Buddhism and Entrepreneurs
Do you ever wonder why Steve Jobs is a Buddhist? A person who had realized how the world is behaving. A great entrepreneur who was born during our time. Steve Jobs suffered from a cancer which was incurable. He ascertained the truth of the life during his 56 years of the life journey through it.
According to Steve Jobs
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
He knew that no one has ability to escape from the death. No one means even a person who rule this world that we think who has ability to control everything, or the most richest person on the earth that we think who has ability to buy anything and everything he wishes. But we all have to give up everything and buried under the soil of this earth one day.
If you ask from an entrepreneur the reason why he/she want to become an entrepreneur you would get different answers. Most of entrepreneurs want to make lot of money to have a happy life. But which is not true for entrepreneurs all the time. Some restrain their happiness to earn top dollars and ended up with nothing in their life or even they make money they are unhappy all of the time.
Look at this story, whatever you do; you want finally want your life is happiness and relaxation.
It is true that money is bringing you happiness. But that is how the way you use it. It is like a knife. It could help you or harm you. Our life ultimate goal is not money, but happiness. So you can spend money to bring happiness into your life. For that you have to understand the truth of the life.
Buddha was born 2500 years ago. His first name was Siddhartha and he was a son of a royal family in India. His father king Suddhodhana was afraid of a prediction which was said by a Brahmin about his baby Siddhartha that one day he will give up everything and going searching for the truth of the life.
Siddharatha’s father tried everything to prevent his son of thinking about the life. He gave his son a luxurious life, and keep everything that make him sad until he became the age 29. One day he went out with his friend for walking, he saw a very old man first time in his life. He had never seen that kind of old man before and he started thinking of the old man very seriously. “One day I will have to face it for sure”. He tried to understated the truth of the life. It was not ended next days he saw very incurable sick man, and a dead body the following day for the first time and he thought of himself “One day I will have to face it for sure, Not only me, we all. but is there any way to stop it?”
Next day he saw a priest who study the behavior of mind and decided to give up all of his luxurious life and find the truth of our life, mind and the universe. During his journey he saw lot of people are suffering from sad, sick and being old. He wanted to find a solution to stop suffering. He met many teachers who study about the mind but non of them had the solution for what he was looking for.
He was a entrepreneur himself. His main ambition was to find the happiness of the life to end suffer. He also wanted to learn it by himself and teach it to everyone as he could. He found that if we study our mind very deeply, we would able to concentrate on it and find solutions for many problems we have. That’s how the science is. Science is not something that were automatically written on books, but it is a collaboration of inventions by scientists’ thoughts. Scientists are not super natural humans, but they use their mind to find the truth of this universe. Every animal on earth has some natural tool to survive on this earth. For human it’s the brain.
Siddhartha found that human has special ability to control and concentrate on their minds than other animals on earth. He also found that when we die, our mind is transferred to another creature depend on how strong our mind is. If your mind is very strong you should be able to enter into a someone’s body intentionally, but if your mind is weak it is automatically assigned to a living creatures body which does not have a mind. There are lot of living creatures in the universe, it could be a human, worm or even a bacteria. If your mind is assigned to a living creature other than a human on earth, you can never escape and you never get ability to strengthen your mind. So being a human you are lucky.
By concentrating and strengthening on his mind, he got ability to control others minds also. It is similar to frictional character Professor X in x-man. But any human being can truly achieve it, if you can have a strong mind according to him. In fact we don’t know how far our brain can go, but it is a precocious tool we ever had.
He found that all the suffering is happening because of our birth as a creatures. If we can dismantle our mind before transferring to another living creature, we would able to stop it. He became Buddha, since day he found to dismantle the mind after the death and stopping the rebirth. He also found many ultimate truths of the universe by concentrating on his mind. For that you should have a very strong mind and have ability to eliminate the sadness from mind.
Buddha also taught us doing good things in life, positivist thinking and happiness make our mind calm and relaxed state and help us to concentrate and strengthen mind. It also make us more creative. Doing bad things, depression, negative thinking, guilty anger and sad make our mind more weak. There are lot of lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Budhdha’s story. One such a story is Apannaka Jathakaya
You can also find his life story from following documentary done by BBC
Siddhartha never expected money for what he did, He found inner peace of himself and the taught the world how to obtain it. Even after 2500 years his name, philosophy and work is not disappeared from this earth.
So as an entrepreneur, at the end what we really need is the happiness of our life, by doing a great work to the society. You can earn money as a consequences of that and make your life more happy. But do not try to chase money by killing your happiness or harming others.
So I going to end up this article with another quote of Steve Jobs regarding the happiness.
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. ”
So you don’t want to have lot of money for your startup. Try to learn something on your own. Do something useful to the society. It would take some time but never give up and go for it. Eventually you will get what you want in your life with all of the Happiness!
