Path of excellence and Spirituality

Let me try to touch upon a topic that is discussed by various scholars: excellence and spirituality.

Many of you might think about how these two are related. But in my humble opinion, these are related. You can attain excellence by mere intelligence and hard work, but to sustain it, you need to have work ethics, humility, and perseverance. These all are more developed with a spiritual blend of mind.

If you open the history book, you will learn about a lot of warriors who probably reached excellence by wars, mass destruction; but no one remembers them for their excellence because these were more for selfish reasons without any ethics and spiritual blend. However, we know about great inventors, scholars, scientists, freedom fighters who excelled in their field but with the right spirit and work ethics and did something for the greater good.

In the corporate world also, everyone is behind excellence. But most of the time, people are willing to sacrifice work ethics, team spirit for the sake of fake excellence, which might be temporary at best. The great corporate leaders are one who puts their company's & team's interest before their and hence achieve greater excellence. But unfortunately, most of the time people are made to believe that success should come at any cost, and in the long run, those costs are so dear.

To give a simple parallel, we all know about Gautam Buddha. But why do we know Buddha? Do we know him because he was Prince Siddhartha? There must have been so many kings, do we remember anyone of them, or do we worship them. But why do we then worship Gautam Buddha? He left his kingdom, and then only he could become Buddha. Symbolically if we understand, once he overcame his selfishness and thought about the greater good, he became Buddha, and we remember him. So in the path of excellence even by leaving things, we can achieve excellence.

Another virtue on the path of excellence is bouncing back from defeats or failures of life. Again taking back the Gautam Buddha example, at first, he had the toughest of rituals almost sacrificing his body, but he couldn't attain enlightenment. Then Buddha realized his mistake and importance of balance and started taking care of his body. Through hard efforts and dedication, he achieved enlightenment. So the whole point is that even Buddha had to face failure, and it is almost inevitable. But those are the tests of life, and we should not give up. Only after that, one can achieve excellence. In many military for crucial missions, they don't recruit people who have never failed because if the situation would go wrong, these people wouldn't know how to bounce back.

Striving for excellence is a continuous journey, and those with good spirits and selfishness way go a long way and are sustainable. Time to probably reflect on what we are running towards, and are we following the righteous path because the journey is as important as the result. And honestly, the path of excellence probably has no end: it's a spiral path where each loop is of a higher order than the previous one.

I hope you like this article. Stay happy and stay blessed.

( Pic Credit: Image bymsandersmusicfromPixabay)