To Those Who Want To Follow Higher Principles In Business
This is a short guide on learning how to achieve success in Business. It is based on the wisdom of Paramhansa Yogananda – An Enlightened Yogi.
The post will cover some important aspects of business that can help you in creating a strong foundation. It will cover some principles which you won’t generally find in any business books.
Whether you’re starting a business or already have one if achieving success the right way is something you’re looking for, you’ll find this guide helpful.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Paramhansa Yogananda (1893-1952)
Paramhansa Yogananda born in 1893 as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India. He was a great spiritual master who introduced millions to the teachings of Meditation and Kriya Yoga.
Yogananda was the first yoga master to teach and live in the United States from 1920 – 1952.
He established many successful spiritual entities while spreading the ancient teachings of Yoga in America.
His book “Autobiography of a Yogi” achieved phenomenal success in the East as well in the West in the late 1940s. It is still considered one of the best spiritual books of all time.
Introduction
The main purpose of business should be service, not only money-making.
The store that gives the best service and the best products is the one people like.
Remember that you must serve in order to make others happy.
The law of prosperity is not governed by the law of selfishness, but by the law of unselfishness. Each one of us must live for others. In supporting yourself, you must also support others.
Remember that the greatest responsibility in lies with you, and your awakened creative ability.
All difficulties can be overcome only by your continued planning and persistence.
Refuse to acknowledge defeat, and you will win. If you don’t succeed in the business you are in after trying for some time, then try something else, and keep on trying until you succeed in something. Try to do well in the line of business with which you have experience.
Besides discovering your innate ambition and learning how to build your moneymaking methods around it, you must do something every day that will satisfy the Cosmic Plan for which you were sent here.
Most people are unhappy because they forget to harmonize their earthly, learned duties with the duties demanded by the Cosmic Plan.
The Cosmic Plan demands that you satisfy your soul by including in your own happiness the happiness of the most needy ones.
Every day try to help uplift physically, mentally, or spiritually suffering people, as you would help yourself or your family.
If, instead of living in the misery-making selfish way, you live according to the laws of God, then, no matter what small part you may be playing on the stage of life, you will know that you have been playing your part correctly, as directed by the Stage Manager of all our destinies.
Your part, however small, is just as important as the biggest parts in contributing to the success of the Drama of Souls on the Stage of Life.
Make a little money and be satisfied with it by living a simple life and expressing your ideals, rather than make lots of money and have worries without end.
Selfishness In Business
Selfishness is the metaphysical blunder which leads self-seeking industries to undergo the throes of periodic depressions and false inflations.
If all the businessmen of the world are selfish, then each businessman has millions of inimical competitors. But, if each businessman wants to succeed by including the success of others in his success, then each businessman will have millions of helping business friends.
“Each for all and all for each” must be the motto for real success and happiness in business.
How To Select Your Business Associates
The true success of any business depends upon the right business leader and his proper associates, and the right business management plus the right business environment.
There are some businesses run by a single individual, but most businesses need to be run by a group of intelligent associates.
When a business run by a single individual finds itself expanding, the owner may have to employ associates, but no matter whom you employ, always keep the controlling interest of your business in your own hands.
Most business concerns fail due to the lack of proper business associates.
Employees should be judged by their previous record of success and their creative intelligence.
Avoid silken-tongued but insincere, or impulsive, business associates. Such people will retard the progress of your business if they do not entirely ruin it.
You must depend not only on references but also on keen observation, intelligence, open-mindedness, and intuition in order to select business associates with superior qualities.
It is also a good idea to study the horoscope of a prospective business associate. If properly interpreted, the stars indicate an individual’s good or evil habits of a former incarnation, which appear now as instincts and hereditary tendencies.
1.Tests of Character and Ability
Attracting honest, loyal, friendly, intelligent business associates, who will make your business their business and your ambition their ambition, is the best way to conduct a business.
Look for creative ability, intelligence, and above all, trustworthiness in your business associates.
Don’t take for granted the integrity of a business associate. Be sure to test him directly or indirectly, through friends or detectives. Give him a temptation and see how he reacts.
Through friends, try to make your business associates talk against you, and find out what their intentions are.
Forgive every minor fault twice or thrice, but never overlook treachery. A business associate who is treacherous toward you will repeat the same act when you are least expecting it, and can do you irreparable damage.
If a business associate is profligate, drinks too much, or shows no shame when criticized for his moral conduct, excuse him several times, giving him a chance to reform. If he fails to show signs of contriteness and improvement, discharge him.
Don’t employ a slow-to-understand person, or a mentally or physically lazy person. A mentally lazy person grunts and moans, and considers it a terrible expenditure of energy to create, plan, or think about your business success.
2. Honesty and Loyalty in Business Relations
Do not keep a dishonest person in your employ. You can never tell what such a person might do to your business. Be sure to find out from his previous employer about his character, ability, and honesty.
On the other hand, if you are an employee and you repeatedly hear something very negative about your prospective employer, then be sure to stay away from him altogether.
Never let a friend take advantage of you just because you are his friend.
Business must be conducted strictly on business principles.
Those business associates who stand by you in your troubles are your best friends.
Never take into business a friend who would not take orders from you or follow your advice, due to wrong familiarity.
3. Read Character Through the Eyes
The Intuitive Way
The history of an individual is in his brain, and is reflected in the eyes, which show the character, habits, and the soul of an individual.
Beware of shifting, untrustworthy eyes, cruel eyes, and crafty, sarcastic, revengeful eyes.
Beware of hate-projecting eyes, and lack of straightforwardness in the eyes.
If you feel an automatic, intuitive shrinking after looking fully in the eyes of an individual, then beware of that person.
The Spiritual Way
After deep meditation, hold your mind at the point between the eyebrows and visualize the eyes of your prospective employee or partner. Study the feeling in your heart. If you feel fear, don’t employ such a person.
The First Impression
Keep your soul unprejudiced and look penetratingly into the eyes of the person you are interviewing, the first time you meet him. If you remain calm and receptive, your impression at first sight will be correct.
The Magnetic Way
After deep meditation, pray: ” Father, send me my proper business associate through my spiritual magnetism, increased through Thy Grace.”
Develop Your Creative Ability
You must think creatively every day and equip yourself with the necessary knowledge and experience that your business demands.
Creative thinking consists of going into the Silence every day for at least half an hour, and in putting your entire mind and concentration on discovering how you can improve your line of work and how you can become fit for a position of greater responsibility in your present business.
Congenital defects of a non-productive, non-intelligent mind can only be removed by meditation and creative thinking.
Contact with God can remove all human limitations that impede success. Learn to receive success vibrations from God during meditation, and from successful men in the world.
The use of your creative ability will lead you to the sphere of unlimited success.
By daily thinking about your line of work and the business you are in, and by business training and experience acquired in school or at work, you will find your knowledge of your business increasing a hundred-fold.
How To Overcome Trials
Trials do not come to you to destroy you, but to help you better appreciate God.
God does not send those trials. They are born of your own making. All you have to do is to resurrect your consciousness from the environment of ignorance.
Environmental troubles are born because of your conscious or unconscious actions in the past, somewhere, sometime. You must accept the blame for them, without developing an inferiority complex.
You must say: ” I know that Thou art coming! I shall see Thy silver lining. In this tumultuous sea of trials, Thou art the Polestar of my shipwrecked thoughts.”
Why are you afraid? Remember, you are not a man or a woman. You are an Immortal Being.
Even as Jesus could manifest his love and when sorely tested, say, ” Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” so must you forgive your exacting trials and say, ”
My soul is resurrected. My power is greater than all my trials because I am the child of God.” Thus, your mental powers will expand, and your cup of realization will be big enough to hold the Ocean of Knowledge. Then you will be happy and prosperous.
Your Most Important Engagements
Systematize and schedule your engagements.
Your business engagements are important, and for them you sacrifice your equally important engagements of daily physical exercise, and of bathing the nerves and mind with the peace of meditation.
Your business engagements have always come first in your consideration. They can remain the most important until you are called away into the Mystery beyond. But I advocate evenness of development and prosperity.
I do not believe in spiritual aspiration being chloroformed by business madness.
Many people think that unless one is ” at it” day and night he is going to be left behind. That is not true. The one sided business-bent man, forgetful of the other duties of life, is not the truly successful man. It requires the greatest skill to live life evenly, rightly, and successfully.
He who only keeps engagements with money is left behind by God.
Yet God talks to us very loudly through the pangs of hunger He has given us to remind us that we must make money to support our physical bodies.
Using all our mental powers to maintain our physical bodies should not be the goal of life.
There is little difference between eating food from a gold plate or an ordinary plate-in both cases, the food satisfies hunger. Then why continue to multiply self-created, useless desires, and to work night and day in pursuit of things one does not need?
Your engagement with business is important, but your appointment with serving others is more important, and your engagement with meditation, God, and Truth is most important.
Don’t say that you are too busy with keeping the wolf from the door to have time for the development of heavenly qualities.
Break your self-satisfied, immovable bad habit of idolizing your less important engagements and utterly ignoring your most important engagement with wisdom. No one else will answer for your actions, though others often keep you enmeshed in useless frivolities and so-called important engagements.
Engagements with Over-activity and Mr Idleness both lead to misery.
It is time for the modern man to shake his drowsiness of centuries and systematize his life.
The modern man has learned to apply science, psychology, and system to his business for his material comfort. He ought also to apply system and science to improve his health, prosperity, wisdom, and social life. In order to do that, he must not give all his time to business, which only insures the hope of physical comfort.
People forget that living too luxuriously means a corresponding increase in use of nerve and brain energy and the expenditure of longevity!
Most people become so engrossed in making money that they cannot enjoy the comforts they have acquired.
Compiled excerpts from The Wisdom of Yogananda Volume 4 “How to be a Success” by Paramhansa Yogananda
