Don't Take Yourself So Seriously

 

Take your work seriously. Don't take yourself too seriously."

I recently heard this thought in a podcast featuring Kunal Shah, and it stayed with me long after the podcast ended.

He spoke about how there have been brilliant thinkers, inventors, and leaders who have done extraordinary work, and yet, over time, many of them have faded into history. He even mentioned how people working at the Bombay Stock Exchange didn't know who its founder was.

It made me pause.

We spend so much of our lives worrying about what people think of us, whether we are successful enough, whether this one meeting went well, whether someone appreciated our work, whether this week has been good or bad. We carry the weight of every little event as though it defines our entire life.

But does it really?

I don't think the message is to become careless. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite.

Take your work seriously.

Do it honestly.

Do it sincerely.

Give it your best.

Learn from it.

But don't let your entire identity depend on whether today was a successful day or a disappointing one.

Some days will go exactly as planned.

Some won't.

Some days you'll receive appreciation.

Some days you won't.

And that's okay.

I've realized that sometimes we judge our entire life based on a few moments. A difficult week becomes "I'm not doing well." A rejected idea becomes "Maybe I'm not good enough." One setback suddenly becomes a "bad phase."

Life is much bigger than that.

It is made up of thousands of ordinary days, a few extraordinary ones, and many lessons in between.

The more seriously we take ourselves, the more every small event starts feeling like a verdict on who we are.

Perhaps we need to loosen our grip a little.

Smile a little more.

Be kinder to ourselves.

Enjoy the process a little more.

At the end of the day, what will remain is not whether every day was perfect, but whether we lived honestly, learnt continuously, and left the world just a little better than we found it.

So yes...Take your work seriously.

But don't let life become so serious that you forget to enjoy living it.