stress miraculously leaves your life.
If you have an ongoing relationship with a person, think of everything positive about that person that you possibly can and enter your interaction from that space. Ignore all the crap that used to drive you up the wall before. You will be amazed at what a change this attitude shift brings about.
