‘Your success and my failure’ – are they linked? HR message from jungle life

As far as life is concerned, nothing exists between good and bad. But the beauty of life is created neither by good nor by bad.

When the hunter becomes successful in his hunt, it is indeed good for the hunter but bad for the hunted. Similarly, when the prey could escape from the hunter, it is good for the prey animals but bad for the hunter.

In fact, our capability, smartness, success instinct, laziness etc., come not from something that is good or bad to us. They come only from our ‘adjuctivefying’ of everything either as good or bad.

When the hunter misses the hunt at the close encounter, the hunter develops necessary smartness from such failure to ensure absolute success in his next effort. The story is same with prey animals also. The concept of group living among large species of herbivores animals commonly called as ‘herd’ and group living and hunting philosophy of several predatory animals like a pride of lion, a troop of monkeys, a pack of wild dogs etc., also come only from such experience. In fact the prey animals try to avoid bad/danger hence prefer to live in a group and on the contrary, the predatory animals try to achieve good (success) and for which they live in a group.

Adaptation and evolution are counter products of only the adjectives of either good or bad like too close, just escaped, missed at last minute etc. Good in every probability will make one lazy. On the contrary, the bad/failure will annihilate or kill life or may make one extra smart to avoid failures in future. But when one goes close to death and then escapes, the scope for learning new techniques and improvising the skills to have a meaningful existence also would improve.

People in corporate must understand the meaning of success and failure in the larger context than from self-centred myopic vision. Once such approach is developed, unnecessary grief and complaining can be avoided. Most unfortunate part of corporate life is that people always see the world around only from how to profit from it or how to avoid loss. How to contribute to the system should be the instinct and only such instinct will make people happy and cheerful.

The science and philosophy of nature and the delicate equation of predator and prey are set on the absolute tenet that nothing is absolutely bad or absolutely good. It means everything is relative.

Dr. S Ranganathan