Reboot Your Career This Year: The Qualities You’ll Need

Q: Namaste. When someone is consciously looking to take a rebirth in their career or business or life in general, what are some of the practical pointers or thoughts one should look at?

Sadhguru: This happened in a Sunday school in Alabama. An enthusiastic teacher asked the children, “What do you have to do to go to heaven?” Someone said, “Every Sunday, if I clean the church steps, I can go to heaven.” Someone else said, “If I help my friend in his examination, I will go to heaven.” Each person said something. Then, one little boy was simply sitting nonchalantly on the last bench. So the teacher asked, “Hey, Tommy. What do you think you have to do to go to heaven?” He said, “You got to die first.”

There aren’t many points. Don’t go by readymade points because we don’t know what the ground reality is. If you are talking about a business rebirth, to drop something that has failed is easy and inevitable. It will anyway happen. But to drop something that is successful and recreate something else out of that needs vision, courage and a certain level of madness in you. It is a completely different level of looking at life. You must be able to see something that others don’t see. Only then will you be able to do this. So, you should sharpen your ability to see. Leadership is a kind of perch. Once you get onto a perch, you are supposed to see better than other people. If you don’t see any better, you will become an object of ridicule.

Are You Willing to Die?

What you need to look at is whether you are capable of dropping what you are right now – either as an individual or as an organization. And whether you want to die entirely and recreate something or do you want to die partially and recreate it is a judgment one has to make on the spot, knowing the realities of the situation.

Think Before You Jump

Once we have chosen to be reborn – to dissolve something and create something fresh – many possibilities will be open. Many possibilities always means trouble. To be able to identify which one of these possibilities you should go with is a certain exercise. The problem is people jump into something and then exercise their mind – no. Before you jump into something, it needs to be looked at with enough attention because once you jump into something, there should be no looking back. If you are constantly looking at the rearview mirror, you are not going to go forward.