Sadhguru: See,
you’re talking about businesses.
Businesses usually,
or initially when they start,
it’s a question of personal success
because of a certain volume,
then it becomes a larger phenomenon in a country or in the world,
but initially it’s a question of personal success.
So that success has a personal stamp on it.
If you want to peel that stamp off
and hand it over to somebody,
there’re many problems.
And there are many things,
in the process of building,
that you have realized which can never be taught to another person,
which they have to imbibe by being around.
There’re many small nuances.
So particularly businesses which are crafted around a person,
it’s very difficult to pass it on.
It takes a certain amount of effort.
It takes years and years of culturing people around you
to be able to pass it on to somebody.
And the effort that it takes to pass it on to people is so much sometimes,
you rather do the work yourself because
it takes so much effort to
pass on a simple nuance of doing something in a particular way
that it feels like it’s better you do it .
And also beyond a certain age,
you don’t care so much about the business
as you cared about it in the beginning.
Now as life ebbs within you,
your concern is more about yourself –
how you are and what’s happening to you and stuff.
So when that’s the thing,
others may be thinking in terms of
“Oh, such a great business,
he’s not passing it on –
what is he doing?
No…”
Succession plan and all these things
others may be thinking because
they’re only looking at the bubble of success,
but that person has done the bubble, blown the bubble
and now he’s matured into looking at his life.
He’s looking at himself, how he eats in the morning
because an entrepreneur doesn’t eat on time,
doesn’t sleep on time,
doesn’t do anything well when he’s building something.
Now he wants to eat well in the morning,
he wants to take a walk,
maybe he wants to golf,
he wants to do something
because he knows whether consciously or unconsciously everybody knows
when the bones start creaking that your time is limited.
Now you start looking – this bubble looks great from outside,
is it worth building?
Is it worth investing more of your time in this?
But at the same time, if you want to pass it on to somebody,
you will have to spend more time on it than you doing it yourself.
So you’re just hoping, you keep doing it
and one day maybe somebody will take over.
Whatever happens, you don’t care –
something will happen. Some… Somebody will take it and run it.
This may be the attitude of many business people
and I’ve… I’ve had very close conversations with people like that
and this is the reality with them
and I don’t blame them.
It’s fine.
That’s why I said right from the beginning,
if your interest is multi-dimensional,
your growth would be multi-dimensional,
you would not feel this lethargy in this.
The succession would naturally come because
you allowed people to be around you to imbibe things.
Not just teaching them -
just allowing them to absorb how things are done.
So, that would make succession very simple.
You don’t have to name –
“Okay, this is the guy.”
Whoever absorbs, one day you will see that
it’s safer in this person’s hands than anybody else’s hands,
so you hand over.
And that person, what he does – what he or she does with it –
is entirely their own,
there is no guarantee, okay?
There’s no guarantee not necessarily
because that person’s responsibility or irresponsibility,
competence or incompetence.
A particular business may be relevant to a particular time,
may not be relevant to another time.
And it’s very difficult to come to terms with that
that what I invested my whole life upon is not relevant
to the next generation of people is something
very difficult for people to come to terms with.
So, entirely changing the very focus of business –
the business itself –
using the financial capabilities that a business has,
to change the very focus.
That level of entrepreneurship is not always there.
I want you to understand,
at some point in life,
at some stage in your life,
human beings lose interest in money.
Only somebody,
who is very rudimentary in his mind,
maintains that interest to the end.
Most human beings lose interest in money
when they reach a certain point in their life.
Initially
Probably, you know,
these sayings are going around –
“Time is money.”
slowly as age creeps in,
you begin to understand that time is not money –
time is life.
So, as that understanding and experience sinks in,
you would want to invest your time in a different way
than just about making money.
Entrepreneurship is essentially
about investing your time to make money.
That’s why I said right from day one,
if your attention and your interest is multi-dimensional
you can succeed as an entrepreneur,
but still you don’t have to be stuck in that one dimension,
which could be very depressive,
regretful
later on if you spend too much time on it.
It’s good some people choose to just retire no matter what.
Business running well, not well is not my business.
They have the necessary dispassion to hand it over
and sit back and look,
“Okay, if it goes well it goes well,
it doesn’t go well it doesn’t go well.”
Even I could have failed when I did things.
Somebody else is failing – it’s their privilege