:: Robin Sharma

Life has great plans for us

Robin Sharma

June.12 : I did a show on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. The host, Jesse Dylan, asked me a thoughtful question: "Robin, we all have goals and aspirations. But sometimes things don’t go as planned. How do you know when to quit?" My answer was straightforward: "You’ll know when you know".

No one gets to world-class in their work or within their personal lives without a relentless devotion to not giving up. All acts of heroism were accomplished by human beings who refused to lose. They just wouldn’t let go — no matter how bad or impossible or impractical things looked. But having said that, life often sends us curve balls and has other plans for us. (Comedian Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer at 42, put it so very well: "Now I’ve learned the hard way that some poems don’t rhyme and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the most of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity".)

We long for something to happen and some dream to get done. But no matter how hard we try, the clouds never part. We never get the break. Luck never smiles on us. We continue to toil in darkness, fuelled purely by faith. That’s fine — if deep within you your fire burns brightly and every fibre within you tells you to carry on (self-faith is a hallmark of greatness). But sometimes you get to a point where you just know it’s time to change strategy. It’s not about losing hope. You just know. It’s about trusting life. Trusting that there’s an even better thing waiting for you. And that it’s time to course-correct.

For the past few years, I’ve tried to live by the pretty simple philosophy: Do your best and let life do the rest.

It’s not easy to let go of what you want (I know how painful that can be). But why wouldn’t you, if something even better is waiting just around the corner?

— Excerpted from The Greatness Guide 2 by Robin Sharma. Published by Jaico Publishing House, jaicopub@vsnl.com