Karma and Zen

1) In the corporate world, you often hear the argument which more or less centers around the Just-World fallacy. Typically, we’d like to believe in a Just-World where efforts result in benefits and hard work and dedication leads to success. Anything contrary to such a philosophy would result in cribbing at coffee corners and many a heated lunches during office hours.

However, more often than not, the world is not fair. In fact, most of the examples that you see in the corporate world is an example of it – ‘A’ in a team works very hard for the success of a project and ‘B’ markets in such a way to sideline ‘A’ and promote himself. In a world where time is short, perception is everything and ‘B’ in this case often gets away with a promotion leaving ‘A’ to be frustrated and resigned to fate.

In the Oriental way of thought, we believe in ‘karma’. In other words, we believe (and in most cases, rationalize ourselves to believe) in ‘what goes around, comes around’. We want to believe in this principle because we feel in control of our lives – we do good now, we’ll get it back a few year later or maybe next life. On similar lines, how often have we seen someone end up with a misfortune and utter within ourselves ‘Poor chap…however, he/she must have done something to deserve it’? If similar misfortune befalls on us, we cry out loud ‘why has this happened to me?’

It sucks to think the world is not fair. We believe (or want to believe?) in hard work, doing good, being good to ensure that success is ours (karma, right?). We want to believe that manipulation, laziness and taking credit for other’s work will eventually lead to ruin. That doesn’t happen often, does it? This leads to unhappiness and despair. That’s how the world is and probably will be. You are not in control. Get it? Now, suck it up.

2) How true is the statement ‘The more you know about something, the less you know about it’? Sounds Zen? Let me explain.

For example, let’s say you are the best chess player in your family. You beat every family member, young or old in chess. You begin to feel that you are the champ and destined for history-in-making title. You also get a feeling that you know everything that there is to know about chess and how the pieces move. Your family members are encouraged by your skill and set you up in chess tournaments around your city. You meet people who are of similar quality and end up with enough draws or losses to bring you to the ground. Undettered (history-in-the-making, remember?), you work hard to improve your skill. You participate in city tournaments around the country and start doing well but not too well. You work harder and harder and you don’t really seem to move ahead beyond the National Master title. You begin to appreciate the vast complexities of the game and start being humble, understand that you know very little (probably miniscule?) and work even harder.

The first 20 levels of a video game are very easy, the next 5 are incredibly difficult to get by.

The first few days of understanding a system makes you think it’s a piece of cake. The more you work/learn about it, the more complex it gets.

Do the stories sound similar? Every one of us go through the cycle of novice to amateur to expert to master in every field we pursue. Each level is more difficult than all the levels previously combined, till you hit a level beyond which everything becomes easy. Malcolm Gladwell puts it very well in his book, Outliers where he says that to become an expert at anything in life, you need to put 10,000 hours towards that goal.

Why do I tell you this story? I see many thick skulls around today who exhibit an air of superiority on a particular subject, knowing next to nothing about it. I was one such thick skull a few years ago, before reality hit but it took time and a lot of practice to kill my ego and get my hands dirty. If you really want to be great at something (and you can be!), it needs a lot of practice, a lot of luck and humility to learn from others – because, the more you know about something, the less you know about it.

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