Beyond Success: Finding Balance in Business (final preview)

We are pleased to bring you the final preview of this excerpt from the Ram Dass title "Beyond Success: Finding Balance in Business".  Learn how to gain balance in your life, learn effective strategies for happiness, in order to reach your full potential, both personally and professionally. 

I was with a man a few weeks ago in New York City. He was working in Coney Island with one of the rides in Coney Island, selling the ride. He is in real estate in New York City and all around the world. His net worth is, I don’t know, probably 75 to 100 million. His children are all in therapy, very neurotic. His wife is heavy on the valium. He has a private yacht, airplane, many homes. He has an office in which he has three rooms so he can have three deals going at once. It’s showbiz.

He’s just rushing from one deal to another. The more chaos the more excitement, the more excitement the more gratification. His family has gone, everything else in his life has gone, but the deal.  And the bigger the risk for the deal, the more the adrenalin pumps, the more sweat, the more the excitement and the more he can embroil everybody in the drama for the rush he’s getting. And he’s got to keep doing it.

He can’t stop. He can’t stop for an evening off. He can’t stop for a vacation. They mean nothing to him. He’s just got to keep going.  It's as much of an addiction as a heroin addiction. It’s an addiction in that he only feels alive at the moment when he is playing with that risk.  It’s like a gambler at Las Vegas, it’s the risk-taking behavior that is reinforcing him for playing at that leading edge and it’s very exciting and very heady stuff, and he can’t stop, and he keeps playing it more and more, and working on further margins, and at any moment, one wrong move and then they go under.

Loss is even part of the game as far as they are concerned, and they just start again. It’s part of the excitement, and the adrenalin hit.  Now, that one is based on the model that more is better and if this is good, more is even better.  That’s part of the myth, that more is always better.